It is such an intriguing mystery, but at the end does it matter if it was a pilot error or not? I think it does, imagine if the gun had really been used in flight, imagine if there had been foul play. However I wonder what kind of investigation can be made so long after the accident and when all witnesses have died.
let me make it simpler. Buy all the UK official releases up to “Let It Be” except for “Magical Mystery Tour”where you need the US version, “Live At the BBC” “Anthology 2” and “Past Masters” I and II and you can pass on the rest
I hope you are getting well paid for your soundtrack to “the new Noah Baumbach film While We’re Young, which stars Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Driver, and Beastie Boys’ Ad-Rock”, because, well I only heard the sample “Only the Stars Above Welcome Me Home” and then only once because it stopped working
I am as completely unbiased when it comes to music as I can be,, and if you want proof here is my review of Madonna at Yankee Stadium. But there is doubting her pop music genius and while Lady Gaga may one day find herself in the same league, it sure hasn’t happened yet.
Santana and Sha Na Na sure got shafted, and CSNY made as much as Arlo??? I’m guessing some managers got canned (heat) when these umbers leaked. Joe Cocker left a superstar, right? Was Sly really the only back act???
Mr. Crenshaw is a music connoisseur with a taste for jazz and oldies, so he picked an early album of Sun Ra, as well as a 50’s album of the gospel soul band the Staple Singers, the new album by jazz guitarist Nels Cline, some Indian Style heavy funk, ‘SitarBeat’ and the best of Buddy Collette,… but also Mitch Ryder’s autobiography, ‘Devil and Blue Dresses’, since the Detroit-native musician feels connected to the musical legacy of the city
They have emailed us their new single ‘Everything Changes’, the title track of their upcoming full-length, which starts like a Beatles song, but as soon as strings and keyboards wake up the tune literally jumps and bounces of joy. It grows fuller and fuller with energy and urgency as many instruments jump in the mix
My problem is: Friday is a great day anyway, we don’t need to make it a better day but Tuesdays suck, it is the heart of the matter, the weekend is miles away and all that surrounds Tuesday is barren, lifeless and blankness. Most people die on Tuesday because, like Beckett, they go on, they can’t go on.
Last summer, singer songwriter Marshall Crenshaw visited California with The Bottle Rockets and he had the chance to haunt my favorite place in Los Angeles, Amoeba Music, for an episode
The painting is just a whirligig of pop art style. I did this one in oil and in black and white but made his lips and eyes in full Technicolor. These are his most striking features. When he sang, he always blinked his eyes for a bit too long and you always wondered if he was ever going to open them again.
Five years after “Hot Tub Time Machine” took us back to the 1980s a lot has happened: Mostly, three The Hangover movies, where the big concept, a missing day, morphs into a missing ten years, as Nick and buddy Lou (long with Lou’s long suffering son go back to the future to stop Lou’s murder
The rap band has decided to defy the idea as the album is housed ‘in a custom-made nickel-and-silver box in a Moroccan vault’, and last year they said they wanted to take the single edition on tour, charging people to hear it on headphones with heavy security around… again crazy idea!
The band we loved to hate till we saw em live (twice!) and changed our minds are back again with a new album, the poetically named Wilder Mind and a tour, lotsa festivals it says here, Gentlemen Of The Road. When will this be happening? May 4, apparently. And apparently they are putting down their banjos for an electric sound.
Maroon 5 are performing a skimpy though career spanning 17 song set. Three out of the four songs from V (their latest) are already hits, though the five songs from Overexposed feels like overkill and surely Songs About Jane is over represented
joke about Kanye West all the time, but he must be the most divisive musician ever, people either love him or hate him, he sure polarizes people, however I just don’t get the coverage that this guy can receive. He comes up with the most trite title and everyone is talking about i, when it is just a name
My problem with The Big Picture is my problem with Kat: her voice is so damn distinctive even when she is covering blues, country, rock, it all sounds like Kat. Good over a coupla of songs but a little too much over an hour. But I may be wrong and this is a great setlist.
The band we loved to hate till we saw em live (twice!) and changed our minds are back again with a new album, the poetically named Wilder Mind and a tour, lotsa festivals it says here, Gentlemen Of The Road. When will this be happening? May 4, apparently. And apparently they are putting down their banjos for an electric sound.
I am looking longingly at that September 16th, 2015 at Madison Square Garden. A Wednesday. I know it is probably gonna be an expensive piece of crap, with her waddling on stage at 11pm, and doing one lousy set piece after another before re-arranging “Like A Virgin” so it sounds like a dirge.
Christgau bludgeons the reader with endless dives into various intellectual rabbit holes (his “theory of pop,” Dostoyevsky, Theodore Drieser, etc.) and recalls then discredits every slight he has ever received. If you are purchasing this book for his writing on music, forget it.
The myth of the D.C. Straight Edge is another thing the movie should clear up, it just started as a reaction against venues with age restrictions due to alcohol consumption, and punk teenagers just wanted teenagers to be able to attend gigs. Despite the fact that MacKaye has never wanted to be a movement (that would have been very un-punk) the term has pursued him to this day, to his greatest aggravation.
The outpouring of sorrow over the death of Leonard Nimoy is not, and I think I can claim this with absolute certainty, nothing whatsoever to do with his singing, no not even “If I Was A Carpenter” or, god knows, “Highly Illogical”. Even so, Spock is an instrument of rock and roll culture and his cultural significance, his Pan-Universal Humanism, will hopefully hopefully, live long and prosper.
It’s funny how a veteran like her admits ‘to make it up as it goes’… doesn’t she have years of experience in the business? It’s true that the business has changed a lot and now artists get paid pennies for millions of streams, so I can understand the decisions of artists of her caliber.
The cover (above) is a “a 13th Century monastic symbol for the Virgin Mary” according to Stereogum who got the info from a website called God And Religion reconciled (here). That dead Mommies stuff might explain the McCartney angle a little, right? Mother Mary and Only One are not a million miles away conceptually or in tone
Among the many many things I admire about the book is just how unsentimental it is, how to the point, how it doesn’t deal in life in abstraction but rather it deals in life as flesh and blood. There is a stubborn resilience to it. Over and above the fun of reading about people you know is the fun of reading about a world you have no clue about
People are like, ‘Beyoncé’s hot. Got a nice fucking ass.’ I’m like, ‘Cool, I like skinny white chicks with big tits.’ Doesn’t really fucking do much for me. Not liking her music is one thing but…
I love the Brandi Carlile song off the newbie and it may prove to be the best album of next week. But most anticipated? Alyson has mentioned em a coupla times and I really like Gateway Drugs, I mean any band that calls one of its songs “Los Angeles Will Have Its Revenge On Francis Bean” and gets it to stick is sure worth anticipating.
Gregory Porter is having some 2015, a top 10 album in the UK is great, and the loud and intense approval of your some of the biggest names in pop music, Sam Smith for one, should make this a big gig, but singing a duet with Van Morisson on Van’s next album? That’s BIG. You can catch Gregory yourself, alongside rock nyc friend, bluesman Tomas Doncker, on Sunday afternoon
Usually I am looking up and down the list for half an hour before catching the name of a must see artist but next week Kate Pierson is sitting in with the Seth Myers show for four nights, in celebration of her new album, the absolutely terrific Guitar And Microphones and therefore goes straight to the head of the class. The picture is of rock nyc friend and B-52s fanatic Michael Malone and her royal Kateness.
Ryan explained that the format decided what should be excluded from the final audio file and that tests, determining which sounds were more important than others, were designed ‘by and for western-European men, and using the music they liked’. European men? What a surprise!
This time it is Brian Wilson’s turn, played by the brilliant Paul Dano. I like this guy so this upcoming movie can’t be a total mess right? ‘Love & Mercy’, directed by Bill Pohlad (‘The Tree of Life’) from a script by Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner, will be released on June 5th in a theater near you. The movie, which narrates the career of the Beach Boys and their rise to the top of the world of rock & roll, has a new trailer
“I’ve been on that podium too and if someone got up on my stage I’d knock them out. I don’t care who it is I would’ve knocked them out … That’s my stage. I earned the right to be on the stage at that moment. That was Beck’s moment.”
What is truly disappointing, is Bjork of all people knows how to prove the limitations of streaming by using it, she could have if she wanted it, make the album itself secondary to the overall experience.
Madonna fell off the stage last night in London so in our ongoing efforts to be entirely irrelevant in the world of music journalism, here is the list of winners, available only everywhere and some priceless moments… especially Madonna falling off stage.
I painted it a couple days after his death. It was later used in a flyer and poster for a “Tribute to Lou Reed” night at Fingerprints Records that Rockford and several local Long Beach musicians played songs from his catalog in a tribute, held coincidentally, on the anniversary of JFK’s assassination
Best Coast have made the move from the Beach Boys to the Dream Syndicate while remaining true to themselves. It is a real goodie with a sterling guitar break and a haunting, sadly sad (does anybody do sad quite as well nowadays?) vocal
Butler wrote the song after reading about the repatriation of the body of anti Apartheid hero Moses Kotane from Russia to South Africa. Kotane was a great influence on Nelson Mendela and he was also a communist, which first confused Butler
I’ve been listening to the album and I must admit to being very impressed, it is incidental music but with a beautiful haunting quality, we know Greenwood knows this stuff but Yorke and everybody else involved should be pretty damn pleased with it.
‘I’m rooting for Greece. I mean, broadly, who the hell isn’t rooting for Greece? Even if you’re super right wing, or super German, or super capitalist you probably don’t want Greece tumbling out of the Euro and defaulting on its debts.
So right now I’m working on a video game for ‘Only One.’ The idea is, it’s my mother going through the gates of heaven and you have to bring her to the highest gates of heaven by holding her to the light. We’ve been working on it for like six months.’
Personally, I think if Jesse really wanted to stir stuff up she’d join the GOP but chance would be a fine thing and since I don’t know Jesse’s music and i do know Patti’s music, plus, I wouldn’t mind having nature heal me, this might be worth the price of admission
“I’m a not so regular person in a not so regular world, and I’m just making the most of it and embracing myself,” explains Makonnen (born Makonnen Sheran), who signed to Drake’s OVO imprint in Sept. 2014. The success of the gold-certified “Tuesday” has been explosive: it topped the Billboard
Banks is performing at Irving Plaza on May 11th, the first time in years (I’ve been keeping an eye out since “212” and haven’t heard of any gigs). There is a Live Nation Mobile presale today at 10am for the gig and this is a must see.
I just wonder what subjects he will pick, it’s difficult to be optimistic about another ISIS beheading. Take any headlines on the Guardian website today, ‘South Sudan gunmen kidnap at least 89 boys from village near Malakal’, ’14-year-old Palestinian jailed for stone-throwing maintains innocence’ ‘Jewish magazine in Germany to be delivered in plain envelopes’ … ouch!
I think, and I believe I can prove this, that standing for three hours to hear Willie take a catnap is one of the seven rings of hell. It is puishment for all the wrong you’ve ever done. The only way I’d go is if he sang a medley of “To All The Girls I Love Before” and “On The Road Again”.
I thought let’s pass on the Knopfler track but then noticed which song it was and Knopfler channelling the Chieftains might be excellent but even if it isn’t, surely a Bobby Womack duet alone is worth the price of admission, plus Mavis Staples, Gregory Porter, Georgie Fame, Taj Mahal… these are good singers, these are guys we can imagine giving Van a little bit of competition.
ReeRee plays up to the competition, the only time I’ve seen her put on a good show was opening for young Eminem, where she was forced to raise her game through the roof and here is an idea if they wanna play Stadium, why not invite McCartney? Imagine that for a second, Paulie can do an hour in the middle and blow the youngsters minds.
I have as many problems with the duo acceptance of the Oscar speech as I did about Marlon brando’s much braver refussal to accept an Oscar to condemn the US treatment of Native Americans. So if they give awards for acceptance speeches good for them, if they give it for songs , “Glory” stinks.
‘The idea was to write super-pop dance music written and performed by girls,’ Johansson says in a press release. ‘I love Grimes. And I love the Bangles. And I love the Go-Go’s. I wanted it to be like those bands: ultra pop but also a little ironic, a little in on the joke.
His memoir, the book “American Sniper” is based upon, had to retract the claim that he beat Jesse Ventura up. Why would he have lied about that? Wasn’t 100s of killings enough, did he also have to LIE ABOUT beating up professional wrestlers? How violent is violent enough?
Give Steve Strange this: he was the definition of THE FACE and also a real music guy who moved from lead singer of ultimate New Wave band Visage to promoting DJ concerts. He died of a heart attack last week at the age of 55.
