Category: Music

I picked up a few albums off “Best of 2010” list a few weeks ago, and have been listening to them on shuffle play a lot. These included Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Which is kind of a rough one for shuffle play with SteelyKid in the house– I keep having to skip […]

A somewhat surprising number of people asked for a return of the guess-the-lyrics posts in the who are you? thread, and it seems like a good Friday activity. So, as with the previous rounds, each of the following gives a pair of rhyming (or at least intended-to-rhyme) phrases from a pop music song in my […]

I’ve shifted the iTunes shuffle from the Christmas-music playlist over to the top-rated songs of the year playlist because, well, it’s the time of year when anybody with any pretension of writing about pop culture does some sort of Top N list to wrap up the year. And, since I’ve got “pop culture” right up […]

As is often noted, most modern recordings of Christmas songs range from utterly bland to excruciatingly awful. There are some that sorta-kinda work, though, and a bare few that are brilliant: In the interest of promoting, you know, music that doesn’t suck, it’s perhaps worth taking a look at what makes the good songs work. […]

As you can see from the picture at right, we’ve got our Christmas tree up, waiting to surprise SteelyKid when she comes home in a couple of hours. This also means it’s getting toward the time when I switch over to the holiday music playlist on iTunes. Christmas music is, of course, a problematic genre. […]

It feels a little weird not to be doing a Short Story Club entry, so here’s a different sort of pop culture item: Over at EphBlog, my classmate Derek Catsam has decided to break up the carnival of reactionary politics by commenting on great albums, jumping off from Spin‘s Top 125 of the Last 25 […]