Come over to the dark side. We have music.

A deep dive into a few numbers you might have missed so far on your journey through life.

• 1: “Midnight Man” by The James Gang
• 2: “Starless” by the Unthanks
• 3: “Ach heile mich” by Cassiber
• 4: “Opening Theme” by Morte Macabre
• 5: “Gotta Go” by Bud Shank
• 6: “Night Life” by Ray Price
• 6a: “Repent Walpurgis” by Procol…

When our beloved musicians die, we feel bereft because we know we’ll never hear anything new from them. An archivist may discover some buried treasure, but that’s not the same…

A Plethora of Pop challenge

The original challenge:

Is self-definition possible?

Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

“You cannot define the truth of yourself within a given system while you’re in that system” (my feeble extrapolation of Tarski’s…

As we head relentlessly towards February 15 (Valentine Candy Half-Price Day), let’s remember the other side of the coin — good old fashioned hatred. As Ray Davies sang, “It’s the only thing that lasts forever.”

• Ed Sanders, “The Iliad”
  Jonathan Abner Tobias (aka Johnny) Pissoff espoused homophobia, racism, and xenophobia…

I hope they can help you as well. (Rock n’ Heavy Ten Album Challenge)

2021 was rough — not the deliverance from 2016–2020 that I had hoped for. Everywhere I looked, I saw crazy people.

So I’m compiling a menu of musical comfort foods to get through this new year…

In terms of popular music, I’m always at least a year or two behind. I’ve been burned by bad music that was trendy at the time, so I tend to wait until something has garnered so much credible praise that it seems worth checking out (e.g. Billie Eilish’s debut).

But…

The only genre of music I know of that’s more self-reflexive than country western is rap. But even then (according to my limited experience), rap musicians tend to refer to other rappers rather than per se to the music that they’re creating.

Country music has a long tradition of defining…