Blog: My hmphs

I finally got to witness the craze that is Ke$ha on "Saturday Night Live" this weekend. Color me unimpressed. I had already been warned that she could be fodder for a Hmph article; after all, she sounded extremely shallow and foul-mouthed - one of her lines describes urinating in a bottle of champagne (The utterly descriptive title "Party at a Rich Dude's House"). So I wasn't expecting much. She didn't disappoint. Her two performances on SNL were all style, no substance. It was a bad imitation of Lady Gaga, with her band dressing like [...]

We all know the stories of the online music craze - Napster, the RIAA suing its customers, Radiohead's "Pay us what you think we should get" philosophy. But Greg Kot's book Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music is a fascinating analysis of the music industry's transformation over the past 10 years - a time in which power has been passed from the major labels to the consumers. Kot, a music critic with the Chicago Tribune , creates a compelling argument that the industry 1) wasn't prepared for the oncoming Internet age; and 2) made [...]

On March 30, I sat down with singer-songwriter Bleu before his show at Eddie's Attic (Read the review). Here's the conversation. My hmphs: This is kind of a short tour, isn't it? Bleu: Yeah. I don't usually tour for huge runs - ever, you know? I like to keep it pretty mellow. It was basically just time. Scott [Simons] and I had talked about doing stuff for forever. I used to do this duo thing for a long time with this buddy of mine, Joe Seiders, who played drums with me for quite a while. He's a multi-instrumentalist. [...]

It's 6:10 p.m., and I'm sitting on the deck at Eddie's Attic in Decatur. I'm waiting for Bleu, and for some reason, I'm nervous. It's not like Bleu McAuley is a superstar - the number of fans in Atlanta probably doesn't top two dozen - but he is part of what I call the Justice League of Power Pop. Along with his friends Mike Viola, Kelly Jones, Steve Eggers and Roger Joseph Manning Jr., he makes music that is so pleasing to the ear, I know that humans have a higher calling. I have [...]

I've never been a big Weezer fan. Through their six albums I've smirked at their flirtation with power pop; they created songs laden with hooks but always managed to do something to piss me off. Maybe it was their laissez fare attitude, their attempts to position themselves as the quirky, geeky guys who didn't think it was cool enough to play pop music. They had to throw in funny lyrics, way-too-powerful guitars and tongue-in-cheek videos to call attention to themselves. "Buddy Holly" was catchy, but it left one wondering it these guys were really serious. Song titles [...]

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars It was inevitable that Corinne Bailey Rae's new album would be framed in the wake of her husband's death from a drug overdose in 2008. But those expecting a funeral dirge will be surprised. Sure, there are moments of sadness and longing - the first and last cuts, specifically - but Rae's sophomore effort is strong, upbeat and simply beautiful. "Are you here?" is the question and the title of the opening cut, and the song is emotional, but it's more about remembrance, not sadness. The music is sublime, [...]

"What's dying is the idea of only the crappiest crap, made with the crappiest intentions, with the crappiest production, to entice the most airtime on the crappiest giant chains of radio stations, bought and paid for by crappy labels, and dictated by some crappy, contemptuous, lowest-common-denominator-proj ecting programming exec from his crappy polling printouts in some crappy office somewhere, to ensure we all swallow the same crap all over the country at the same crappy time, and then placing that one slice of crap on a longer disc with a bunch of even crappier crap. That is the concept that is [...]

(Hat tip: Susie B.) Recently the Vatican's official newspaper, L' Osservatore Romano , published its list of the Top 10 albums. We're not really sure what the context here is, although the translated article does mention something about a desert island. Maybe it's Top 10 albums you should hear to get to heaven, or Top 10 albums that don't make fun of the Pope. It's just, um, 10 albums that they thought they should single out for one reason or another. The top 10 (in chronological order): Revolver - The [...]

Outside of the bizarre performances (Lady Gaga! On fire!) and Auto-Tuned hip-hop madness, the next biggest story of the 2010 Grammy Awards was Taylor Swift's awful duet with Stevie Nicks. Swift limped through Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon," sounding mostly flat and at times completely losing the harmony line. She then relegated Nicks to backup vocals while she performed her monster hit "You Belong With Me," sounding more like someone performing a karaoke version of the song. I had my doubts about Taylor Swift. Any 15-year-old blonde who takes the country music charts by storm screams marketing ploy. But as [...]

If you missed Sunday night's Grammy Awards, you didn't miss much. In fact, if you saw the American Music Awards, you pretty much saw the Grammys: Another freak show from Lady Gaga, performers trying to out-shock each other with more glitz than talent, and more crap offered up by the Black Eyed Peas. By the time Jamie Foxx came out in an army uniform pretending to be an opera singer and auto-tuned his way through what he thought was a song, I realized I was witnessing the implosion of American popular music. Where to start? I already mentioned Ms. Gaga, [...]

The celebrity telethons hastily organized in the wake of recent disasters such as Katrina and the 2004 tsunami have raised millions for good causes, but from an entertainment standpoint, they've sometimes given us a rare glimpse into the talents (or lack thereof) of some of today's hottest acts. The artists usually perform ballads with a stripped down sound - very little production to save them. Last night's Hope for Haiti telethon featured an impressive list of performers, from Taylor Swift to Haiti's own Wyclef Jean. In case you missed it, here are the highlights (and lowlights): [...]

Pardon the absence. You see, I've been in a bit of a funk. Watching all the crap emanate from all the New Year's Rockin' Eve performances, coupled with the inexplicable rise of the foul-mouthed Ke$ha (more on that later this week), has me mourning for the death of popular music. 2010 is not starting out well for me. When this happens, I turn to my iPod, and like an old codger who plays his dusty Benny Goodman 78-rpm records over and over, I play the songs I know and love. I hit the "My Top Rated" playlist containing [...]

In the midst of all the Kanye West albums, Beyonce releases and Jay-Z hysteria, I doubted seriously whether I would find 20 albums that I actually liked this decade. It was a decade in which hip-hop strengthened its stranglehold on Western music, grunge devolved into Nickelback and Hoobastank, and the Black Eyed Peas gave us "My Humps." I mean, look at Billboard's top 5 artists of the decade: Eminem Usher Nelly Beyoncé Alicia Keys Ew. But as I put my iTunes in [...]

Each year, dozens of new Christmas albums are released, and every artist tries to record one song that will break through and become a new Christmas classic. I remember back in 1993, right at the height of the Harry Connick Jr. craze (He sounds like Frank Sinatra! He really does !), Connick released a Christmas album with the title track, "When My Heart Finds Christmas," braced to become a yearly carol. He tried so hard. But it didn't happen; you rarely hear this song anymore, and it, like *NYSNC's "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays" and that Toby Keith [...]

Believe it or not, one of the wonderful things about Christmas is that each year, for about three or four weeks, you get inundated with about 50 songs total, each with hundreds of different versions. And then you don't hear them for another 11 months. So the response is almost Pavlovian: Hearing Christmas songs immediately invokes warm, fuzzy feelings, sugarplums, insert yuletide vision here. At least most of the time. Sometimes you hear something on the radio that sounds like a Christmas classic, only it sucks. Practically every artist and celebrity has recorded a Christmas album, from Regis [...]

Last April, when my blog was all of one month old, I reported on the best bands to come out of SXSW festival. It was a big undertaking for me, but it was worth it: I discovered such wonderful artists as Nicole Atkins, Clare & the Reasons and Stephanie Dosen, and it was the first post from my blog that garnered any attention outside of my wife and mom. So in March of this year, I eagerly downloaded 6 GB of free music from artists represented at the SXSW Festival in Texas. In case you're wondering, 6 GB [...]

The Beatles Any song accompanied by a piano and violin The chord progression of George Michael's " Praying for Time " "Come On Eileen" Key changes Mike Viola The Edge's guitar playing Phil Spector's Wall of Sound The British Invasion of the 80s " Isn't it a Pity " by George Harrison (both versions) The 7/4 signature of Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill" Handclaps Aimee Mann's angst [...]

In an attempt to be open-minded, young and hip, I decided to tune in to the American Music Awards last night. Three hours later, pale, shaking and somewhat grayer, I turned off the TV convinced that popular music has gone to hell in a handbasket. What do you say to a music industry in which a dead guy wins four awards for releasing no music this year, in which J Lo gets yet another chance at a comeback (and falls on her ass), in which the final act is an American Idol runner-up ? What [...]

I think I have an unwritten rule for my blog that says if I write a post about U2, I must follow with one about R.E.M. They are infused almost as one band into my collective psyche; I followed them religiously during the mid- to late-80s. And so, a few weeks after my top 10 U2 songs , I give you 20 great R.E.M. songs . Most people will have the same songs in their top 10 U2 songs ("Pride," "With or Without You," etc.), but not so with R.E.M. With the exception of two [...]

There's a headline you don't see everyday, along with "Kanye can write." From Paste Magazine: With illustrations and commentary explaining 12 of his most well-known songs, Kanye West's Through the Wire takes on both the title and overall sentiment of his breakout single: "I'm a champion, so I turned tragedy to triumph." Why, oh why do we need this? Tags: hmph , kanye Related posts Kanye vs. Taylor Swift: [...]