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”

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”

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”

There is some music that simply sounds like 90FM to me. Or rather, it sounds like the version of 90FM that was there for me when I was an undergraduate student. Tuning in to the campus radio station was like reading a letter from my closest friends. The music that achieved the greatest success there often connected with someone there in a deeper way that a simple admiration for its catchy hooks (although, let’s not diminish the importance of that factor). It didn’t necessarily have moony, heartfelt lyrics that expressed some unspoken melancholy among my friends or, conversely, some triumphant … Continue reading One for Friday: Blackgirls, “Happy”

As had been established over and over again in the “Disclaimer” section of this weekly feature, I genuinely try to make sure every song I post here is out of print, at least in terms of physical copies that can be ordered through a record store. Tim Quirk from the great Too Much Joy convinced me a while back that any similar reticence around sharing sound digitally-available music was at least somewhat misguided since I’m not all that concerned about damaging the ability of label bigwigs from lining their already overstuffed pockets (round these here parts, we call it “The … Continue reading One for Friday: Los Lobos, “I Got Loaded”

I’ve always liked the idea of a grand artistic community informally springing up in the heart of a robust city. The brand of nostalgia that Woody Allen traffics in (before dismissing it with trademark cynicism) with Midnight in Paris has a high, almost undeniable appeal. If you love some form of entertainment art–theater, literature, painting, film–how is it not a thrill to think of artists at the peak of the form sparking off of one another, intermingling their inspiration like some big, crazy TV sitcom crossover. Pet Sounds is most interesting when considered against Rubber Soul which begat it and … Continue reading One for Friday: Kevn Kinney, “MacDougal Blues”

The term “emo” meant nothing to me when I bought the album Something To Write Home About by the Get Up Kids. At the time, I was just detached enough from the ever-undulating music fandom community that I didn’t realize the way that music starting to get carved into smaller and smaller categories and subsets. As maligned as the term “alternative music” was back in my college radio days, at least it stood for an admirable breadth and depth of music. It had equal amounts of room allotted for the pile-driving, metallic rock outrageousness of The Cult, the dance floor … Continue reading One for Friday: The Get Up Kids, “Ten Minutes”

I find band names fascinating, especially considering the ways they can evolve over time to just feel like second nature. R.E.M. and U2 probably sounded a little odd at first, but they eventually developed natural associations with the bands and, in these instances, their distinctive sounds. I don’t even think about the other meaning of, say, the Jesus and Mary Chain. I also find it interesting when a band’s name can somehow completely convey the sound that’s going to be found on their records. Maybe I’m applying too much of the knowledge I already have rattling around in the record … Continue reading One for Friday: The Candy Skins, “She Blew Me Away”

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”