"A bunch of insanely catchy hooks refusing to play together nicely, but they've been corralled against their will onto the same track anyway." If that had been my review of a Ke$ha single it would surely have been high praise, song meriting an 8 or 9 or higher. Three days ago when listening to Enrique Iglesias ft. Pitbull on "I Like It" those same ( Read more... )

Last month I linked the "radio edit" of my decade's end piece, the version that was printed in the Las Vegas Weekly. Here under the cut is the "extended freestyle mix" (a.k.a. director's cut), a full one thousand words longer - that's 60 percent more, for the same price! To put it in brief, I'm suggesting that the musical story of the Web is words, ( Read more... )

Sometimes the 'Net is a great place. I received this email the other day from someone who'd found her way to my old Las Vegas Weekly column about the Boney Joan Rule:

Email from Diana from NYC:Dear Frank ( Read more... )

My decade's end piece in the Las Vegas Weekly, though after I'd pitched it I rebelled against the idea of trying to fairly sum up, hence no mention of Timbaland or Max Martin, whom I'd peg as the two most important figures in '00s music. (The Club Mix has brief mentions of "Behind These Hazel Eyes" and "Since U Been Gone," though not in regard to ( Read more... )

Here are links to my Rules Of The Game columns in chronological order, the column running in the Las Vegas Weekly from June 2007 to March 2008, with December off.

( Links to The Rules Of The Game )

Tom asks over on Blue Lines "Why don't reviewers write about how they feel?" I don't necessarily buy that they don't, but here's my response ( Read more... )

petronia ( The last of the questionnaires):

I've always thought dancing about architecture would be a particularly interesting exercise, because whatever you could effectively demonstrate about architectural structures using choreographed human bodies would probably be immensely complex to convey in any other guise. So complex that it would be dismissed as ( Read more... )

New kid joshlanghoff from one of my other flists joins livejournal and asks me questions that I try to answer here about my PBS symbology that I referred to in The Rules Of The Game #24: The PBSification Of Rock.

(And some of you discussed the subject with me here.)

You all can once again read my old Rules Of The Game columns, since The Las Vegas Weekly has finally transferred them to its new server. Here are links to all but three (search results for "Rules of the Game"* so you get a few non-Frank links as well), though so far the link to #28, "Dresses Are My Weakness, Seriously," doesn't link to anything ( Read more... )

OK, here it is, the latest Rules Of The Game, the final one before the column goes on hiatus, I don't know for how long. American Idol Brooke White, Spitzer call-girl Ashley Alexandra Dupré, ambivalent party animals Aly & A.J.:

The Rules Of The Game #33: The Hotel Detective, He Was Out Of Sight

Since the Las Vegas Weekly is being so uncertain ( Read more... )