I recently saw a quartet of Asian films, two Korean and two Japanese. All they had in common is that they were genre movies: crime and horror. Let’s get the weak one of the bunch out of the way. I had heard good things about Whispering Corridors (1998). The setting is very similar to that [...]
CHOOSE ONE: Rap Grows Up / Rap Gets Old
Fascinating article in the Weekend Journal about the maturing of the rap scene: Thirty years after hip-hop first emerged as a distinct genre, it has become second only to rock in popularity by some measures and accounts for 13% of all music purchased — including four of last year’s top 10 albums. But for all [...]
The Lost Experience
The producers of the show Lost are doing this thing called The Lost Experience, to keep viewers interested and entertained over the summer. What does that mean? For example, during last night’s awesome episode, they ran another Hanso Foundation commercial. It points you to this website. If you run your mouse around the page, you’ll [...]
What Is Pop?
Following up on my previous post, I don’t know if you’ve been following this contretemps between Slate‘s John Cook and Sasha Frere-Jones & Jessica Hopper (nicely summed up by Oliver Wang here). This sort of dust-up doesn’t typically interest me, but there are a few small points. Stephin Merritt (of Magnetic Fields) seems to be [...]
Life in song.
You may recall that I previously mentioned the 1959 book Fifty Years with Music by Dr. Sigmund Spaeth, the noted musicologist and critic, which I picked up about three weeks ago. I promised I would quote from it in the future, so here ‘tis. You’ll note that Spaeth’s central tenets about the meaning of popular [...]
“Your eyes, they shine like the pants of a blue serge suit.”
There are very few musical performers that I revere so much that I would buy their next album sight unseen and music unheard. Portishead is one. In fact, I would buy their next album even if I heard it sucked. So, imagine how excited I am to learn that Portishead has emerged after eight years [...]
“Hear the notes from a distant song…”
I’m diggin’ the new Nouvelle Vague album so much that I thought I’d give you another dose. Do you remember the New Romantic movement? Were you even alive back then? Early Eighties England. Bands like Adam & the Ants, The Fixx and Spandau Ballet. Influenced by the look and sound of David Bowie and Roxy [...]
“What I find is pleasing…”
Following up on yesterday’s post about multiple versions of a song, here’s another pair. The song is Blondie‘s 1979 single “Heart of Glass.” It attracted some controversy at the time; many bands got sucked into the disco trend (including Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones), so for a band like Blondie to seem to do [...]
“Here we go…”
Longtime readers will recall that I am a huge fan of Jon Brion, whom I consider to be a god among men. I’ve been lucky to see his weekly show at Largo a couple times. There is an (almost ridiculously) long profile of Brion in this week’s LA Weekly, which you can read here.
“…but you can’t tuna fish.”
I wanted to pick two songs that were performances of the same piece, but were as diametrically opposed as possible in terms of performance — just to see what happens. The piece is J.S. Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue #2 in C Minor” from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Many of Bach’s keyboard works were [...]