Category: Music

For Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore has an excellent new post:
Please Remember Victor Jara, “the Chilean singer-songwriter and pioneer of the nueva cancion movement, who was tortured and murdered with many others following Pinochet’s CIA-supported 1973 military coup on September 11, 1973.” Jara’s name is little-known in the U.S., but he was canonized in the Clash’s track “Washington Bullets,” when Strummer intoned “Please remember Victor Jara, in the Santiago stadium.”

Recently at Stuck Between Stations:

Roger: Reasons To Be Cheerful

… on how a new biography and forthcoming film may signal an Ian Dury renaissance.

As the missing link between Benny Hill and Bertrand Russell, Dury had ingenious ways to find the sublime in the ridiculous. His backing band, the Blockheads, stayed tight and funky in an era better known for its sloppy chaos.

Scot: Auto-Tune This!

… finally learning what the mysterious term “auto-tune” means, just as the meme heads for the dustbin.

Scot: So Messed Up, I Want You Here

Would Iggy Pop approve of this modeling school for girls rendition of “I Wanna Be Your Dog?”

Roger: Blues for Dracula: An Impromptu Halloween Playlist

If you’re George Clinton, every day has been Halloween for the last 68 years.

Recently at Stuck Between Stations:

Scot sat down with his better half to watch Radiohead: Seven Television Commercials, a brief collection of Radiohead music videos.

Such impressionistic stuff, we decided to skip any attempt at actual review/synopsis and instead just riff words off the visuals and post whatever came out, do a sort of Kerouac typewriter roll on it. What follows are seven songs, seven paragraphs.

Roger, Discovering Japan

I recently stumbled upon Neojaponisme’s summary of the hundred greatest Japanese rock albums, as compiled by Kawasaki Daisuke two years ago. While I’m generally no fan of numerical rankings for music, I’m struck by his explanation of why such lists have often been uncommon in Japan: he claims that almost entire music industry there “is infected with the idea that they should not rank releases because it would ‘make the record companies angry’.”

Recently at Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore has been on a tear.

Wilco: For Dads About to Rock, We Salute You

Wilco will always be too traditional for those who want them to be weird, and too weird for those who want them to be traditional.

Shatner Meets Sarah: Tundra on the Edge of Forever

For a long time after I first saw spoken-word artist Sarah Palin recite for a national audience, part of me doubted her existence. … But Palin is indeed real, and the past month has shown that I clearly misunderestimated her artistic skill. A governor is a lot like a performance artist, but with actual responsibilities.

Jacques Dutronc: 500 Billion Little Martians Can’t Be Wrong

I only remembered it was Bastille Day an hour before it was over this Tuesday, but I knew just what I wanted to hear. Jacques Dutronc is a revered figure in his country’s rock history that remains a total obscurity to many stateside. That’s a shame, because if there’s one person who can demonstrate that “French rock” isn’t an oxymoron, it’s Jacques Dutronc.

For Stuck Between Stations, brilliant piece by Roger Moore on William Shatner’s dramatic reading of Sarah Palin’s Twitter stream, including a sideways reference to Swedish children’s books:

“It didn’t help that the author of her signature convention speech is a vegetarian animal rights activist, or that the names of her six children (Snipp, Snapp, Snurr, Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka) sounded too familiar. “

That’s when blueberry smoothie squirted out of my nose from laughter.

For Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore on how Michael Jackson liberated Eastern Europe from communism: The Aviator, Part I:

As with Elvis, I dismissed most of what he did long before he left. But MJ was an arresting presence even for those who, like me, did my best to ignore him. Elvis even seems an inadequate comparison for his stratospheric global reach. A closer comparison might be Howard Hughes, another man-child of erratic brilliance, whose master aviator’s soaring heights later gave way to reclusive paranoia and heartbreaking tailspin.

Then, in The Aviator, Part II: Sky Saxon Moore pays tribute to Sky Saxon of The Seeds, whose death was completely overshadowed by Jackson’s.

The Seeds discovered trippy keyboards before the Doors, and were unleashing raw power before the Stooges. They were their best at their simplest, exemplifying Woody Guthrie’s dictum that if you use more than two chords, you’re showing off.

See also: Mayra Andrade’s Lunar Mission

This week at Stuck Between Stations:

Roger Moore on the appearance of Metallica’s Lars Ulrich on the Rachel Maddow Show: Heavy Metal Drummer.

Scot on the greatest prog rock band you’ve never heard of: The mythical Gemini Rising takes to the web’s faux airwaves.

This week at Stuck Between Stations:

This Band Could Save Your Life
Roger, on classic tracks that have a bpm count of around 100, matching that of the human heart:

A Reuters article this week reported that the Bee Gees’ falsetto-fortified 1977 disco hit ‘Stayin’ Alive,” which clocks in at 103 beats per minute (bpm), almost perfectly matches the 100 per minute rate that the American Heart Association recommends for chest compressions during cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Strange Fruit
Roger, recalling the indelible power of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” and the effect it had on his young mind. Connected to recent revelations about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their sons’ reactions to the revelation.

This week at Stuck Between Stations:

Roger Moore: Change of the Century: A Campaign Playlist, on the politics of campaign soundtracks… or what should be campaign soundtracks.

Me: Zoe Keating, Tetrishead — Recent discovery of avant-cellist Zoe Keating on WNYC’s Radiolab has us re-thinking what the cello can do to your mind.