It’s a good time to be a music video fan with a DVD player. Seems like every time I look around, there’s a new video compilation to snatch, and for kids like me who have an ample amount of grainy little MPEGs on their computers, usually encoded by god knows who and probably obtained from a junk server of dubious legality, it’s nice to upgrade.
The present is also a wise time to release a DVD of definitive Wu-Tang Clan videos: ODB’s death has …

Okay, I give. Things have been far too cute and nonsensical over in Canada ever since the Unicorns’ 2003 Stateside heyday with the release of Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone. I didn’t always feel that way. The Unicorns’ album was a piece of sweet and silly pop taffy, but even their disintegration was a joy, because it lead to the formation of Islands and the creation of one of this year’s best records, Return to the Sea. However, while I can …

What is this, a time warp? Here I am in June of 2006, and the face that stares back at me from the promo CD on my desk might as well have stepped right out of 1981. That curled lip. That spiky fringe of jet-black hair. Those thick clouds of eyeliner around the toughest set of sloe eyes in rock’n’roll. It’s Joan Fucking Jett: trailblazing female rocker, inspiration for Guitar Wolf’s “Jett Rock’n’Roll,” and probably the hottest alleged lesbian ever to pour herself …

Stax Records Week could not go on without Otis Redding. Granted, too many people have made the mistake of using Redding as a catch-all symbol for all of the great moments in Soul music; but at the same time, whenever that aching, smoky-sweet voice pours out of a set of speakers, anyone can understand why this mistake is so often made. Otis Redding sang with a resonant loneliness that can still capture any listener and both soothe and plummet them to emotional depths few …

Johnnie Taylor may be largely unknown now, but his influence is far-reaching, helping to form the sound of artists such as Otis Redding, Al Green, and Sam & Dave. For Taylor’s Stax Profiles collection, former News frontman Huey Lewis has compiled some of the best selections from the singer’s nearly six-decade career, covering a wide range of the genres in which Taylor experimented: R&B, blues, soul, and disco, among others.
Taylor was discovered by Sam Cooke in the early 1950s, and would later replace …

Group Hug & PostSecret
Internet Confession Projects
Perhaps there’s a level of voyeurism involved. Sure, every now and then it’s nice to get a glance inside other people’s heads and know what they’re thinking (without them knowing you know.) Mostly, however, I think the beauty of Grouphug.us is rooted in the same principle that has kept housewives glued to soap operas since the heyday of radio (and what, incidentally, brings me back to Degrassi Jr. High week after week)–it’s nice to know that other people are more fucked up than you are. …