Category Archives: Music/Popular Culture

Dir En Grey: Japanese Metal from Hell (Saturday Video Roundup)

Godzilla ain’t the only hardcore badass from Japan. I’m not the Japan expert around here – that distinction falls to blogger, poet, photographer and Japanophile extraordinare Dan Ryan – so I won’t pretend that I know anything about J-Pop. It just felt like a nice day to do something a little different for SVR, and I’ve been thinking about Dir

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The grimm reality of Matthew Grimm: Saturday Video Roundup

It’s Matt Grimm Day at S&R and we’re celebrating music with a social conscience. Join us? We love great bands and artists of all stripes around here, but by now it’s probably no secret that we’re champions of the overlooked genius. I don’t know. Maybe I’m projecting because I think more people ought to pay attention to me and as

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Generation X, whatever, nevermind: reflecting on Kurt Cobain

No one could possibly be THE voice of Gen X, but Cobain was certainly A voice of my generation. In their seminal 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, published in 1993, Neil Howe and William Strauss argued that the only thing Generation Xers really agreed on was that there was no such thing as Generation X. Given the inherent irony

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Walmart “Working Man” ad: Rush sold out their fans. Big time. #WTF

Rush’s decision to license “Working Man” to a company that has declared war on American workers is one of the biggest betrayals of trust in Rock history. Yesterday I offered up a brief post wondering what the folks at Walmart were thinking when they chose to use Rush’s iconic “Working Man” as the soundtrack for their ad on investing more

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The best CDs of 2013 that I didn’t hear until 2014, part 2: Adam Marsland’s The Owl and the Full Moon

A few days ago I offered up volume one of stuff that should have been in my best CDs of 2013 note, but wasn’t. So now we arriveth at volume the second, whereupon I apologize to Adam Marsland. Adam has been one of my absolute favorites for a long time. I’m a sucker for the sub-genre we call Power Pop,

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Whatever happened to Country & Western?: imagining an alternate Nashville

It’s easy to see how the mid-1980s Roots revival could have shaped Nashville into something completely different than the wasteland it is today. Not long ago I was lamenting the embarrassing state of Country & Western music, and if you track down through the comments of that post you’ll see a couple folks, including our boy Otherwise, recommending that I

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Is John Newman the “dude version of Amy Winehouse”? Simmer down, Buzzfeed

Newman is pretty darned good. But it’s too early to know if he’s the dude Amy Winehouse or the dude Duffy. A few days ago BuzzFeed up and wet itself over Brit Soul-Pop wunderkind John Newman, calling the 23 year-old singer the “Dude Version Of Amy Winehouse.” As a famous man once said, “simmer down, Beavis.” Comparing Newman to 27-Clubber

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