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Living where I do (the San Francisco Bay Area), the Napa Valley is quite close to my abode.  If you’ve ever been to a winery (or participated in a wine tasting), sometimes they do vertical tastings of wines from various years to highlight how different one vintage is from another.  Since it’s a new year, and I wanted to stay away from a “Best of 2008” mix, I thought I would do a vertical tasting/listening of songs that were released in years ending in the number nine.

As I surveyed the musical landscape from 1959 to the present, I was struck by the way in which a musical style essentially peaks around this time of a decade and then lingers a bit into the new decade only to be eclipsed by another style.  And even though the songs in this mix aren’t necessarily the most popular or most representative of what was going on in popular music, they were popular enough that they reflect the zeitgeist of that particular year.

“I Need Your Love Tonight,” Elvis Presley (download)

Vintage 1959.

Before Elvis became a mythological figure (or an object of comedic ridicule), his songs of loving and longing were wonderfully solid and, as they used to say on American Bandstand, “Had a great beat and you can dance to it.”  I have to admit, however, that because I’m not a big fan of The King, I hadn’t heard this tune before.  But after repeated listens, I do love the lyric: “I got the Hi-Fi high, and lights down low.”  Clearly, Elvis was not shy when it came to “business time.” (more…)

Here in the etherworldly state of Serious Pop Culture Fandom, Internet division, it’s traditional to set impossibly high quality standards and then smite with mighty (and snarky) blows any album/film/novel that isn’t up to snuff. But sometimes you happen upon an artist whose work gnaws away at you, even though you know it’s not all that great — maybe because you can respect the intention behind it, or maybe because you can spot a glimmer of greatness buried in what’s really only a pretty-good vocal. And sometimes you just want to cut an artist some slack.

For me, Mandy Moore is such an artist, and I’ll tell you why: Because she’s making an effort. From humble, frankly questionable origins — she was part of the constellation of starlets plucked out of Orlando, Fla., in the post-Britney-Xtina-Justin-Jessica hysteria of the late ’90s — Mandy has managed to build truly interesting careers in both music and movies. In each field she has evolved from a generic teen star into a mature performer who is as comfortable taking detours as she is with mainstream fluff. (Hey, if she can land a gig playing herself as Vincent Chase’s love-obsession/Aquaman co-star, she’s gotta be doing something right.)

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