Steve Almond wrote a little diatribe raging against music criticism for The Boston Globe a couple weeks ago. I say “little” because his argument is just that: Weak, narrow-minded, short-sighted… All of these things and more. For an author/journalist whose work I’ve enjoyed when I come across it, I was genuinely shocked to see the contempt … [Read more…]
The new year is almost here, and with it comes a maelstrom of “End of the Year Lists.†Here on Ex-Spectator, I’ll be rolling out a few “End of the Yearâ€/â€End of the Decade†lists. Today’s list: The Best Overlooked Albums of the Aughts. A while back I started an ongoing feature called “Overlooked in … [Read more…]
The Indiana Daily Student‘s Cory Barker recently put out his “Best of the Decade” list on emo. Fine enough. Except that he begins with this little quote: Before 2000, we’re pretty sure that the word emo didn’t even exist. What? No need to really delve into this, but shouldn’t Barker have, I don’t know, say, … [Read more…]
Usually, newspaper corrections tend to fly under the radar. They appear in the paper days after the initial article with the mistake in question was published. By that time, most readers have most likely forgotten about the mistake and/or article and have moved on. That’s not the case with Akeya Dickson’s Washington Post article on … [Read more…]
The behind-the-scenes (or rather, behind-my-thoughts) on the Boston Phoenix piece I did on scrunk and Warped Tour is still to come, but consider this a little preview. A lots been said online since the piece went on the net about scrunk/crunkcore and its impact on Warped Tour, which isn’t to say that my article caused these … [Read more…]
Last night, Public Enemy’s Chuck D dropped some knowledge at Harvard. Among the many insightful and brilliant things D had to say, one struck me in particular: “People need to write books. People need to write more books, now, more than ever. Write books and the cream will rise to the top.” That’s a bit … [Read more…]
2008 is almost gone as the New Year will arrive in a matter of hours (or it may have already arrived depending on when you read this). So, in anticipation for the number of times I’ll forget to put “2009” on whatever documents need a proper year, here’s a little listing of 9 things I’ll … [Read more…]