Tag: music

  • Elaine, let’s get the hell out of here.

    I don’t like country music. The yodeling vocals, the whining guitars, the relentlessly predictable lyrics about faithless babes, abusive bubbas, pickup trucks, disreputable nightspots in the middle of nowhere … An hour of this, and a visitor from another planet would marvel that everything south of the Mason-Dixon line had not long since slid off into the Gulf of Mexico, crushed into slurry under the weight of all that drama and all those tears.

    “Wait just a gosh-darned minute!” I hear someone shouting from the back row. “Yes, a lot of country music is like that, but it’s not all the same. You’re being unfair.”

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  • The Orphans and the Red Priest

    Have you ever wondered why we use the term “conservatory” to refer to a music school? The word conjures up images of greenhouses and environmentalist GoFundMe pages, but what exactly is being “conserved” at the Oberlin Conservatory, the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, or the Paris Conservatoire?

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  • Unintelligible at any speed

    • Satan’s little helpers? The Kingsmen, 1965.

    In my younger days, my father often expressed concern that I was becoming prey to a languid intellectualism that he feared would leave me ill-equipped for life in the Real World in the unlikely event that I should ever shamble into it. In retrospect, he was probably correct: fortunately, he had a plan to address the problem.

    Jobs. Lots of jobs.

    No job was too small, too filthy, or too ill-suited to my temperament (which was, admittedly, opposed to work in almost any form) as long as it paid. From the moment I was old enough to get a work permit, Dad was unsparing in his efforts to get the most out of the twenty-dollar fee. Loading hay, working on a garbage truck, cleaning offices, flipping burgers: I was a busy boy.

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