If you can’t say anything nice… welcome home.
I wish iTunes had this — the two free tracks make me want to apply for dual citizenship of the U.S. and the Zulu Nation. Will have to look for it in a “real store” the next time I have “real $.”
[UPDATE Jan 2004: The iTunes store got it a few weeks after I bought the CD. Bowmp bowmp got that vibe. Time to get live.]
When did the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion drop Jon’s name from their title? It appears to be the same rockin’ lineup, which is fine by me. Were they tired of saying the whole name? It’s not like JS said the band’s whole name all that often in his endless [rockin’] namechecks. It was always “BLUUUES EX-PLO-SHIAAAAN!!!”
If this is a move toward a more democratic blues explosion, then that’s delightful. Good on them.
Sometimes on Slashdot, as on Fark and Metafilter, the comments are better than the actual posts.
This track, which you can download from the comment linked above, bears a striking resemblance to the old chestnut “Hard Times” by someone called “Fresh Bush and the Invisible Man,” from a bygone George Bush era. I had it on CD at one point, but apparently ~blakeh is the only one who knows where a copy is.
Heard their track The Richest Man [this is an iTunes link] on the Disney cruise last winter — they were in heavy on the on-ship video channel.
Since then, I have read up on them a bit and gather that they are one of those Evanescencey “please don’t hate us because we’re Christian” kind of bands — they are on Maverick Records [until recently “Madonna’s vanity label”], but at the same time most of the write ups you see about them are on Christian rock sites. Google them, for real tho. The message of “Richest Man” is that material goods are essentially unimportant. Which, sure, is true. The song is great, though — sort of a Nickelbacky Creed minus the oily torsos.
It just goes to show that, with a little ingenuity, some paid-off deps, and a handheld camcorder, a ragtag crew of determined inmates can make a real-life version of Eazy-E’s We Want Eazy video.
This could’ve been the greatest Late Night Top 10 ever with five more lines. And you know that Dan Rather, who once crooned the chorus of “It’s The End of the World [As We Know It]” a cappella, would read a list like this. I especially like two and four.
In fact, they should go all the way with number two, and on those nights when Rather anchors the newscast in Washington D.C. [which he has occasionally done when important news occurs there], have him backed by a real WAMU : Metro Connection : Music HistoryD.C. go-go band. [For way more on Go-Go, follow the links at the bottom of that linked page.]
I was in downtown Birmingham the other day to visit a client and noticed a huge, empty corner retail space where Tower had opened in 2002. Were they really already gone? Apparently they closed in April with little fanfare. Not a huge surprise given their parent company’s ongoing financial spiral, but still a little disappointing.
Longtime readers of this page, by which [this time] I mean people who knew me before I had a weblog [yes, an intentionally confusing statement], know that I used to spend hours in Tower Records and that a significant portion of my weekly income went to stacks and stacks of CDs. At least one of my as-yet-unconceived future childrens better like 90s music and s/he better be into the retro Compact Disc movement, or else it was all for naught.
The cherry on top: Virgin Megastore was kicked out of Columbus, OH because their landlord just had to have a Crate and Barrel in the mall. This leaves visiting my brother-in-law as the only viable reason to go to Columbus.
Oh, and remember Detroit’s own Harmony House, the serious music buff’s alternative to mall record stores? Per this article, its sole remaining store is now owned by… FYE..
Through it all, Schoolkids Records skates along in a below-ground space in Ann Arbor.
I have had a cutesy lite-reggae song bouncing around my head for about five years, ever since I heard it a couple of times at Blizzard Beach. I heard it again last night at Bahama Breeze, the island-themed chain restaurant with cheap beer and decent burgers in the parking lot of the AMC Livonia 20, and tracked it down through a few Google searches and a little luck. It is “I Would Find a Way,” by Big Mountain, possibly the only reggae band with links to Aztlan websites on its homepage.
[“I Love the 90s” types may recall Big Mountain as the hitmakers behind that reggae version of
“Baby I Love Your Way” from the Reality Bites soundtrack.]
Well, I figured out with a little more research why I liked the melody so much — it was written by creepy pop ballad hit cyborg lady Diane Warren.
At long last, it is safe once again to enter the record store.
On “the WB’s Superstar USA” website, D, from Minneapolis, MN takes a few minutes away from vampire hunting, or tenacity, or whatever this D does, to share his/her concerns about an entirely different show with America. By forgetting to use quotes to frame his/her descriptor, s/he creates a beatifically inscrutable sentence:
Unfortunately these speak before we think people are way too abundant.
For what it’s worth, I have caught exactly one episode of this. The concept seemed a little cruel, yes, but the judges made it oddly compelling. Just the looks on their faces.
