MUSIC is not a GENRE

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE Following along with last week’s housecleaning, this week is a smaller and less significant batch of albums. Their greatest commonality is they almost exactly span what would be considered my “childhood years”. Other than that it’s a damn eclectic mix of artists you’d be hard pressed to find listed in the same genre, let alone the sa...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE When I started these posts 4 years ago, I had NO PLAN. So it’s no surprise I’ve hit a roadblock. I had an idea to do each album individually. Which could have worked if I'd kept to text only. When I kicked off video, it all went 8-track shaped. I took an album as an opportunity to talk about the artist in general, not thinking ahead...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE *If you don’t know the Beastie Boys by now, stop reading this and go find out. Get their EXCELLENT Beastie Boys Book and/or watch the Spike Jonze doc that comes out tomorrow. I might whip through some of their history in the video, but I’m not going to flesh it out here.* Beastie Boys are top 10 for me. Not in a revolving “these 50 b...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE I never understood people who only listen to one or two kinds of music. Life is way more intricate and interesting than that. I believe your emotional maturity and openness are directly reflected in the type of music you listen to (and in other art you consume). I love punk. I love heavy metal. I love hip-hop. I love funk. I love gru...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE Everything comes from something. The Beatles came from a mix of skiffle and American popular music of the 1950s. Bach wouldn’t have been Bach with out the lovely and talented Deiterich Buxtehude. Nirvana name checked both the Pixies and the Monkees, and damn if you can’t hear that convergence. (Fans of New Order, you know where I’m g...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE Life ain’t black and white. That’s not a revelation, and yet we constantly have to be reminded of it, because our brains WANT IT TO BE. It’s much more comfortable to slot things into categories. WELL if there’s one thing you know about me, it’s that I prefer artists who defy categorization. In most cases – like Prince or The Beatles...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE One of the great things about revisiting the past is finding out how wrong you are. A memory gets stuck in your head, but not in a big & clear way like something seminal or life changing. Then, like a mental game of Telephone, the memory gets warped. It gets stored in your brain as a warp and overwrites the old memory. Other thoughts...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE I’ve been realizing that I have not respected my destiny. The destiny I’ve chosen, that is. I was born into music. I have thrived on music since before I could spell. At every turn, during every boon and through every hardship, music has been my constant companion. Nothing ever been more important to me than music. (THING, not PERSON...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE Musicians & comedians have been in love with each other since forever. Talk to any musician or comedian and it’s likely they’ll tell you how much they revere the other profession. I mean, look at how Stephen Colbert & Jimmy Fallon salivate over music of all kinds, and even do some themselves. Yes, you could say artists tend to do and...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE This week is all about country music, so I thought I’d discuss one of my top ten favorite bands of all time: Violent Femmes. Yes, that’s right. The Femmes. And country music. They link. Seriously. Read on, and then go listen to the three albums I’m featuring this week, and it’ll hit you like a pickup truck on fire. Those of you who k...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE I love greatest hits collections. There are four kinds I particularly love: 1. A retrospective that spans the life of a band to date, and shows their evolution. 2. The hits of an artist I’m not interested in enough to listen to their whole catalog. 3. A genre collection, especially of one I haven’t dived into for realz. 4. A time cap...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE I’m taking a 4T pause this week to discuss the cause of all my weekly postings, them being: · Song for Saturday – I started way back in February 2016, with “SNo Globe”, which at the time was off my latest release, The Sunshine Seminar. I decided to do a “reverse chronology” of my music from that point on. Nearly 200 weeks (and songs)...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE “I Need A Beat” – “I Can’t Live Without My Radio” – “Rock the Bells” – “Going Back to Cali” – “Big Ole Butt” – “Jingling Baby” – “Around the Way Girl” – “Mama Said Knock You Out”. Anyone who knows classic hip-hop – second & third wave in this case – knows LL Cool J. And if you know LL, you probably know at least one of the songs I ju...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE Remember Lilith Fair? Remember how it was the “first” time that women in rock were famous and getting respect, and how that would change everything? That attitude pretty much summed up all of the 1990s. I still have huge nostalgia for that decade, and I do believe lots of important issues were brought to the forefront in every field....

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE When you’re in high school, you’re looking for two wildly divergent things. First, you’re looking to belong. That’s different for everyone – and as the practically-a-documentary The Breakfast Club taught us, where you belong can be entirely up to you. The point is finding like-minded people one way or another, so you’re not a total o...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE There have been many Chicagos. As with most bands, people tend to know their most commercially successful period. But the 1980s was actually their FOURTH phase, in my estimation (don’t get me started on sub-phases or we’ll be here all year). PHASE ONE (1967-74) was all about fusion & eclecticism and experimentation. Just about any ty...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE If you didn’t live it, you can’t feel it. The title track of this album was 100% accurate. While video games had been a craze for a few years, when Pac-Man was introduced in 1980, everyone went Berserk (pun intended – this was another arcade game released in 1980, and was almost always near or right beside the Pac-Man machine. Plus i...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE Music & nostalgia are SO closely linked. You can hear a song and it immediately takes you back to when you first heard it. You feel what you felt then, or a slightly bittersweet/painful echo laced with fondness. For you, that song is classic, and will always mean something. Christmas season is the best time of year to get nostalgic....

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE There are albums that shake the earth. Everyone’s got at least one that, after you listen to it, your world can never be the same. Of the couple dozen that changed my existence, this one here I just can’t ignore any longer. I’ve been sifting through my LP collection these past months, pulling out releases at random, and I knew I coul...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE I never really knew much about Talking Heads. They were one of those peripheral bands for me – floating in and out of my field of vision depending on my mood & taste timing out right with what they were releasing. Lately I’ve been discovering more about them because I’ll be heading out to see David Byrne’s show in NYC soon, and saw a...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE Ever walk through a bookstore and not really know what you want, and while you’re browsing you find a book that catches your interest enough to buy it? That same thing happened to me a lot when walking through Tower or Full Circle or Sam Goody. Usually I’d go into a store knowing exactly what I wanted, and needing to get it NOW or I’...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE Philadelphia – my old hometown – has a rich musical history, and every few years there’s a buzz about the scene there (NOW? - look up Mannequin Pussy). When I was a teen, the Philly area had some major acts either making their name then (The Hooters, Joan Jett, Robert Hazard & the Heroes) or starting out on their way to major success...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE Here’s another Top 5 band – I’m sure typical for people who came of age in the 1980s. Once again, I was introduced to U2 by a good high school friend of mine, and afterwards dug into their back catalog to devour everything I could. Like The Cure, like Joy Division/New Order, like The Jam, like PIL and so many others, U2 was post punk...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON WATCH MUSIC is not a GENRE VIDEOS and MORE The CURE for What Ailed Me - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (The Cure - 1987) Let’s get this out of the way first. The Cure ranks top 5 for me. When I discovered them back in the mid ‘80s, they became instant soul mates. Like Prince & U2 – two other top 5-ers, they were just about 10 years older than I, and from the get-go showed me my mu...