I am curious, and needing new things to listen to.

Ruts are boring: Help me escape!

The HMV at Yonge and Dundas, has seen better days. Evan Davies' oral history, published in The Grid in August of last year, gives an idea as to how exciting a store it was at its prime--well-stocked, well-organized--before a combination of ill-judged corporate policies and the growth of downloads of all legalities gutted it. The last time I visited ( Read more... )

I wrote about Shakespears Sister, "a British based BRIT Award and Ivor Novello Award-winning synth-pop-rock band", and the duo's signature 1992 hit "Stay", back in 2005. I noted then that the song was a fairly inventive love song, a dialogue between characters played by high-pitched ex-Bananarama singer Siobhan Fahey and the throatier soprano of ( Read more... )

Rihanna's 2007 "Umbrella" was a huge song at the time, and by now has entered the popular music vernacular as a standard. In case you forget, listen to/watch the striking official video here, and/or the fan video with the music, at least, below.

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The genius of the song--the thing that made "ella ella ella ella" echo around the world from a million ( Read more... )

I thought of Donna Summers' 1979 "Bad Girls" a couple of Saturdays ago, when, walking west to the College subway station at about midnight, I ended up walking past some female sex workers standing on the southeastern corner of Church and CarltonChurch and Carlton is located just to the south of Church and Wellesley, east of Yonge Street, and shares ( Read more... )

From Wikipedia:

A Place to Stand, A Place to Grow (Ontari-ari-ari-o!) is the unofficial anthem of the Canadian province of Ontario. The song was written as the signature tune for a movie of the same name that was featured at the Expo 67 Ontario pavilion ( Read more... )

The terrifying and eerie pathos of GLAdOS' song "Still Alive," authored by Jonathan Coulton, makes that song a brilliant achievement.

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Kudos to Ellen McLain.

Thanks to P. from Facebook for reminding me Pop Will Eat Itself and that group's very catchy 1989 single "Wise Up! Sucker".

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Pop Will Eat Itself always reminded me of the KLF, perhaps because it shares in the KLF's grandly-conceived and -produced semantic emptiness ( 1, 2). Still, what fine songs they both have.

I've just read Australian writer Margo Lanagan's "Singing My Sister Down", from the collection Black Juice, and the tears are still in my eyes. My God but that Lanagan can write.

I'm disappointed in Garbage. 1998's Version 2.0 was fun, with songs like "Special" and "Trick Is to Keep Breathing." Both 2001's Beautifulgarbage and this year'sBleed Like Me left me cold, unmoved by their too-perfect electronica-enhanced alternative rock spectacle ( Read more... )