Category: Music

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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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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

With my countdown of nineteen-eighties films approaching the end, I’ve been trying to both watch and rewatch important movies from the prior decade in preparation for the next naturally step backwards in my tops of the decade project. As for the latter endeavor, there are simply some movies that I haven’t seen in approaching thirty years (and perhaps never saw properly, given that my exposure to them was dictated by the way I watched the material on cable, not always the most ideal manner to take them in) and in order to figure out their placement on the pending list, … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: The Spliffs, “You Know What They’ll Say”

Dan Seeger

While the deep denizens of the Internet have been shockingly good about documenting pop culture topics like movies and music with great thoroughness, there’s still all sorts of things that they miss. One of the fascinating things to me about our current information age is the way that absolutely everything that’s happening now will leave a digital footprint, but there were be more than a few phantoms from the days before the nineteen-nineties. As far as I can tell, there’s no entry at the impressively exhaustive allmusic website for the band The Spliffs, and there’s certainly no Wikipedia page for … Continue reading One for Friday: The Spliffs, “You Know What They’ll Say”

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Come See”

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. By the time “Come See” was release in 1965, Major Lance had already notched five prior Top 40 songs, the biggest of which was probably “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um,” which had climbed all the way to #5 (and topped the R&B charts) the previous year. He was considered one of the major figures of Chicago soul and was one of the … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Come See”

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

So this week was all about the Muppets and Miles. A better week of responsibilities could be constructed for me, but it’s hard to fathom how. I’ll cop to not loving the angle I took in writing about the new documentary about Kevin Clash, the Muppeteer who is the man behind Elmo. I feel like I’ve seen similar pronouncements about emotional steeliness in the face of emotional filmmaking as a precursor to confessing to prodigious tears. Still, it was absolutely the most honest way for me to write about the movie. Whatever flaws are in place, I can’t deny that … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: Death of Samantha, “Good Friday”

Dan Seeger

I didn’t know as much as I would have liked when I first walked through the college radio station doors all those years ago, such I really clung to those few factoids that I did have at my disposal. Or at least I thought I knew these things. There was a band out of Cleveland (though, at the time, I didn’t know that was where they were from) called Death of Samantha, and I was completely certain that their name referred to the untimely end of Samantha Smith. She was a young girl from Maine who engaged in unlikely personal … Continue reading One for Friday: Death of Samantha, “Good Friday”

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Naturally Stoned”

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. Some biographies of Chuck Woolery note that his nineteen-sixties band the Avant-Garde “had one-hit wonder success in 1968 with the top 40 pop hit ‘Naturally Stoned.’” This is absolutely true, fully verifiable. The duo Woolery was part of with some character named Elkin “Bubba” Fowler peaked at #40 with their soft, almost lackadaisical psychedelic song. It was a pretty oddball year for music … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Naturally Stoned”