Rock music is, and shall always be, a hopelessly overcrowded field, analogous to the Darwinian state of nature, in which only the strongest ...

Today’s paper carried the news (news to me) that Billy Bob Thornton’s band, the Boxmasters, canceled the remainder of its Canadian tour, no ...

I mentioned yesterday I awoke preoccupied with songs about animals (see W. J. T. Mitchell’s fine work of theory and criticism, Picture Theor...

Today is Easter Sunday, and I woke up this morning thinking of songs about animals. My thoughts inevitably turned to songs about birds, and ...

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...

While there’s a rather obvious connection between comics (“sequential narratives”) and motion pictures, the connection between comics and po...

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...

In her book, Women and Popular Music (Routledge, 2000), Sheila Whiteley is interested in identifying and examining female archetypes in pop...

On this day in 1982, David Crosby fell into a drug-induced slumber while taking a spin on the San Diego Freeway. Although he crashed into th...

For Georges Bataille, who thought a great deal about what constitutes human pleasure, for pleasure to be what it is, it has to exceed a limi...

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