Alby's Latest Posts
Song of the Day 3/11: Deep Purple, “Hush”
Of all the illegal acts Donald Trump has committed, its appears lying about his hush-money payment to a hooker is the one that will get him indicted first. It’s worth nothing that a hush-money payment is not illegal, but lying about it so he wouldn’t have to declare it as a campaign expense is. Pretty […]
Song of the Day 3/10: The Dave Clark Five, “Catch Us If You Can”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: The leader of the Trump crime family is about to be indicted. Yeah, sure he is. He’s been indictable for 40 years and it hasn’t happened yet. This should be his family’s theme song. The Dave Clark Five was one of the most popular bands in the first […]
Song of the Day 3/9: Disturbed, “The Sound of Silence”
Sometimes it takes a cover to show everyone how great a song can be. “The Sound of Silence” was the song that made Simon & Garfunkel famous, but not right away. When the duo first began playing it at Gerde’s Folk City in 1963, Dave Van Ronk said, audiences thought it was a joke. He […]
Song of the Day 3/8: Ted Hawkins, “Cold and Bitter Tears”
A lot of people have never heard Ted Hawkins, the singer-songwriter who spent most of his career busking on the boardwalk in Venice Beach, where he earned, he said, about $300 a week. Even public radio station WXPN barely plays his music, and when they do it’s mostly covers of songs he made sound original. […]
Song of the Day 3/7: Sweet, “Fox on the Run”
The Dominion lawsuit against Fox “News” has provided receipts showing the Murdoch media empire is nothing but a propaganda arm of the international fascist movement, which isn’t news to anybody with a working set of critical faculties. Though we should never doubt the ability of the American justice system to fail at administering justice, a […]
Song of the Day 3/6: Wayne Shorter with the Miles Davis Quintet, “Footprints”
Guest post by Nathan Arizona From Miles to the Multiverse. That’s the trajectory Wayne Shorter took as he established himself over a 67-year career as what the New Yorker called “the world’s greatest living jazz composer” and as maybe the finest saxophone player since the 1960s. Shorter, who died last week at 89, made his […]
Song of the Day 3/3: The Ramones, “Punishment Fits the Crime”
I suppose there’s a reason America’s laughably labeled “news” channels covered some South Carolina ass clown’s murder trial as if it were OJ 2.0 — I didn’t experience this first-hand, but I’ve seen plenty of bitching about it on political blogs whose readers couldn’t figure it out either. I can’t account for it, other than […]
Song of the Day 3/2: Big Louisiana, Willy Rafus and Arthur Davis, “Let Your Hammer Ring”
A bunch of millionaires known as “U.S. senators” have been sitting around in their Washington, D.C., offices pretending that the richest country in the history of the world simply can’t afford to take care of its retirees if they stop working at 67. They want you to keep swinging that hammer until you’re 70. As […]
Song of the Day 3/1: Laura Jane Grace, “Lolo 13”
If drag shows freak Republicans out, I wonder how freaked they’d be by an actual transgender performer like Laura Jane Grace. Born Thomas James Gabel, Grace came out in 2012 as a transgender woman while she was fronting a fairly successful punk band called Against Me! that she formed in 1997 after dropping out of […]
Song of the Day 2/28: Aerosmith, “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)”
As anyone who follows the news knows, Republicans have a hard on for drag queens — uh, maybe I should rephrase that. Or maybe I shouldn’t. Southern states must be hotbeds of drag shows, because many of them are trying to curtail them or ban them outright. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has been particularly vocal […]
Song of the Day 2/27: Albert Hammond, “It Never Rains in Southern California”
The weather in the USA has been weird lately — 50-degree temperature swings, February tornadoes and snow in Southern California. Maybe the lyrics of this song need an update — it never rains, but it snows. Albert Hammond OBE moved from London to Los Angeles in 1970 as a singer-songwriter. By the time he released […]
Song of the Day 2/26: Iris DeMent, “Goin’ Down to Sing in Texas”
Singer-songwriter Iris DeMent isn’t usually described as a folk singer, I suppose because much of her work sounds like country music, but some of her compositions are as pointed as any of the protest songs that came out of the Great Folk Music Scare of the early ’60s. Her first album in eight years, “Workin’ […]
The Straight Dope on Masks
For some reason, a few MAGAts got tired of buffing their muskets and decided to weigh in on scientific matters that they don’t understand. Don’t be too hard on them — many journalists are clueless, too, which is why so many reported that a recently released meta-analysis concluded “masks don’t work.” That’s not what the […]
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