Posted this on a Freaky Trigger comment thread:

The elephants in the room of popular music, the ones who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and ( Read more... )

I hate the term "alternative," but that doesn't mean I get to dismiss other people's use of it.

When Christopher Weingarten sent his list of potential acts for Spin's '60s alternative roundup, I wrote back that they should get rid of the Velvets, Stooges, and Leonard Cohen and put Vanilla Fudge, Rare Earth, and Iron Butterfly in their stead. Was ( Read more... )

When last I embedded Brown Eyed Girls' "Abracadabra" I asked for theories regarding the dog in the video, but got no response. I would like to ask again, not just regarding this video, but dogs in general in Korean music vids.

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My own commentary in full, regarding the dog in "Abracadabra," was: "The dog? Someone walks a dog down the hallway." What ( Read more... )

In regard to Wednesday's post about Dottie West: I should point out that pre-makeover Dottie is already going pop (the country-pop of Patsy Cline and Skeeter Davis, etc.), and whatever the lyrics and dress and placid instrumentation tell us about her in "Country Girl," there is a pop-jazz sense of rhythmic (dis)location in her singing, and at the ( Read more... )

Why country singers want to go pop.

Dottie West 1968 ("I Was Born A Country Girl"):

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Dottie West 1979:

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[EDIT: Well, YouTube killed the clip: It might have been a live version of "You Pick Me Up (And Put Me Down)" with her look at its most disco. Anyway, here's "A Lesson In Leavin'" from probably about a year later.

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And here's a link to a ( Read more... )