Madonna wouldn't be doing her job if she weren't getting critics' knickers in a bunch. Fortunately, she did it again when "Give Me All Your Luvin'," the cheerleader-themed lead single from her 12th album, MDMA, drew comparisons to Nicola Roberts's similar 2011 U.K. hit "Beat of My Drum." But as the history of this micro-genre reveals, cheerleader pop is by definition derivative. Its nostalgia aims to recapture adolescence, a time when infatuation with contemporary musical… more »
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five… more »
Hotel California, the Eagles '1976 album, has sold more than 16 million copies. But beyond its place as one of the best-selling non-greatest-hits albums ever lies its once-controversial cultural significance: It was a seriously disputed piece of evidence in one of the great culture wars of the 1970s.
That battle was not between red state and blue state, liberal or conservative, anti-abortion or pro-choice. It was the culture war between New York and Los Angeles. A… more »
Around 1978, a handful of bands in downtown New York City who all knew each other tried to answer the central question of post-punk: "why does rock music have to sound a certain way?" The groups that came to be identified as the "no wave" scene rejected every kind of orthodoxy of pop music, from tunefulness to conventional instrumental skill - what the Ramones and other punk bands were doing, by contrast, was practically bourgeois… more »
Contains one of the Ramones’ biggest radio hits, “Pet Sematary” (written for Stephen King’s movie of the same name), “I Believe in Miracles,” and “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight).” The final Ramones album recorded for Sire Records (their label from day one), and sadly, the last to feature bassist and creative leader Dee Dee Ramone. – Eduardo Rivadavia
