The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

R.I.P., Little Richard

  “A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom!” Arguably the most exciting words in the history of music, the opening lyrics of “Tutti Frutti” announced the arrival of a bright-burning star who, in a period of two years, created the sound of rock-and-roll. You could say Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley had […]

Your Low-Rent Friends Are Dead

  Glenn Reynolds continues piling up the obscure Steely Dan references, and spotting them is becoming easy: If you see any phrase on Instapundit that doesn’t make sense, Google it, because it’s probably a Steely Dan reference. As for example when, in reference to Joe Biden’s doomed campaign, he drops in a lyric from “Kid […]

The Things That Pass for Knowledge

  This morning, I woke up and checked Instapundit and found an item about the wrongness of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s COVID-19 prediction — “Missed it by that much,” as Maxwell Smart would say — that included this: “The weekends at the Covid didn’t turn out like you planned.” This is an allusion to a Steely […]

Trump Country

  In 2016, Donald Trump got 84% of the vote in Johnson County, Kentucky. And you may ask, “Why does this matter?” Because there’s a tiny community in Johnson County called Butcher Hollow, which is the birthplace of Loretta Lynn, the First Lady of Country Music. If you start looking up the hometowns of Grand […]

‘All the Leaves Are Brown …’

  One thing I’ve tried to do with my kids is what I call “cultural education.” Like, there’s no reason children should grow up without an awareness of rock-and-roll classics, and I’ve had many rewarding experiences like the time I heard my youngest son, born in 2000, in the shower singing along to his Spotify […]

Chad Allan & the Expressions

Chad Allan and his groovy band, circa 1964. My mind works in mysterious ways and I’ve forgotten why I started the research that led me down a rabbit hole into an obscure tale from Canadian musical history. In 1958, a singer named Allan Kowbel formed a band in Winnipeg originally called Allan and the Silvertones. […]

‘The Last Song Nearly Killed Me’

  On this date in 1963, the Beatles released their first album, Please Please Me, an event memorialized by the poet Philip Larkin: Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban And the Beatles’ first LP. The story of how that LP was recorded […]

Rule 5 Sunday: Pussycat No More

— compiled by Wombat-socho “Who says A must say B,” some old Bolshevik once said, and in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it seems only reasonable to turn a jaundiced eye on the music business. Rose McGowan deserves a lot of credit for blowing the lid off Weinstein’s disgusting habits, and there’s a […]

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