True fact: Right now, this very minute, in autumn 2009, three decades after he ducked into a college radio-station bathroom to record “My Bologna,” “Weird Al” Yankovic is absolutely more popular than he ever has been in his life, and we can prove it, with math:
2006’s Straight Outta Lynwood, Yankovic’s 12th album, debuted at #10 on the Top 200, making it his first Top 10 album ever. Its first single, the wondrous “White and Nerdy,” reached #9 on the Billboard Hot Singles chart, making it both Yankovic’s first Top 10 single and his highest-charting single ever (besting the personal best set by “Eat It,” which reached #12 on the singles chart back in 1984). The video for “Nerdy” was in iTunes’ top 10 for like a year. More weirdness: “Nerdy” performed a second-week jump on the singles chart from #28-#9, making Yankovic one of a very few artists to have only one top 40 single in three successive decades.
Part of this is due to the Interweb machine, which Yankovic has been using masterfully of late, part of it is nostalgia for us dorkwad 30somethings who grew up with this stuff and are gleefully fascinated to see that it’s still funny, and part of it is the UNBRIDLED BARELY CONTAINABLE GENIUS, which is collected this week in a new greatest-hits comp, The Essential ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, featuring two discs of material picked by the man himself and liner notes from music snob Stephen Thompson. But you don’t care about that. All you want to know is HOW you can get your sticky, slightly orange hands on one of these things without paying for it. This is where Popdose becomes your angel. (more…)
SLAUGHTER
Title: “Fly To The Angels”
Album: Stick It to Ya
Release Date: January 27, 1990
Why You Remember Them: Credit Slaughter with arriving (late) to the hair-metal party without any even vague designs on rocking it. Slaughter’s tapes, available at Kmart and Venture stores nationwide, were solely prom-theme delivery machines; their attempts at lip-licking lasciviousness, mostly in titles like “Stick It To Ya” and “Up All Night,” were about as dangerous as a Tuesday night episode of Jay-Walking. “Fly to The Angels,” the video for which was made for $49.50, most of which was spent on airplane stock footage and an oscillating fan, is 50 minutes of viscous cheese puncutated by seagull sound effects, in case you were unclear about that whole flying thing. (Sorry – I’m told it’s actually only 4:30. How about that!)
Sales Figures:Stick Moved over 2 million copies, and was nominated for an American Music Award for best metal album in 1991. Yeah, I said it. AMERICAN MUSIC AWARD. Suck on that, haters. (more…)
So Bowie sold out. Really, what else could he do? Selling out was the thing to do in the ’80s, and Bowie was always one to stay on top of current trends. Of course, he had to have it his own way, drafting Nile Rodgers as producer, enlisting Stevie Ray Vaughan as the lead guitarist, and making a hit out of an old Iggy Pop collaboration (that would be the only slightly cringe-inducing “China Girl”). And of course, some of the songs had to kick ass. “Modern Love” is as exciting an opener as any in Bowie’s catalog, and the title track was a deservedly huge hit, an addictive slice of disco-funk that sounds like it was recorded in an exceptionally trebly cathedral. The rest of the album is carried along by the momentum of the three singles, not just in terms of quality but stylistically as well, which means that this is essentially a party album through and through. It may be the one case where all the “style over substance” claims lobbed at Bowie ring true, but it’s still one hell of a style. Fuck art — let’s dance.
Apparently running out of ways to surprise his audience, Bowie decided to try failing miserably. This isn’t terrible as far as mainstream ’80s pop goes, but by Bowie’s usually high standards, it’s a complete misfire. Supposedly he didn’t even want to record this album, and it shows: more than half of the album’s songs are attempts to get Iggy Pop more royalty money, leaving two genuinely good singles (“Loving the Alien” and “Blue Jean”) and two lame-ass covers that make a valid case for manually removing and eating one’s own eardrums. I suppose there’s some decent stuff among the Iggy numbers, provided you’re comfortable with a barely-audible Tina Turner, an overzealous horn section, and a full-time marimba player. Welcome to the ’80s, Bowie fans. Welcome to hell. (more…)
After the rise of rock and roll, jazz, and jazz guitar especially, has carried a penumbra of snooty affectation. If you take the time to learn how to play over “Giant Steps,” and learn four different voicings for a Bb13(#11) chord, why would you care about the pedantic, pentatonic noodling of Eric Clapton? That’s kid’s stuff. If someone is really into jazz guitar, they don’t like rock and roll.
I’ve always thought that was crap. I love jazz, and rock, and more or less every other genre of music. That jazz is more complex, and requires more of the player than the other, does not invalidate other genres.
Case in point? Mike Stern. Stern is one of the best-known jazz guitarists currently working, but few have taken better advantage of the genre-busting power of the electric guitar. He has played with everyone from Miles Davis and Joe Henderson to Roy Hargrove and the Yellowjackets, but he has never turned his nose up at rock and blues music, and on his latest release, Big Neighborhood, on Heads Up records, his original compositions run the gamut from rock to funk to jazz, and feature a star-studded guest list from Steve Vai to Randy Brecker to Medeski, Martin & Wood. (more…)
Episode 10 marks a couple of big firsts for me. This was the occasion of my first visit to Seattle, which was surprisingly sunny and blue-sky laden in spite of its grey cloudy reputation. It was also the first time I met the members of the Purrs in person, after having continuously enjoyed the band’s 2007 album, The Chemistry That Keeps Us Together, ever since it was sent my way by my Performer Magazine editor.
When I arrived in Seattle, I got a good impression right from stepping off the plane into the airport. It was 9-ish in the morning, and much to my delight, I was able to score a cup of delicious shrimp cocktail without having to wait till the lunch hour. It’s the little things, you know?
Despite having accidentally taken the bus in the wrong direction from the airport, I still had plenty of time to get acquainted with downtown Seattle, which at 11:30am was still pretty dead, particularly around the U.S. Bank shopping mall at 5th and Pike. I lunched on a bread bowl filled with lobster bisque from Soup’s On, and then proceeded to gorge on a toffee almond bar, a slice of pumpkin loaf and a cup of chai from one of the two Starbucks’ inside the mall. It seemed like there was a Starbucks on nearly every block of the city. (more…)
You know the joke, “It might look like i’m doing nothing, but at the cellular level I’m really quite busy”? Bruce Hornsby’s post-1990 career is a little like that. As far as a lot of people are concerned, Hornsby may as well have quit making music after his last release with the Range, 1990’s A Night on the Town, but to those who have kept listening, that album only marks the spot where things really started to get interesting. From 1993’s Harbor Lights on, Hornsby has moved steadily away from the tasteful piano pop that made him a star, indulging a wanderlust that has been reflected both off his records (during his stint with the Grateful Dead, for example) and on. Along the way, he’s worked with a long and varied list of virtuosos, including Pat Metheny and Bela Fleck, and cut an eclectic swath with his albums, dabbling in programmed beats (2002’s Big Swing Face), bluegrass (2007’s Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby), and jazz (Camp Meeting, recorded with Christian McBride and Jack DeJohnette). Even though he’ll forever be popularly identified with “The Way It Is” and “Mandolin Rain,” those songs really only begin to scratch the surface of Bruce Hornsby’s music.
This is not to suggest that Hornsby’s more recent music is necessarily more difficult than the hits you remember, or even that he’s above copping to commercial pressures once in awhile: his last pop album, 2004’s Halcyon Days, was a piano-dominated affair, featuring plenty of radio-friendly songs and guest appearances from Eric Clapton, Elton John, and Sting. It was a slow pitch down the middle for Columbia — one which the label, predictably, barely managed to turn into a bunt. Now on the Verve Forecast roster — and having tamed his more idiosyncratic impulses, at least for now — Hornsby returns to the pop fold with the 12-track Levitate. (more…)
Well, it’s (almost) the end of Beatles Week, and by now, it’s clear that many of you were just as excited about the remasters and video game as we were — Popdose has broken its own single-day traffic records twice this week — and as sad as we are to see the celebration end, we knew we had to finish our Fab Four tribute in style. And what better way, we ask you, than with a Friday Mixtape of Beatles songs — not the originals, mind you, and not the remasters, but covers done by other artists?
What we didn’t realize when we started assembling our little treat was just how many Beatles covers there are. In the course of a single afternoon, the Popdose staff put its hard drives together and came up with an even 100, and that’s just scratching the surface — but it does make for a pretty damn cool Friday afternoon playlist, doesn’t it?
Because none of us was willing to sit in front of a screen for several hours and build 100 links, we’ve done a couple of things to ease the burden: One, we’ve bundled up the whole compilation into a giant zip file; two, we’ve laid out the whole list here, and randomly selected 18 “singles” that you can grab a la carte.
Take a look, folks. More Beatles covers than you can shake a stick at, and some rather unexpected ones to boot. Enjoy — but be forewarned: in the interest of preserving our servers’ sanity, that big ol’ zip file won’t stay up for long. Get it while you can! (more…)
I think you’ve gotten us all wrong, and it’s time to set the record straight.
I’m not going to say there isn’t a contingent of malcontents in the field of criticism, because that would be a lie. There are plenty of people who got into the game because of a grudge against that which they’ve chosen to review. I once knew a movie critic, a local guy for a local newspaper, who frequently and regularly savaged the films he saw. It didn’t matter what it was — comedy, drama, animation, universally lauded, universally panned, the danger money was on him trashing the subject. In the meantime, he shopped spec scripts to agents and sent off treatments to studios. The more he sent, the more he was rejected. The more he was rejected, the nastier his criticism became. His reportage was venomous, like hate notes from a spurned lover.
That, right there, is the underlying truth. Even though that writer was an exception to the rule, approaching everything with aforethought disappointment, most of us critics don’t and it is because we’re still in love, if not with the media of our choosing then with the promise that’s always there. Somewhere in our adolescent lives, we stumbled into a movie theater and saw something that set our eyes on fire, made the blood flow a little faster, gave us something we hadn’t experienced up to that point. For me, it was music and I can’t very well say when it first caught on. Was it my mother’s records of The Coasters Greatest Hits, or The Fifth Dimension or even “Cathy’s Clown” by The Everly Brothers? Was it Dad crooning along to Sinatra and Perry Como on those long, languid summer drives? Was it when we lived in that rental house and I played the 45 RPM record of E.L.O.’s “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head” until the sunset, and I stared at that beige United Artists record label spin ’round and ’round? Was it that weird, unsteady feeling I got when the right chords were strung along, exploding into a surprising and pleasant direction? There is a love there that is almost impossible to adequately describe, but is there in most critics. (more…)
Ahh, the kids are back in school and out of my hair, which opens up wide vistas of time to revisit some old favorites on the iTunes playlist, stuff with which Mojo can whistle while he works. Probably new to you—indeed, we of Popdose love to dote on lesser-known but wonderfully talented musicians—is the one and only Paul Reddick, a Canadian harp player whose vintage gear propels his sound back into the late 1950s.
As a solo artist, Reddick’s put out four albums on Northern Blues, but I first came in contact with this monster—and I mean a big personality as well as a big talent—while he was playing with the Sidemen, who released the album Rattlebag in 2001. (more…)
My colleague John Hughes has graciously let me take the wheel today for this edition of Lost in the ’80s.
Fields of the Nephilim were the gothedelic deathrock cowboys of the apocalypse – dressed in cobwebby dusters, cowboy hats, and spurs – they delivered a string of singles and three solid albums before riding off into the sunset. (Sorry!)
To achieve their trail-worn appearance, the Nephs famously rolled around in piles of flour. To dust their dusters, as it were. According to legend, they were late for a gig when a local constable raised an eyebrow at their suspicious sack of King Arthur all-purpose. (more…)
![51EUrr0U6XL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/51EUrr0U6XL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "51EUrr0U6XL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
True fact: Right now, this very minute, in autumn 2009, three decades after he ducked into a college radio-station bathroom to record “My Bologna,” “Weird Al” Yankovic is absolutely more popular than he ever has been in his life, and we can prove it, with math:![918992c008a0bc976f888010.L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/918992c008a0bc976f888010.L._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "918992c008a0bc976f888010.L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
SLAUGHTER
![MikeStern_photo1[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/MikeStern_photo11-682x1024.jpg "MikeStern_photo1[1]")
After the rise of rock and roll, jazz, and jazz guitar especially, has carried a penumbra of snooty affectation. If you take the time to learn how to play over “Giant Steps,” and learn four different voicings for a Bb13(#11) chord, why would you care about the pedantic, pentatonic noodling of Eric Clapton? That’s kid’s stuff. If someone is really into jazz guitar, they don’t like rock and roll.
Despite having accidentally taken the bus in the wrong direction from the airport, I still had plenty of time to get acquainted with downtown Seattle, which at 11:30am was still pretty dead, particularly around the U.S. Bank shopping mall at 5th and Pike. I lunched on a bread bowl filled with lobster bisque from 
Ahh, the kids are back in school and out of my hair, which opens up wide vistas of time to revisit some old favorites on the iTunes playlist, stuff with which Mojo can whistle while he works. Probably new to you—indeed, we of Popdose love to dote on lesser-known but wonderfully talented musicians—is the one and only Paul Reddick, a Canadian harp player whose vintage gear propels his sound back into the late 1950s.
