It started a couple of weeks ago, with the unlikeliest of progenitors: The Boss.
Bruce Springsteen dedicated a live rendition of his hit "Born In The U.S.A." to Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. Everybody cheered, even though that song isn’t really a "go America!" kind of song at heart, and after all these years of defending Read More
Solange Knowles, like so many young people today, is an avid blogger! Recently, to accompany her posting of a song titled "F#@k The Industry" (scandalous!), Ms. Knowles wrote the following:
"Unfortunately I’m in an industry where diversity is not celebrated the way it should be. When some people see and hear something different it feels Read More
The Jonas Brothers don’t occupy their prominent position in pop by accident, and they don’t owe their success to critics, music blogs, Imeem, Pandora, iTunes, or even a savvy Volkswagen commercial. New media be damned, they owe everything to the Disney monolith, a big old record label, and legion after legion of screaming girls.
With Read More
Randy Newman’s new album, Harps and Angels, is in stores today.
What is the deal with joke rock? Does anyone actually listen to Randy Newman? At home on a stereo?
These are two questions with which I have wrestled over the past few years, as respected peers, with increasing persistence, lobby hard for Newman’s spare, Read More
What does U2 sound like?
For a question that seems so absurd to ask-surely, everyone knows!–it’s pretty hard to answer. Not because the band has been around for over three decades and experimented with a number of styles. Its that the answer is tautological: U2 sounds like U2. Its commercial success and attendant ubiquity has Read More
Three albums come out today; all of them might be called "Indie" releases; they will be promoted and marketed heavily at Indie record stores and compete on the same Indie charts this week.
Needless to say the genre is almost meaningless as a description of the music. One of the bands is from Brazil, one Read More
The critics who praise the Hold Steady share a kind of collective relief that at last, someone’s making music for men in their 30′s who like classic rock.
But since when are men in their 30s who like classic rock such an underserved demographic?
I have had the band pushed on me by aging, formerly Read More
Why should anyone care about Beck? Isn’t he just some 90′s holdover gone morose, gone Scientologist, gone lame with the weight of his early successes and the death of irony, that vein he mined so long and so well?
His last two releases, the aimless Guero and the overworked yet hollow The Information were critically Read More
A couple weeks back, Ice-T, whom you may know from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and who is also, it turns out, a famous rapper, fired a shot across the bow of the unlikeliest of enemies: gimmicky teen dance-rapper Soulja Boy.
Averring that Soulja Boy had "single-handedly killed hip-hop." Ice T continued, "We came Read More
A couple of months ago in this space, I reviewed Moby’s latest, a paean to New York nightlife. Interestingly, a far more convincing homage to the sounds that defined this city’s clubs over the years, to the underground originators that spawned the overground hits, comes out this week: Hercules and Love Affair.
Andrew Butler Read More
