One for Friday Encore: Mollie Donihe, “Come on Eileen (Cover)”
It is now a longstanding tradition that the Friday that ushers in the annual staging of the World’s Largest Trivia Contest by my broadcasting alma mater, WWSP-FM, is a day on which I post a version of “Come On Eileen.” As everyone knows, it is the official theme song of the Trivia team I play on. Really, everyone knows it, even Wikipedia: But the thought of hunting down a new take of this familiar song seems pointless to me when I already have a favorite cover version. This is my friend Mollie: She’s fantastic in countless ways. I could provide specifics, but I’m … Continue reading One for Friday Encore: Mollie Donihe, “Come on Eileen (Cover)”
Trivia Answer of the Day: Magic Carpet Airlines
This coming weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. As per tradition, this week is filled with idle reminiscing about memorable answers in past years. For this go-around, I’m further commemorating an anniversary. The weekend before the contest, the radio station sponsoring Trivia holds a midnight movie screening as a kickoff event, a practice that just celebrated its twenty-fifth straight year. Though it had been done a couple times prior to my tenure at the student-run radio station, I was the one who revived the practice, drawing upon my dual status as an on-air movie critic and a popcorn slinger … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: Magic Carpet Airlines
Trivia Answer of the Day: The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
This coming weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. As per tradition, this week is filled with idle reminiscing about memorable answers in past years. For this go-around, I’m further commemorating an anniversary. The weekend before the contest, the radio station sponsoring Trivia holds a midnight movie screening as a kickoff event, a practice that just celebrated its twenty-fifth straight year. Though it had been done a couple times prior to my tenure at the student-run radio station, I was the one who revived the practice, drawing upon my dual status as an on-air movie critic and a popcorn slinger … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
Trivia Answer of the Day: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
This coming weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. As per tradition, this week is filled with idle reminiscing about memorable answers in past years. For this go-around, I’m further commemorating an anniversary. The weekend before the contest, the radio station sponsoring Trivia holds a midnight movie screening as a kickoff event, a practice that just celebrated its twenty-fifth straight year. Though it had been done a couple times prior to my tenure at the student-run radio station, I was the one who revived the practice, drawing upon my dual status as an on-air movie critic and a popcorn slinger … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Trivia Answer of the Day: The S.S. Cooney
This coming weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. As per tradition, this week is filled with idle reminiscing about memorable answers in past years. For this go-around, I’m further commemorating an anniversary. The weekend before the contest, the radio station sponsoring Trivia holds a midnight movie screening as a kickoff event, a practice that just celebrated its twenty-fifth straight year. Though it had been done a couple times prior to my tenure at the student-run radio station, I was the one who revived the practice, drawing upon my dual status as an on-air movie critic and a popcorn slinger … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: The S.S. Cooney
College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 214 – 212
214. Modern English, “I Melt with You” After the Snow, the second album from Modern English, represented a very deliberate stab at creating big pop hits. The band’s debut full-length, Mesh & Lace, released one year earlier, was very much in the gloomy, agitated post-punk mode perfected by Joy Division. When it came time to follow it up, they wanted to do something markedly different. At the time, lead singer Robbie Grey explained, “We could have easily carried on with the Mesh & Lace formula. We could have played the barren landscape, the heavy drumming, distorted guitars, and wailing vocals game … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 250 Songs, 1979 – 1989, 214 – 212
From the Archive: Flashback Friday – 1984
A few weeks ago, I took the occasion of a melancholy anniversary to raid my digital archives for a post that resided under the heading “Flashback Friday” at my former online home. Besides the Hotel Washington entry, I’d forgotten about … Continue reading From the Archive: Flashback Friday – 1984
One for Friday: The Godfathers, “Birth, School, Work, Death (Live)”
There’s an interesting choice on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the live album released by the U.K. band the Godfathers, in 1989. To the best of my knowledge, this full-length wasn’t issued for sale in record stores, at least not in the United States. Instead, I believe it was a promo-only release, largely targeted at college radio, Epic Records’ means of keeping the band in the minds and hearts of fickle student programmers, many of them already coming down from the energized highs of the group’s debut release, Birth, School, Work, Death. That album’s title cut served as the perfect angry anthem, after all, for … Continue reading One for Friday: The Godfathers, “Birth, School, Work, Death (Live)”
The New Releases Shelf: Patch the Sky
On Silver Age, Bob Mould reclaimed his history after several years that could reasonably be characterized as messy (which doesn’t mean altogether bad, but his explorations sometimes verged on aimlessness). He followed that with Beauty & Ruin, expanding the scope of his productively nostalgic creativity to deliver music that sounded like every skipped stone ripple of his career gathered together to formulate something just new enough to turn heads anew. Now we come to Patch the Sky, which feels like the end of a trilogy. This time, Mould is settling into a comfortable mode, or as comfortable of a mode as his somewhat … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Patch the Sky
My Writers: Kelly Sue DeConnick
I possess no inside information about how Marvel Studios executives land on the characters that will move from the comic book page to the big screen, but I am totally convinced that there would be no Captain Marvel movie in the offing without Kelly Sue DeConnick. By the time it was announced that an adventure featuring the superheroic alter ego of Carol Danvers would be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Three, DeConnick was well into her transformational run on a character who’d been around since the late nineteen-sixties and taken up a more significant role beginning around a decade later, when … Continue reading My Writers: Kelly Sue DeConnick
Coffee for Two 