This summer marked the 40th anniversary of the infamous Disco Demolition Night in Chicago. For some, that event was a shock jock’s baseball promotion that got out of hand, turning into a riot and marking the end of disco’s pop cultural moment. For others, it was a violent attack on the communities — people of color and LGBT folks — that built disco long before “Saturday Night Fever” turned the genre into a punchline.
Posted in Music
When it was time to figure out how to present her latest album, Marina Diamandis was drawn to the work of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Best known for her model for the five stages of grief, Kubler-Ross also theorized that all human emotions come from either love or fear.
As she tells it, Jenny Lewis was born in Las Vegas after her mother went into labor while performing at the Sands. Like much of old Vegas, The Sands is no longer standing, but Lewis, who performed at the Anthem on Thursday, is doing her best to keep that spirit alive.
As the summer of 2019 winds down, everyone seems to have the summer of 1969 on the brain: We almost celebrated the 50th anniversary of Woodstock (in Columbia, Md., of all places) and Quentin Tarantino’s latest stab at hysterical/historical fiction, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” takes place back then, too. Nostalgia for those days fuels Tame Impala, the brainchild of Kevin Parker that played the Anthem on Saturday night.
Leela Dawson was 4 years old when she first wanted piano lessons, but there was one problem: The teacher told her parents that she had to learn the alphabet before she could be taught. Undaunted, the young Dawson went home and learned her ABCs that week.
All of our great thinkers have toyed with the dichotomy of life’s questions and answers, whether Rainer Maria Rilke (“Love the questions themselves . . . Do not now seek the answers”) or “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (“Just when they think they have the answers, I change the questions”).
A few years ago, doomsdayers predicted that the apocalypse would occur in 2012, based on some creative readings of astrology and Mayan history. There was even a bloated disaster film about it. But 2012 came and went, and life went on.
Or did it?
For many of us, bouts of anxiety or depression can be treated by window-shopping or Amazon trawling to reach a better state of mind. But no matter how good a salve, such retail therapy can’t cure underlying issues — a truth hinted at by Harriet Brown as he sings, “I’m just one choice away from purchasing away this pain” on his song “Retail Therapy.”
“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life doing something else, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. That might explain what happened to Lil Wayne on Thursday night at Jiffy Lube Live, where a man once considered the greatest rapper alive asked the crowd for forgiveness, played about a fifth of the songs he played the night before, finished his blunt and left the stage.”
“Familial legend has it that Taylor Brooke taught herself to play the piano by the age of 2. By 6, she picked up the violin, and as a teen, she learned how to use production software to turn her loose ideas into fully formed songs.”
