Category: Music

  • More Doughty than a Fan Can Handle


    Mike Doughty’s got a new album out, it’s called Golden Delicious, and I was already hooked just from hearing the 30-second samples. I’m a monstrously big fan of Soul Coughing. My first take on Haughty Melodic (Doughty’s first “real” solo album) was unfair disappointment that it didn’t sound like Soul Coughing, but over time it…

  • Old News, Everyone!


    My favorite thing on the internet of the moment is this old-school video for “Psyche Rock” by Pierre Henry, the inspiration for the theme song from “Futurama.” Transistors as bombs and spermatozoa: awesome.

  • Todavía me gusta la música


    A few weeks ago, I rocked the internet to its foundations when I spent an entire week posting lists of my favorite things to this blog. But even by those low standards, I still managed to under-perform on the music section, a fact that haunts me to this day. I’ve been digging through my iTunes…

  • The best song of the BOSTON band of all the times


    John Scalzi’s blog passes along the story that Boston’s lead singer died on Friday. He also passes along some damn lies, saying that the band’s “moment is over.” Spoken like a guy who never played Guitar Hero. Or, for that matter, never heard Boston. There are very few “perfect” pop/rock albums, and Boston is one…

  • Me gusta la música


    The best performance in pop music is Merry Clayton’s solo in “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. The part where her voice cracks may be the best moment in pop music history. And there you go. I don’t know from writing about music. You want Lester Bangs, go to a different blog.

  • Tonto! Jump on it!


    Sometimes I’m forced to look into the very heart of my whiteness, and it’s astounding. It’s like walking down a long, white tunnel inexorably towards a blinding vanilla light. As I get closer I hear echoes of the Hellman’s Mayonnaise jingle and the white granny shouting “Where you at?” from cell phone commercials. Finally I…

  • Fun Fact


    The guitar hook to the awful James Blunt song “You’re Beautiful” is the tune played at the end of “The Incredible Hulk” TV series. At least Bob Marley made something cool when he ripped off The Banana Splits.

  • I feel great! You can too.


    One of my all-time top 5 favorite albums ever recorded is Telecommunication Breakdown by Emergency Broadcast Network. EBN’s schtick was remixing video sources to techno beats, basically popularizing the mash-up a decade before it got popular. Their video releases were pure capital-G Genius but could get tedious quickly. The best example of that is the…

  • Stop winding it up so much please thank you.


    I was watching “Saturday Night Live” this week (eyes over here, Mrs. Beatty) and the first musical guest was Gwen Stefani doing “Wind it Up” with an over-enthusiastic drum line and a throng of badly-dressed dancers. It’s difficult for me to describe my reaction to seeing this, but in short: I became firmly convinced that…

  • A Bunch of Noise


    What started out innocently enough as a search for “I Want Candy” by MC Pee Pants (second page) somehow ended up with me on the iTunes Signature Maker. It’s a java app that digs through your iTunes library and generates a file that contains snippets of your favorite tracks mixed together. It’s not exactly pleasurable…

  • Lousy Runs Both Ways


    Every time I’ve tried to see Alison Krauss and Union Station in concert, the tickets have been sold out long before I even heard they were going to be in town. One time I even considered driving down to some God-forsaken town in central CA to see them because the Bay Area shows were sold…

  • Who’s Peeking Out From Under a Stairway?


    When we went to Disneyland last year, Rain played a CD where every track was a person’s name, from A to Z. The entry for W was “Windy” by The Association. And so began my two-month-long nightmare. I’ve always been susceptible to getting songs stuck in my head, but this one is the worst since…