Tag: pop music

3,158 words

During my misspent youth, back when wooly mammoths still walked the Earth, I caught a replay of the Yellow Submarine movie at an indie theatre. It went into production during the Summer of Love, and the film premiered in 1968. One way of regarding the movie is as a framing story to showcase a dozen Beatles songs. (more…)

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It’s been 20 years since Nirvana’s Nevermind album and its breakthrough single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” were released. The scrawny corpse of Kurt Cobain, the Man Who Refused to Be Marketed, is being repackaged and remarketed, with Nevermind now reissued in multiple commemorative editions of escalating cost and pointlessness. (more…)

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Laurie Anderson
Big Science
Warner Brothers, 1982

In the Seventies, Laurie Anderson made a modest name for herself in the “performance art” scene. (more…)

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This is the first installment of a new series, Music to My Ears. I will review albums and talk about music and musicians. I will say a lot about my own history with music and my listening experiences. There will also be a strong element of nostalgia. (more…)

4,186 words

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A vast majority in American society remain confident in so-called First Amendment values. (more…)

294 words / 1:57:40

Last weekend, Greg Johnson welcomed Jim Goad back to Counter-Currents Radio to talk about Jim’s newly-reissued zine Answer Me!, the zine culture of the 1990s, Jim’s karaoke fundraiser for Counter-Currents, and listener questions, and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

1,412 words

Earlier this year, rock star Elvis Costello announced that he would no longer play his 1979 hit “Oliver’s Army” in concert. Further, he entreated radio stations not to play the song at all. Why? Well, the song uses the word “nigger,” which is now so toxic and taboo that most white songwriters dare not use it, regardless of context. And Costello prefers this to rewriting the lyrics or hearing the word bleeped on the radio.

“Oliver’s Army,” which appears on Costello’s album Armed Forces, is an excellent song, and this is one reason for my sadness at its self-cancellation. (more…)

Meat Loaf

3,393 words

“We didn’t know each other, we were each other.” — Meat Loaf on Jim Steinman[1]

On Thursday, as it must to all men, death came to Marvin Lee Aday, known professionally as Meat Loaf. Mr. Loaf was perhaps an acquired taste, but he was certainly an energetic performer — on one occasion, falling off the stage, only to insist on completing his tour in a wheelchair. Despite his prodigious girth and periodic drug abuse, he more than fulfilled his Biblical three score and ten, dying at 74. (more…)

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Who are the greatest underachievers in music history? A few names come to mind. Of course, you have The Sex Pistols, who became a national cultural phenomenon in Britain and then broke up after one album. The Stone Roses are also strong contenders for the cup. Their earth-shattering 1989 debut album regularly shows up on Greatest Albums Ever lists (in 2000, NME placed it #1). When their sophomore effort finally emerged five years later in an entirely changed musical landscape, The Roses had transformed into banal Led Zeppelin clones before imploding with a most undignified whimper. (more…)

France Gall

2,278 words

There once existed a time, alien to my young brain, in which people primarily discovered and listened to pop music on radio stations. These were entities subject to important forces, like censorship and record label interests, that gave rise to various standardizations and trade practices that persist to this day. During the age of the radio, the forces of globalization (more…)

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Sabaton is a Swedish metal band hailing from Falun. Their musical style, in the loose sense of the word, is mostly unremarkable power metal combined with a typically European harte vocal inflection courtesy of the group’s part-Czech lead singer, Joakim Brodén. Sabaton’s shtick, for lack of a more fitting term, is their use of “history” (more…)

1,718 words

Author’s note: Tomorrow marks one year of my writing for Counter-Currents.

Folklore is Taylor Swift’s eighth studio album. It joined the hallowed halls of other so-called “isolation records” on July 24, 2020, in a surprise release (more…)

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Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

So, there are blacks with beats, heebs with chutzpah, and Swedes with serenity. What is a white dissident to do in an environment in which the talents of his people are so easily turned into springboards for cultural developments that annoy at best and brainwash at worst? (more…)