Singles Jukebox Comment Competition
The Singles Jukebox turned five this week, and to celebrate this achievement, they’re having a contest: “So for the next three weeks, we’re having a comment competition! The best comment on any entry...
View Article“On Women Writing About Music”
“Allow me to set a spell in my rocking chair and reminisce about the days when I was coming up in the music writing world. This was the late 1970s, early 1980s. At the time, music writing was truly a...
View ArticleEpic Tuesday Reads #1: Geeshie & Elvis
The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie: On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace. By John Jeremiah Sullivan N THE WORLD of early-20th-century...
View ArticleEpic Tuesday Reads #2: The Trouble With Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Chart
Ideally, any effective genre chart—be it R&B, Latin, country, even alt-rock—doesn’t just track a particular strain of music, which can be marked by ever-changing boundaries and ultimately...
View ArticleEpic Tuesday Reads #4: Five Years, Two Million Words
In the last five years, there have been nearly 3400 songs covered from over 60 countries, with about 30,000 individual paragraph-long reviews from us adding up to about 2,000,000 (two million) words....
View ArticleIn Defense of Schlock
In a 166-word blurb in the 1983 edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, Dave Marsh, the Bruce Springsteen biographer and guardian of rock-critical orthodoxy, gave one-star reviews to all of...
View ArticleProductive Ways Not to Like Music
“Over the past two decades, the impulse to talk shit about bands and the people who like them—the impulse, that is, to delegitimize other people’s pleasure (yeah, you know me)—has largely, though not...
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