Author: Dan Seeger

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “The End of Our Road”

Dan Seeger

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. As I write this, I’m too tired to count high, so I’m going to rely on the ever-shaky Wikipedia to provide some information. According to the crowd-edited website, Marvin Gaye reached the Billboard Top 40 a total of forty-one times, including three songs that topped the charts. Of those many hits, one of them qualifies for this series, just barely scratching into the … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “The End of Our Road”

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From the Archive: A River Runs Through It

Dan Seeger

This review comes from The Pointer, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. While hardly an epic, I’m a little surprised at the length of this piece. Certainly I was trying to make the case for a film I though was excellent and all too likely to be ignored by my fellow twentysomethings, but it still looks to me like it would have wound up being an awful lot of column inches devoted to my opinions. I remember endlessly championing cinematographer Philippe Rousselot by name when Oscar season came around, but I clearly hadn’t gotten his French moniker … Continue reading From the Archive: A River Runs Through It

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One for Friday: Aretha Franklin, “A Rose is Still a Rose”

Dan Seeger

I suppose by now Lauryn Hill’s status in the exalted realm of pop stardom has been reduced to the almost entirely negligible, at kindest a cautionary tale and at meanest a punchline. Back in the mid- to late-nineteen-nineties, though, she was widely considered to be the next great music artist, the one destined to crank out classic after classic following her beloved solo debut, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. She was treated as some sort of creative revolutionary, reclaiming the nearly lost sounds of old school soul and delivering a finished product with a powerful replacement engine, assembled from the … Continue reading One for Friday: Aretha Franklin, “A Rose is Still a Rose”

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Black, Buck and Lee, Emmerich, Frankel, Wells

Dan Seeger

Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013). The most successful animated feature in the traditional Disney mold (fairy tale structure, a bevy of Broadway-esque songs) since the studio’s nineteen-nineties heyday, Frozen is charming enough if a little flat. Like a lot of modern Disney fables, it’s more interesting for the ways it compulsively upends the legacy tropes–the “true love” with a man, the oversimplified villainy–than for the actual merits of what winds up onscreen freed from meta examinations. The songbook provided by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez may have launched a thousand (or more) YouTube videos on the strength of … Continue reading Black, Buck and Lee, Emmerich, Frankel, Wells