Iman Lababedi

Founding Editor of Rock NYC. Iman Lababedi was a freelance rock critic in the 1980s, took a break of 20 years, and has been writing and editing the music blog rocknyc.live since 2009. He considers this to be in many ways a golden age for pop music and hopes you are enjoying it too.

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US Top 10 Albums 12-14-13

Sometimes you look at the charts and you say, ‘who are these people? I haven’t heard of one of them.” And other times you look at the charts and you say “Who are these people? Well, I know every single one like the back of my hand and they all suck”. 2013 has been a lousy year for music and this is a disgraceful chart.

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US Top 10 US Albums 12-14-13

the Garth Brooks Walmart only 6 CD, 2 DVD box set, with four albums of Brooks covers, his greatest hits album from 2007 and a live special that aired on CBS on DVD. Whatever future CDs have, it will be something like this

rock nyc

Barbra Streisand's "Back To Brooklyn" Reviewed

Barbra might want to tells us about being mother natures guardian or treasuring every minute, it doesn’t mean much, and we are not there for platitudes, but but to hear her sing “Some Other Time”, we understand instinctively what it means to pass through the world on borrowed time.

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Miley Cyrus And Katy Perry Go Gold

Prism is a sad and sorry album and going gold in six weeks won’t do it (it took Eminem two weeks to go platinum). Katy Perry has a problem and where goes Perry goes Miley. Look at it this way: Eminem sold more in a week than Miley and Katy sold in a combined 14 weeks.

rock nyc

YouTube Read Their Own Research, Cancel Two Billion Hits!

The advertising community is dead meat when it comes to online buying, since it is very very easy to fake your numbers of readers, indeed there are companies where you can essentially buy clicks on a cost per click basis. If you are buying it at 10 cents and selling it at a dollar the numbers speak for themselves

rock nyc

Be Here Now: New Album Releases Snapshot Review 12-3-13

Four songs and not bad at all the guitar solo on the title track is a thing of deep beauty and the song keeps shifting gear from deep pop to sideslip jazz and back But the highlight is Marshall’s cover of Bobby Fuller’s “Never To Be Forgotten” two tracks later. On Spotify, so I guess even the great can’t fight technology – A-

rock nyc

Bright Eyes "A Christmas Album" Reviewed

What Bright Eyes understands absolute these timeless songs is that they bring with them their own memories and 12 years after they are recorded, they bring with them the memories of memories; like the memories of childhood and lost loves.

rock nyc

Golden Slumbers: Recent Deaths In The Music Community 12-3-13

Bootsey X – Aka Robert Mulrooney, legendary Detroit rocker who performed with original punk rockers the Mutants and almost famous the Ramrods before forming his own Bootsey X And The Lovemasters, dubbed Iggy Pop fronting James Brown And His Famous Flames here. A lesson in the limitations and lack thereof in loving rock and roll.

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Sneak Peaks: New Album Releases 12-3-13

Well now, this really sucks. There is little doubt Spears isn’t up for anything that important at this juncture of her care and there is nothing else remotely close to cool. I guess I would have to go with Boston just because, well, they are Boston after all,

News

Worst Decade Ever? The 1980s

I remember the 1980s as one long nightmare, never ending, never pleasant, buying the new Costello album and discovering it was Spike, being so broke I couldn’t afford a gyro before work, contemplating suicide on a daily basis and no fucking music to get excited about.

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UK Top 10 Albums 12-7-13

One Direction have the best selling opening week of 2013 in the UK but the story here is the revenge of the boy band, if you include Elvis (and why wouldn’t you?) that would make six of the top 10, and the entire top fives all boy band redux.

rock nyc

UK Top 10 Singles 12-7-13

An alright, Englishy, Christmasy, feel goody type of charts, with Elle, Lily, McFly, Barlow, 1D and more with English-y sweety sticky love makes me strong-y four little word-y let’s hold hands to process guitars and programmed drums

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Best Albums Through November 30th, 2013

Darkside – Tom Stoppard And Pink Floyd – A radio play that works as a record album that works as a radio with Stoppards rat-a-tat dialogue and concise storytelling. No, it isn’t “The Invention Of Love” but then neither is “The Coast Of Utopia”.

rock nyc

"Frozen" Reviewed

The songs are just plain awful, all of them, even “Let It Go”, even “Let It Go” when sung by Idina Menzel, certainly one of the best Broadway singers of the 21st Century, even with a Idina Menzel portraying Princess Elsa, the Snow Queen -a sort of Silver Surfer who can’t control her powers

rock nyc

Best Concerts Through November 30th, 2013

M.I.A. – Terminal 5 – November 1st, 2013 – A masterpiece of modern pop with a conscience that puts former contemporaries like Madonna and Lady Gaga into the nostalgia files, while M.I.A. finds the middle ground between beats and beatings.

rock nyc

Active Viewin': rock nyc Concert Picks Week of 12-2-13

Right about now it is always touch and go with Elton John on stage, last time round he promised a greatest hits package and it sucked what there was of it anyway since half of the sucker was that crap album with Leon Russel. What a ripoff. So why am I going again on Wednesday, December 4th, 2014: well, Elton is playing a lot off Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

rock nyc

Tom Stoppard's "Darkside" Reviewed

“Who’s to say he didn’t save a serial killer? Or a mad bomber on a date with destiny? Or just people who fuck you up normally? Geography teachers or ticket inspectors or boyfriends who shag your best friend? People who write the small print, see over the penalties? People who go ‘I’m telling you for your own good’ and ‘can’t you read we’re closed’?”

rock nyc

Happy Thanksgiving From Abba!!!

Literature is too insulated, motion pictures too social, art is wet literature, and none of them have the wham bam social compatibility. None of them matter and don’t matter as much for so many. Music is everything and without it life can be lived but man would it drag

rock nyc

US Top 10 Albums 12-8-13

That Cities thing is from a Minneapolis radio station KTCZ, it is for charity and it takes the best live performances from the past year, guys like Passenger and fun., and it sells the albums at Target. They sold out their entire 40,000 production run in a week

rock nyc

US Top 10 Singles 12-8-13

Some time this summer when Passenger was blowing up he UK charts I predicted this would crossover Stateside and though, to be honest, I am not always exactly accurate in my predictions, this very appealing track was more than everybody gets it right once in a blue moon.

Track Review

Bruce Springsteen's "High Hopes" Reviewed

Really, this is an amazingly lame little track, who exactly is he singing for? It is so generic it could be for really any one and it is so unspecified it seems like a general complaint about nothing. The song itself isn’t fully formed: it doesn’t coalesce in your ear.

rock nyc

David Bowie's "Pin Ups" Reviewed

My concept is that since it was cover songs from second wave Brit Beat bands of the early 1960s, and since these bands, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things, Pink Floyd…, since these were all boy bands attractive in post- Beatle sense to a girl fanbase with pictures from “Fabulous” pasted on their walls, well, they were Pins Up, weren’t they?

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Bob Lefsetz On What Works

In 2010, I reprinted an interview with Dave Davies and here I am going to repost a newsletter by Bob Lefsetz. I am not a huge Lefsetz fan (he is terrible on music) but I forgive him a lot for being so right about so many subjects here. read em and weep

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rock nyc's pick for 2014: John Newman

The thing about disco bands as opposed to DJs (even though Newman has done his fair share of the latter) is that the pop showcase move and sell of disco doesn’t exist in EDM and Newman is a salesman, he wants to be popular, he wants to sell a lot lot lot of copies

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