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Showing posts with the label The Kinks

Track This: The Clash's "Something About England"

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Sandinista! often gets short shrift in discussions of The Clash's output. Critics and fans discuss it in dismissive tones, often viewing it as a failed experiment that should have been released as a single LP, not a triple. To be fair, there are quite a few people that view it as an underrated masterpiece that shows how effective the band was at disparate musical styles and gives more credence to the growth of their songwriting. The conventional approach in the punk rock community these days is to entirely dismiss the Clash and treat them as a punchline, except for their first record, which will always remain the classic for punk fans because it includes straightforward angry, punk numbers. However, these are not often punk enough.  London Calling remains their acclaimed classic rock masterpiece, while Combat Rock is their breakthrough. Fortuitously, the only radio track off London Calling is continuously played on classic rock radio alongside Combat Rock's "Rock th...

Track This: The Jam-Down in the Tube Station at Midnight

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The Jam's "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" has been one of my favorite Jam tracks since I first purchased Greatest Hits in 1995. Long before I listened to all their records, and just when I was beginning to dip my toe, into Paul Weller's increasingly lengthy catalog, I would play the track on my beatdown boom box. Sequestered among rock posters and stacks of comic books, I marveled at Weller's detailed songwriting that told of another side of British culture different from what I got from The Clash, my favorite British band at the time. While I loved early Jam tracks like "Eton Rifles" and "The Modern World" and later got heavily into the later soulful tracks, especially "Town Called Malice" and the ballad "The Bitterest Pill (I Ever Had to Swallow)," "Down in the Tube Station" grabbed hold of my teenage imagination and would not let go. The imagery and story-telling alone sucked me in, but the music seal...

Classic Rock Saturday: The Possibilities of Genre

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What is classic rock anyway? Sometimes genre specification make me wonder, especially when I listen to music from numerous genres as I work. However, I often believe the genre, rock music, is not so much a genre as a catchall category for most types of guitar-based music made after 1965. Just like alternative rock, such subgenre categories as hard rock, have become close to meaningless. Those who have suffered through my endless diatribes about certain periods of music know that I reserve specific definitions for other genres: rock 'n' roll to me is a very specific type of music drawing from Sun Records luminaries like Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Indeed, bands who play rock 'n' roll today follow this template. Yet it is more about rocking out on bass, guitar, and drums than exploring guitar solos. Rock 'n' roll is also an attitude like punk that gets the job done fast and dirty with little indulgence. In the last couple days my musical ex...