Top Five Artists You Think More People Should Listen To Before I begin: I used to collar people and demand that they listen to some particular track. It wasn’t generally successful. I did manage to ‘give’ a musician to a…
Top Five Live Musical Experiences Before I begin: I am not counting experiences I actually participated in, which for Your Humble Blogger would date back to high school. Well, or singing to my Perfect Non-Reader. That sort of thing. Not…
Top Five Instrumentals Before I begin: Would you believe that I had a lot of trouble deciding what counted as an instrumental and what didn’t? For instance, is “Pennsylvania 6-5000” an instrumental? What about all the other songs that have…
Top Five Lyrics that Move Your Heart Before I begin: This one was difficult even to decide what the criteria are. The big problem is that (as with all Top Fives in whatever fields) so much of my attachment to…
A while ago, Amanda Marcotte, the ultimate maximum over at Pandagon, wrote a response to a music meme which led me to spend way too much time thinking about my answers. And, since I really am a verbose and prolix…
It may be difficult for Gentle Readers to believe, but Your Humble Blogger does try not to write about subject on which I am entirely ignorant. One of those things is the corporate media, sometimes called the mainstream media, mostly…
Your Humble Blogger is tempted to discourse about the role of money in the nonsense poems of Edward Lear. Well, and really I just happened to notice that it seems odd how frequently money changes hands. Everybody knows that The…
Well, and after talking about Your Hit Parade and great or lousy songs, it occurred to YHB that one distinction some would make (and I failed to) is between melodic and lyric stupidity. When I presented my case that there…
Have you ever wished you were there when, say, the first critic dismissively called a style of blurry paintings that called attention to their brushwork and the surface of the painting rather than a naturalistic depiction of the subject “impressionism”?…
Many of my Gentle Readers are aware of the Time Traveler Convention, which will have been this evening. It was being mentioned on several blogs and journals, mostly with a vaguely entertained and amused air. Your Humble Blogger’s immediate thought,…