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Archive for February 1st, 2013
Obscure Music Magazine of the Day: Feeling
Posted by s woods on February 1, 2013
Posted in Obscure Music Magazine of the Day, Zines | 1 Comment »
Who Wrote the Book?
Posted by s woods on February 1, 2013
- Frank Owen, Spin, Jan 1990
Posted in Disco, Nik Cohn, Quotes | Leave a Comment »
Rod the Bod
Posted by s woods on February 1, 2013
“‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ still needs modest defenses. Eerily mimicking the feel of the Stones’ ‘Miss You,’ Stewart’s band plays every extant disco signifier: four on the floor drums, locked-down bass, guitar fills too groove-conscious to do anything besides stay out of the way, sax solo. The key, though, is the amazing synth line, lumbering across the track, suggesting a scenario much colder and sleek than the one written by Stewart (noting the synth is one of my earliest memories). This is the second curious thing about ‘Sexy’: it’s a singer-songwriter narrative bedecked in polyester, which, thanks to the synth and rhythm section, intensifies the comedy.”
Alfred Soto on disco-era-and-beyond Rod Stewart. I have some thoughts on this, may try to express them later, but I don’t read Alfred’s piece as a rebuke to the Bangs/Nelson [insert most '70s rock critics] line on Rod. I dig the visors, though.
Posted in Lester, Links, Paul Nelson | Leave a Comment »
James Chance on Film Noir
Posted by s woods on February 1, 2013
Yes, that James Chance. From the latest edition of Perfect Sound Forever. Because I’m fairly noir-deficient, much of the context here eludes me, but there’s some great lines throughout. On 1947′s Nightmare Alley: “The movie that proves that the geeks that you meet on the way up are the same ones you meet on the way down. In fact, you just might be meeting yourself.” (If that’s not a tag line for this very site, I don’t know what is.)
Posted in Movie Critics, Musicians, Punk | Tagged: Contortions, Film Noir, James Chance | 3 Comments »
The Sublime and the Subliterate
Posted by s woods on February 1, 2013
From Joe Carducci’s, Rock and the Pop Narcotic. For me, the smartest thing about his book is his use of quotes, the more (apparently) non-sequiturial, the better. You laugh or scoff at many of them, then are forced to ponder their place: why is this one here? What does this have to do with ANYthing?
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Quotes | Leave a Comment »
Bread and Butter
Posted by s woods on February 1, 2013
“Lists are bread and butter to music writers; the problem with bread and butter, as we all now know post-Atkins, is that it sits in your stomach too long and makes you fat. Some of the writers here love lists, love making them, perusing them, criticising them, codifying and collating them; and some of the writers at Stylus hate lists, partly for what they represent (an attempt to mask subjective tastes as objective establishment, the stuffy domain of dullards and geeks, boredom and approval) and partly because listening to music seems like much more fun than sorting it into order. Either way though, one can’t deny the importance of them; in many ways they’re our currency, our identity, our cultural history, glimpses of where we are now so people henceforth can look back and see where we were then.”
- Stylus (writer unknown), introduction to Top 101-200 Favourite Albums Ever, 2007
Posted in Polls & Lists, Quotes | Leave a Comment »
Nick Tosches in January Esquire
Posted by s woods on February 1, 2013
Nick Tosches talks to Scott Raab about his new book, fear, Moby-Dick, opium, booze, and the weather.
SR: How does a writer retire?
NT: I’d retire by allowing most of my days to be as they have been for the past three months: I’ll sit on a bench, drink coffee, smoke cigars, and watch the clouds move through the sky, and watch this complete parade of idiocy around me. People speaking into handheld devices while they walk down the street and saying to the device, “I’m walking down the street now.” People are enslaved. I was just up in the country for a few days last week and it was great: no television, no telephone, no nothing. I walked through the woods, sat around, smoked. And it was lovely. I think the desire to be free has mutated, and we now live in an era when the slaves celebrate their slavery — this whole corporate concept of being part of a “team” at work….
Posted in Interviews | Leave a Comment »
