Oasis are returning for a series of huge concerts this summer. I will not be attending, but I have friends who are hardcore fans who have been able to think of little else since the announcement. There’s been a lot of texting back and forth about the potential set list, largely surrounding the question, “Do they play anything that came out in the current century? Do they even play anything past Be Here Now?”
Read MoreSacha Jenkins passed away over the weekend. He was 54 years old.
Read MoreRemember when characters from movies would appear in music videos? When was the last time that happened? The past was almost always smellier and worse, but if we’re going to be inundated with retrograde unpleasantless from everywhere at all times, then maybe we can have Scarlett Johansson welcoming Dua Lipa into Jurassic Park.
Read MoreI often say I miss record stores, but that’s not entirely true.
Read MoreSka music keeps threatening to come back, but though certain elements of the late ‘90s two-tone revival have wormed their way into contemporary music, there will be no reconsidering the relative legacies of Voodoo Glow Skulls or Reel Big Fish.
That’s fine, by the way.
Read MoreOn my very first day as an editorial assistant at Spin, I didn’t do a whole lot of work. Does anybody do much of anything on their first day? You meet some people, you settle into your space, you get a spiel from IT about your computer, and otherwise you’re just setting up your e-mail signature and waiting for people to ask you to do stuff (which they don’t feel comfortable doing yet because they have known you for all of 22 minutes).
Read MoreTom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ 1991 album Into the Great Wide Open was the first CD I truly appreciated as a complete thought. I had loved other albums before that, but I thought every song on Into the Great Wide Open was a smash. I loved the art work. I obsessed over the liner notes. I started watching VH1 because they played the video for “Learning to Fly” more often than MTV did. Even though I fell under the spell of Nirvana and discovered punk rock and old Iron Maiden records shortly thereafter, Petty continued to be one of my guys.
Read MoreFor reasons beyond my understanding, there are a handful of recent-ish reviews of my deeply out of print book up on Goodreads. They all basically give the proper assessment: it’s not especially good or even coherent, but the enthusiasm is there. There is one sentiment that popped up that I thought deserved further exploration: that I was too mean to Stone Temple Pilots.
Read MoreStreaming music is broadly bad.
Read MorePulp have returned! They’ve actually been back a couple of times since disbanding shortly after the release of their 2001 album We Love Life, but this time they’ve got a new album with a great new single.
I’ll write about it soon, but today I’ve got one of Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker’s solo joints stuck in my head.
Read MoreWhen I first started buying music, it was on cassette tapes.
Read MoreDespite my longtime devotion to ‘90s Britpop, I was late to Suede.
Read MoreI don’t think they were ever my favorite band (none of their albums are in my top 100 list), but there was definitely a period of my life when I was a very intense apologist for They Might Be Giants.
Read MoreEven though the way we find, consume, and think about music has been repeatedly upended, it’s mildly comforting that there are still some constants. Chart breakthroughs are still meaningful. Physical sales still count for something. Little trend pockets can still cross over and influence the mainstream. Lots of stuff about the current music world is a drag, like Kate Nash literally showing her ass so she can pay for a tour. But even I, a deeply depressed cynic, find silver linings on a lot of these clouds.
Read MoreMy relationship to electronic music has always been mercurial. My first real experiences with it likely came during the ‘90s Euro-pop boom on mainstream radio—the big tent voice-based house and techno jams like Real McCoy’s “Another Night,” Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night” and La Bouche’s “Be My Lover,” alongside the rise of Ace of Base. I didn’t like most of that stuff at the time, though I have a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in some of that stuff (I’ll always ride for Gina G’s “Ooh Aah…Just a Little Bit”)
Read MoreLucy Dacus is in a weird position at the moment.
Read MoreI’m not sure when I heard David Bowie for the first time. I imagine I heard “Space Oddity,” which was one of those songs that was always in the air, floating through radio airspace and embedding itself in the carpet even if you weren’t going out of your way to find it. I also have a clear memory of seeing Tin Machine perform on an old episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Macaulay Culkin. (Like the rest of the universe, I was unimpressed.) I was aware of Bowie and what a towering figure he was, and I had seen him on screen in Labyrinth and The Last Temptation of Christ, but if I’m being perfectly honest the first time I really engaged with David Bowie was when he was interviewed next to Trent Reznor on MTV.
Read MoreI have a hard time with Playboi Carti. He seems like he’d be a really rough hang, and the predominant narrative about his output in the past 18 months has been how strangely difficult it has been to hear new music by him. But a big part of me admires just how intensely he has managed to stick to his guns and how much he has bent the mainstream to his deeply chaotic approach.
Read MoreChuck Klosterman once half-jokingly wrote about how Radiohead’s Kid A might have predicted 9/11. I don’t think Thom Yorke had any sort of inside info about the comings and goings of international terrorists, but I do acknowledge it’s kind of wild that album feels like what life was in the immediate aftermath of that attack, even though Kid A arrived nearly a full year before the event. Kid A wasn’t a response to 9/11, but it felt like one, and retroactively feels like the soundtrack to life in New York in the aftermath. (The same could also be said of PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea, which also came out in the fall of 2000, is all about urban isolation, and features vocals from Yorke.)
In a similar vein, I sometimes think Matty Healy of the 1975 anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic.
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