Regina recently dropped the news on her MySpace page that she is currently working on her new album. Rumor has it it's due out in early 2009.
Classic Regina song:
25.9.08
16.9.08
Sad Video Tuesday
This one's from Nick Cave's brokenhearted classic, The Boatman's Call. The track by itself is a moving and sincere love song, but when contrasted with the imagery of the music video, is utterly heartbreaking.
Try watching this thing all the way through and not feeling emotionally drained
Try watching this thing all the way through and not feeling emotionally drained
9.9.08
Why Times Magazine Has No Business Discussing Music
The following is from Time magazine's website and is their list of "the greatest and most influential records ever" compiled by decade.
1) They want to be hip. Including an Eminem album, any Eminem album, in a list with the purported purpose of stating the top 100 " greatest and most influential records ever" effectively says that you want to appear in touch with modern music but don't want to put in the time to actually remain knowledgable. It's lazy, and depressing considering it's coming from a highly respected and popular publication.
2) At a bare minimum, they long for the return of the simplistic self indulgent rock of 60's and 70's mainstays like The Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin. At worst, they consider those decades to have produced music superior to anything from the last 20 years and only included the contemporary albums they did out of a fleeting sense of journalistic integrity. Either way, the list is severely off balance.
Here are some highlights from their All-Time 100:
They DID include:
The Marshal Mathers LP, Eminem
The College Dropout, Kanye West
Live Through This, Hole
My Life, Mary J. Blige
Ropin' The Wind, Garth Brooks
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams
One Nation Under A Groove, Parliament/Funkadelic
2 Aretha Franklin albums and 4 Beatles' albums
They DIDN'T include:
Dr. Octagonecologyst, Dr. Octagon
Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Wu-Tan Clan
Odelay, Beck
Post, Bjork
Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth
Doolittle, Pixies
Richard D. James Album, Aphex Twin
Moon Safari, Air
Anything from Nick Cave
Anything from Tom Waits
Anything from Frank Zappa
It should be noted that they snubbed electronic music all together, although you could argue Kid A, but still
But this list is important and here's why: It embodies a certain music critic ethos that makes up a large part of music journalism (with rags such as Blender making up most of the rest). The ethos consists of the belief that rock attained perfection in 1974, The Beatles were mostly a rock band not a pop band, and that liking random rappers (Lil Wayne, Nas, etc.) and calling flavor of the month pop singles (such as Umbrella or SexyBack) "good" and "quality pop" makes you current. They like Radiohead but they'll always put Pet Sounds or Zeppelin IV above OK Computer. It's okay to endlessly praise a band that sang misogynistically about women in California or howled about Hobbits as long as they did it before 1980.
The other part of this ethos is acting reflexively defensive by alluding to a steady onslaught on their integrity. They make statements like "Read and listen to the arguments for the selections, then tell us what we missed or got wrong. Or even possibly what we got right," where the attempt at wit functions more as a way of saying "We think you're not going to like what we wrote, but we also think we're smarter than you and what we wrote is probably right anyway." That defensiveness often appears as elitist and by extension for most, intelligent, granting whatever they have to say an undeserved air of authority.
The thing is, none of it would be so bad if it wasn't all done under the guise of intelligent critique. Doing any of the above and then talking down to your audience about it is absurd and counter productive. There is plenty of good music out there among all the garbage. It's the critic's job to sift through the mediocre and abysmal and let people know about the good and even excellent. Standing on a soap box hearkening for days long past and attacking people before they disagree with you is as effective a form of informing people about quality music as aggressively panhandling is an effective form of entrepreneurship.
http://www.time.com/time/2006/100albums/The first thing you'll notice is Eminem is on there. The second thing is how bottom heavy it is. Over a third of their choices come from the 60's and 70's. These two pieces of information tell you two crucial things:
1) They want to be hip. Including an Eminem album, any Eminem album, in a list with the purported purpose of stating the top 100 " greatest and most influential records ever" effectively says that you want to appear in touch with modern music but don't want to put in the time to actually remain knowledgable. It's lazy, and depressing considering it's coming from a highly respected and popular publication.
2) At a bare minimum, they long for the return of the simplistic self indulgent rock of 60's and 70's mainstays like The Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin. At worst, they consider those decades to have produced music superior to anything from the last 20 years and only included the contemporary albums they did out of a fleeting sense of journalistic integrity. Either way, the list is severely off balance.
Here are some highlights from their All-Time 100:
They DID include:
The Marshal Mathers LP, Eminem
The College Dropout, Kanye West
Live Through This, Hole
My Life, Mary J. Blige
Ropin' The Wind, Garth Brooks
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams
One Nation Under A Groove, Parliament/Funkadelic
2 Aretha Franklin albums and 4 Beatles' albums
They DIDN'T include:
Dr. Octagonecologyst, Dr. Octagon
Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Wu-Tan Clan
Odelay, Beck
Post, Bjork
Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth
Doolittle, Pixies
Richard D. James Album, Aphex Twin
Moon Safari, Air
Anything from Nick Cave
Anything from Tom Waits
Anything from Frank Zappa
It should be noted that they snubbed electronic music all together, although you could argue Kid A, but still
But this list is important and here's why: It embodies a certain music critic ethos that makes up a large part of music journalism (with rags such as Blender making up most of the rest). The ethos consists of the belief that rock attained perfection in 1974, The Beatles were mostly a rock band not a pop band, and that liking random rappers (Lil Wayne, Nas, etc.) and calling flavor of the month pop singles (such as Umbrella or SexyBack) "good" and "quality pop" makes you current. They like Radiohead but they'll always put Pet Sounds or Zeppelin IV above OK Computer. It's okay to endlessly praise a band that sang misogynistically about women in California or howled about Hobbits as long as they did it before 1980.
The other part of this ethos is acting reflexively defensive by alluding to a steady onslaught on their integrity. They make statements like "Read and listen to the arguments for the selections, then tell us what we missed or got wrong. Or even possibly what we got right," where the attempt at wit functions more as a way of saying "We think you're not going to like what we wrote, but we also think we're smarter than you and what we wrote is probably right anyway." That defensiveness often appears as elitist and by extension for most, intelligent, granting whatever they have to say an undeserved air of authority.
The thing is, none of it would be so bad if it wasn't all done under the guise of intelligent critique. Doing any of the above and then talking down to your audience about it is absurd and counter productive. There is plenty of good music out there among all the garbage. It's the critic's job to sift through the mediocre and abysmal and let people know about the good and even excellent. Standing on a soap box hearkening for days long past and attacking people before they disagree with you is as effective a form of informing people about quality music as aggressively panhandling is an effective form of entrepreneurship.
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