There have been many surreal moments in popular music during my (and your) lifetime, moments in which you could consciously feel that something bigger than usual was happening. The most obvious (for me) was the release of the Smells Like Teen Spirit video, and then the ascendency of Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Piolots, and Smashing Pumpkins, and then the floodgates opening after that. But there were other moments. Two that stand out in my mind are the MC Hammer release of “2 Legit 2 quit,” which basically buried party rap and it’s excesses of ridiculousness (bragging about how much a video cost to make is probably not a sustainable model), and the related moment of first seeing the “Nothin’ but a G Thang” video, and the onset of gangsta rap. Another one was the summer of ’94 and the meteoric rise of Green Day, culminating with them overshadowing everything at Woodstock ’94.

But perhaps my favorite single musical “event” of my lifetime is the incredible moment that was Danzig’s Mother 93 in late winter and early spring 1994… Continue reading →

The short prologue to my novel is now available for download on the fiction page.

The ubiquitous black and white photos from the depression have a tendency to make one perceive that everyone wore clothing in drab shades of gray, and that life was a bleak visage of darkness. The accompanying downtrodden motif of the time usually reinforces that idea as a contemporary psychological construct — why wouldn’t people dress in ugly, depressing colors when the world was collapsing?— and further skews our received interpretation of the era.

Of course, in reality that’s nothing but pure nonsense, as shown in these glorious color photos from the 30’s. People dressed in vivid color, street signs exploded with pastels, and buckets of peaches were, in fact, not gray. But then again, the depression-as-uncolorful-time construct is perhaps squarely wrong as a theoretical matter: ex ante, we might presume that people would dress more colorfully in hard times, as a psychological weapon against the hardship.

In any case, it’s almost shocking to look at the photo collection. Dont’ be surprised if your initial reaction is why are those people from the 70’s wearing clothes from the 30’s and driving around in old-fashioned cars?

A lot of people are talking about George Packer’s article on the Senate in the current issue of the New Yorker. I think it’s an ok article; George seems to have a better handle on Senate procedure than most of the DC press corp, although he still doesn’t seem to understand how the filibuster, holds, and unanimous consent are structurally all the same issue, and therefore his reformist position seems a little shaky to anyone who does fundamentally understand the issues. (Case and point: an obsession with “secret holds,” which also plagues the DC press corp, is a pretty good sign that you’re not quite wearing the right glasses yet). On a couple of occasions, he also mistakes the changing shape of partisanship for an increase in partisanship, for instance when he talks about how in the 60’s, the minority leader and majority leader often worked together to break filibusters. Well, that’s because the minority obstructionists were southern democrats hostile to civil rights, members of the majority party. The majority coalition in most filibuster situations was the northern democrats and the GOP. Amazingly, he writes several paragraphs later about how most of the civil rights act of 1964 was written in minority leader Dirksen’s office, but fails to see how the notion of party didn’t really apply in the case of 60’s civil rights battles. It wasn’t a partisan issue.

But leaving all that aside, the thing that irked me most about the article was Packer’s understanding of deliberation. Continue reading →

Driving to the grocery store yesterday, I heard Smokin’ by Boston on the radio. Which got me thinking — how many rock albums can you name in which every single song on the album gets regular radio airplay?

I can only come up with two, and they are both arguably not legitimate. The first, of course, is Boston’s first album, Boston.  It is unquestionable that, of the eights songs on the record, six of them (More than a Feeling, Piece of Mind, Foreplay/Longtime, Rock n’ Roll Band, Hitch a Ride, and Let Me Take You Home Tonight) get regular radio airplay. The other two songs  (Something About You and Smokin’) might not qualify for “regular” airplay, but you definitely hear them once in a while.

The other record I came up with is Continue reading →