The door is open wide

Great live performance:

I can walk you through the park if you’re feelin’ blue, or whatever

I don’t understand the concept of “makeout music.” If you’re going to makeout with someone, you’re concentrating on your lover, not on whether a Marvin Gaye or Animal Collective album is putting you in the mood. Thus, affixing this moniker on what Maxwell does mystifies me. Like Roxy Music’s Avalon, BLACKsummer’snight, his first record in

You’re just kissing to be clever

If you can snag a copy of Dave Rimmer’s Like Punk Never Happened used on Amazon or eBay (it’s available), please do: it’s a wonderful companion to Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again.  Renewed interest in Culture Club’s Colour By Numbers provoked by an I Love Music poll persuaded me to request the

Negotiable space

The idea of Top 40 radio as what Tom Ewing calls “a place where ideas about pop could clash and mutate” is exactly the vision through which Casey Kasem and Shadoe Stevens’ competing but not much different tallies of the most popular songs in America seduced me. This might explain why I’m so tolerant of

The Onion couldn’t have put this more gracefully: In a surprising development, the Roman Catholic church has moved to officially endorse masturbation. The result of an intense theological debate, the decision is seen by progressives in the Vatican as a major step forward in bringing Catholicism into the twenty first century. “Whether we like it

This week’s singles

My biggest tally this week, with Brooks & Dunn coming from behind and surprising me most: Dorrough, Misstress Barbara ft. Sam Roberts, Brooks & Dunn, Christina Milian ft. The-Dream, Fabulous ft. The-Dream, Boys Like Girls, Ben Kweller, Dirty Danger, Mario ft. Gucci Mane and Sean Garrett.

Life is a moment in space

You SPIN me

For three dollars (including shpping and handling) I bought the June 1985 issue of SPIN Magazine. Bob Guccione, Jr’s side project hadn’t yet acquired its reputation as the hipper, bohemian version of Rolling Stone of its late eighties and early nineties salad years but you can see the gestation. The photo of Talking Heads, that

You know, we call them killer whales

Interesting and almost contentious argument today on the Stylus Foundation message board (where former Stylus writers treat their former home as a club room in which to discuss ideas, like Robert Bork and Jonah Goldberg at the Heritage Foundation) wherein I tried to put the rest friend Chris Gaerig’s notion, first proffered last fall, that

F*** The Police

Jonah Goldberg, who considers himself a serious thinker thanks to the success of Liberal Fascism (since Hitler was a vegetarian, and lots of progressives are vegetarian, Goldberg claims, his smile big and luminescent, therefore progressives are fascists), shows how deeply he’s pondered the implications in the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the man’s

Singles, etc.

Reviews of Colbie Caillat, Chicane, 50 Cent, Dizzee Rascal ft. Chrome, Arctic Monkeys, Nelly Furtado. The Dizzee single is one of the year’s most memorable — at last.

The Mental Floss History of the World is a most entertaining recount of the last 8000 years of human civilization. If it’d dropped some of the snark, it’d have been perfect; as it is, it’s quite wonderful airport reading. My review here.