I have been declared Emperor of the World. Let us not waste time explaining why or how; let’s all simply accept the fact that we are better off, as a result; hence, my next decree:

Emperor’s Decree No. 3T-45: Rock and roll stations are no longer permitted to play reggae music. Reggae is the polar opposite of rock and roll. There are no similarities between rock and roll and reggae. The rhythmic stresses occur in different places. Reggae is “laid-back” and rock and roll is “in-your-face.” Barry Manilow fits a rock station playlist about as well as Bob Marley does. (And, no, excessive marijuana use is not enough of a connection between rock and reggae to justify its presence on the playlist.) Hearing reggae on a rock station is like finding a picture of one’s grandmother edited into a pornographic video: it just breaks the whole vibe; lets the air our of the balloon; jams on the brakes; busts the groove; kills the buzz — and all those other cliches that you lowly minions always identify with. It’s a bird in the face of roller-coaster-riding Fabio. When the Emperor is cruising along, slamming his face against the dashboard to “Hell’s Bells” he doesn’t want it followed up with “One Love.” You can’t do the devil’s horns thing to Marley, plain and simple. When the Emperor wants to suck on a juicy mango and loaf in a hammock, he welcomes all things Rastafarian. But when the Emperor feels the need to bang the royal head, he doesn’t want a pillow thrown in front of it. (It just ain’t a party until the crown gets dented.)

The Punishment: DJs who play reggae on rock stations will have headphones duct-taped to their heads and they will be forced to listen to Don Ho singing “Tiny Bubbles” for one solar year.

Now, go forth and obey.

The Emperor will grace the world with a new decree each Tuesday morning.

Tags: music, The Emperor decrees by Chris Matarazzo
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I have been declared Emperor of the World. Let us not waste time explaining why or how; let’s all simply accept the fact that we are better off, as a result; hence, my next decree:

Emperor’s Decree No. 9000: Henceforth, no one is allowed to come up with asinine categories for types of music, especially categories that revel in their own masturbatory paradoxicality, like “folktronica.” Likewise outlawed are terms like “synthcore,” “shoegazer” and “melodic death-metal.” Creators of such silly genres need to be informed, in clear terms, that no level of verbal skullduggery will ever conceal the vapid, hackneyed and generally worthless nature of their insubstantial compositional flatulations. The Emperor, for instance, is The Emperor because he is intrinsically superior, not simply because he wears a blinking neon cape with ermine trim and exquisite silken underlay. (Although he does look dashing in his neon cape.)

The Punishment: Violators will be chained in the bowels the Dungeon of Serious Woe and forced to listen to their own pretentious drek for a period of thee years. If able to survive this heinous ordeal, they will be released into the custody of Barry Manilow who will keep them as pets until the end of time.

The Emperor will grace the world with a new decree each Tuesday morning.

Tags: music, The Emperor decrees by Chris Matarazzo
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I have a tendency to find songs that I get addicted to–listening to on repeat incessantly, walking around with its lyrics in my head all day. One of the most recent examples of this has been Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” (linked below for your convenience.)

As this song keeps finding its way back on my playlist, I started to wonder what it was that made me love the song, and even the video, so much. [Read more →]

Tags: music by Sara W. Moreno
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I first encountered Rammstein in an almost empty cinema on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, during an afternoon matinee of the largely unloved David Lynch movie Lost Highway. Balthazar Getty had just broken into a house, a porno starring his lover was unfolding on a giant screen, and something was about to go very wrong — a point underscored on the soundtrack by sinister chanting, tolling church bells and an impossibly low German voice muttering words I didn’t understand. It was ominous, bombastic, absurd, utterly hilarious- and yet also thrilling: [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, music by Daniel Kalder
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For me, like most people, memory is intricately intertwined with music. Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 was a hit the year I started school, and so the song always resurrects those early experiences of classroom tedium. Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus,playing on the ferry that brought me from England to Holland in 1986, summons textures of my first trip abroad from the sinkhole of amnesia; while Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is forever fused with a 6am walk I took around Amsterdam ‘s Schipol airport. Endlessly and subjectively I can listen to a track and landscapes, people, places and moods return.

What is the mechanism behind this? I don’t care. I note only that the links in the chain of music and memory are almost always forged accidentally- standing in a shop, watching TV, sitting in a café. When I was travelling in Central Asia a few years ago however I decided to conduct an experiment- I would intentionally fuse some music with the landscape to use as an aid to memory later. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, music, travel & foreign lands by Daniel Kalder
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Like many people I enjoy the music of Kraftwerk and think that their reputation as musical pioneers is entirely justified. Indeed I would choose to listen to Trans Europe Express or The Man Machine over anything by The Beatles any day. Come to think of it, I’d listen to their 2003 album about riding bicycles over anything by The Beatles any day, but that’s another matter. I enjoy their dry humour, their minimalist, retro-futurist aesthetic, their decades-long dedication to pretending they are robots… and of course, their music.

And yet, there is a problem. And if you know Kraftwerk then you will know its name: [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, music, technology by Daniel Kalder
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One of the loose collective of my friends — The Defeatist-Malcontent-Anarchist Slacker Collective and Bait Shop — a Vet who’s trying to get his band going in upstate New York doing kind of boogie rock with metal overtones, spends time he should spend doing something like picking up bottles for the return fee on a Marshall Amp blog, and one of the folks on it posted something about a piece of software that my pal had not heard of. He tossed it out to the collective, and one of the guys explained that it is really kind of an auto-cad system that enables engineers, architechts, and marketing types to overlay everything and walk the customer through the whole bloody thing. He then commented that if he wanted to go back to working for somebody else, he’s take some classes…and then realized what he just said. Commented that he hated his life, and went off to drink copiously in the pine woods of Maine. [Read more →]

Tags: damned lies, music by Mike Farrell
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I was watching Paul McCartney in concert on TV the other day. He was playing to a festival crowd — maybe eighty-thousand strong. (It was at the Isle of Wight or the Isle of Lucy or something like that.) As he got the end of “Hey Jude,” the crowd, many of whom had been years away from being born when “Hey Jude” was written, joined in, singing the “Na-naaa-na-nanana-naaaah,” part and it occurred to me that success is a bizarre thing. [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, music by Chris Matarazzo
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If it weren’t for Lady Gaga, many of the points I have tried to make in this column would have been so hard to illustrate. She consistently delivers. She constantly examplifies the things that, in my opinion, are the unnecessary and even damaging trappings of art, from the element that I have called “artistic weirdness” to plain-old insincerity. At the recent MTV video awards, dressed up and acting like a dude, as “Jo Calderone,” Gaga physically illustrated the pitfalls of insincerity in art — the problems that are caused when “show” overshadows art. [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, music by Chris Matarazzo
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I’ve been going back in time. As I have said before, I’m a real believer in the potential of pop music, though I’m a lover of modern orchestral music and classical. I think pop is the music with the most creative potential, even if it is the area in which the least creative potential is realized, as things stand. Anyway, I have been going back in time to check out the the particular tunes of the pop greats that we don’t usually hear.

My latest purchase is Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection. (It’s really, really good. But this isn’t a music review. I hate music reviews.) [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, music by Chris Matarazzo
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I have been waiting for this week for months. On Thursday, my friend John L. and I will be traveling to New York City and meeting my buddy Johnny to see Buffalo Tom play at the Bowery Ballroom. Then on Friday I will be seeing them in Philly with my buddy Dennis Doc. This is my favorite band of all time and I will be seeing them twice with some of my closest friends. The nostalgia is kicking in so hard that I might not bring my cell phone and bring a disposable camera to get a genuine 90’s feel. And to kick things off, last night Cailin and I ordered take-out food from the Colonial Diner – which was the ultimate late night after party destination in South Jersey for me from 1992-2007. [Read more →]

Tags: Marty digs, music by Marty O'Connor
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“We slept in a bungalow! On the floor!”

“After waiting in line for 3 hours, we were lucky enough to see a 30 minute comedy show…for free!”

“As far as the eye could see, there were free energy drinks…and boy did we drink them.  We drank them all.  We were sick as dogs.” [Read more →]

Tags: creative writing, mostly kidding by Matt Scottoline, music by Matt Scottoline
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I remember a deucedly long van ride to Binghamton, New York. The various discussions among the band blur together now, but I distinctly recall sharply differing opinions as to whether one needs to actively wash one’s feet in the shower or whether the time said feet spend sloshing in the soapy water at the bottom of the tub does the hygienic trick. I also remember our soft-spoken and usually ironic lead guitarist, Jimmy, weighing-in on the debate, during a lull: [long silence] “Questions . . .” he said, languidly.

We were to play an open-air show to several thousand people, right next to the Susquehanna river, outside of a big hotel.  As we came into radio range of Binghamton, we began hearing advertisements: [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, music by Chris Matarazzo
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Wednesday evening is ‘church night’ for some of us, and you’ll find me attending “The Gathering” at First Prez-Midland each Wednesday night, enjoying a shared meal, fellowship and a variety of activities … sometimes choir practice, sometimes Bible study, sometimes a worship service … and sometimes, an intense discussion of contenders for the title “Best Rock Band” … e-vuh!
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Tags: art & entertainment, music by Jeff McDonald
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Over the years, I’ve fallen in love with Ravel and Debussy’s work and gaped at and then studied their complex, soul-crumpling harmonies; I’ve gone through my progressive rock period and my jazz period (fusion to big band to mainstream) and thankfully escaped sane; I often enjoy playing a Renaissance piece on the guitar; I’ve even dabbled in Gaelic folk music, for Pete’s sake. I’ve learned to appreciate all of the great classical stuff that really doesn’t move me much, just because it has merit supported by years of scholarship. But, in the end, the music I have the most faith in — the music I think has the most potential — is popular music. I still think 95% of it is total crap, mind you, but that doesn’t stop me from believing it is the musical area with the greatest artistic potential. [Read more →]

Tags: artistic unknowns by Chris Matarazzo, music by Chris Matarazzo
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This week I am teetering closer and closer to my first nervous breakdown. I am knee deep in graduate school work, we have an uninvited “mouseguest” problem, and my little boy bounces off the walls until midnight every night. My sleep is messed up, I’m out of shape, unmotivated, and out of sorts. The realization of my problems came to a head last night when I hazily sat through 1/4th of the movie “You’ve Got Mail” with my girlfriend and was actually getting into the storyline. My cure-all for this is time traveling in my mind back to the glorious mid-90s. The band joining me on this journey is the much misunderstood band The Goo Goo Dolls.     [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, Marty digs, music by Marty O'Connor
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When I was a lad I watched lots of weird, psychotronic movies very late at night. You know the kind of thing I mean — Italian zombie movies, French vampire movies, usually from the 70s, with weird proggy soundtracks etc, etc.

The problem with all such films of course is that the plots are almost invariably dreadful, the acting awful, and the exciting freak-out horror sections are separated by long stretches of narrative tundra. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if somebody took all the interesting bits- the psychedelic breakdowns, the grinning skulls, the orgy scenes, the flashing strobe lights and melting flesh and stitched it all together in one continuous montage of hallucinatory imagery? [Read more →]

Tags: movies, music by Daniel Kalder
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Last night I went by one of my best friend’s parent’s house and saw that his dad decorated the house. The decorations have been roughly the same my entire life, and always instantly put me in the Christmas spirit. So I thought I would devote this week’s entry to the things I love about Christmas since I am brimming with holiday cheer! [Read more →]

Tags: Marty digs, music by Marty O'Connor
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So a month ago my wife, in one of those heroic moves toward permanent marital stability, bought us tickets to the Jason Bonham Led Zeppelin Experience. The show tapped directly into my untouchable love of Zeppelin. I was awed not just by the talent of Bonham and his band but the emotion driving this tribute. Meandering home afterward, thinking about the grainy videos of Jason as a child that were part of the show, I wondered what if Zeppelin had tried to launch today, in the age of helicopter parents. [Read more →]

Tags: music, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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No, I am not talking about the heartwarming 1993 movie about the love affair between a young boy and a killer whale. I am talking about the weekend arrest of grizzled country music star Willie Nelson for marijuana possession. It just ain’t right.

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Tags: drugs & alcohol, Marty digs, music by Marty O'Connor
2 Comments »