Loaded Couch Potatoes

the skinny on this falls must have DLC (continue reading…)

Here for all you “deadly Sinner’s” (continue reading…)

Rollover for more. (continue reading…)

Chicken Wings anyone? (continue reading…)

Coming straight from the “sounds like a joke but apparently isn’t” file:

Billboard.com reports that Bob Dylan will release his 47th album on October 13: Christmas in the Heart, an entire album’s worth of Dylan performing holiday standards such as “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Winter Wonderland,” and “The Little Drummer Boy.”

The album’s royalties will be given to Feeding America, an organization dedicated to providing meal assistance to hungry families during the holiday season.

Dylan fans will perhaps take note that this is an interesting strike into new territory for the icon, who is one of only nine recording artists in all of history who has never issued a Christmas album.  Simultaneously, the album marks a return to familiar ground in at least two ways: it represents a new phase in Dylan’s on-again-off-again social activism, and also can be seen as a return to Christian-based music.

Dylan’s first album of 2009, Together Through Life, hit #1 on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart

Master Black talks some music. (continue reading…)

Bob Dylan made a major break from the protest-song scene with his fourth album , 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan.

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Raging against the man (continue reading…)

The Times They Are A-Changin’ — released January 13, 1964

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I’m going to get the rude, cruel, and malicious part out of the way right up front: I’m glad Michael Jackson has died.

Honestly, I wish he’d died twenty years ago, before his image and career collapsed.  And collapse they did, as spectacularly as that of anyone who has ever lived.  Here is a man who was, as literally as it is possible, on top of the world.  He was a cultural giant … a behemoth whose name, for a while, belonged right up there with Elvis Presley and The Beatles as being amongst THE most influential and important entertainers in American history.

Now that his body has joined his artistic and cultural reputations in death, perhaps we can all get back to remembering why this man was such a titan.

What I remember about Michael Jackson is being given Thriller on a cassette tape for Christmas, and playing it until my cassette player broke.  Not having any means of obtaining another one, I would go and sit in my family’s carport, listening to the songs over and over in my mother’s truck … until the cassette finally gave out and stopped playing in certain sections because the thing had been played so often.

Somebody gave me a new copy, eventually, along with a K-Tel compilation of Jackson Five songs, which I loved nearly as much as Thriller.  Somebody else gave me Off the Wall, which I didn’t like very much at first, but eventually warmed to.

There were also Michael Jackson songs I had no access to: “Say Say Say,” his duet with McCartney from one of Sir Paul’s albums; “Somebody’s Watching Me,” the Rockwell song he sang the chorus on; “We Are the World,” which featured Jackson and about a gajillion other singers; all of the songs he did in The Wiz; the songs from the album he did with his brothers as The Jacksons when they all reformed.  In some ways, I treasured all of this music even more than I did, say, “Billie Jean” or “Thriller”, simply because I couldn’t listen to them whenever I wanted.  Remember, those were very different times from these.  I’d sit in front of the radio, listening anxiously for one of these songs (or for one by somebody else whose music I didn’t own), and getting positively jubilant when one of them would come on so I could hear it.

Very different times indeed.  There was magic in that kind of experience.  There’s still magic, today, of course; I’m not one of those old-fart types who’s railing about how much better it was back in my day.  Far from it.  No, the magic is still there today, it’s just different, and I’ll leave other people to talk about it. 

I’ll talk about sitting up late with my Grandma Clara, a died-in-the-wool Elvis fan who was cool enough to be interested in what was going on in music for me, even if she didn’t much like it; we’d watch the Top 10 Videos countdown on whatever channel it used to come on, and the Michael Jackson videos were always the best.  Even Grandma Clara got into those a bit … except for “Thriller,” which scared the piss out of me and didn’t do much to thrill her, either.

It all started to go downhill with Bad, which had some decent enough songs on it and sold well enough to keep his position as superstar intact.  But it was no Thriller.

Then again, what was?  It remains one of THE great albums in pop music history, and it’s important to remember that.  People seem to have mostly forgotten it, which is a shame, and if it takes Jackson’s death to get them to remember it, well, that’s a shame too, but it’s better by far than a future in which nobody remembers it at all.

It’s important to remember that for about five or six years, you simply couldn’t talk about american pop culture at large without Jackson’s name coming up.  Here was a guy who, when he made the Captain Eo film for an attraction at Disney World, was giving a big career boost for everyone else involved … including George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and the Walt Disney Company.  That’s no run-of-the-mill starpower; that’s something you maybe see once in a lifetime.

My lifetime has seen the one, and I’m not at all sure it’ll see another.

Maybe it’s that Michael Jackson who can now start to be remembered again.