Page Tuner: “Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove”

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson likes music criticism. A lot. Throughout the length of his impressively arch, anti-formulaic pseudo-autobiography, he nearly spends more words on the subject of music criticism than the art form itself. As a kid, he grew up worshipping not just records, but the reviews of those records. Basically, he was part of the first generation of omnivorous music nerds, the kind of which now rule the insanely divergent cultural mass that we call the internet. As a musician, writer, and curator, he was made for these times.

Advertisement

68 Songs for Neil Young’s 68th Birthday

To me, Neil Young is the greatest musician who will ever live. He chases down ghosts and makes them sing. He wrenches beauty from brutality. He connects delicate fragments like a wise old spider. He’s a touchstone of authenticity in this false, confusing world. He’s the prairie wind, blowin’ through our heads. He’s just the coolest, most fearless artist of our time.

He’s given us so much over the years that it is difficult to appreciate the scope of his musical output. To prove that point, here’s 68 songs from his staggeringly varied and enormous catalogue, in celebration of his 68th birthday.

Changes: David Bowie Is @ AGO

Icons can influence people in indirect, peripheral ways. Artists who achieve some measure of cultural ubiquity quickly become diffuse and viral, influencing fashion and music and informing the hive-mind concept of what it is to be “cool”. Sometimes you end up becoming a fan without even realizing it.

Motion Pictures: “Sound City”

“Sound City” is Dave Grohl’s offering to the Gods of Rock. It’s a beautiful, life-affirming film that honours both rock and roll itself, and one of its greatest temples.

Interview: Steve Poltz

Steve Poltz is a restless and creative spirit. He is one-of-a-kind.  He’s a true Renaissance man who can change his artistic hat at any given moment. He is a musical shape-shifter who dances between genres. He is a well-spring of creative urges. Since his early days in the San Diego band The Rugburns, he has charted a unique and dynamic artistic path that few others would be able to pull off. Although he is presented as singer-songwriter, Poltz incorporates a wide background in music and the arts into his own unique stew of entertainment.

The Sky Is A Landfill

Jeff Buckley was the last of an endangered species.

Live from the Desert (Brant Bjork’s Birthday)

Today is Brant Bjork’s 39th birthday. Bjork is a multi-talented multi-instrumentalist with a long resume of projects, both as a band member and a quasi-solo artist. But he is known to most rock fans primarily as the founding drummer of Kyuss, the most influential band ever to come out of Palm Desert California. 

“Dust” Never Sleeps

This is not an album review. If it was, it would be a ridiculously late one, since the album came out in 1996. But I was indulging myself in vintage 90s rock music recently, and the thought came to me (as it always does in revisionist thinking) that this particular record was unfairly ignored in its own time. Listening to this record in its entirety for the first time in ten years brought back all kinds of memories, and in a moment of epiphany I realized how much of an influence it had on me as a younger man. The album of course is “Dust” by Screaming Trees, which turned out to be their swan song. But my personal history with the Trees goes a bit deeper…

Shannon & Elliott

Shannon Hoon left this world on today’s date, as did Elliott Smith.

Listen Without Distraction

This is Kyuss. They don't care if you think they're cool...

When I was a teenager, there was a weird period when the truly great guitar bands of the 90s gave way to the testosterone-drunk imitators. This moment, of course, was when ‘rap-metal’ and ‘nu-metal’ (dumbest genre names ever, by the way) replaced grunge and alternative as the commercially dominant forms of guitar-based music. The whole mainstream rock scene became very macho and infected with the least subtle aspects of the grunge idiom (i.e. angst for its own sake, etc).