Musically, my Songbook is grounded upon Martha Bayles’s theory of American popular music, and my last post gave an account of what I believe I’ve learned from her. In the next several posts, I’ll be providing some elaborations upon or reactions to her theory. That theory is . . . . Continue Reading »
The Songbook has been a heavily 60s affair so far, with occasional forays into the 70s and 80s. Why the neglect of the 90s and the aughties? Well, I hold that 60s rock set the basic patterns of the ongoing rock sound and attitude; and that while these patterns get some major adjustments in the late . . . . Continue Reading »
Well, I’m obviously not talking about a song here, but rather, about a high-school play that no-one not connected to the San Diego area Mt. Carmel High School during the 1980s has any reason to know about. (Nor am I talking about the musical that features hard rock songs.) I’ll say more . . . . Continue Reading »
The Songbook was analyzing a set of songs about Loneliness and Individualism, such as Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence,” before it got side-tracked into laying out my theory of modernity’s sociological stages. It’s time to return to the first task, which brings me . . . . Continue Reading »
Okay, here’s a shorter way, for those of you who haven’t the patience for my full cinemascopic link-littered prose, to get at what I mean by Intermediate Modernity In Book VIII Republic terms, intermediate-modernity was the era of the self-repressing Oligarchic Soul, and “the . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Cheeks suggests in his comment on my last Songbook post that if there aren’t any, there’s really no point in me saying that Rock is ambivalent about or even resistant to modernity. He has a point. So, here are two possible candidates. The first is the most obvious choice, the . . . . Continue Reading »
The Songbook inevitably has to analyze modernity, precisely because it is interested more in what rock reveals about our overall sociological and spiritual situation than it is in rock itself. So what follows are two organizing posts concerning this. Here, I’ll quickly lay out my . . . . Continue Reading »
Yeah, she was the cute-as-can-be gal in the one great Will Farrell movie, Elf . Also in Almost Famous , early on as the hip sister who becomes a stewardess. The commenters at Big Hollywood are happy about Zooey’s rendition of national anthem at the World Series—not her first time at . . . . Continue Reading »
But really, when you consider how much praise and attention is heaped on lyric writers, its astonishing how rare it is for any of its great exponents to try to dig a little deeper (or at least ramble on a little longer) than a three minute pop song allows. I have a theory about this. It’s a . . . . Continue Reading »
What to make of the #occupy “movement?” Well, come to think of it, I unknowingly did say something about it a few weeks back when I wrote a far too long post on Joe Pug’s contemporary folk song I Do my Father’s Drugs. So my contribution to the punditry’s occupation with . . . . Continue Reading »
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