The Undisputed Truth’s psychedelic soul opus “Smiling Faces Sometimes” vividly captures the paranoia coursing through the American bloodstream at the dawn of the 1970s as the utopian ideals of the Aquarian Age crashed and burned. KSID::502E503la26405
How MTV buzz launched Blind Melon’s ‘No Rain’ into the stratosphere
No hit single is more symbiotically tied to its hit music video than “No Rain.” Blind Melon’s lone Top 40 entry and its fantastical Samuel Bayer-directed clip linger in the collective consciousness as conjoined twins: inseparable, indivisible, different but the same. Premiering on cable network MTV in mid-1993, close to a year after the release […]
How Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’ earned its wings
“Free Bird” is the sacred text of Southern rock, and like all sacred texts, it is the object of both devotion and derision. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s elegiac magnum opus is so deeply burned into the collective musical consciousness, so inescapable across decades of nonstop radio airplay, that it’s all but impossible to separate the song from […]
Blues Traveler laughs all the way to the bank with its audacious ‘Hook’
“Hook” holds you in contempt for succumbing to its charms. Blues Traveler’s savagely satirical follow-up to its breakthrough single “Run-Around” skewers all facets of the hit-making machine, from creatively bankrupt artists to soulless corporate media outlets to listeners who gobble up whatever tripe the music industry conspires to shove down our throats — tripe including […]
How Def Leppard brought on the golden age of power ballads
“Bringin’ on the Heartbreak” isn’t simply the best power ballad of the 1980s; it’s also the savviest. The second single from Def Leppard’s sophomore album High ‘N’ Dry ushered power ballads squarely into the pop mainstream, demonstrating that ostensibly earnest love songs burnished with the sound and spirit of hard rock could dominate commercial airwaves […]
OK Go’s ‘Here It Goes Again’ foretells pop music’s digital destiny
As a song, “Here It Goes Again” is a footnote. But as a marketing stunt, it’s a milestone — a harbinger of a world where fame and fortune are measured in views, likes and shares, not record sales, radio airplay or downloads. Released online roughly a year prior to the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, the […]
How Huey Lewis and the News hooked America with ‘I Want a New Drug’
No rock act better encapsulates the zeitgeist of the Reagan Era than Huey Lewis and the News, whose slickly inoffensive bar-band anthems dominated the Billboard Top 40 from 1982 to 1987. And no song better encapsulates Huey Lewis and the News than “I Want a New Drug,” which embraces the “Just Say No” fervor of […]
A toast to Dean Martin, the forever king of crooner cool
“You’re Nobody ‘Till Somebody Loves You” bottles for all eternity the essence of mid-20th century cool. Dean Martin’s 1960 classic is insouciance incarnate, a singularly swinging evocation of postwar America on the cusp of a new frontier. Sure, Martin’s pal Frank Sinatra was the matchless pop stylist, the Chairman of the Board, the undisputed leader […]
One-chord wonder: Why Junior Walker’s ‘Shotgun’ still hits the target
“Shotgun” is the Motown classic that sounds nothing at all like a Motown classic. Junior Walker and the All Stars’ roadhouse R&B juggernaut is untamed and unbound — a wild card in a catalog synonymous with sequinned style and silk-trimmed sophistication. Released on Motown’s Soul subsidiary in early 1965 (a pivotal year in the company’s […]
Here’s the story… of a TV cult classic: ‘It’s a Sunshine Day’
Close your eyes, and you can picture them with startling clarity: six impossibly wholesome American teens (three boys and three girls, the latter with hair of gold like their mother, the youngest one in curls) dancing on the checkerboard stage of a televised talent showcase, lip-synching the corniest, campiest pop song imaginable — a song […]
