1. Keith Richards drinks and smokes, Madonna works out—while the display of the body is central to rock culture, their bodies reveal distinc...

1. The fact that rock ‘n’ roll is about a whole lot more than the music is rock culture’s equivalent of the elephant in the living room. 2. ...

I went ahead and posted nine more aphorisms today, so as to make the number I’ve posted on this blog at this point total an even 70. Several...

1. Concerts once were performed for the purpose of being recorded, but now concerts occur for the purpose of promoting a record. 2. There’s ...

1. An old adage advises not to judge a book by its cover; it is therefore the height of folly to judge an album’s greatness by the album cov...

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...

1. The Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie,” not Bob Dylan, taught rock musicians a fundamental lesson in writing lyrics: the best are highly ambiguous...

1. Tennyson might say that the special agony of the “Baby Boom” generation is that it must watch its rock gods grow old and gray and beyond ...