Adam Ragusea explains it in Slate today.
Sam Smith’s Stay With Me is an irritating faux gospel falsetto pop ballad that Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne now have writing credits on.
You be the judge:
UPDATE: Tom Petty released a statement about this.
OTHER UPDATE: Later in the day, after this post, I posted about another song called Stay With Me, by the Chin-Chins, without even connecting the two. Now they’re connected.
Some time back we posted about the Internet K Hole, a collection of photos from the 70s and 80s curated by a woman named Babs from time to time, featuring shots of rockers, skateboarders, bikers, the drunk, the sitting around, the naked and the dressed up, among other things. That post featured a shot of early Devo, while this Devo shot is of somewhat later, um, vintage, along with a few of the hundreds of kaptivating photos, in honor of the new Internet K-Hole Tumbler. Set aside some time and enjoy.
Helen Green drew every David Bowie hairstyle and animated it on her tumblr, which is full of drawings.
Not by me. This was posted today at Gothamist.
I realized reading this that I’ve always listened to Bowie as a singles artist. I’ve heard most of these albums, but I never listened to his albums obsessively, and so I don’t have an immediate reaction to the writer’s comments about them. At one point last year I decided I would listen to all of the albums in order, but I quit the project in the middle of the first album.
I know, silly.
I came across this article about the Internet Underground Music Archive this morning. IUMA started in 1993, was a website that allowed bands to post their songs and make pages for themselves. Started when the Web had tens of thousands of users, it persisted until 2006. The article tells how some music loving engineers got their, where Napster and mySpace and Soundcloud eventually landed, years earlier.
One problem, when they started, was that the file for one song could be the size of a user’s hard drive!
One of the stories in the piece is that of a band called the Himalayans, the band that Adam Duritz was in before Counting Crows, and the band that wrote and recorded the original version of Round Here, which was posted on the IUMA website long before it became a hit. The Himalayans’ version sounds a lot more like U2, I’d say.
Much of the IUMA trove can now be found at archive.com.
For instance, Inspector Ganja:
The problem with memoir is that the facts or the memoirist aren’t always sure how to close the deal (or tell the story).
I’m not sure what Neil Ratner could have done with this, but it isn’t fully baked. What we know is that he wasn’t inclined to be a doctor, but he became one. And he wanted to be a drummer, but he became a doctor. At the same time, it’s a slice of the rock ‘n’ roll life, starring two of our faves, Johnny Winter and Rick Derringer.
And Doctor Ratner is an affable host. (Click the link at the end to visit his website, which covers other aspects of his career.)
And we might as well add a clip:
Robin Sloan Bechtel writes about how she and few others created the Internet’s first rock band site for Megadeth, 20 years ago this month. Gee, times have changed.
Plus a little something for lunch:
I first learned/heard about the MC5 in Rolling Stone magazine, which as I recall ran a long story about John Sinclair, the martyred leader of the White Panthers who was imprisoned for possession of two sticks of Motor City tea and having grand ideas about freedom and equality that apparently scared the crap out of the cops and their bosses.
I just went looking for that story, to see how much my memory was playing tricks, and found instead this review by Lester Bangs of the first MC5 album for Rolling Stone, which captures his sense of the hype and situation. His lede:
Whoever thought when that dirty little quickie Wild in the Streets came out that it would leave such an imprint on the culture? First the Doors (who were always headed in that direction anyway) grinding out that famous “They-got-the-guns-but-we-got-the-numbers” march for the troops out there in Teenland, and now this sweaty aggregation. Clearly this notion of violent, total youth revolution and takeover is an idea whose time has come — which speaks not well for the idea but ill for the time.
Later in the review Bangs says that the song Kick Out The Jams is like Barrett Strong’s Money as if recorded by the Kingsman, as if that was a bad thing.
A story in the Independent has a story with an embed of a webcam pointed at the zebra crossing the Beatles and Red Hot Chili Peppers used as album covers. Seems that the spot is a tourist attraction and people stop traffic just to cross the street, and you can watch them!
There’s also a documentary about the crossing, which is fairly short and atmospheric and notes that the photo for the album cover was taken two weeks after Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon!
Vice has an interview with pictures by a photographer of the punk scene named Godlis, with lots of good shots of the bands and people you would expect. Nice stuff.
