Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

There is an age-old mixtape code that does not allow for much recopying. The tape you make for one person should not be given to another. This does not stop these tapes from being recopied if they are good, usually by the receiver of said tape without the knowledge of the author, carrying on the tradition of musical choices and adding more variety to one's musical taste. Tapes can throw a monkey wrench into the works and introduce an interesting theme that needs to be carried on, or a genre that has not been explored. One of these types of thematic tapes turned me on to power pop, and more recently music blogs have taken over some of the work of mixtapes, introducing me to older rock and country stuff that I would have missed.             Mixtape etiquette also assumes that the tape will be a labor of love. Now mixed CDs or playlists do not have to be listened to as they are made. Those old mixtapes required that the creator w...

I haven't been blogging much or doing other writing because I am currently revising my dissertation and feeling the gloom of being in school for so long with no glimmer of light at the end. I've been in a perpetual dark hallway, bumping and bouncing off the walls, feeling sicker than ever as I look for academic jobs, while trying to get published. Many days I feel like I have zero skills, zero prospects, and zero opportunities. I'm not getting any younger, and there are times when I feel like I have made some very regrettable mistakes. Yet I also know that this is what I want to do, so I'm going to finally get the dissertation done. Then I can think about paying back student loan debt and moving on into the light. Music has been my saving grace as always. Coming off of a two week sinus infection, I reloaded my MP3 player and put it on shuffle only to be hit with a barrage of old country songs, mostly of the trucker persuasion. I have been spending tons of my time li...

Growing up in a small Wisconsin town, I developed an early aversion to country music bars. My aunt owns a cool bar now, but it is still in the part of Wisconsin that caters to a clientele that likes "both kinds of music -- Country and Western." Dan Aykroyd in his sagelike wisdom pointed this anomaly out in Blues Brothers. No one ever threw bottles at me, but they played a hell of a lot of Garth Brooks. So I guess many of those bars are County radio bars, but not the kind that play old school honkytonk, the kind that play Country with a drum machine. Sitting in one of these bars, I commend them on sticking with the country theme. Personally,  I would rather drink my beer at a bar that plays real honkytonk. I'd take some Johnny Horton or Slim Whitman. Or give me some outlaw country. Ol' Waylon or Billy Joe Shaver would go down smoothly right now. I could kill for some Jason Isbell or John Moreland to be honest. I raise my glass to the real country heroes. I'm head...

I've been a Clem Snide fan for a long time, enamored with Eef Barzelay's easy, literate lyrics and the band's indie country shuffle. They have released a number of solid albums over the years, and have now turned to putting them out digitally, recently releasing several fan chosen collections of covers. For my money the best albums are Soft Spot and End of Love , although I know that The Ghost of Fashion and Your Favorite Music are strong contenders. Eef's solo records present other sides of his songwriting that have been making their way into the later band output. The first is contemplative, while the second rocks like nothing else he has done. For this edition of Track This, I wanted to review a track from his solo albums but had trouble picking one, so I chose two. The musically upbeat, yet lyrically down, "Could Be Worse" from Lose Big and the Rocket Science soundtrack cut, "I Love the Unknown." Both recognize Barzelay's ability to...

I have a knack for finding records at thrift stores, digging through the dust and crinkled cellophane and finding that one elusive gem. I chalk it up to the persistence of the hunt that finds me going back week after week, month after month, while some would just buy the damn thing on eBay. After digging through the Mantovani, Mitch Miller, interminable copies of Carole King's Tapestry , I had begun to give up hope that I would find something halfway decent. Then, I pulled a Jerry Reed record that I was unfamiliar with, The Man with the Golden Thumb . I've long been a fan of Reed's humorous songs and his criminally underrated guitar work, but I had no idea how good this record would be. The title track has shown up on Greatest Hits collections, and is just another in a number of good novelty songs about guitar players that stem back to Reed's early hits, such as "Guitar Man," which made it to number 53 on the country charts in 1967 before Elvis Presley too...