Day 300: It’s The Euro-Idol Winners! Save Us All! (Part 2)

originally published October 26, 2012 According to my raven-haired mistress whom I call Ms. Wiki, there have been sixty top-prize winners in the Eurovision Song Contest since its 1956 debut. That’s fifty-seven years of winners, with an ugly four-way tie in 1969. Because today is Day 300 and I foolishly believe that history cares if […]

Day 299: It’s Euro-Idol! (Part 1)

originally published October 25, 2012 Long before Simon Fuller made televised talent shows a North American addiction, the Europeans had made an annual ceremony out of it. No, I’m not referring to how American Idol grew from Britain’s Pop Idol, which evolved from Australia’s Pop Stars, which was foretold in hieroglyphics on an Egyptian cave […]

Day 297: The Ultimate Best Of Greatest Hits Gold Collection

originally published October 23, 2012 As a young aspiring music snob, I was taught to shun the Greatest Hits album. I was told to aspire to find the brilliant album tracks, to let the unwashed masses scramble over each other to merely settle for hearing the radio hits. I might have dismissed such blatant snootery, […]

Day 293: Why Music Matriculation Matters

originally published October 19, 2012 When the crosshairs of impending budget cuts find their way to a school board, one of the first programs to catch a bullet is inevitably the arts. Drama classrooms get re-tiled for use as math rooms, easels get boxed up and shipped to more affluent schools, and band instruments get […]

Day 287: The Funkified Hipsters Of Soul

originally published October 13, 2012 Were it not for my stunning lack of dance-floor coordination, I think I may have found the genre of music which could be my perfect match: Northern Soul. The ‘North’ in Northern Soul says nothing about where the music was recorded, nor does it necessarily distinguish a specific style from […]

Day 277: Humming A Tune Of Paraguay

originally published October 3, 2012 History has shown – and by ‘history’ I mean my arbitrary interpretation of history for the purpose of having an introductory sentence that sounds like I actually did research – that the most poignant and important music has come from the urban centers. Folk dances and country music may pocket […]

Day 273: WUUW-FM Public Radio Presents – Experimental Music In The Afternoon

originally published September 29, 2012 Good afternoon. You’re listening to WUUW, public access radio. I’m your Saturday afternoon substitute host, Yemini Apollodopolis, and this is “Saturday Clanking”. Normally on my show, which you can hear Tuesdays and Saturday nights between midnight and three I tickle your eardrums with the greats of classic jazz: the Monks, […]

Day 266: Go, Stagger Lee!

originally published September 22, 2012 “The night was clear, and the moon was yellow, and the leaves came tumbling down.” When those words trickle through my headphones or ooze from my speakers, it’s a call to the volume knob. Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee” is one of the finest rock ‘n roll singles from 1959 – […]

Day 235: From The Battlefield To The Movie Theater – Journey Of A Song

originally published August 22, 2012 Sometimes a rich and textured piece of music requires further analysis. Only by delving deeper into the complexities and subtle modal shifts of a great work can we truly hope to understand it, to appreciate its aesthetic and kinesthetic properties, and to gauge its true importance in whatever sub-cultural niche […]

Day 225: Tuned Out By The BBC

originally published August 12, 2012 One incalculable and oft-forgotten benefit of living in North America is our relatively free access to music. Even in my youth, before the internet showed up and turned censorship into a half-hearted punchline, there wasn’t a lot of music getting yanked off the air due to supposed indecency. Over in […]