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…

This “poem” was culled from 20 Google pages (and 34 sources) in 2018. Google was the sole search engine, “The Ramones” (or “the ramones”) was the sole search term. Google search pages were scrolled through until an article about the band was found. Excerpts from each article were copy and pasted, and then edited into the form you find here. The articles had to be by individual authors in dedicated magazines/newspapers (or webzines), rather than band websites or encyclopaedia entries. …

How is that a group of musicians who had a number one hit*, who spawned three albums on two major American labels, are now distinguished as a “cult band”, with all the esoterica and obscurity that implies?

Perhaps this status amounts to Dr. Buzzard’s Savannah Band being alternately in and out of step with the musical trends of their era (“the disco era”), let alone, whatever precise marketing genre they might have been pegged with.

Wikipedia (our ever-ready source) lists them as beholden to: soul, big band, disco. Beyond the obvious and perhaps egregious overtones of a non-white, primarily black…