Image via WikipediaOR: WHY ALL HISTORY IS POLITICAL Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records … [Read more...]

Image via WikipediaSo after I arm wrestled with the sound collecting for the radio story and got to my seat, the band had found a respectful groove, and they were truly nerdy like you'd expect. Totally engrossed in their instruments, very little eye contact, and tossing off classic licks with original flourishes that would have made lesser musicians weap. Fagen sat up front behind a Fender Rhodes and shades, tilting his head almost like Ray Charles, and developed a rasp, but he was totally committed. He's gone way beyond irony and ennui, now … [Read more...]

Image via Wikipedia It's impossible to say anything original about Michael Jackson, so I won't even try. As a celebrity and a media presence, for so much of his life, he cannot be extricated from all the words and images and sounds that he generated, or that were (and still are being) generated about him. Just as we cannot separate his music and performance from his persona, from all the allegations and scandals and media frenzies of his later years, so we cannot separate the "real" Michael Jackson from everything that has been thought and … [Read more...]

THE TWO EASIEST media responses to the death of a public figure are reverence or ridicule, and Michael Jackson made both easy. A singer of breathtaking suppleness and soulfulness, one whose early work with the Jackson 5 the rock critic Dave Marsh called "the last great moment of soul as we knew it," and a dancer who, as the film critic David Edelstein observed in a piece on CBS's "Sunday Morning," seemed intent on synthesizing the entire history of popular dance from Fred Astaire on, Jackson was one of the few performers who could truly amaze … [Read more...]

Rock'n'roll was once a working-class occupation. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Billy Fury and Johnny Hallyday saw music as a way out and up, like sport, hell-fire preaching or trade union politics. That Fury and Hallyday didn't grow up picking cotton or shining shoes mattered very little. They weren't students of the music, but clung to it as unselfconsciously and with the same desperate energy as their mass audiences... producer Joe Boyd in the Guardian … [Read more...]

From Noise Addicts, an impressive list, especially since many of these do not involve chemicals or gunplay. In fact, the subtext is really: business as usual. To participate, submit your favorite 1) missing celebs 2) producers 3) dead celebs, or 4) other non-musician industry beggars. "And please, no wagering." Glaring Omission: Ike Turner For Further Research: Frankie Laine Symbolic Overlord: Vanilla Ice … [Read more...]