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Continue reading →: Singles! Er, single!
With the Singles Jukebox down for a week, we only posted one single: Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance,” which swiftly became the most played song in the newsroom last week.
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Continue reading →: The Dumb Approach
Poking fun at the monsters in The Corner is as easy these days as insulting a three-headed baby, but once in a while one of those guys post something whose cynicism takes the breath away. Editor in Chief Rich Lowry tonight: At this point, Obama needs to settle for a…
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Continue reading →: “I’ve never been so good at shaking hands”
Julian Casablancas’ first solo album Phrazes for the Young has two superb tracks: the adolescent shaggy-dog story “Left and Right in the Dark” (which a friend said made him imagine young Julian listening to his parents having sex in the next room), with help from a synthesizer riff pilfered from a…
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Continue reading →: Old news is good news
Unsurprising news, considering the state of the industry. I can’t say I ever agreed with the segregation of older (or “catalog”) albums, as if they were nursing home habitues who had no business mixing with the young. A continuing pleasure in my Billboard-obsessive days in junior high and high school…
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Continue reading →: Singles!
Hollywooders like John Mayer and Pete Yorn and Scarlet Johansson scored the highest this week. Timbaland ft. Soshy – Morning After Dark. (3) Q-Tip ft. Norah Jones – Life is Better (5). Marina and the Diamonds – Mowgli’s Road (3). Wild Beasts – All the King’s Men (5). The…
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Continue reading →: It’s the rich who are socialists
I don’t much care for Frank Rich, but today’s column is notable for accusing the Democrats on the Hill and in the White House of endorsing and, more grotesquely, duplicating the conditions under which the economy tanked last fall. It came as no surprise that corporate media — born out…
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Continue reading →: History as farce
A Serious Man closes with the most apocalyptic, devastating (literally), appropriate shot of the Coen brothers’ career. It’s hard to explain why I found the meanness in this movie preferable to just about everything these prolific directors have done in the last twenty years. Maybe the clue is realizing that…
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Continue reading →: Which do you choose — a hard or soft option?
I had been aware of Tom Ewing’s years-long project of blurbing every British number one hit, but of course I had to note today’s entry — Albion’s most popular song on 11 January 1986. My relation to “West End Girls” does not reflect flatteringly on my fandom. At first I…
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Continue reading →: She once was a good friend of mine
I suspect that we’ll be hearing a lot more records inspired by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Raising Sand in the coming years, of which Rosanne Cash’s The List is one. This is not to say that Cash deliberately emulated the record; but The List‘s midtempo respectable covers of…
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Continue reading →: Hello November
From the usually just okay Richard Wilbur, a splendid poem: To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle, When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm. Your reputation for saying things of interest Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics, Nor…
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Continue reading →: Singles!
More middling scores than usual this week. Funny how Pottery Barn shopper favorite Michael Buble’s single is both the least offensive and most successful at what it attempts — he’s a more attractive blank than the current Rihanna, say. As for Chris Brown, he longs for blankness. Michael Buble –…
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Humanizing The Vacuum 