David Dunlap Jr. downloaded the most recent Depeche Mode album last spring, and he does not know why. Clearly, he'd had a few too many Shirley Temples.
Writing in our Music in Review issue, Dunlap explains how just a few tipples bring out his inner nostalgic beast—which is exactly how he ended up downloading a much-derided [...]
Yesterday, Douglas Wolk—whose byline I recognize and who, according to Beaujon and this online encyclopedia thingy, is sort of a dude—published an item on NPR's Monitor Mix blog to the effect that, dammit, AutoTune and Pro Tools and click tracks and, you know, Twitter are conspiring to kill rock & roll.
Holding up the 48th second [...]
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Morning, y'all! Roundup's a little late today, as your pep pep had a helluva night. Top of the news pile: the Book World podcast is in trouble! Daniel Radcliffe fulfills early 2000s-era MAD magazine prophecy by morphing into Harry Pothead! Somebody get Mike Phelps [...]
In which the author wonders whether art for kids is art at all.
Children's music is like child pornography: Both serve the same purpose as their adult counterparts, but an adult's interest in either is unacceptable. Why, then, have They Might Be Giants made the children's book/DVD Kids Go and, in this last decade, redefined themselves [...]
It's probably fair to say that Tribute To, the My Morning Jacket singer Jim James Yim Yames' new disc of George Harrison versions, comes off more as a thought experiment than an organically approached extracurricular. That's not a put-down: How many times have you asked, "What if ___ covered ___?" and smiled at the thought? [...]
Richie Unterberger, who penned the books Turn! Turn! Turn!: The '60s Folk-Rock Revolution, Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, and Unknown Legends of Rock'n'Roll, among others, will be chatting Monday night about his latest effort, a 400 page, detail-filled work called The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film, and showing rare [...]
Some forms of political protest are beneath contempt, and one of them is sporting–sans a shred of irony–a Che Guevara T-shirt. Yet most Che-sporting hipsters don't know that Guevara opposed art forms that carried the taint of "imperialism"–including jazz and rock music. (Uninformed hipsters? Surprise!) My colleagues at Reason produced an eye-opening video about Paquito [...]
