Category: Musicians

Bob Stanley’s ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’

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Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley to publish ‘The Story of Modern Pop’ book.

Bob Stanley is a sometime-critic of pop music and the founder of Saint Etienne. His upcoming book is (apparently) 800 pages long and has the best (and yet, the most obvious) title of any book on pop yet written. The book is an attempt “to bring the whole story to life, from Billy Fury and Roxy Music to TLC and Britney via Led Zeppelin and Donna Summer.” If every single reviewer of the book manages to convince me that it is the worst piece of garbage ever written on the subject of music it will still be something I insist on owning. Its mere (at this point, only imagined) existence makes me smile.

–bob_stanley_yeah_yeah_yeah_book-500x764

The Name Game

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The important thing about Musician magazine is that it is named Musician magazine. It is not named Music magazine. It is not named Sociology magazine. It is not named Popular Culture, Politics and Anything Else the Editor Likes magazine. And it is certainly not named Critical Theory magazine. Why? Because musicians are interesting and everything else is boring. Well, okay. Music is intensely interesting when listened to. When written about, it is boring. Try it sometime.

– Charles M. Young, “15 Years of Musician: Why We Write About What We Write About” (Musician, August 1991)

(For the record, I would happily buy a magazine called Popular Culture, Politics and Anything Else the Editor Likes, which describes pretty much every great magazine ever, though not Musician, which was also once in a while a great magazine.)

James Chance on Film Noir

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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.)

Nightmare Alley