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Top 40 Smash Taps: “I’m in Love”

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. Evelyn King got the nickname “Champagne” because she had a bubbly personality, which couldn’t have hurt when she was recording music designed for the discotheque. King’s first album, Smooth Talk, was released in 1977 and it was meant for the dance floor as surely as Tony Manero’s white suit. Supposedly, King was working as a cleaning lady at a record label when a … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “I’m in Love”

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Spectrum Check

Dan Seeger

There are a few things I will always, always, always be ready to do. One of them is expounding on my admiration for the films, artistry and general cinematic passion of Martin Scorsese. I was given the opportunity to do just that for the current Best Living Directors series. I did the best I could, but it always feels like there’s more to say, more to write about the way he both honors and reshapes classic Hollywood narrative storytelling. Someday I’ll get it right. I also wrote a new film review about a film that’s about as grimly nutty as … Continue reading Spectrum Check

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One for Friday: Ben Lee, “How Can That Be?”

Dan Seeger

When I’d transitioned from the exploratory freedom of college radio to the stifling monotony of commercial radio in the mid-nineteen-nineties, I worked very hard to keep myself reasonably well-versed in music that was distinctly different from the jackhammer awfulness I was charged with lobbing out onto the airwaves. I used every resource at my limited disposal, leaning especially heavy on the monthly magazine that had recently been launched as a companion to CMJ, the trade journal of college radio. I’m fairly certain it was within the pages of one of those issues that I first read about Ben Lee. More … Continue reading One for Friday: Ben Lee, “How Can That Be?”

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Arteta, Feig, Hayward, Malick, Ritchie

Dan Seeger

Youth in Revolt (Miguel Arteta, 2009). This was Arteta’s first film in almost a decade after some quick, buzzy success to kick off his career. All the time between features didn’t eliminate his slightly arid style, which has a tendency to deaden the drama after a while. More problematically, the film exhibits a offbeat pushiness as it heaps in quirky details and disaffected anguish. It simply tries to hard. Michael Cera plays a sweet, timidly pining young man who conjures up an imaginary tough-talking alter ego who drives him to get the girl while also slipping deeper into a quicksand … Continue reading Arteta, Feig, Hayward, Malick, Ritchie

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Just Like Heaven”

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. The Cure were hardly new faces in the mid-nineteen-eighties when they first started to garner some significant commercial attention in the United States. The band first got together in 1976 and released their first single, the controversial and occasionally disowned “Killing an Arab”, two years later. They quickly developed into a perennial presence on the charts in their English homeland, but had to … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Just Like Heaven”