by Fred (follow us on Facebook) From Tyler Cowen: In 1984, my marriage to Cindy was in serious trouble. I had started once a week therapy with a McLean Hospital based psychiatrist named Lenore Boling, and I used the sessions really just to give voice to my unhappiness with what my relationship with Cindy had [...]
(The interesting part of) American Idol returns, and (interestingly enough) Ann Althouse returns to American Idol.
by Fred To wit, read her thoughts on why Tyler Grady failed to pass muster, here. Rarely does AA out-think a problem, and the dispatches she files from American Idol are usually no exception, but this one is simple: the poor kid is a theme park of one. He likes 70′s music, e voila! He [...]
The more things change,…
Someone teleported through time from the early 1950s to 2009 would find a music business curiously similar to the landscape of 60 years ago. Few specialty record outlets. Department stores dominating the market. A singles-driven industry. Pop music dominating radio. TV musical talent shows all the rage. That’s from Tyler Cowen. Read more here.
“A subject only a movie music reviewer can care about.”
Great post, and great point about year-end “bottom ten” lists, from our favorite battery type (that’s AA, you fiends; get your minds out of the gutter): Come on, if a movie was that bad, any lay person would have avoided it. It’s nothing we’re longing to erase from our memories. We figured out not to [...]
Great bloggers make great music bloggers
From Ann Althouse: George Gershwin left some songs unfinished. And now — authorized by the Gershwin estate — Brian Wilson is going to finish them. Read the whole thing, and follow the links, here.
Great bloggers make great music bloggers
Over at Marginal Revolution, a reader (who identifies himself as Adam Smith, no less) poses an interesting music question: Why are the typical lengths of albums across different music genres so different? In particular, I was thinking most of my rap albums are at least over the hour mark and many run all the way [...]
Great bloggers make great music bloggers
From Marginal Revolution: Monkeys don’t care much for human music, but apparently they will groove to their own beat. Previous experiments have shown that tamarin monkeys prefer silence to Mozart, and they don’t respond emotionally to human music the way people do. But when a psychologist and a musician collaborated to compose music based on [...]
Great bloggers make great music bloggers
You know when you get an unwelcome song stuck in your head? Or maybe you like the song, but it’s still stuck, so, enough is enough? Or Heaven forbid it’s a very short snippet of one song, say 2-3 seconds in length, over and over and over and over and over and over and over? [...]
Great bloggers make great music bloggers
As part of a series he calls “Outing Iran,” Sullivan introduces us to Iranian singer Sussan Deyhim. And her music is not to be believed:
Great bloggers make great music bloggers
Andrew Sullivan links to a BBC article, wherein a thirteen-year-old reviews a Walkman. (Remember those?) Money quote: My friends couldn’t imagine their parents using this monstrous box, but there was interest in what the thing was and how it worked. In some classes in school they let me listen to music and one teacher recognised [...]
