Broken Record

  Ok. So a few days ago I made a post using Celine Dion as an example of someone who has a very remarkable voice but was still an artist I wasn't particularly a fan of. Maybe it's not a voice I gravitate to or it's about the material and production. So anyway as a day or so went by I started to feel very guilty about this. After all, Dion seems like a very nice, hardworking person with a good sense of humor about herself . And if I had to come up with an example that day to define my taste in things, why throw Celine Dion under the bus? And I then I thought, "Aww geez. I'm going to have to make a Celine Dion playlist now." Because, in the spirit of rockstar essayist Lester Bangs, I should double back and get stuck into the weeds of calling out my own shit. To be honest Celine Dion has recorded so much music, just by the laws of probability there has to be something to like in there. She had a whole decade of singing in French (29 singles!) before she even sta...

  While I was in Cleveland a week ago, some of our family and friends stayed at the Hampton Inn in Medina and we would bump into one another in the breakfast area. So beyond the scheduled family events, little tables of conversation would occur between groups of family and friends who normally wouldn't run into each other in this world. Like friends of the family running into cousins or in-laws. Funerals are a weird amalgamation of groups coming together. I found myself introducing my bff Julie (from St. Louis) to my brother's high school friends (also from St. Louis) and their having conversations about Cardinals baseball or "where you went to high school" which is the homing-device question of all St. Louis peoples.  In any case, we were sitting eating Hampton Inn eggs and waffles one morning and my sister-in-law was complaining about the music her daughter played in the car on their drive from Kansas City to Cleveland. And to be fair, my niece was listening to a po...

So I've been asking all my friends and family to give me their Top 10 list of music acts they love. These are like deserted island picks. Not who my friends listen to the most often right now or over all time or who they've seen play live the most. Just their favorites.  I got this idea from Lucy O'Brien and her book  She Bop . She did the same query in the 1990s but with men only and found that none of them had women included in their lists. Only one of her respondents, an African American man, included two women on his list. O'Brien suggested this was vaguely cultural.  First off, people complained that coming up with ten was hard. Then after a time, they complained that keeping the list to ten was hard. Talking it over with them, there are these "bubbling under" lists that developed, their "almost top 10s" that were interesting in themselves. As if to say, "I like these artists or bands, just not top-10 like them."  Okay so my brother do...

    I should have called this the Gray Haired Old Lady Music Blog. But when I set up the Blogger blog a few days ago, I was in a very surly mood and did not care to take any time to give this a fancy or accurate moniker. So I just picked Music Blog. But then today, the right name came to me like an Angel. More on that later.   To start off I picked Blogger as a tool so I that didn't have to bother with a vanity URL and so that I could hearken back to a time when the Internet wasn't a cesspool of evil brokenness. Kind of like zines do one step back. I actually forgot how crappy Blogger is, how awful the features are, how god-awful the HTML is under the hood and how I can only upload images if I use Blogger in the Firefox browser. Something about safety settings but it's always something. Just like how nothing online works anymore.    And here I must confess I have other blogs. Which is a socially awkward thing to admit in the year 2026. I have a  C...