Category: Music

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Laughing Matters: Portlandia, “The Dream of the Nineties”

Dan Seeger

Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. I can’t claim that I stuck through Portlandia through it’s entire run — including the pending final season — but I have tremendous affection for the comedy series co-stewarded by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein. Although I didn’t have intimate knowledge of the scruffy metropolitan area it satirized when the program launched, I recognized a generational identity within the comedy. My swath of the … Continue reading Laughing Matters: Portlandia, “The Dream of the Nineties”

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Laughing Matters: George Carlin, Class Clown

Dan Seeger

Sometimes comedy illuminates hard truths with a pointed urgency that other means can’t quite achieve. Sometimes comedy is just funny. This series of posts is mostly about the former instances, but the latter is valuable, too. It’s not accurate to call the nineteen-seventies the heyday of comedy records, not when the prior decade saw the smash-hit album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, elevating a guy who’d recently been a Chicago advertising drone to both Best New Artist and Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. That doesn’t even get into the likes of Vaughn Meader and Allan Sherman tying … Continue reading Laughing Matters: George Carlin, Class Clown

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College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 34 – 32

Dan Seeger

34. Sinéad O’Connor, “Mandinka” It didn’t start with a picture of the Pope on live television. Sinéad O’Connor was at war from the beginning. “I had no illusions that there were such things as record deals — I just happened to be lucky enough to get one,” O’Connor noted shortly after the release of her 1987 debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. “I didn’t realize there were such bastards in this business.” Her famously shaved head — a look especially out of step with late-eighties fashion trends — was O’Connor’s rebuttal to label attempts to impose a more MTV-friendly style … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 34 – 32

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One for Friday: The Soup Dragons, “One Way Street”

Dan Seeger

After I graduated from college and was underway with the slow, sad process of detaching from the student-run radio station, I did the best I could to compensate for no daily exposure to the waterfall of new music that came through the doors. After initially insisting my break would be clean, I eventually signed up for a weekly on-air shift as a community volunteer, and I scoured music magazines with the intensity of a conspiracy theorist looking for the clue that would bring down the menacing shadow government. When I found a song that I believed had similar stuff to … Continue reading One for Friday: The Soup Dragons, “One Way Street”

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The New Releases Shelf: Goths

Dan Seeger

I have a lot of affection for the Mountain Goats, but I was disappointed with their last album. Released in 2015, Beat the Champ was a concept album, awash in songwriter John Darnielle’s abiding affection for professional wrestling, and not the kind that takes up hours of national programming hours with intricate stories and flashy production values. Darnielle was writing for the hardscrabble, downscale grapplers who shed blood and sweat (but no tears in this manliest of sports) in half-filled municipal coliseums and on static dappled UHF stations in his younger years. Much as I appreciate Darnielle’s conviction that absolutely … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Goths

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College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 37 – 35

Dan Seeger

37. U2, “I Will Follow” Iris Hewson died in 1974, when her son Paul was fourteen years old. Understandably, the pain and loss stuck with him for years. But what better tribute could a boy provide than to make a song about his mother — indeed, a song written from the perspective of his mother — the first track on the first album from his rock ‘n’ roll band, especially if that group in question goes on to become one of the biggest acts in the world? Leading off the 1980 album Boy, the first from U2, “I Will Follow” is about … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 37 – 35

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One for Friday: Spooner, “Burn It All Down”

Dan Seeger

Since returning to my cheesy homeland, I have been blessed with multiple opportunities to make up for my feeble work in supporting the live, local music scene during my more youthful years. I remain woefully under-schooled on the upstart musicians who toil in the clubs with energizing blast of sonic invention right now, but I’ve had the chance to see a bunch of acts — or at least their delightfully odd new offshoots — that I should have stood before twenty years (or more) ago, bobbing my head and holding a plastic cup of sloshing Point Special. My one-city, multi-act … Continue reading One for Friday: Spooner, “Burn It All Down”

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The New Releases Shelf: No Shape

Dan Seeger

How ludicrously exquisite can pop music get? Truly, how much tingly elegance can be layered into songs of piercing beauty before the material shifts and ripples into something else entirely, some fragile creation that begs for the invention of a whole new artistic designation. Words must be coined, because the contents of the current dictionary are inadequate. Others have flirted with this level of dazzling transformation — Kate Bush comes immediately to mind — but it’s beginning to seem that Mike Hadreas, in his guise as Perfume Genius, may yet reach it. No Shape is the fourth full-length studio release under … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: No Shape

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College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 40 – 38

Dan Seeger

40. The English Beat, “Save It for Later” Since this is a chart for U.S. college radio that we’re tracking through, we are obligated to refer to the band featuring both Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger among the ranks by the vulgar and pedantic moniker the English Beat. In their native U.K., there was no need for the geographic qualifier, of course. The original name for the group preserved truth in advertising since the ska-singed beat delivered didn’t necessarily call to mind the British Isles. The Beat were already a force on the U.K. charts by the time they released their third … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 40 – 38

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From the Archive: Five for Friday, Hot Fun in the Summertime edition

Dan Seeger

I dragged over an old “Five for Friday” just a couple weeks ago, but I knew this timely topic was somewhere amidst the two hundred editions of my former recurring exercise in participatory listing. Offering it as a rerun today was simple too tempting. As was the case last time, I created a YouTube playlist with (almost) all of the songs that I and my far-more-inspired commenters listed. It’s perfect accompaniment for your holiday weekend grilling. Five Great Summer Songs 1. First Class, “Beach Baby.” It’s from 1974 and boy oh boy is it crammed with cheesy, from the piercing, poppy horns … Continue reading From the Archive: Five for Friday, Hot Fun in the Summertime edition