Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press
Paul Gorman
Thames & Hudson, 2022, 384 pages
traitors to the flesh / traitors to the spirit / cultural ambassadors—pontiffs—overlords—Hear Ye! Hear ye! Heed this wacko—the man who walks back and forth in the soaking rain—protected by the sandwich board he wears that cries out—in boldly-lettered paroxysms of despair—REPENT!—but it is too late for that
Continue reading ““Rock Critics as Rock Stars” by Dave Rubin”
I’ve been dipping a lot into Michael A. Gonzales’s writing in recent months, particularly his stories about growing up, discovering the music that would carry him through to adulthood, working at record stores, book stores, and coffee shops (working environments I’m all too familiar with). Continue reading “Critical Storyteller: Interview with Michael A. Gonzales”
Happy to welcome back (not that he ever really went away) Steven Ward. In the first several years of this site’s run, Steven conducted roughly 80% of the interviews that were posted here, starting with his great 2000 interview with music critic Paul Nelson (the first most fans of Nelson’s work had heard from the man in over a decade), then following through with (only to name a very select few), J.D. Considine, Anthony DeCurtis, Deborah Frost, John Mendelssohn, and dozens more. Continue reading “Turning the tables: Interview with rockcritics.com’s very own Steven Ward”
In the same way that February, 1959, would have such a lasting effect on McLean, the winter of 1972 forever shaped the course of my own life. Nothing so newsworthy as a high-profile plane crash, but a benchmark nonetheless: a doorway, ground zero, my own version of Rosebud. Continue reading “Benchmark pop years”
Aaron Aradillas, who’s interviewed a number of movie critics here, asked me to join him for a conversation about the Jonathan Demme/Talking Heads movie, Stop Making Sense (1984), inspired in part by Pauline Kael’s wildly enthusiastic review of the film (collected, initially, in her State of the Art collection). Continue reading “Movie + Review Zoomcast: Stop Making Sense”
On his frequently updated Substack newsletter, Rock and the Beat Generation, Simon Warner doggedly traces the connections inherent in his title, through interviews and correspondences, reviews, profiles, scrapheap-of-history sidebars. Continue reading “He’s got the Beats (interview with Simon Warner)”
In 2001 we posted a transcribed version of a “lost” Lester Bangs interview from 1980 Continue reading “Bangs Radio Interview 1980 (audio version)”
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