Tom Jones sits on the line of the potentially hip, tongue-in-cheek campiness, and effusive dinner-theater-style showmanship. It can’t be denied that the boy has a voice, “the pipes”, and while he’s someone who clearly admired and covered Otis Redding, his career took a far different direction than, say, Janis Joplin. Conversely, he’s not exactly the next Engelbert Humperdinck or Wayne Newton.

It is appropriate to mention him in the same breath as Engelbert Humperdinck as I started collecting Tom Jones 7” records in the confines of Hong Kong. One gets a good idea of the proclivities of the market, in…

After suffering a few strokes over the last few years, which saw him receiving medical treatment in Cuba and Jamaica, Bunny Wailer died on March 2nd, 2021 at the age of 73.

Bunny Wailer was the last living Wailer, that foundational and practically mythological harmonizing triumvirate that included Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, all ghetto-strugglers who broke through to the other side, the three who combined their inherent talents with just the correct dose of the-right-place-at-the-right-time. And though Bunny Wailer (née Neville O’Riley Livingston) took on the name of the original band (before it was “Bob Marley and . …

The sheer amount of cinematic product from 1930s, 40s and 50s, which could have had wider (or the widest) distribution in the pre-internet era, was suppressed (via copyright control) by Hollywood studios/monopolies. This can now be well demonstrated via the endless amount of black and white movies from those years, and from those same studios, that is now available on Youtube due to catch-me-if-you-can amateur, semi-professional and downright professional content providers.

Back when I only had three TV channels/networks to choose from (for the most part), and could find any one of these under-rated, never-rated or poorly rated black and…

Remember when they called your playback machine “high fidelity”? Fidelity, in this case, indicating authenticity, accuracy, veracity; what in other situations might be called “the truth”. The idea being that your record player / playback machine bore a close, if not complete, resemblance to the live — to a live performance.

Even a live performance depends on optimum conditions, not the least being the health and well-being of the performers. And then, if we’re centered in the electric age, there’s the matter of “the mix”, in which a technician balances amplifiers in relation to whatever space is being performed in.

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Let’s start with what seems like a simple question: what’s the difference between singing and speaking? Provide a technical answer, one that we might not be able to follow, or offer something so basic that it misses the target. Or . . . let the creative tangents split off and waft to the sky, so we can bathe in the glorious weirdness of “culture”, that is, endeavors otherwise deemed all-too-human.

What about the word “rap”, which seems to have entered the language long before it designated a kind of music? If we get past get past the “official” definition (“there…

After all the chatter about music, the loves and hates sorted by way of your dad’s record collection as well as your wireless earbuds, the moment has finally arrived to talk about “Classical Music”, in quotes or capitalized, we’re never sure. It’s something over to one side, the other side of “Pop”; that field of “difficult music”, with a distinctly different fan-base, a whole other way of doing things. That’s, like, 500 years of music, boiled down to a marketing category. Classical Music.

Seeing as this fixed category attempts to wrap its arms around Gregorian chant, choral music, opera, chamber…

The “earworm”, a song that is stuck on auto-repeat in one’s head, is such a pervasive cultural phenomenon that it has been researched by a variety of psychologists and neuroscientists, and given the official sounding name of Involuntary Musical Imagery (IMI).

Why would anyone substitute thought, or the space for a thought, with a repeated phrase from the last or most frequently listened-to tune? The phenomenon should be placed within the context of playback technologies, which are inherently a form of repetition. …

Survival, released in 1979, was Bob Marley and The Wailer’s 11th studio album. By then, Marley was well past the market barriers that had previously stymied reggae artists, and with that kind of superstardom, came media scrutiny, perfunctory dismissal, and rote explanations about Bob Marley, who he was, and what he was up to.

In my own experience, before the release of Survival, the less astute or recently converted listeners that I knew, began to complain that Bob Marley and the Wailers weren’t “the real thing,” were more pop-oriented or less radical than someone like Burning Spear (at that time…