This is why I pretty much stopped listening to White music in the late 90's—all those bitter bellowing sensitive tough guy vocalists backed by sludgey geetar that you hear now advertized on those god awful compilations. I couldn't tell them apart and there were a lot more interesting things going on in Hip Hop,…

Yo!!!
I always feel as if the gold standard for this sort of thing is Seven Seconds' version of '99 Red Balloons'—because dammit it was always a great song, but as a anti nuke parable it was a bit precious in its original delivery. Seven Seconds managed to have that cake, eat it, and be both angry and not overly…

'Sansho the Bailiff' is positively Dickensian. I would also suggest 'Ugetsu' and 'Street of Shame'—but I'm sorry, I still can't take Ozu as anything other than a chore.

I liked Ally Sheedy more as a dandruffian than when the prom queen "fixed" her.

I used to be pretty involved in the poetry scenes of Dayton circa 1995 and then in DC as I was earning my MFA, but I got so worn out on the aesthetic laziness of most of the poets. There was this same recognizable cadence and subject matter that so many of them had—and the perormance requirements of "reading out"…

sarCCastro, I'm not sure the first three were any less beguiling to younger kids. The first time I saw Star Wars I was 6 or 7 and I was convinced the whole thing was about Darth Vader wanting to marry Princess Leia and not about the politics of tyranny and resistance. Loved it though, and by the time I grew to…

July 01, 1992—I looked it up
When I was in college I was an avid fan of LSD and that naturally brought me into the atmosphere of a number of Hippie types who naturally were massive fans of this band you may have heard of called The Grateful Dead. Now, I have no problem with just about any kind of good music but I just…

To each his /her own.

Unlike you, Migrant, I'm not willing to stay up late debating this—there's no winning in any case—but I will say two things:

I don't know what other non-reggae they've done, but there are three perfect Grace Jones records ('Warm Leatherette', 'Night Clubbing' and 'Living My Life') and that's all I was referring to.

Mmmmm…congolese rice.

I'm sorry, Migrant, but whereas Dub is a genre, Funk is a Faith. Everything is on the one—Remember that.

John Sayles.

Surprisingly, it never came up —but only because they had so much else in common to talk about.

The truth is that any adaptation to be made of 'Catcher in the Rye' would HAVE to star the petulant pretty boy heart throb du jour—in the last twenty years it might have been River Phoenix or Leonardo DiCaprio—but even if it were someone brilliant but completey unknown, if he did a good job, he would certainly become…

That's true, I understand he was reclusive…not elusive.

"all the great novels and short stories he's been writing in secret"

Though, strictly speaking, not all White nor all Dub, the first couple of UB40 albums Dub it up nicely, too.

I don't know, Migrant, but as producers and players I give Sly and Robbie the primary credit for the best work of Grace Jones career:

This question seems to get a thread every week. I think the word "geek" nowadays is used to mean something along the lines of "obsessive fanatic" more than as an insult (the way some might've used the word "freak" in the past). And calling Dub a "kind of slighty-less-than-mainstream music" is a bit generous,…