scaling up in Silverlake (R.I.P. Arthur)
Arthur Magazine is no more. After 31 issues published over 2002-08, and another two years as blog and events promoter, the self-styled countercultural periodical ran out of money and, on March 15, 2001, ceased releasing new writing altogether. Today there is silence from this bold and clever champion of freak folk, psych rock, underground comix,...
don’t cross a Scottish new romantic
I’ve always loved Ultravox since I first heard “Vienna” in the early 1980s. However, my musical education from the New Musical Express (which, as I mentioned before, kind of fucked me up) quickly impressed upon me that Ultravox were actually fey pompous bourgeois muso popstars. (Just earning three of those five modifiers would ensure a critical death...
shameless self-promotion: “Pursing Quality of Life”
I’m pleased to announce that my new book has finally been published: Pursuing Quality of Life: From the Affluent Society to the Consumer Society. Here’s the official blurb. From anxieties over work-life balance and entangling technologies, to celebrations of cool jobs and great places to live, quality of life frames the ways we enhance our lives...
branding alienation with Tony Wilson
I recently watched Joy Division (2007, dir. Grant Gee), an exciting documentary that carries more intellectual heft than maybe any other film about a rock group. Great interviews not just with the surviving band members and others who knew them, but also early followers who were deeply affected by the band’s records and performance. I’m struck, for...
adventures in arts-based urban revitalization: the RoboCop statue in Detroit
On February 7th, someone tweeted the mayor of Detroit with a passing thought: “Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky & Robocop would kick Rocky’s butt. He’s a GREAT ambassador for Detroit.” The city’s mayor (and former NBA all star) Dave Bing replied, “There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you...
Teaching Musical Urbanism
As you may know, this blog runs in tandem with a team-taught undergraduate seminar I teach at Vassar College with Hua Hsu. We’re four weeks into the semester now, and I’m excited by the multidisciplinary group of students we have in the course. In case you’re interested in what a course on musical urbanism looks...
singing in Tahrir Square
Words can hardly convey the magnitude of this historic moment in Egypt, or of my awe and admiration at the people’s achievement in forcing the dictator out nonviolently. So no essay today. Instead, the sights and songs of the joyful crowds in Egypt’s streets. To get a feel for what it might sound like in...
uncovering the underground: Ladbroke Grove
As someone who’s been seeking out underground rock music for over 25 years, punk rock really fucked me up. Specifically, the punk rock dogma I internalized by reading the English music weekly New Musical Express religiously between 1983-85. Punk rock in England was largely over in these years, unless you were talking about groups like...
gathering no moss with Keith Richards
The beginning of the new semester has kept me from posting recently. Well, that and the excellent distraction provided by Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life. So much fun to read, and so much food for thought for someone who’s admittedly not the world’s biggest Stones fan. One theme that emerges loud and clear is his cosmopolitanism. Raised...
are you really going to listen to their new album?
I’ll admit, I got excited after seeing the announcement that Echo & the Bunnymen are performing their first two albums, Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here, in their entirety on an upcoming North American tour. Ocean Rain is fine; they played that whole album on tour awhile ago anyway. For my money, though, the gloomy garage rock—“Going Up,” “Over The...
out of the valley of the dolls
Since we’re talking about Legs McNeil and Gilliam McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, one of the most colorful quotes in a book chock full of them comes from Peter Jordan, the oft-forgotten replacement for bassist Arthur Kane in the New York Dolls. Jordan describes the 1971-74 milieu in which Kane fell...
please skill me: the growing credentialism of NYC’s rock underground
Using an admittedly unscientific sample of 38 indie-rock groups from Brooklyn, I poked around the bands’ Wikipedia pages and their underlying sources to look for any members’ college affiliations. In no time at all [update: and with further information from my sources; see below], I found information for 26 groups. Even if we assume the remaining...