R.E.M. had a lot of theoretical end-dates. I may be misremembering, but it seems like various band members used to speculate on the moment that they’d collectively decide to call it quits, pegging that date as roughly equivalent to their … Continue reading Resign yourself that radio’s gonna stay
4. Lou Reed, New York Lou Reed’s New York has the following instructive message amongst the liner notes: “This album was recorded and mixed at Media Sound, Studio B, N.Y.C., in essentially the order you have here. It’s meant to … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 4
Ah, here’s Spectrum Check, back at it’s regularly scheduled time. So the first piece I had go up this week happened as a direct result of the intervention of my friend, a fabulous babe who a generation of Madison music fans know as Casino Queen. Somewhere around the midpoint of my ongoing countdown of the best films of the nineteen-eighties, she emailed me with the gentle but firm assertion that our friendship might be in jeopardy if the 1981 cinematic extravaganza The Great Muppet Caper wasn’t included somewhere on the list. I sheepishly informed her that it indeed would not … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I have a somewhat idiosyncratic opinion about the peak of Liz Phair’s music career. I’m fairly certain the consensus remains locked into amber that Phair’s very best album is her attention-getting debut, Exile in Guyville, which famously topped the influential Village Voice year-end music poll when it was originally released. I like that record fine, but I felt it got a disproportionate amount of attention just because of the raw language Phair used freely across the songs, a facet of the record she later admitted was a blatant tactic to to stir up attention. I knew plenty of women who … Continue reading One for Friday: Liz Phair, “What Makes You Happy”
Sheesh. I just realized that this didn’t post on Saturday as I intended. I’m inclined to pile this into this weekend’s Spectrum post, but I’ve actually got a lot of background to add to the things I wrote this week. On top of that all, I don’t think I’m going to have time to finish my intended post for today, so…that’s that. Here a bonus, delayed midweek Spectrum Check. There was a stretch in the early-nineties when it felt like crossover foreign cinema–to the degree that foreign cinema ever truly crossed over to broader audiences–was defined by crusty old-timers bonding … Continue reading Spectrum Check
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. The line-up of the terrifically successful band the Archies was as follows: Archie Andrews on lead vocals and guitar, Reggie Mantle on rhythm guitar, Jughead Jones on drums, Betty Cooper on tambourine and Veronica Lodge on keyboards. Except, of course, it wasn’t. Transferring the popular comic book teenagers that debuted in the pages of a standard superhero anthology series a quarter-century earlier to … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Who’s Your Baby?”
5. XTC, Oranges & Lemons Perhaps befitting a band that had a colossally strong affection for the era of the Beatles built on densely layered psychedlia, XTC played their last tour date in the spring of 1982. While the Fab … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 5
I employed a lot of methods to try to keep up with new music once I’d graduated from my college radio station to “the real world,” which, I assure you, was, if anything, less real than the noncommercial broadcast outlet that I’d left. It was in the days before a countless number of online purveyors typed out everything any living soul could possibly want to know about every band out there so I relied on magazines, newspaper articles (this is band when the Chicago Tribune was actually a genuine newspaper) and what little I could glean from the fairly rare … Continue reading One for Friday: Rocket From the Crypt, “Lipstick”
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 aren’t many other figures in popular music whose decline from pretty cool to comically insipid is so clear and stark. The first Top 40 single that Kenny Rogers sang on was “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” which made it all the way to #5 in 1967. That was with his first truly successful band, the First … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Buy Me a Rose”
6. The Replacements, Don’t Tell a Soul Earlier this week, in writing about the DC Comics relaunch that had an uncommonly prominent place in the ongoing mass media conversation, Tom Spurgeon noted, “no one does consumer entitlement like a comics … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 6
Coffee for Two 