No getting over you: On Amy Grant’s ‘Heart in Motion’

“Just keeping up with Myrrh recording artist Amy Grant these days is a full-time job,” Bob Darden noted in an April 1986 column for Billboard. Plowing through the Christian star’s impressive crossover attempts in the last calendar year, he saw no reason to subdue his expectations — and this was several months before Grant would

Some of my essential gateway albums

A gateway album acquires its resonance from retrospective fondness. A product of timing, it benefits from the curiosity of the purchaser: you’re ready for each other. This fervent AT40 listener hadn’t been exposed to much hip-hop besides 2 Live Crew, Digital Underground, and my cousin’s Fat Boys tapes, so the overwhelming whiteness of this list

Performance art: Beyoncé, Mitski, Amanda Shires

On first glance it looks like recency organized this list. Check again: most extravagant production costs in descending order. All we need is a Grammy moment where Beyoncé, Mitski, and Amanda Shires take turns bellowing “Running Up That Hill.”

Ranking #62 singles, U.S. edition: 1984-1989

As serious as a deep kiss, “Love Comes Quickly” (or “Disaster Came Quickly,” according to Neil Tennant, their first comparative flop) uses sustained sequencer lines and a keening Tennant vocal to limn the reality of falling in love. Chronic ironists like the Pet Shop Boys don’t drop the jokes — the first line is a

The best Gene Hackman performances

Like Jeff Bridges and Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman formed part of a new generation of actors whose coming of age as the studio system collapsed allowed them to flit from lead to supporting performances. And like Bridges, Hackman is an actor without vanity. Without resorting to makeup, costumes, or accents — without changing a note

Songs that peaked at #5: 1985-1989

As we approach the era in which I’ve staked a few thousand words, I see the gap between Actual Radio Hits and songs I never heard on Y-100 Miami (WHYI) yet heard on the Shadoe Stevens-hosted American Top forty: Deon Estus and George Michael’s imperial-era hit “Heaven Help Me,” Madonna’s “Angel,” and Jeff Healey Band’s

Defining the Poppy Bush Interzone

Congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, RNC chair, and CIA director, George Herbert Walker Bush became the first vice president since Martin Van Buren to win the presidency without his predecessor dying on him and so far the last president in forty years to lose reelection. His term could not have gone

The best films of 1990

For a studio to give writer-director Charles Burnett the dough to make a poetic, sometimes purposely abstracted film about contemporary black life in 1990 strikes me as an act of willful financial sabotage; but years of dwelling in the cultural memory of cineastes resulted in a Criterion release last year. Streaming it in the autumn,

You dance to disco and you don’t like rock: Ranking Pazz & Jop’s 1993 singles

At least this chart had diversity; no list can rule governed by consensus, right? So I expect resistance to what I did with Tag Team. I expect Fort Sumter without end for what I did with Radiohead’s whinge. Overall an unimpressive list considering this was PBI’s late Cretaceous Period. Many singles we consider classics are

Marie Fredriksson — RIP

Hello! You fools! I loved you! Roxette’s fluorescence was brief, and their songs offered as many layers as an almond cracker, but during the Poppy Bush Interzone when radio hits were getting dirge-ier singles like “Dangerous” and “Dressed for Success” brought the silliness and the hooks; in the era of Paula Abdul and Maxi Priest

Offer up your best defense: Ranking Pazz & Jop 1989

Welcome, boomers! Pull up a chair. VH-1 has videos for you. In this segment, Don Henley will stand in a barley field scowling at the young man he will sullenly deflower. In another, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ogle each other like a drunk middle-aged couple who remember why they dug each other’s ass cracks.

Ross Perot — R.I.P.

Goodbye, Weird Plutocrat Guy, one-third responsible for the first exciting presidential race of my lifetime. Empty the pockets of H. Ross Perot, called “H.” Ross Perot by Dave Barry, and the following aphorisms jingle like fresh dimes: If someone is blessed as I am is not willing to clean out the barn, who will? and: