Don't know where you are, but up north the cicadas were eerily quiet this year. Normally the noise is deafening and there are husks everywhere, but hardly saw or heard any this year. Also worth noting that during a typical summer at least a dozen or so giant spiders set up shop around my house (to catch cicadas, among…

Similarly, I have an irrational prejudice against Dead Can Dance, because at the record stores they were always there in lieu of any of the Dead Kennedys or Dead Milkmen albums I was looking for.

I totally get this. My first copy of The Modern Lovers had "I'm Straight" as track 5, "Dignified & Old" as track 6 and "Government Center" as track 12, but years later when I finally upgraded from my played-to-death-taped-off copy to a deluxe remastered CD, those songs appeared as bonus tracks, as they weren't part of…

My Friends are so depressed by this suggestion

Looks like I'm walking through a living hell.

Wearing the T-shirt of the band he went to see.

Booooooo!!!!!!!!! Saturation rules!

Good article. Think O'Neal makes the right calls on which combinations were the most and least effective. "Fallin'", "Missing Link", "Freak Mama" and "I Love You Mary Jane" are all solid tracks that work on their own merits and are far removed from what came to be considered "rap-rock". "Just Another Victim" and…

These pigs wanna blow my house down

JUDGMENT NIGHT!

Probably not worth doxing myself over a couple of CDs, but if you're serious I'll gladly email you with my contact information. As a heads up though I live in Japan, and if word gets out about this and you get other inquiries, purging your collection could end up being a lot more time consuming (and potentially…

Amazing that it came out only three years after Apocalypse '91, but it was seen as a throwback to another era because of the rise of gangsta rap during that time and Chuck D's lyrics criticizing the genre.

Proof or it never happened, chimp.

I'm calling bullshit - this is too good to be true. This can't possibly exist - can it?

Like many a kid just getting into music in a big way in the early nineties, Nevermind is probably the album that changed my life the most in opening up a whole world of music that hadn't been on my radar before. But about a year before that, Fear of a Black Planet is the first full album I ever became obsessed with -…

For me they're both essential and pretty much inseparable. And they complement Bowie's "Berlin" trilogy so well.

Somebody else remembers Pony! I taped "Fortune Cookie" off the radio late at night back in high school but never did get the albums. Feel free to send them my way.

The production on Fear of a Black Planet is incredible - so powerful, and densely packed with sounds yet uncluttered. The James Brown drumbeats were used frequently during that era so the impact may have been dulled to a slight extent, but for my money it stands along with Paul's Boutique and 3 Feet High & Rising as…

I think the idea is that it seems like trying to hard - you're at the concert already, so obviously you like the band.

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