Tag: pop music

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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

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“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…)

Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa

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Dalrymple: Then why am I watching it?
Costanza: Because it’s on TV!  

Let’s start with three statements that are in no way, shape or form, related to each other. 

1. Narcocorrido artists are sometimes used by Mexican cartels to launder money. (more…)

France Gall

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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…)

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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…)

Icona Pop performs at Summerburst Festival, Gothenburg.

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White people are the undisputed masters of making catchy music. American and European pop songs make their way onto the airwaves of the entire world through a robust mechanism of economic globalization and sheer memetic power. But why is the music we make so catchy to just about all ears? And who doesn’t find our music appealing? It would be easy to chalk it up to the undeniable creative strength of our people, but like all endeavors in the arts in the modern world, songwriting has taken on the forms of science and cynical commercialism. (more…)

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As the country gets more diverse, the radio gets more homogeneous. I don’t mean this in the ethnic sense, of course; America’s rockstars are more colorful than ever! Instead, the songs that dominate the country’s charts are beginning to sound more and more alike. The average pop station tends to be an indistinct mass of the same noises (more…)

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Crystal Castles is a Canadian band, initially consisting of singer Alice Glass and producer Ethan Kath. The two met each other because of their mutual connections in the large and prolific Toronto music scene, and collaborated on one track, the chaotic “Alice Practice,” as a mere experiment. The two never intended to form a full-time group (more…)

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Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot is a famed French actress, singer, pop culture icon, and accidental provocateur. Bardot’s marks on pop culture include her popularization of the bikini, the eponymous Bardot neckline, and her collection of absurdly fun and often intriguing slices of French pop music that feel both timeless in their replay value yet (more…)