For a band so insistent on defying any and all principles of behavior, even (or perhaps especially) when it meant sabotaging their own success, it’s perfectly fitting that the Replacements’ best and most quintessential album bears a title so openly flippant in its disregard for the popular music establishment. And while inspiration for that title likely stopped at a simple gesture of blasphemy, there is also an irony to Let It Be. Where Paul McCartney’s “Let It Be” finds a…
There comes a time in every young pop vixen’s career — usually, after her third or fourth album has dropped and sales slowly start waning — where she supposedly has to “grow up” and re-shape her image if she wishes to remain professionally relevant.…
It can be tempting to give up early on Radio City — right after album opener “O, My Soul,” the one song here that seems to just go on and on, as if it were meant to weed-out those who would judge the band…
The origins of The Velvet Underground as a group are about as haphazard as they come. The ostensible writer of the outfit, college-educated Lou Reed, seemed as entranced by the literary realism of his creative writing professor (esteemed poet and novelist Delmore Schwartz) as…
There’s no better place to start with demolishing the myth of Captain Beefheart’s ‘inaccessibility’ (and, frankly, many other myths) than Safe as Milk. The man born Don Vliet cut his teeth with former schoolmate Frank Zappa and formed a blues band with another peer,…
Brian Eno will always be best known for his invention of ambient music (or at least its coinage) and for his work as the producer extraordinaire behind such classics as Remain In Light, The Joshua Tree, and Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, but the avant garde,…
The Last Word from Your Editor, Sam C. Mac: With the 2010s officially over, the time seems right for another departure: after 12 years (with a small break in the middle), I’m stepping down as this site’s Editor-in-Chief, to be succeeded by co-founder (and unapologetic…
The Last Word from Your Editor, Sam C. Mac: With the 2010s officially over, the time seems right for another departure: after 12 years (with a small break in the middle), I’m stepping down as this site’s Editor-in-Chief, to be succeeded by co-founder (and unapologetic…
2019 was another faithful year that reminded us that there’s no hope whatsoever for anything: Our political system continues to fail us in a remarkable number of ways, cultural institutions continue to decay from lack of funding and relevancy, and the nearly-decade long rise…
Nobody denies that Johnny Cash was a legend; his mythos looms large in Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary, as good a bellwether as any for how Cash remains one of the genre’s defining personalities. On what foundation does his legacy truly rest, though? For decades, the Man in…
