#19 — Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979) A few months ago, I wrote about Hal Ashby’s Being There, proposing it as an excellent choice for the film geek debate over which work represented the true end of the artistic boom in … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Nineteen
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. In some respects, it’s not all that surprising that country singer Tracy Lawrence’s sole experience with the Billboard Top 40 came with a single he released at the tail end of 1999. The title cut to the then forthcoming album Lessons Learned, his sixth studio release, came out at the peak of pop radio’s embrace of country-western music, fueled by major hits from … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Lessons Learned”
I had a bunch of blocky Stephen King paperbacks on my shelf for a long time before I dared to commit to one. As I’ve mentioned before, I owned a copy of The Shining that beckoned to me occasionally. … Continue reading My Writers: Stephen King
10. Death Cab For Cutie, The Photo Album As anyone who’s spent quality time with my Friday posts is probably well aware, I have extremely strong associations between the college radio station and certain songs and albums from the era … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 10 and 9
It was another modest week for me at Spectrum Culture. I only had one full piece go up there, a review of the new album from the Gaslight Anthem. When I was younger, I found it odd that there weren’t more bands emulating Bruce Springsteen, given his significant success. Now that there are a couple who clearly use his music as a touchstone, I actually find it just as strange. His distinctive sound, fueled by rock ‘n’ roll bombast, seems to be harder for bands to transcend than, say, that of the Velvet Underground, which dozens upons dozens of groups … Continue reading Spectrum Check
It’s now been over three-and-a-half years of quite regular weekly posting since I launched this particular Friday feature, a span that has, by my rough tally, led to just over 180 songs being shared in this space thus far (including the week that I proudly ceded to others). It would seem, given that number and my propensity for featuring tracks from my first year of college, that I would have exhausted every out of print college radio hit bearing a copyright date of 1988 or 1989. Indeed, there are times when a song shuffles up on my trusty iPod and … Continue reading One for Friday: Easterhouse, “Come Out Fighting”
Through what’s known as the Silver Age of Comics, there were plenty of punctilious publishers proficient at producing furiously fantastic feats of four-color fables, but one rocketed above the rest when it came to breathless boasts of the bountiful bustle … Continue reading Mighty Marvel Checklist HyperboleCheck: Tales of Suspense #93
#20 — Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978) The legend and legacy of Days of Heaven begins with the lush, vivid, painfully beautiful imagery. The second full-length feature from director Terrence Malick, the film was and is renowned for its … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty
Piranha (Alexandre Aja, 2010). It’s remarkable that a film that so overtly embraces its own willful trashiness can still be dour, flatfooted and boring as hell. Richard Dreyfuss’s early cameo as a scruffy boater who’s a victim of carnivorous fish is only the first overt reference to Steven Spielberg’s superlative Jaws. The entire plot about the vicious water-dwellers is essentially lifted from the earlier feature, with the family vacation crowds in a terrorized tourist tour replaced by ribald Spring Breakers, all the better to fill the screen with R-rated nudity. It’s gory, ridiculous and almost deliberately inept. It’s also no … Continue reading Aja, Cameron, Hanks, Ophüls, Saladoff
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. There were few bands that benefited more clearly and distinctly from the launch of MTV than Culture Club. The music video channel launched in the summer of 1981, and Culture Club’s debut album, Kissing to Be Clever, arrived just over a year later. Boasting a sunny, catchy sound that often melded to more melancholy lyrics, the band benefited from their charismatic, attention-getting lead … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Live My Life”
