List Of The Day
  • [Photo: Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images]On March 3, 2013, Robyn Hitchcock will turn 60 years old and his new album Love From London will be two days away from being officially released. Though most of the living, breathing world barely knows of him, if at all, the hardcore musical elite, who honor such things as creativity, silliness, pop songs, British accents and mediocre record sales, consider Mr. Hitchcock to be an artist of considerable greatness.

    In honor of his continuing life, I though it would be touching to round up his ten best albums. It beats writing a blog about Michael Bolton!

    As always, the order could be thrown together differently in another hour. Certain choices could be moved for others at another time of year. I avoided live albums. And if you're wondering what got cut at the last minute: Respect (1993).

    Read More »from Robyn Hitchcock Turns 60, Slightly!
  • The rule for inclusion is simple: one (1) Top 40 Pop Hit. No Alternative hits, no Adult Contemporary charts, no Country, no Jazz, no R&B, no Anglo-Saxon Hardcore, no Canadian charts. No #67 hit single, which is essentially "Big In Japan." No hits with five other supergroups where you stood in the background and made faces for the camera.

    I also don't care if you've had ten albums hit #1 on the Album Charts. That's a different level of success.

    Most importantly? No second Top 40 hit that cancels out your One-Hit Wonder Status!

    Read More »from Genuine Real Life One-Hit Wonders
  • Nancy Wilson and Ann Wilson of Heart (Photo by Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic)Pardon my distinct lack of enthusiasm here, but while I understand the political reason for letting Heart into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (look -- women!), I can't get my mind around the fact that they're supremely average and if Foreigner aren't going into the Hall with their radio-friendly hits -- and the Cars have been overlooked with their better than average pop songs -- I don't see any reason to let these pleasant people in either. If it's women the Hall seeks, couldn't they go for the Runaways? And then tap Poly Styrene?

    Now, of course, I believe everyone should be in the Hall. Your band? Yep! So, it's up to me to find a couple different songs that make the argument for inclusion. I've done my job and listened through the catalog and I wrote down the ten songs they're likely most remembered for and in technical terms the music is 'eh.'

    I am not counting their performance of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," which is just fine for what it is, but covers of other people's famous songs don't make much of a case for anything but your potential gig at the corner bar.

    Read More »from Heart — Yet Another Inductee Into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
  • Having seen that controversial Facebook app of "The 100 Most Influential Albums," I set out to capitalize and create the correct list upon which men could measure their manhood and women could be reassured that it's a man's man's man's white man's world out there. Magazines and websites have been doing this kind of thing forever with the exact same results and my entire existence depends upon making these meaningless lists. So humor me.

    First thing I did was get rid of that awful "Influential" word and go for the less controversial "essential," where no one has to be influenced by anything. Unfortunately, upon doing the preliminary work, I ended up wasting four hours compiling a list of albums that turned into the 125 Most Essential Albums of 1964-1980. I wasn't putting down the albums I liked best but the ones that seemed like other people thought were pretty important, since they show up on other lists. I would've started the post-1980 list but things gets so esoteric it's impossible to determine which subgenres things need be divided into.

    Read More »from The 25 “Essential” Albums of All-Time, Generically Speaking
  • Looking through the vintage footage it becomes clear that the more the Super Bowl tries to jam the halftime show with big names the worse the show becomes. New Kids On the Block managed to be rotten single-handedly, but no one really expects flavor-of-the-moment manufactured pop to look good in retrospect. Fact is, no matter how much money you throw at a project, it's still 12 minutes of entertainment and having everyone run around and act silly actually makes the time move slower than if you just let them play a song all the way through. Or maybe my ADD isn't quite up to snuff.

    I didn't consider any Super Bowl performance pre-1991 because it's not fair. That was the dark ages when Up With People! were regularly run out there and if you know anything about them you know they weren't real entertainment but some kind of mind-control unit that never should have been allowed in front of the people they were so allegedly "Up" with.

    Read More »from The Worst Super Bowl Halftime Performers!
  • Randy Newman [Photo:David Livingston/Getty Images]Wow! Huh? People annoyed at Public Enemy and Donna Summer being admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ahead of Iron Maiden, Iron Butterfly, Iron City Houserockers and Iron Prostate are surely going to completely freak out when they check out this Randy Newman dude.

    I went nobly hunting through his catalog looking for songs that rocked and all I kept finding were horns! And strings! In the end, I settled for anything with drums on it. Or a curse word or something. I forget. If I were Randy, I'd show up at the Induction Ceremony in that faux-Kiss make-up he wore on the cover of Born Again and blow some stuff up in hopes that nobody notices that these songs are kinda jazz.

    I left out the movie music stuff. I'm sure Babe: Pig In the City has some fine moments and he did win an Academy Award for "Best Original Song" for "We Belong Together" from Toy Story 3, but I highly doubt any of it rocks.

    Fact is, I left off lots of Newman "classics" because they didn't sound like heavy metal. (I didn't discover "Beat Me Baby" until after the list was formalized.)

    I sure hope getting inducted into this Hall of Fame finally leads to that long-awaited collaboration with that New Orleans musical legend himself, Phil Anselmo of Pantera.

    Shall we get this over with?

    Read More »from Randy Newman: The Last Rock Star!
  • [Photo by KMazur/WireImage]With Super Bowl XLVII (47) upon us and a performance from Beyonce and Destiny's Child pending, it's time to go to the videotape and determine with scientific accuracy who was very good and who was very bad. For the record, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were 'Very Bland' and The Who were 'Very Old.'

    And here's where I suggested who should play the Super Bowl after viewing the Who's olden performance…so far, the Super Bowl Honchos have taken up my idea for the Black Eyed Peas, but that still leaves nine more!

    Ten Performers Who Could Play The Super Bowl

    We don't count performances before the modern era, which began with 1991's nod to New Kids On the Block. Previous to their performance, the Super Bowl halftime show featured a lot of marching bands and performances from Up With People!, who may have done a wonderful job in 1982 with their "Salute to the 1960s and Motown" or in 1986 with their "Beat of the Future" but I don't want to encourage those kinds of choices in the future. Especially when many legends are still potentially semi-living. We need David Bowie, not Up With People's "Tribute to Sexually Ambiguous Rockers of the 1970s."

    Let's all be grateful that there won't be any more tributes to the Big Band Era, now that its fans are either dead or in places where they're not in control of the TV remote. Laugh all you want, but it comes to us all.

    Read More »from The Best Super Bowl Halftime Performers!
  • Public Enemy in 1988 [Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images]I'm not a purist (rock 'n' roll is a hybrid) and I don't care about who's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But I have a blog that's allegedly about music and it's now "timely" to write about the one hip-hop group that every white, male rock writer hailed as the second coming back in 1988 and then jumped ship when their records got ignored. (Turns out we missed a few good ones in between the dumb ones.)

    Considering one-hit-wonders are as important to Rock 'n' Roll as artists who release the same album for twenty years, a group like Public Enemy, who made two bonafide classic LPs (one more than GnR and the Sex Pistols!) at a time when they were inventing their music, surely deserve immediate induction. Charges of "not-rock" are silly. Of all the hip-hop groups to share the times and college radio airwaves with the likes of the sleepy R.E.M. and contemporary Christian strains of U2, PE had the closest ties to rock 'n' roll, both in Chuck D's steely baritone and the Bomb Squad's uncompromising beats. And that was before they teamed with Anthrax. (Their use of Slayer was smarter, tho.)

    Here are 25 reasons Public Enemy belong in the Hall and, more importantly, deserve your attention.

    Read More »from Twenty-Five Reasons Public Enemy Belong In The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame
  • Rush [Photo: Paul Warner/WireImage]Rush will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Los Angeles this April. Shouts of "We Have Assumed Control" are sure to follow and personally I can't wait to hear the jam at the end when Randy Newman, Public Enemy, Heart and Rush tribute Donna Summer with a little "Love To Love You Baby/ Hot Stuff / Bad Girls" medley and then "Born Under A Bad Sign?" Break out the rockin' chair!

    It's a big step for the Hall to allow the fans to push them over the edge. Next stop, Kiss? Bachman-Turner Overdrive? GFR???

    Read More »from Rush: Forty Years After!

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News for You

  • Mom: RI theater threw out disabled girl over noise

    NEW BEDFORD, Mass. (AP) — A woman says she and her 5-year-old developmentally disabled daughter were thrown out of a theater during a "Beauty and the Beast" performance because the girl was making giggling and humming noises she makes when she's happy.

  • Family tweets indicate Kim Kardashian gives birth

    LOS ANGELES (AP) — It looks to be a baby girl for Kim Kardashian and her rapper boyfriend Kanye West. Or does it?

  • 'The Voice' Winner: Who Did the Experts Choose?

    By Jethro Nededog LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - NBC's "The Voice" will crown another winner on Tuesday night's finale. Season 4's three finalists - Daniellle Bradbury, Michelle Shamuel and The Swon Brothers - battled it out for the title on Monday's performance finale episode. Before the performances, coaches Blake Shelton, Adam Levine, Shakira and Usher performed The Beatles' "With A Little Help From My Friends." The Top 16 then got together for the second group performance of the night on Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros' "Home. ...

  • Jenner: Kim Kardashian 'thrilled for the new baby'

    LOS ANGELES (AP) — Kris Jenner says her daughter Kim Kardashian is thrilled to have a new baby girl.

  • Miss Utah latest beauty queen to botch answer

    LAS VEGAS (AP) — Miss Utah Marissa Powell is the latest beauty queen to trip on national television, not over her gown, but during the interview segment.

  • Bieber behind wheel as car hits man in Hollywood

    LOS ANGELES (AP) — Video shows Justin Bieber running into a photographer with his white Ferrari in Hollywood, but police say there was no crime and the injuries aren't life-threatening.

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