Carl Scott

I like all the “Beach Goth Noise-Pop” music I linked to last time, and have a real fondness for a number of the bands. But now it’s time for some critical observations. The major objections to this music are three: 1. It doesn’t swing, and the blues has been totally bleached . . . . Continue Reading »

Sane remarks on the subject, over at Acculturated, from Mr. Postmodern Conservative. And you also learn that he reputedly plays guitar in a band called Black Hi-Lighter! We’ll believe it when a link is provided . . . My own fantasy band is called The Cicadas. . . . . Continue Reading »

No, I’m not trying to sell you a piece of property; these are all bands featured in the latest Carl’s Rock Songbook below. Because sometimes, two titles are better than one. . . . . Continue Reading »

The last five or so years there’s been something of a renaissance, something of a new charge, rippling through indie rock. Quite a few college radio stations seem to be playing an awful lot of good stuff as far as rock goes . . . at least, to my ears much of it sounds as good as what was on . . . . Continue Reading »

Another of Tocqueville’s possibilities, that is, that sometimes it’s the “laws” that shape the “mores.” For never did laws/regime/ideology degrade mores more than in the communist countries. Kopplekamm’s stunning slide show of East Berlin buildings . . . . Continue Reading »

Ampontan has some nice juxtapositions, jumping off Victor Davis Hanson among others, highlighting the culture-and-mores-rooted FACT that Greece, Southern Italy, Detroit, and urban Britain are simply more difficult and troublesome places to live than Germany, Northern Italy, Switzerland, and of . . . . Continue Reading »

Take a look at this video , of a sixteen-year old who videoed herself criticizing the Obama and general liberal stance on gay marriage.  Innocuous, civil, standard-issue conservative commentary on the subject, really only distinguished by the commentator’s youth and her quoting Billy . . . . Continue Reading »

SMiLE was to be the follow-up to Pet Sounds , but its recording was apparently so arduous for The Beach Boys, the session musicians, and the increasingly unstable Brian Wilson, that he called it off in the Spring of ‘67. Driblets of the studio material were released over the years, Wilson . . . . Continue Reading »

Roger Boesche is not among the top ten Tocqueville scholars in my opinion, but he probably deserves to be in the top fifteen or at least twenty; he has at least three serious books on Tocqueville I can recall off-hand, the most well known being The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville , and . . . . Continue Reading »

Do you like “Do You Like Worms?” ? Let’s try an experiment: I’d like readers who have not really heard the Beach Boys’ SMiLE , their ambitious 60s album only recently “released” in a Brian Wilson-approved form, to listen to two of the most popular songs from it, . . . . Continue Reading »