According to This Day In Rock , on 15 April 1955 CBS talent scout Arthur Godfrey turned down the chance to sign Elvis Presley. However, acco...

The pedal steel guitar is to drunken self-pity what the amplified, distorted electric guitar is to drunken licentiousness. Two instruments, ...

During this happy Halloween season, let’s not forget Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and its doomed, hypersensitive prot...

The way the story goes, John Lennon’s infamous remark about the Beatles being “more popular than Jesus” was printed in an interview that app...

Movies such as High Fidelity (2000) explore the perils of record collecting, the way that the homosocial behavior of the obsessed collector...

One of the reasons The Who’s “My Generation” is so memorable is, of course, because of Roger Daltrey’s distinctive delivery—his stuttering: ...

Although the subject of his book, Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture , is the racial appropriation of black culture i...

I apologize for not being the best of bloggers this past week. I’ll plead the usual: too many things going on, too many irons in the fire. I...

Perusing the used record bins in the local Goodwill Store the other day, I came across the worn, tattered cover (no LP inside) of a K-Tel co...

Trivia question: What was the first album in the history of rock to include the disclaimer, “This Record Was Made To Be Played Loud”? I cann...

According to Roland Barthes, virtually all music criticism “is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective...

Jacques Lacan observed that public life in the Western world, rather like the majority of primitive communities, is subjected to the laws of...

The songs one might consider placing under the broad rubric of “Halloween Rock” occupy a curious niche in rock music history. They do not es...

1. “The Top 500 Albums of All Time”—another name for the outcome of a questionnaire, a device derived from a nineteenth-century parlor game....

1. Marx revised Hegel by averring all great historic personages appear twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. When appl...

1. To lift a phrase from Brecht, it is the special dignity of rock—entertainment—that makes it so very difficult to be a rock critic: the fu...

...because, as Hamlet said, “The rest is silence.” Such is my reaction when I confront a title such as 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You D...

According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary , the musical term riff is probably an altered or shortened form of the word refrain , an ...

The cultural practice known as “cruising”—defined by Phil Patton as “to drive without purpose”—is largely a post-World War II phenomenon, th...

My previous blog entry discussed the word “raunchy,” in which I concluded by saying there was a rather significant difference between the me...