One of these days I'll get this thing right. Anyway, updates:My latest post at PopMatters, this one concerning the new album by Chastity Belt, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone. This calls back to a piece I wrote last year about the Felice Brothers and "termite art."My book is being finished up. One… Continue reading Catching Up Again
Category: Music Criticism
Power Play: Brian Williams, Leonard Cohen, and “First We Take Manhattan”
My new column is up at PopMatters. Read it here. One of the more interesting discoveries in researching this piece was finding the videotaped interview from Toronto 1988 from which the prominent quote about "First We Take Manhattan" is taken. The quote from Part I of the interview that I included sheds a little light… Continue reading Power Play: Brian Williams, Leonard Cohen, and “First We Take Manhattan”
Lana Del Rey’s “Love” In a Time of Trump
My new music column is up at PopMatters today. It concerns pop chanteuse Lana Del Rey's recent single "Love" and listening to her use of nostalgia in a time of Trumpism. In many ways, this is a catching-up-with-things essay, and also very personal since it concerns, in part, my students at CCAD.I should be back… Continue reading Lana Del Rey’s “Love” In a Time of Trump
Nothing Has Been Done Before To Be Published by Bloomsbury
So I can finally announce the big news I've been keeping hush-hush: Next fall, Bloomsbury will publish my book of music criticism! The working title is NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE. The book explores the concept of the "new" in American popular music since 2000 and argues for a different way of engaging with that… Continue reading Nothing Has Been Done Before To Be Published by Bloomsbury
Back On It
The Blind Engineer EP is out, today is Aug. 12, CCAD awaits, so I'm shifting back into non-summer mode. Boombox is playing some Times New Viking, Mark Lanegan and Isobel Campbell, Rae Sremmurd, and Frank Hutchison. My latest column is up at PopMatters re: Protomartyr's "The Devil in His Youth" and how it now seems… Continue reading Back On It
Summer of ’16: Fantastic Negrito’s “Working Poor”
My new column is up at PopMatters. It's one of those survey-the-land kinds of pieces, reflecting on where we're at as a country. Specifically it considers Fantastic Negrito's song "Working Poor" from his new album The Last Days of Oakland and what the song does--not just what it's about.I want to clarify that my interest… Continue reading Summer of ’16: Fantastic Negrito’s “Working Poor”
PopMatters: The Flea-Market Music of the Felice Brothers
My new "Ties That Bind" column is up at PopMatters, this time around concerning The Felice Brothers' music which I lovingly think of as "flea-market music":With the release of “Plunder”, there are now two new Felice Brothers singles in advance of the group’s forthcoming album, Life in the Dark. Both songs sound like they were… Continue reading PopMatters: The Flea-Market Music of the Felice Brothers
This Week’s EP
Once again I'm trying to keep my pencil sharp by reviewing single tracks from wherever, whenever, most of it fairly new unless otherwise stated. This time around I'm calling it "This Week's EP" because the EP is a lovable form: brief, intense in its focus compared to an LP, but spacious enough for some noodling around. The idea is that the included songs would fit on an EP. If that means six songs, or two, so be it. The point is to write this off-the-cuff, no planning, typos okay, lots of semi-colons, perhaps.
The endeavor to create a weekly update, or even any kind of regular update, on this site has failed before, and I expect it to fail again.
Track 1. "Complicated," Fitz and The Tantrums, from their new self-titled album (Elektra/WMG)
The zenith/nadir of indie pop in the sense of highly compressed synth-crunch made with the "spirit" of indie-rebellion-something-or-other, this song, on the heels of the band's single "HandClap," reminds me of the white-collar bar near the Short North Market called Brothers, a meat market kind of place I wandered into once years ago and will never wander into again. "Kissing like a car crash" is a good lyric, though. My rating: three half-smoked cigarette butts on a sidewalk.
Extended Thoughts on Prince: Never Stop Arguing
When Prince passed away on April 21, I knew that my next column at PopMatters would be about him. That column, "Prince: Never Stop Arguing," is up now. Read it before reading any of what's below.
The problem was that I didn't know what to say. For me, trying to write about Prince has been like trying to walk around an ocean. Where do you even think about beginning? I've been a Prince fan since I was thirteen and first heard Purple Rain. As a young musician I was blown away by his talent, his soul, his ambition, his dedication. I traded for bootleg tapes. When my truck was broken into one night, I was more pissed about the thief taking my Paradiso live CD than I was about the shattered window. I've been trying to write about Prince for years, either for a PopMatters column or something else; I have a few stalled essays, one dating back to the album 3121, one as recent as last year.
Documenting The Life of Pablo
My latest column at PopMatters has posted. It's about Kanye West's new album, The Life of Pablo, and its evolving nature. I was reading a recent essay by the philosopher Boris Groys concerning contemporary art and the internet, and something clicked. West's constant revising of his album has been treated like a novelty, so I… Continue reading Documenting The Life of Pablo
Robert Loss 