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TOMMY T

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About Tommy
Tommy Tompkins has been on full alert for most of his adult life, looking for art endowed with sufficient power, wisdom, courage, and grace to save a struggling humanity from itself... More


About Extreme Measures
Extreme Measures comes at you at a time when, as a society, we are experiencing a kind of aphasia; language has been so distorted by corruption of aging institutions and the commercial pressures of an all-consuming, popular culture that our range of motion -- our ability to feel, to dream, to rage beyond the toothless dictates of media and capital -- has been critically circumscribed.
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tommyt@...

TOMMY'S TOP FIVE

Art Attacks
an always-changing list of the creative people and creative expression that help keep my world together.

this week's top 5

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TOMMY ELSEWHERE


Cheap shots, anyone? Hell yes, like shooting fish in a barrel - Crosby, Stills, & Nash, to be exact in "Second Time Around," my weekly reissue column in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

The successful selling of Crosby, Stills, and Nash as one of rock's first "supergroups" was, above all else, a marketing triumph. The insipid folk trio with a penchant for predictable three-part harmonies were packaged as a brilliant, innovative rock band and sold, no questions asked, to a generation that would go on to make history for a consumerism as voracious as its perceptive powers were small...

Read on, please...


Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Greatest Hits (Remastered) (Rhino)


I would have rather been in California than anywhere during those days, and in fact I was in California. Nevertheless, though my ass moved, my ears were another story. Take the O'Jays, for instance, whose blue-collar soul music helped me forget about CS&N's lame folk music.


The core of the O'Jays – Eddie LeVert, Walter Williams, and William Powell – had been together for 14 years when they had their first big hit, "Back Stabbers," during the summer of 1972. Their career had gyrated everywhere except up when they joined forces – for a second time – with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff shortly after the songwriting-production team formed their label Philadelphia International...



O'Jays
Essential O'Jays (Epic/Legacy)



The flurry of reissues may be proof the music industry is dying, but it's produced a few sublime moments, like the "Deluxe Editions" of the Wailers' Burnin' and Catch A Fire. This piece, titled "Wailin'," ran in the Bay Guardian with Jeff Chang's take on the new Trojan Records box, "This Is Pop.".

DURING SO MUCH rain, one – or, in this case, two – bright spots really stand out. Ever since the birth of Napster and the gloomy end of days for the music business, the reissue industry has been going full tilt. It makes sense on both sides of the commercial exchange. For the labels, there's very little overhead and practically no guesswork; deliver Al Green with a couple of mysterious "alternative takes," perhaps a previously unreleased cut, and remixing or remastering – another mystery...
San Francisco Bay Guardian Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Brian Jonestown Massacre: And This Is Our Music
Pitchfork Media, July 19, 2004

BLOGROLL

Sites I like...

L.A. Observed
HipHopMusic.com
TomDispatch.com
Danyel Smith's Naked Cartwheels
Then It Must Be True
Davey D’s Hip-Hop Corner
Pagan Moss Sensual Liberation HQ
Different Kitchen
War in Context
Cursor
Virtual Library For Theater and Drama
Jeff Chang's Can’t Stop Won’t Stop
Usounds Internacionale
Maud Newton
Paris's Guerrillafunk.com
Silliman's Home of the Hits
Negro Please
mp3s please
Boondocks
Oliver Wang's The Pop Life
American Samizdat
Sasha Frere-Jones's SF/J

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