newcritics

Bing Crosby’s birthday is May 2, or 3. He was born in 1903, although his tombstone says 1904 because of a mix-up. This confusion about the simplest of a man’s details is the least of the problems with his legacy.
Like the Olympian gods, he is largely forgotten and unloved today. Gary Giddins made […]

It was quite unexpected when my brother walked into rehearsal one night way back in 1979 and announced that “Steve Miller” had a new record out that blew him away. He told us the name of the song was Is She Really Going Out With Him, and that it rocked hard with great lyrics. Back […]

[From the archives. Originally posted at my place January ‘07.]
Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly is a modern musical masterpiece. It is a quintessential concept album, never wavering from the theme of a teen-aged boy’s (and a maladroit jazz geek at that!) fantasies circa 1960. Part autobiographical, the album captures the essence of the late 50’s […]

I must admit it thrills me –as a Columbia University alum AND as a dweeby, over-educated white guy–to wake up in a world where Vampire Weekend is the IT indie rock band of the moment (making the cover of Spin on Internet hype and a fan circulated CD-R before the January release of its debut […]

James Wolcott’s right: “it’s wealth that’s required, not scrappy resilience.” So we won’t be reviewing Shine a Light here, because I haven’t yet seen it. In lieu of the requisite Scorcese-mauling, how about a brief Tattoo YouTube for a Friday night, a shambling mess of videos that just percolated up from the series of tubes.

Classic […]

Pardon me, I’m new around here.
When Tom asked me if I would join in the cultural critical fray around here (based on this, mostly), I was… well, astonished; someone actually asking me to do the thing I’ve longed to do, for, like, ever. I grew up - literally - writing movie reviews (as […]

It’s undoubtedly an oversimplification, but to me there are two fundamental models for rock bands–the first involves a style that is tight, punchy, and carefully arranged, the second involves a more ad hoc approach, a style that wheels and sprawls played by a band coloring outside the lines, piling lick upon lick, squealing uncomfortably to […]

I always found it odd that of all pop music, it’s Sheryl Crow’s that is most likely to send my 16-year-old into paroxysms of abhorrence.
On it’s face Crow’s music is unexceptionable: it’s unpretentious and catchy; well written, well played, and well sung (even my daughter would admit). Perhaps for some, Crow’s Sara Lee quality is […]

The last few months have been fertile times for those interested in seeing and hearing rock and roll on the big screen, and for those compelled to investigate and/or dismantle its mythologies, self-perpetuated or not. Todd Haynes dug into six sides of the publicly orchestrated persona of Bob Dylan, and exploded the conventions of the […]

We Philly kids grew up with great rock and roll radio in the 60s. You’d switch on the transistor and you had it all, from the Supremes and the Four Tops to the Stones and the Beatles to the more obscure but fantastic Dyke & the Blazers and the Shadows of Knight and the Seeds. […]

Hey, people, the NewCritics.com post about something that inspired you first anniversary blogging party can’t be over yet, because I still have to post about the current hiphop scene.
Yes, the current hiphop scene. I can’t think of any creative artists in any field that are more inspiring right now than the best of our […]

I’m a channel surfer, especially when I’m driving in my car. It’s a fundamental, deeply ingrained behavior and the primary way in which I still stay in touch with pop music. Call me old school.
Over the past year, the voice that has stopped my wandering finger most often belongs to Alecia Beth Moore of Doyleston, […]

To celebrate the first anniversary of newcritics, Tom has invited contributors to identify their most important single piece of media from the previous year, or perhaps, more specifically as Tony Alva reminds me, “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year.” As usual, I’m somewhat late to the blog […]

Shrunken Heads
Ian Hunter
May 2007
The single most important release in 2007 for me was Shrunken Heads by Ian Hunter. You can read my original post on the subject here, or better yet, just go buy it.
This man has paid his dues. He’s seen good times and bad times. Listening to this […]

In response to Tom’s query “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year”…
If forced to pick, I would have to select Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” (well covered here at Newcritics by my esteemed collegue in all things rock Mr. Ted Wilson esq.). It’s been a while since something […]

(Cross-posted at my hovel.)
Tom has asked us to honor the one-year anniversary of NewCritics by posting on “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year”. Fair enough — there have been many, but this is the latest one…

A friend, knowing the kind of research I’m doing for my book on […]

David Johansen swung into Babylon on Friday night at Irving Plaza, the dank old Polish Army Veterans headquarters that has stood at 15th Street and Irving Place since 1914 - or about as long, in living memory anyway, as Johansen’s grinning Our Gang mug has looked out over New York audiences with that front stoop […]

Art by The Skimmer. I do wear suits like that pretty much every day.
Among all that it has wrought, the digital revolution has changed utterly the way we mere amateurs, without access to mindbogglingly expensive and carefully calibrated recording equipment, collaborate in the creation of music when we live hundreds of miles from each other. […]

2007 was a dark year for people who once made a living selling recorded music.
A couple of data points to put it in perspective:
The average weekly sales of #1 albums this year was 284,000–a 45% decline from the average weekly sales of #1 albums in 2000
While digital sales grew year over year–46% growth for digital […]

Last Thursday night, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) had its 40th annual Deems Taylor awards for outstanding articles, books, and broadcasting. The ceremony was held at the beautiful Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center. It appeared the snow had imposed a foreboding tempo; the awards had gone on much later […]

The Postal Service unveiled a Frank Sinatra stamp this week on what would have been his 92nd birthday. It was, of course, first-class.
For better and occasionally for worse, Sinatra provided the sound track for our romantic lives as the Greatest Generation went to war, morphing from a scrawny crooner mobbed by teen-age girls to middle-aged […]

It’s a world turned upside down where Roger Clemens is likely never to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame,  but Leonard Cohen has been elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The two Halls, of course, reflect very different cultural streams in American life, particularly when it come to the electorates. The sports […]

(Cross post from over at my place. All apologies to Blue Girl for all the colorful language, but you know how it is when someone’s messing with a friend of yours)

So last night I and another buddy of mine went to call on an old guitar player friend that we hadn’t seen in […]

Does anybody remember laughter?
If your answer to this question involves spring cleans, may queens or bustles in the hedgerow, then you might know and love Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same” as much as I do. This classic movie and double album from 1976 has just been re-released in a worthwhile expanded edition […]

I hate the Grammy Awards. Actually, my loathing for industry awards ceremonies more or less extends to the entertainment industry’s whole nauseating annual orgy of self-congratulation and narcissism from the Oscars to the Emmys to the Tonys to the Obies.
But among industry awards ceremonies, the Grammys remain the worst–the least likely to reward the most […]

Recently, at an intimate venue in Queens I had a wonderful opportunity to see the thought provoking cabaret, My Brave Face. The show consisted of three performers, and is really more like a rocabaret, comprised of alternative, folk, and rock music. Collectively, Shellen Lubin and Robert John Cook create a richly woven depiction of a […]

When will we learn? When will we have had enough?
XTC released arguably their quintessential record in 1982, titled English Settlement. It included the song Melt The Guns that rings in my ears every time the news breaks informing us of another senseless public shooting by a lunatic.
There are too many guns […]

A while back I received an e-mail from Tom (Watson, not Petty) suggesting I review the Tom Petty documentary Runnin’ Down A Dream by Peter Bogdanovich that was being broadcast by the Sundance Channel. Absolutely, I replied.
Then life made its own demands. Running a recording studio is not conducive to any kind of […]

Until recently, I could find little tolerance for anyone’s “love me, love my favorite rock band” attitude. It harked back to when I was a teenager and a serial girlfriend to guitar-playing boys. The guys talked about their favorite music for hours. If I disagreed out loud, I would leave the scene an ex-girlfriend. Their […]

Dave Brubeck brought jazz back to 52nd street last Wednesday at The Paley Center for Media. He came for an evening to look at how television has captured his work over the last fifty years.
We watched clips from the heyday of live fifties tv, seeing the young, earnest pencil-tied Dave Brubeck Quartet in […]

Todd Haynes wheeling, kaleidoscopic Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is so dazzlingly fresh and original that it makes me wonder what went wrong with movies over the past thirty years.
How did cinema turn from an enterprise entered into by the bravest creative minds–people like Welles, Fellini, Buñuel, Goddard or even Warhol, people willing to […]

A lengthy and elegant mess of a film, Todd Haynes’ not-so-experimental I’m Not There is nonetheless a beauty of a wreck, a “non-biopic” about Bob Dylan that mainly ignores that facet of Dylan that always hides in plain site when analysts look for meaning in the minstrel poet’s own life - his music.
Oh, there are […]

I suppose that Ben Lee’s bubblegum pop is something that I should leave for my teenage girls, but honestly I love him as much as they do. We’ve been digging his records in our home since his 1995 record, Grandpaw Would. That record has one of the great odes to making music on it, the […]

I had a dream last night that The Gotham Gal and Josh and I were at a Neil Young show, right up front, and during an acoustic version of Powderfinger, Neil invited The Gotham Gal to join him on acoustic guitar. She was great by the way.
That dream ended in the Boston Garden in 1979 […]

When I was a kid it confused and bothered me that All Saints’ Day comes before All Souls. I knew that Halloween was the vigil of a commemoration of the dead, and I didn’t understand how it could leap over this Saints thing.
Then it became more clear that the “hallowed” of all Hallows Eve means […]