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
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MARXMAN 33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE (A&M) Unpublished excerpt from a letter by Friedrich Engels to novelist Margaret Harkness: Dear Miss Harkness, It has come to my attention that a certain Marxman is now invoking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 […]
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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.
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?
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?
On TV: Who’s Afraid of Infotainment?
Are we really supposed to believe that news with actors is any more “staged” than news without?
Reading: Our Professors Are Failing Us
ProfScam begins as an important and passionate critique of academia. It ends, unfortunately, as an antiintellectual rant.
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.
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.
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?