Thirteen years ago today, R.E.M. released Up, their eleventh album. A little over a month ago, R.E.M. announced their break-up after three decades of making music. About twenty years ago, R.E.M. were my first favorite band. They weren’t the first band I really liked — I loved lots of parts of my parents’ record collection, [...]
Last week Jeff Rosenthal of ItsTheReal did a guest “listicle” for The Awl featuring a topic near and dear to my heart: BET Uncut. Back in college — in the dark days before DVRs, TV on DVD, Hulu, streaming video, and all of the other things that keep me from actually watching live television — [...]
Truckin’ Music is back, and we kick off the series revival with a burning question: WHO IS SLIM JACOBS? There seems to be no information about the man, and “That’s Truck Drivin’” is his only song that seems to be released: even the flipside of the various 1960s singles feature other country/truckin’ musicians, so it [...]
Yesterday we looked at the Alpha Bootleg, and today we look at the Omega: my father last visited China a little under a year ago, and among the DVDs he brought back was a collection of Flaming Lips videos:
Truckin’ Music embodies all the great conflicts of literature, and Man vs. Machine is no exception. While truckers harness the diesel to do their job, Ol’ Smokey wields technology to hamper them as well. The dreaded Radar was first used against truckers by the late Officer Leonard Baldy of Chicago, who also pioneered the use [...]
One more song and I promise to drop the “truckin’ music = crack rap” thing. But I can’t get either of these songs out of my head. But come on! In 1968, the Harden Trio have a minor hit with “Sneakin’ Things Across the Border”. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] In 2001, Philly’s [...]
From tenuous sardine links between “truckin’ music” and “gangsta rap” yesterday, we move onto an explicit link: drug smuggling! No, “pinball” wasn’t drug slang, but you bet your ass “white lightning” is! Truckin’ pop culture is rife with liquor smuggling, from The Dukes of Hazzard to Smokey & the Bandit, aka the best advertising Coors [...]
With weekend novelties out of the way, let’s get down to business. This week’s theme is Perils of Truckin’. Now, I know that modern day truckers — the kind you see on Trick My Truck have a pretty sweet life, haulin’ load across this country in a rig full of bluetooth accesories, iPods, in-dash DVD [...]
It’s a shopworn cliche of my generation: middle class white people will insist they like “all types of music – except for country and rap!” It’s an absurd claim: you can easily conjure a dozen musical styles that most of these people would hate, or at the very least that they’d never heard of. How [...]
Yesterday’s subject wasn’t the best-known novelty trucker of the 1970s: that title belongs to one Chatsworth Warrington McCall and his 1976 hit “Convoy”! [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Okay, I made up the Chatsworth bit, “C.W.” doesn’t stand for anything, it was just a name for an character concocted by adman William “Bill” [...]
