Top 40 Smash Taps: “I Can’t Wait”

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. Patrick “Sleepy” Brown is the son of Jimmy Brown, who served as the lead vocalist and saxophonist for the nineteen-seventies funk band Brick, best known for the mid-decade hit “Dazz”. With seventies soul music wrapped into his DNA, Sleepy Brown brought that bygone sound into more modern music as one of the co-founders and primary creative forces behind the Atlanta production outfit Organized … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “I Can’t Wait”

Spectrum Check

This week has been a blur for me, thanks to a stupefying number of hours at work. If questioned without any external references, I’d have no idea what I wrote for Spectrum Culture. Luckily, I can scroll through the site and find out. Of course, I may have already forgotten about The Numbers Station by now under just about any circumstances. I presume this may be the film that sets John Cusack to considering nabbing himself a short-season cable series. On the music side, I reviewed the new album from the Black Angels. It’s fine, but I found very little … Continue reading Spectrum Check

One for Friday: Diesel Park West, “All the Myths on Sunday”

When I got started in college radio in the late nineteen-eighties, there was still a lingering myth about broadcasting being a good route to do something truly daring, even subversive. It was, after all, a radio station that had played George Carlin’s routine about the seven words that can’t be said on television, leading to a landmark Supreme Court case that got the great comedian’s brilliant skewed linguistic analysis forever entered into the federal record. And the notion of the darkly philosophizing deejay still cropped up every now and again, as if everyone who got behind the microphone could hold … Continue reading One for Friday: Diesel Park West, “All the Myths on Sunday”