A George Harrison summer playlist
The Best of Dark Horse came up on my iTunes shuffle the other day, and I was struck by how many George Harrison songs can go with a sunny, breezy day. George has a (not wholly undeserved) reputation as the dour Beatle, but here's a playlist of his solo songs that I think make for good summer listening. 1. "Blow Away" (1979) -- A great hook [...]
Critic Amanda Marcotte: Sgt. Pepper’s made rock “music for men”
Amanda Marcotte, critic and politics writer for Salon. Yeah, no surprise that the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's has everybody out there opining. But I find Amanda Marcotte's take in Salon worth calling out, if only to say that as someone who considers herself a feminist I'm thoroughly tired of this kind of facile, oversimplified finger-pointing. Her claim that Sgt. Pepper's "was the point when rock stopped being the music of [...]
Critic Richard Goldstein’s 1967 pan of Sgt. Pepper
Richard Goldstein, back in the day. The Washington Post has published this intriguing piece about how a 22-year-old critic came to write a negative review of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for the New York Times when the album was originally released. Richard Goldstein, the critic in question, has the complete review on his website: you can read it here. Although [...]
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: “Monkberry Moon Delight”
Ran across this in the comments at the always-entertaining Dangerousminds.net, and felt moved to share. When Paul asked, Screamin' Jay Hawkins obliged. My life has been taken over by Bystander, but I hope to post more in the coming months. Carry on. https://youtu.be/bL6GJ10OBPE
The Beatles, Sean Spicer, and the Chicago Women’s March
Saturday was a tale of two crowds: the kerfuffle over the inauguration audience and the turnout for the women's marches around the country and around the world. Given that the facts / "alternative facts" in question concerned crowd size, it's fitting that the ever-popular Beatles featured in a couple of the memes generated in the wake of Sean Spicer's statements to the press about [...]
Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles”
Please welcome back guest Dullblogger J.R. Clark, who sent in these thoughts on the hit song and video "Black Beatles." If you're not a fan of contemporary hip-hop music or the Mannequin Challenge, you may be unaware of “Black Beatles,” the recent Billboard Hot 100 number-one single by brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi, the duo known collectively as Rae Sremmurd (Ear [...]
The Beatles in musical context, 1963-1965
Guest Dullblogger Justin McCann, a freelance writer, musician, and self-described “inveterate lurker” on Hey Dullblog, offers these observations on the Beatles’ musical context in 1963-65. Please give him a warm welcome. As innovative as the Beatles were, their rivals — the Stones, The Who, the Kinks, Bob Dylan et. al. — were often just as inventive and you can read about them [...]
Deconstructing The Beatles, the movie
Enjoying your magical mystery tour...? Against all odds, and perhaps against our better judgment, life seems ever-so-slowly to be returning to normal. This morning I received an email from musicologist Scott Freiman, who lectures regularly on the Fabs, dissecting some of their most interesting albums in front of a live audience. Now Freiman's lecture on the White Album has been [...]
Election reflections, Beatle-inflected
Like many Americans, I’ve found this week emotionally exhausting. In the aftermath of this election, blogging about the Beatles seems ridiculous, so I offer these reflections with the hope that they may be helpful. However angry we may be, may we return no one evil for evil. May these times make us stronger and more determined to oppose injustice with love, and [...]