“Commercial R&B has been an extremely important genre for young black women since the 1980s, but because it doesn’t speak to me directly, it’s terrible” - every goddamn review on this website
You know how on albums from this era that drugs make the album and other times drugs made the album? This is definitely one of those.
Sure, one of the greats. But the recording and playing is just incredible. With the band in Memphis and Dusty in New York, just an incredibly well produced record.
Gen X pop punk is the American version of the long nineties. Turns out there’s a lot of collapsing middle class families in a nation.
Back when cannabis was smooth and mild, and the dealers were genteel, ruthless hippies.
Will these words add anything to the volume of those already written about this? No.
“What were the seventies in America?” Is a question to which this is one of foundational documents. In this thesis, I shall argue…
The bridge between the post-britpop afterglow and Coldplay’s soft lad optimism rock. But it’s a more significant epitaph; ‘The Man Who’ is the last breath of British art school as a cultural force in the UK. Killed by sky high tuition fees, the emergence of the Brit-school as a machine, and the establishment reasserting control over the cultural industries. Now, the only class difference between British pop stars (and actors, and writers) is whether they were full boarders or day boys.
“Commercial R&B has been an extremely important genre for young black women since the 1980s, but because it doesn’t speak to me directly, it’s terrible” - every goddamn review on this website
Most of us are the same. And then a very small number of us are two standard deviations away from the most of us.
Try all you want; put on a donkey jacket and flat cap, add all the brass and play all the stuff you heard from two-tone. Even put on a dress and hire backing dancers. But if the first thing people think of when they hear your name is white British people dancing in a municipal hall in the eighties and nineties, that’s who you are. Alternatively: Track 1 on a musical accompaniment to a Martin Parr exhibition.
“Britpop was the sound of the nineties!” so goes the aging writer, as they attempt to sell another reminiscence of being ridiculed by Damon Albarn outside of The Good Mixer. They are wrong; Popular trance and house music was the sound of the nineties. This was not popular.