It's hard to find an exact release date, but one of the greatest albums ever recorded by anybody came out thirty years ago this month. I can remember right where I was the first time I heard "Blister In the Sun," the first song on the first album from The Violent Femmes. I was in my friend James' kitchen, where we'd go every afternoon in sophomore year to pinch a pipe's worth of pot from the brick his mom kept wrapped in plastic under the telephone book in the drawer next to the fridge. James had a tape, a taped tape, a cassette recording someone had made for him. I [...]

If you are an old person who takes drugs, or a preschool age child who doesn't take drugs, or anybody else, really, you might enjoy this video for a song from J Mascis' new, mostly-acoustic solo album. I've been enjoying the video, the song and the rest of the album a lot lately. J Mascis is a longtime favorite of mine, and I've been fairly stunned by how excellent he and his band Dinosaur Jr. have been since the original line-up reunited in 2007—nineteen years after recording the classic Bug, which was the first album of theirs that I got. It's just been announced that they'll be [...]

Thirty years ago today a pop music album came out that, for those of us who can count ourselves as members of the Star Wars generation, was a lot like Star Wars. Meaning that it was so culturally dominant for a stretch of our formative years that it became a part of the way that we would think and talk and view the world for the rest of our lives. Regardless of whether or not we even liked it back then, or of how we have come to feel about since, Michael Jackson's Thriller is closer to something like an objective truth than anything else in music history: it [...]

"Rap History: This Day in 1987 Public Enemy release Yo! Bum Rush The Show."