Excerpt of Chapter Five from Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll by Maureen Mahon reprinted with permission by Duke University Press (footnotes omitted). © 2020 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt… Read More
This year has been a dark time for rock ‘n’ roll, with the coronavirus pandemic sidelining the live music industry. But rock music has long been about responding to troubled times with cathartic songs to provide fans with an emotional… Read More
“All the pressure you never applied / Can’t be asleep at the wheel / But something had already died / And something had lost its appeal.” So sings lead songwriter John Paul Pitts on “Dessert Island”, the opening track of… Read More
80. Drive-By Truckers – Decoration Day [New West] Decoration Day came on the heels of 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, a loose concept album about growing up in the shadows of Lynyrd Skynyrd, George Wallace, and “the duality of the Southern thing.” It… Read More
“I think self-depreciation is important in music; there is such an art to saying something really serious in a humorous way. I think Jarvis Cocker (Pulp) nailed this, along with people like Morrissey and Elliot Smith. To me, even the… Read More
Matt Sharp, frontman, songwriter, and only permanent member of the Rentals, doesn’t release music very often. Q36 is the band’s fourth album over 25 years of existence, and first since 2014’s Lost in Alphaville. It bears some of the hallmarks… Read More
In 2013 and 2015, drummer/composer/arranger John Hollenbeck released Songs I Like a Lot and Songs We Like a Lot, collaborations with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band and singers Kate McGarry and Theo Bleckmann. He mainly reworked relatively popular songs from… Read More
Of all the versions of “I Can See Clearly Now” that have been circulating since Johnny Nash died on 6 October, my favorite is the one from 1973, when Nash performed the song on the late-night variety show The Midnight… Read More
Our previous installment of Dread Reckoning, “Horrors in the Closet: A Closet Full of Monsters” describes how, within the context of horror culture, the construction of non-heteronormative sexual identities exhibits a telling duality. That is; because of the impurity and… Read More
“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” —William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890) Philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) was interested in the epistemological question… Read More