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putting a needle on the cultural wax
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"He brushed off any mention of genius, likely haunted by the heightened expectations that come with it. 'No, I’m just a hard-working guy,' he told me. 'And I always get a little bit paranoid when I get a lot of attention.'"
A tribute to Brian Wilson:
(this is @8sided.blog talking, by the way — I posted to the wrong account 🤣)
"With close to 100 albums, he can’t not include himself in his favorite music on Bandcamp. That’s because, as he says, 'I wouldn’t know what to do if I was not a musician.' All he can do is play."
Ivo Perelman Picks His Bandcamp Favorites:
"The record’s sonics reflect the New York-based, Monterrey-born electronic artist’s border-traversing perspective: On the one side, bludgeoning U.S. techno à la Jeff Mills, flecked with acid house squelches, on the other, the triplet syncopations of Mexican guaracha …"
"In the second part of a tribute to Steve Barrow, Steve Barker selects ten tracks from the catalogue of Blood & Fire, the reggae reissue label helmed by Barrow and underwritten by Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall and Elliot Rashman …"
No lightweight stuff — A Blood & Fire playlist:
“My life has been startlingly devoid of the standard rock’n’roll drug-and-sex dramas, so I thought a documentary about me isn’t something people will want to see. It sounds boring.”
Peter Asher on being music’s incredible ‘Everywhere Man’:
back when I did career consultation for bands, one of the first questions I'd ask was whether they'd be willing to split everything equally, which, for me, gauged the chances of the band achieving any sort of longevity
"He affectionately refers to the guitar as his 'Mouse Strat' because of a sticker on its body of a Mickey Mouse-like figure giving the finger … after decades of wear, about all you can make out is Mickey’s buttoned trousers and floppy shoes."
The Guitar That Defines Ed O’Brien's Haunting Sound:
On 'Asymmetrical Dot,' Stephen Emmer turns grief and new birth into a multigenerational meditation, drawing on the Indonesian folk traditions his mother carried from Ambon to Amsterdam and the hushed compositional vocabulary that hearing loss made necessary.
Stephen Emmer on Beauty Out of Misery:
By embracing the role of hip-hop's "biggest hater," Kendrick Lamar exposes the paradoxical joy we find in our pettiest grievances, transforming a diss track into a meditation on human nature.
The Pleasure of Pettiness — What Kendrick Lamar Knows About Hate:
