The Grateful Dead Literary-Industrial Complex Is A Long, Strange Trip All Its Own
The Grateful Dead are with us, always—in the past year, inescapably so. In our modern, retromaniacal culture, their benevolent aims and DIY apparatuses, from ticketing to merch to bootlegging, have long been a refuge for their fans. And 2015 peaked with the band’s latest, greatest, and allegedly las...
<i>The Comedians </i>Is The Deep-Dive History Stand-Up Comedy Deserves
For close to a decade, Kliph Nesteroff, a former stand-up comic from Vancouver, has been exploring the underbelly of showbiz, and especially comedy, history, mainly for WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, the New Jersey freeform radio station’s online home for longform ephemera. Though the writing was clearl...
John Seabrook's Pop-Music Treatise <i>The Song Machine </i>Is Half Wrong, Half Boring
Don’t bore us, get to the chorus: John Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (Norton) is one of the most frustrating music books in memory. You will learn a lot from this book; unfortunately, a lot of what you’ll learn is inaccurate. And all too often, what’s not inaccurate is vitiated...
The "Blurred Lines" Verdict Is Bad News, Even If You Hate Robin Thicke
Thanks to the decision of a Los Angeles jury yesterday afternoon, pop-music fans have a fun, frightening new game to play: Who's Next? No, not named after the Who album—though maybe its infamous pissing-on-the-wall cover shot might now inspire a lawsuit from Andrew Loog Oldham, who as the Rollin...
<em>The Basement Tapes Complete</em> Gives You All The Bob Dylan You Can Stand
Chronology imposes narrative when all else fails. So thank the tape-crawlers who've assembled Bob Dylan and the Band's The Basement Tapes Complete, the 11th volume of The Bootleg Series, Dylan and Sony Music's shrewd posterity-burnishing enterprise, for putting the thing together in as close to prop...