When I passively heard news reports Bob Dylan had been voted into the “prestigious and elite” Academy of Arts and Letters, I was surprised, and immediately recalled famous Groucho Marx quote, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Bob Dylan is no hoity-toity academic — he’s a measured man of depth and magnitude. What was going on?
Continue reading → Bob Dylan is Not a Man of Arts and Letters
We have been big supporters of Rihanna — but the tastelessness of her new “Man Down” video where she assassinates a man before the song even begins — is just too much tacky for our type. We are also plainly aware that the core mistakes of the Man Down video are identical to the errors made in the video for “Love the Way You Lie.” We see a pattern here and we don’t like the mosaic.
Continue reading → Rihanna Gets a Gun and Shoots Herself in the Breast
I was first introduced to the band Destroyer in my workplace, when a coworker of mine was playing the album Destroyer’s Rubies. I was quite impressed by the impressive guitar work and the gentle singing.
When we are listening to the words of a song being sung by a musician, does the gender of the musician matter? I think it really comes down to the subject matter of the music itself. There are songs that are completely gender neutral and there are many songs which imply some sort of gender from the very subject of the song itself.
I have one hard rule about lyric writing: Use the Singular form over the Plural in every instance. “Boy” is better than “Boys” and “Snake” is better than “Snakes” and “Love” is better than “Loves.”
If you get into music full-bore to make up for 20 years of lost time, your effort quickly begins to ascend into the monetary stratosphere as costs pile up to bowl you over in that everlasting and neverending chase for “that sound.” The latest example of my overweening ear interest is demonstrated in my new obsession with Evidence Audio
amp, speaker and guitar cables. This is my story.
In Salon the great critic and intellectual Camille Paglia rips apart Madonna for being creepy and old and trying to incorrectly recapture her angst and youth instead of blazing a path that matches her temperament and established philosophy of performance:
Even allowing for the fact that she must strenuously maintain her hipness for a busy husband 10 years her junior, Madonna is starting to morph into the mature Joan Crawford of “Torch Song,” still ferociously dancing but with her fascist willpower signaled by brute, staring eyes and fixed jawline. In cannibalizing her disco diva days, Madonna runs the risk of turning into a pasty powdered crumpet like the aging Bette Davis in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” Will she become a whooping Charo shaking her geriatric hoochie-coochie hips on TV talk shows? Or should we expect a sudden, grisly collapse from glowing beauty to dust, like Ursula Andress as the 2000-year-old femme fatale in “She”? Too hungry to connect to the youth market, Madonna goes on childishly using naughty words and flipping the finger (as onstage at Live 8 last summer). Marlene Dietrich, her supreme precursor, knew how to preserve her dignity and glamour.
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