Jimmy Page and Robert Plant No Quarter (Atlantic) Joni Mitchell, speaking to her audience on the rudely entitled live album Miles of Aisles, combined pretension and bad manners in equal measure when she compared her fans to poor art historians: “No one ever said to van Gogh, ‘Hey, man, can you paint Starry Night again?’” […]
Author Archives: Andrew Goodwin
Posted inMusic
Crude Marx…but You Can Dance to It
MARXMAN 33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE (A&M) Unpublished excerpt from a letter by Friedrich Engels to novelist Margaret Harkness: Dear Miss Harkness, It has come to my attention that a certain Marxman is now invoking the ideas of our good friend and comrade Karl Marx. Indeed, both Marx and I were astonished to find ourselves credited […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Currents: New Horizons in Aural Sex
Somewhere in the future lies a meeting of sex, music, and digital technology. Two new CDs of “virtual reality” porn point the way.
Posted inNews & Politics
On TV: Something to Watch Over You
As security video infiltrates entertainment programming, TV busily promotes itself as a technological remedy for the nightmares of an embattled America.
Posted inNews & Politics
On TV: Truth, Justice, and Videotape
Arguing that a video camera captured the “reality” of Rodney King’s beating is a preposterous position for liberals and leftists, and a dangerous one.
Posted inMusic
Virtual funk: the soul of the new machines
You might call it Virtual Funk. It’s the process whereby “feel” and “groove” in modern pop music have been progressively diverted from actual human performers and inserted into microcircuits. Contemporary dance music of all kinds–rap and hip hop, soul, pop, and hard rock–all now benefit from the triumph of the machine. If it seems paradoxical […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Media: Mindless Drivel on MTV
We refer not to the programming, but to the load of “critical analysis” occasioned by the channel’s recent birthday.
Posted inNews & Politics
On TV: What’s Going on in Twin Peaks?
Aren’t stories like sex? Didn’t you want to delay the climax a little longer? Is that gum you like coming back in style?
Posted inNews & Politics
On TV: America, Watch Yourself!
How did the most boring thing in the world become the hottest thing on TV? Is it democracy triumphant, or capitalism run rampant?
Posted inNews & Politics
On TV: Who’s Afraid of Infotainment?
Are we really supposed to believe that news with actors is any more “staged” than news without?
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: Our Professors Are Failing Us
ProfScam begins as an important and passionate critique of academia. It ends, unfortunately, as an antiintellectual rant.
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On TV: Secrets of Sesame Street
Its popularity is largely due to its clever use of double encoding–its ability to serve two very different audiences with the same message.
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: A Groupie’s Claim to Fame
Alongside the vicarious thrill of a fan’s passion and the titillation of backstage sex, Pamela Des Barres’s updated confession offers something quite frightening.
Posted inNews & Politics
Reading: The Cultural Crash of ’89
Have we reached the End of Civilization as We Know It? Or have we just hit a run of bad books by cranky conservatives who don’t know anything about pop culture?