Author: Dan Seeger

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One for Friday: They Might Be Giants, “Santa’s Beard”

Dan Seeger

Much as I loved being on the radio back in college, I usually loved it just a little less in December. While 90FM certainly wasn’t one of those radio stations that completely ceded the playlist to yuletide cheer, somewhere around this time of year a modest stack of records (and, somewhat later in my tenure, CDs) were retrieved from their hidden corner of the music library and shoved in right by the new music in the main studio. In some respects, this was useful, given that there were practically no new releases after the late fall crush of horrid new … Continue reading One for Friday: They Might Be Giants, “Santa’s Beard”

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Your Old Standby”

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. According to most accounts of Motown Records, Mary Wells was the label’s first big star, the one who set the benchmark for “The Sound of Young America.” A talent contest regular from the tender age of ten in her hometown of Detroit, Wells approached Berry Gordy, then the head of Tamla Records, a label that had a string of major successes. Wells wanted … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Your Old Standby”

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, Spectrum Culture followed a shorter publishing week. While I’ve got a couple fairly significant things looming for the week ahead, my only contribution to the site last week was a couple essays for our PLAYLIST feature on R.E.M. The premise is fairly simple: the various music writers go through all of a band’s albums and select the best single track from each release, duking it out electronically until we come to a reasonable consensus. Logically, the songs I was assigned to write about were among those those for which my first pick represented the song … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: Toni Basil, “Shoppin’ From A to Z”

Dan Seeger

As long as I went ahead and gave a shout-out to Thanksgiving in yesterday’s post, I may as well concede my digital space to the sorry fact that today is the busiest shopping day of the year. I’m certainly not going to participate by doing something a hellishly masochistic as going to the mall. Toni Basil was a choreographer with credits that included Head and American Graffiti and an actress who, among others things, was sitting across the booth from Jack Nicholson when he delivered one of his most famous lines. She released her debut album, Word of Mouth, in … Continue reading One for Friday: Toni Basil, “Shoppin’ From A to Z”

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Ficarra and Requa, Friedkin, Gillespie, Penn, Rafelson

Dan Seeger

Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975). Gene Hackman plays a seedy private detective named Harry Moseby who gets drawn into a case that involves tracking down a missing teenage girl, played by Melanie Griffith in one of her first real film roles. The film is entirely of its era, in good and bad ways. It’s nicely gritty and dark, but it also gets completely mired in a sense of existential dread until it become subsumed by its own fatalism. Nothing good can even come of this world, which the film labors to proves across its overly calculated third act. The film … Continue reading Ficarra and Requa, Friedkin, Gillespie, Penn, Rafelson