Wax Poetics Issue 18
This new issue one of the best music magazines out there centers almost entirely on Parliament-Funkadelic, and it’s endlessly fascinating. The editor’s opening essay mounts a convincing argument for P-Funk as the best rock band of all time, and then there’s a great historical overview and an absolute ton of insightful interviews with so many of the key figures (not just George Clinton).
The Wire Season 3 DVD
If I had cable I’d no doubt soon be extolling the virtues of season 4, but instead I’m catching up with the third season, and it’s fantastic. So rare that a television show can be so intricate, involving so many issues and genuinely human-seeming characters, and be so entertaining too.
There’s such a romantic mood to this album, and also a genuine feeling of melancholy. It showcases Dylan’s freewheeling style of poetry, but also how affecting his non-singer’s singing voice is these days. He gets loads of press just by lasting this long and still making decent enough music, but the story here is bigger and deeper than that.
I was in Scotland on a vacation recently, and picked this Scottish mystery novel up at the airport on my way home. It’s set in Edinburgh in August, and is real good so far, very suspenseful.
I have to mention this excellent pop/rock album once more, as it’s apparantly going to be the band’s final album, as they’re ‘retiring’ from music. Hats off once more to a great band!
Hopefully this album won’t slip by people as ‘just another Roots album’, cause it’s not. They’re reined in all their energy and talent, focused them in one direction, and that direction’s visionary, a vivid portrait of the darker side of American life today.
Akron/Family’s upcoming ‘special album’ is special indeed, a compact but infinite space/nature jam.
M. Ward’s a unique talent – this album at first seems the most unassuming of his, the easiest to slip into the background, but for me ultimately it’s his best. The songs have a lot of depth, and are so perfectly executed, that they keep sticking with me.
Like all Method Man albums except the first, this is a ‘comeback’, an attempt to prove himself…and it’s an especially angry, fiery one for the most part, and much of it’s quite impressive, showing off the rhyming skills that everyone knows he has.
But speaking of Wu-Tang Clan, this is even better – sharp, consistent, and with stark and mysterious production. A fantastic album, slipping past the public eye as assassins tend to do…
