Archive for the ‘Punk’ Category
Posted by s woods on April 1, 2013
Was reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a second run-through, for college, and whenever I picked up the book I’d put the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on the record player, over and over, my sound of Quentin Compson trying to break out but turning in on himself in loathing.
My point is that here are a couple of the many ways into hard rock, if someone wants to take them. But then, I can imagine my parents appreciating Hamlet, but I can’t imagine them being him. And I can see the similarities between Mick Jagger’s schematic wrong-end-of-the-telescope analyses of male-female relationships with my dad’s hard-headed, persistent political analyses. But I can’t imagine my dad wanting to blot the sun out of the sky, even in pretend. And my relationship with my parents wasn’t good enough for me to ever explain to them where my dad might have some Jagger inside.
- Frank Kogan mining the territory re: hard rock he more or less invented.
Posted in Punk, Quotes | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on March 10, 2013
It has always been hard for the priests of RockThink to deal with punk in any manner other than ideological; this is why the Sex Pistols go down in history as somehow more valuable than the Buzzcocks.) An almost unlistenable triple LP dedicated to a communist revolutionary government (The Clash’s Sandinista!) means more to those who write the histories than an unspeakably gorgeous #1 pop song like [the Bee Gees'] ‘Too Much Heaven.’
- Brian Doherty, Death Before Disco, Reason Magazine, 2003
[For the record, I'll take Sandinista! over "Too Much Heaven," but the point is nevertheless well-taken.]
Posted in Archival, Pop Musik, Punk | 5 Comments »
Posted by s woods on February 4, 2013
Invented punk rock
as we know it;
penned one of the
great singles of ’68;
inspired an essay entitled
“James Taylor
Marked for Death.”
[Obit]
Posted in Lester, Obits, Punk | Leave a Comment »
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 »
Posted by s woods on January 26, 2013
The Future of Everything, ca. Jan 1978, Rolling Stone
Posted in Advertising, Critical Collage, Disco, Punk, Rolling Stone | 1 Comment »
Posted by s woods on August 10, 2011
Posted in Advertising, Punk | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on July 28, 2011
Tim Marchman revisits Marcus’s Ranters and Crowd Pleasers.
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Greil Marcus, Punk | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on June 28, 2011
A review of Byron Coley’s C’est la guerre: Early Writings: 1978-1983 (published by L’Oie de Cravan, in both English and French), at Blurt Online.
And to further mark the occasion, an interesting interview with Coley at Vice magazine.
Q: So back when this stuff was being written, did you think you’d still be writing about music 30 years later?
A: I remember talking to Richard Meltzer back then and he was telling me ‘You got to give this up! If you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you have to stop this. You can’t keep writing about rock music after 30.’ But I always had this thing for it. I would watch people like Richard or Lester Bangs or Nick Tosches sort of from the sidelines when I lived in New York and it just looked like they were having a lot of fun. They weren’t doing anything really productive, but I would just look at them and think ‘What a way to die!’
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Interviews, Noise Boys, Punk | Leave a Comment »
Posted by s woods on June 25, 2011
Hüsker Dü’s Propulsive Liberation (Reviews of two new Dü books by Christgaü — including one co-written by Mould and Michael Azerrad — in the New York Times)
“Three decades later I still feel lucky to have experienced that transmutation of wrath into flight. Not only did Hüsker Dü generate an impressive recorded legacy during their eight years on earth, they were ferocious live — as memorable onstage as Nirvana or the Rolling Stones. They deserve one great book, not these two mediocre ones.”
Posted in Book (P)reviews, Punk, Xgau | Leave a Comment »
