“American Pie” is the baby-boom generation’s elegy of choice for the Sixties, a requiem mass for a decade that for Don McLean, the song’s writer and singer, came to a screeching halt sometime around the Summer of Love, just eight years after the tragedy McLean famously proclaimed “The Day the Music Died.” Viewed more than […]
‘Cars’ steers the New Wave into a brave new world
Musician and machine become one in “Cars.” New Wave pioneer Gary Numan’s paranoid-android anthem, a No. 1 hit in the UK in 1979, is a marvel of precision engineering — a chrome-plated vision of a world where technology has transcended humanity, foretelling the Orwellian future hurtling towards us at breakneck speed. KSID::g9E04KJ0453D
The Roots break through with ‘The Next Movement’
Play “The Next Movement,” the 1999 single from the Roots’ fourth album Things Fall Apart, and from the first sliding hand clap, listeners at any party, cookout or kickback will stop mid-conversation, nod their heads in quiet appreciation, and allow the music to take them to a place where hip-hop returns to its roots.
Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ celebrates infatuation and innovation
From the pounding thump of its programmed drums to its synth-based violins (a literal embodiment of the term “heartstrings”), Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2011 smash “Call Me Maybe” ranks among the best songs about young love ever recorded — a masterclass in pop songwriting that perfectly captures the thrill of infatuation. Its success also represents a […]
‘All I Wanna Do’ follows a fairytale path to the top
“All I Wanna Do” is one of the most unlikely breakout songs ever released. A pop confection on an album full of earnest roots rockers, it was also an outlier among the grunge and hip-hop that dominated cultural discourse during the first half of the 1990s. Were it not for a series of quirks of […]
How ‘Is This Love’ cemented Bob Marley’s afterlife legacy
Somewhere along the way, Bob Marley’s Legend was accepted as absolute truth. Legend, the hits collection released three years after the iconic singer’s death, is by leaps and bounds the best-selling reggae album of all time, moving more than 12 million copies in the U.S. and an estimated 25 million copies globally — a perennial […]
Mazzy Star transcends time and space with ‘Fade Into You’
“Fade Into You” is a dream-pop lullaby — a fugue-state meditation on love and longing that shimmers with the elusive beauty of a desert mirage. Released to radio in 1994, Mazzy Star’s signature hit really wasn’t a hit at all, falling four spots shy of the Billboard Top 40, but it endures like precious few […]
