“There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child. By abuse, I do not mean sexual abuse; I mean he was used brutally and callously for money, and clearly imprisoned by a tyrannical father. He had no real childhood and spent much of his later life struggling to get one. He was spiritually and psychologically raped at a very early age – and never recovered. Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.”
- Andrew Sullivan, “Thinking About Michael,” The Daily Dish, 2009

“The jerk of the knee always short-circuits critical engagement. I detest cabaret and Broadway nearly as much as Marsh does; yet I treasure those two Beatle recordings. I don’t care for the songs themselves — versions by others bore me stiff — but I love what the Beatles do with them. Their wintry ‘Taste of Honey’ tastes more like quicksilver, with its minor key, bitter guitar, and eerie third-person backing vocals. ‘Till There Was You’ has not only a vocal of surpassing freshness from Paul, but one of George’s loveliest guitar solos. Both are expressions of Beatle identity and cultural affinity as integral and unphony, I would argue, as anything they recorded in the early days. The fact that Marsh’s hatred of the songs’ generic origins precludes any consideration of them as Beatle performances points to one of his limits as a critic: to him, the mere entertaining of non-rock material proves the sin of inauthenticity.”
- Devin McKinney, “Dullblog Book Report: The Beatles’ Second Album by Dave Marsh,” hey dullblog, 2008

“I quit smoking cigarettes recently and I’ve been making do with Gummi Bears, the patch, and tons of righteous weed. So between Kid A, Madonna, and that new Doves album, I’ve been enjoying a summer of love in my mind. The Doves’ mantras of desolation are even trippier than the first couple Cranes records (though maybe not as lysergic as prime Swans or Ravens), Madonna’s new one makes the 13th Floor Elevators sound like the Weavers, and Kid A doesn’t have a thought in its head, always a plus with stoner rock. (Laddish punter Nick Hornby recently lambasted Radiohead for making an album only 16-year-olds could enjoy because apparently adults who have to work and buy food don’t have time to be “challenged” by rock records. What seems to be lost on Hornby is that the biggest challenge most listeners would have with Kid A would be getting the plastic wrap off the CD. I hope somebody bought Mr. Hornby some Lucinda, Victoria, and/or Dar Williams records for Christmas.)”
- Scott Seward, Snowplow You Bad Elephant!, Village Voice (2000)

But at the far edge of the rap universe in the Black neighborhoods of Long Island, Chuck D, then a nineteen-year-old MC, remembers the impact of “Rapper’s Delight” differently. “I did not think it was conceivable that there would be such a thing as a hip-hop record,” he says. “I could not see it.” The famous DJ Eddie Cheeba had been out to Long Island and broken “Good Times” to Black audiences in May, promising as he played it that his own rap record would be out soon. “I’m like, record? Fuck, how you gon’ put hip-hop onto a record? ‘Cause it was a whole gig, you know? How you gon’ put three hours on a record?” Chuck says. “Bam! They made ‘Rapper’s Delight.’ And the ironic twist is not how long that record was, but how short it was. I’m thinking, ‘Man, they cut that shit down to fifteen minutes?’ It was a miracle.”

- From Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (2005) (cf. this excellent Q&A)

Ten tasty bites from Christopher R. Weingarten’s insanely laudable and laudably insane @1000TimesYes Twitter project (context provided here and here), starting just past the halfway mark, which is where I first tuned in (still in progress btw):

506) Twista/Category F5: Slow jams and fast game will always have their place. Hyphy tracks not so much, but hey.#6.5

591) Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johansson: A complete miscast of Scarlett’s fucked up pipes into a She & Him detergent commercial.#3.5

628) Trey Songz/Ready: You should sleep with Trey Songz because he knows Drake and is less crazy than R. Kelly.#6.5

716) Vitalic/Flashmob: It still rocks, but like solar-plexus-punching French house, not ZZ Top.#6.5

791) KISS/Sonic Boom: Somehow even cornier and more overproduced than their puffiest, most AquaNetted, unmasked-’80s hair-glam tragedies.#2.5

802) Alphabeat/The Spell: Within two years they stopped rollerskating to Bananarama and started rollerblading to Black Box.#7

806) Lil Wayne/No Ceilings: Relentless simile fest that sways from hilarious to unfortunate to “I made that pussy gleek.”#7.5

817) Wolfmother/Cosmic Egg: Fuckin A fuckin O fuckin R. But we’ve got the biggest balls of them all.#6

872) Kid Sister/Ultraviolet: When the cool kids invite you to their party and turn out to be as boring and talentless as you suspected.#1.5

884) The King Khan & BBQ Show/Invisible Girl: Mutant doo-wop blown out on a boombox and no less charming.#7

“What drives the need to consume everything, why was I happy as a teenager to dismiss whole swathes of stuff that I now feel compelled to try and understand? There’s an inverted music snobbery which demands that I, the gifted, erudite and trained listener, can get things out of listening to Yes or The Crazy Frog that other, less erudite listeners simply pass over on point of principal, a relativism which decrees that everything has some value, no matter how base or hidden, and that, if you only listened the right way, you too would see what that value is. There is also the demand, a perception heightened and perhaps solely manufactured by the proliferation of easily-available music and music criticism on the internet, that we all be infinite dilettantes, that simply because we have the opportunity to sample everything at the click of a mouse that we necessarily should. But if you’re a dilettante then you are a dilettante.”
- Nick Southall, “Soulseeking” column, Stylus (2005)

White House DJ Battle

Barack Obama’s iPod vs. John McCain’s iPod. (Blender, July 2008)

OBAMA
1.  “Ready or Not” (Fugees)
2.  “What’s Going On” (Marvin Gaye)
3.  “I’m On Fire” (Bruce Springsteen)
4.  “Gimme Shelter” (Rolling Stones)
5.  “Sinnerman” (Nina Simone)
6.  “Touch the Sky” (Kanye West)
7.  “You’d Be So Easy to Love” (Frank Sinatra)
8.  “Think” (Aretha Franklin)
9.  “City of Blinding Lights” (U2)
10.  “Yes I We Can” (will.i.am)

McCAIN
1. “Dancing Queen” (ABBA)
2. “Blue Bayou” (Roy Orbison)
3. “Take a Chance On Me” (ABBA feat. Joe the Plumber)
4.  “If We Make It Through December” (Merle Haggard)
5.  “As Time Goes By” (Dooley Wilson)
6.  “Good Vibrations” (The Beach Boys)
7.  “What A Wonderful World” (Louis Armstrong)
8.  “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (Frank Sinatra)
9.  “Sweet Caroline” (Neil Diamond)
10.  “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” (The Platters)

“‘Adult Nite’ attracts some of these good skaters too, but often has a more desperate vibe. People show up in Hooters and Spanky’s t-shirts, comparing their tattoos and piercings while ranting about their dysfunctional ex-spouse(s). Then the Deadheads wink at the Surfers who wink back, and they all leave at once for the parking lot. When they come back, they’re smiling and their clothes reek of pot. Adult nite music is heavy metal — with the occasional Soft Cell song thrown in by a desperate DJ. Heavy metal generally isn’t good to skate to — it’s too fast — but AC/DC is the one exception.

“Saturday night is when the gang-bangers come out to skate. They usually hog the floor, even though they’re rarely good skaters. Once on the floor, they do a lot of pushing (both kinds) — usually only at each other, but with large enough gestures that those skating nearby sometimes get caught in a ricochet. Music then is mostly gangsta-rap (as difficult to skate to as metal is), but sometimes the DJ slips a diva into the mix, and that’s when everyone else who was complaining to him about the rap stuff lightens up and goes back to the floor.”
- Stripey, What’s a Girl Like Me Doing at a Rink Like This? (Freaky Trigger, 2002)

“Still, it was quite a surprise that winter night in ‘77 when Weekend aired a segment on ‘the punk phenomenon in England.’ Open-mouthed, I gazed at the television screen with a glee as The Sex Pistols wreaked havoc in countless unsuspecting households throughout America.

“Broadcasted ‘in living color,’ this crew of wild Brit boys clad in worn jeans, ripped t-shirts, chunky black boots and numerous piercings stalked the stage of a tattered venue in brutish abandon. ‘That’s disgusting,’ Carlos mumbled sleepily as lead ‘singer’ (screamer, shouter, shrieker) Johnny Rotten lobbed gobs of spit into the frenzied folks in the front jumped up and down. It was as though they were being baptized. ‘You would never see The Jackson Five spitting at their fans.’”
- Michael Gonzales, “White Boy Music” 2008 (in Blackadelic Pop)

“One of the most instructive things I did was to listen to Another Green World at a number of different speeds. Each time I heard something new that I had not heard before — a new sound that was buried in the mix, for example, or an effect, a heavily layered backing vocal, an abstruse lyric. Speeding up and slowing down Discreet Music taught me a lot, too; the title track of Discreet Music, or ‘Side One’ if you happen to own the vinyl copy, is recorded at half-speed. So I listened to it at double-speed, to gain some insight into what the original material might have sounded like before Eno slowed it down. I also listened to it at quarter-speed, which I liked even more than Eno’s half-speed version.”
- Preface to Another Green World, part of Continuum’s 78 RPM 33 1/3 series, by Geeta Dayal

“Some bad singers whine and moan. Some bad singers wheeze and groan. Some bad singers wait to exhale. Others work the soulful wail. Some testify, and some emote. Others sugar every note. Some sing too little, some sing too much, some sing ‘Sometimes When We Touch.’ But of all the bad singers in the world, the third worst has to be… Steve Earle.

“The second worst is Tom Petty.

“Billy Bragg is the worst.”

- Nobody Can Touch Him, Rob Sheffield, Village Voice, 2003

“The 45… perpetuated the time limits of the 78, although in an admittedly greatly improved form. Miniaturized, lightweight, and unbreakable, it could be held in the palm of the hand yet contained immeasurable depths and reaches, a perfect mystical object made of cheap plastic.”
- Geoffrey O’Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Authobiography of My Ears