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“I was in a daycare center, face pressed against the fence, listening to that part of the song where they breathe heavy. I don’t know why they would do that in a song. I didn’t get it. But at the same time, I got it.” On Rush Hour’s crucial post-Newcleus house tracks from Cozmo D and the Burrell Brothers. I also really wanted to include James Mason’s astonishing proto-house Nightgroov 12” reissue as well, but couldn’t track him down. Seriously though, check it out.
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“Disco’s success at capturing glamour and sex as an aesthetic can be frightening…this seems like one of the more-flattering reasons why rock fans treated disco with so much hostility: It’s a puritan’s gut instinct that there’s something dangerous about a sex-and-glamour bubble floating too exuberantly beyond the realm of reality, becoming too stylized and commercial. And of course straight, white, male rock fans were the ones who’d feel that fear and loathing most strongly: They’d have been the listeners with the least to gain from actively reimagining love, sex, and glamour. Disco claimed the audience with the most critical stake in reframing those things — gay, black, female, and Latino listeners chief among them.” From Nitsuh’s Summer/ Gibb obituary, which I wish had more Gibb to it, but still…
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RIP Chuck Brown..
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“Chronological ethnocentrism plays a helpful role for history textbook authors: it lets them sequester bad things, from racism to the robber barons, in the distant past. Unfortunately for students, it also makes history impossibly dull, because we all “know” everything turned out for the best. It also makes history irrelevant, because it separates what we might learn about, say, racism or the robber barons in the past from issues of the here and now. Unfortunately for us all, just as ethnocentrism makes us less able to learn from other societies, chronological ethnocentrism makes us less able to learn from our past. It makes us stupider.” On our first gay president and a culture grown stupider
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“It is, instead, a sparkling reminder of how a movie absorbed in its own historical moment and preoccupied with the legacies of the past can resonate into a future that lies beyond its specific range of imagination (while looking at least as luminous as it did when Mussolini first laid eyes on it).” An essay on Renoir’s humanist classic, Grand Illusion
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“The artists may have heard something hundreds of times, but it still touches them deeply and they are able to articulate the things that make it so special. These interviews impart valuable information about how musicians hear and receive music themselves.” A feature on The Listening Archive and Classic Album Sundays in today’s WSJ.
