I realize this weekend, I should ideally share an old review of one of the first Harry Potter films, but I barely ever put fingers to keys in service of analyzing those blockbusters. (At the risk of incurring the wrath … Continue reading From the Archive: Flashback Friday – 1981
I’ve tapped out plenty of words about the glory of having ready access to an array of new music in my college radio days, an advantage of the gig that has been somewhat blunted by the clicking immediacy of the internet that has emerged in the years since. But the wild west of the worldwide web lacks the intensely personal recommendations that I found in those poster-adorned hallways of my past. The algorithms will keep improving, but I doubt they’ll ever truly catch up to a pal with different music tastes who alights on just the right track to share … Continue reading One for Friday: Mose Allison, “What’s Your Movie”
121. Tracy Chapman, “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” Tracy Chapman grew up in Cleveland during the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, a tumultuous time for the city. As options dwindled and the public education system deteriorated rapidly, Chapman got a chance to get out. The recipient of a scholarship through the program A Better Chance, Chapman found herself attending a private high school in New England, many miles and a world away. It was there that her talent for music started to evolve into a mission to speak, to challenge the problems she saw before her. The song “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” was inspired … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 121 – 119
Remember when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series? That was pretty good, right? Other than that, 2016 continues to be quite the prolonged kick in the teeth. I didn’t know Leonard Cohen’s work when I was first falling into my music obsessions. But I did know of him. Cohen was this almost mystical figure of cool on the fringes of pop culture, not boxed out of the center but choosing not to stroll over to it because it just wasn’t worth his time. Better to lean against a wall and nurse a cigarette. Let others deal with all that … Continue reading One for Friday: Leonard Cohen, “Democracy”
I’m not sure M.I.A. has ever made a single album that’s great from start to finish. Her muse has too much wanderlust for that. Running freely can lead an artist to cross entirely new landscapes, but it can also result in a mad rush into a blind alley or two. It can also lead to a sort of artistic exhaustion, which isn’t quite what M.I.A. copped to in suggesting that AIM, her fifth full-length overall, will be her final album. Still, she’s said she’s ready to move onto other projects, and there are times when AIM betrays a sense … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: AIM
124. Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Cities in Dust” One of the indicators that the nineteen-eighties was a time of very different expectations around bands’ productivity, there was some anxiety around how long it had been since new Siouxsie and the Banshees music had hit record store shelves when “Cities in Dust” was issued as a single, in August of 1985. This was despite the fact that had put out a full-length album and an EP the prior year. A trio of singles had been drawn from those two releases, each of which performed with the usual level of respectability on … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 124 – 122
When I reviewed De La Soul’s gratifyingly strong new album, and the Anonymous Nobody, I wrote about my own journey with the group, from initial hesitance to cheerful embrace, a trajectory that spanned from their debut to their sophomore effort. As I noted, 3 Feet High and Rising was one of those records that completely flummoxed me during my college radio years. It got rave reviews and was clearly sparking with creativity, but it also provoked heightened ambivalence in me when I tried to figure out how it might fit onto our station’s airwaves, especially since the playlists were typically … Continue reading One for Friday: De La Soul, “A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’”
127. Bronski Beat, “Smalltown Boy” There’s probably no way to overstate the importance and the power a song like “Smalltown Boy” carried in 1984. The first single from the London synthpop band Bronski Beat addresses the difficulty of growing up a gay young man in the era, empowered enough to fully understand his own identity, but also cruelly judged and shunned by those around him, their own levels of enlightenment not up to the decidedly simply task of acceptance. “As hard as they would try/ They’d hurt to make you cry/ But you never cried to them/ Just to your … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 127 – 125
One of the aspects of John Darnielle’s songwriting I admire most is his eager conviction that anything — absolutely anything — is potential inspiration for him to sit down with his guitar and create a tune that is piercing and true. He’s talked about that in live performances I’ve seen. He’d learn something in a history class and immediately want to rush home and merge his impressions of the particular slice of the past with a couple of well chosen chords. I’d long assumed that his song “Cubs in Five,” which leads the 1995 EP Nine Black Poppies, referenced the … Continue reading One for Friday: the Mountain Goats, “Cubs in Five”
130. Cocteau Twins, “Carolyn’s Fingers” The Cocteau Twins sound was well-established by the time they recorded their 1988 album, Blue Bell Knoll, stirring the ethereally gloomy hearts of a sizable enough fan base in the U.S. to trigger genially perplexed stories on local television news. They could have easily locked in and kept on with the flow — that’s what the dreamy music sounds like it’s suited for, after all — but they wanted to take greater control of what they created. The band’s fifth album was the first on which they took charge completely. “I just realized I needed … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 130 – 128
Coffee for Two 