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After the euphoria of the night before, many Americans woke up this morning with a) a hangover and b) the sobering realization of the enormity of the problems facing our new president. Obama has seemed clear-eyed about the challenges ahead, but he wanted this job anyway and worked his butt off to get it. […]

Democracy seems such a basic part of our culture as Americans that it comes as a shock to find that it’s actually quite hard to define. Almost every communist or socialist dictatorship used the word as part of their country’s official name: the German Democratic Republic wasn’t democratic West Germany, but communist East. […]

Folkways Records did many things, but chief among them was proving that Big Bill Broonzy was right: “They’re all folk songs,” Broonzy once said; “I ain’t never heard a horse sing.” (A bunch of other people have said the same thing since, so you’ll see various later attributions of this statement.) Trying […]

When I was in high school, I found a record by a comedian I’d never heard of – someone who was apparently big in the 50s – named Stan Freberg. Even though I didn’t get all the references to what were apparently pop culture figures and phenomena of the an earlier generation, Freberg’s musical […]

I’m betting you’ve never heard of Tra La La Blip. Neither did I, until their founder emailed us yesterday. This rural Australian collective makes electronic pop; and all of the members of the band are “intellectually and physically disabled.” Their MySpace page has 4 songs that are really worth checking out. […]

I’ve been thinking about this whole super fan thing. I like a lot of artists and bands – some I like a real lot. But I would never consider myself a super fan; even my favorite artists have songs, or albums, or even whole stretches of albums I don’t like. Then it […]

Wal-Mart has become the 600-pound gorilla in the music business. It is the country’s single biggest seller of CDs (antique silvery round things that contain collections of songs – in the 20th century, it’s how we used to get our music before everything went online). So when Wal-Mart tells the major record labels […]

So Usher is designing and selling lingerie – for men. Opera star Renee Fleming helped design a new perfume, “La Voce by Renee Fleming,” unveiled on opening day of the current Met Opera season. Jennifer Lopez has a new line of clothing, as well as perfume; The RZA of Wu-Tang Clan has co-founded […]

So Tin Pan Alley is for sale, and people who haven’t thought about Tin Pan Alley in decades, and people who’ve walked past those buildings on West 28th Street for years without ever noticing them, are suddenly up in arms. When I read that the buildings were for sale – and that the seller […]

In the mid-70s, the song “At Seventeen” by Janis Ian was unavoidable. Since it wasn’t a song I liked, I never looked any further into what she’d done. If I had, I might’ve learned that almost ten years earlier, in the mid-60s, she’d had another hit song – a far more controversial one […]