Archive for January, 2016

5 reasons this blog will change your life (and 10 reasons why it won’t)

Posted: January 24, 2016 in Miscellaneous, music
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6

This blog is waking up. This blog is stirring. This blog just said, “Five more minutes.” This blog is snoring. This blog just threw the alarm across the room. This blog is staggering around like the Men Without Hats “Safety Dance” video, which has 18 million hits and 14,000 comments on YouTube even though the song was released in 1983 and was long ago certified stupid.

This blog wants to go viral in 2016!

I have done my homework. I’ve studied page views, impressions, sessions, users, earned media, in-kind media, and other words I can’t define. I’ve disrupted the classes and snoozed through the seminars. I’ve taken everything I’ve learned about how to become an Internet sensation and distilled it into the following list:

  1. Headlines with numbers outperform headlines without numbers. Done.
  2. Adding even one image to your post almost doubles your visibility online…especially when your subject is kittens. Done.
  3. Include links to time-wasting reportage about useless shit. Done.
  4. Longer posts are more popular than shorter. If writing long is wrong I don’t wanna be right.
  5. Female bylines go viral twice as often as male bylines. Problem area.
  6. Female writers writing about their dysfunctional sex lives exponentially increases likes, comments, and shares. Problem area.*
  7. Dig up your old content, shock it with electricity, and push it out the door. Done.
  8. Invoke awe, laughter, or amusement (1). Or invoke awe, anger, or anxiety (2). I’d rather invoke Thor because I really want to borrow Mjölner.
  9. Ten is the magic number for lists.

* The trifecta: A current or former Mrs. Trump writing about her dysfunctional sex life.

Thank you, loyal readers, for hanging in there with me. I hope your 2016 is off to a solid start with thousands of new Twitter followers you can retweet me to!

Here’s what I wrote about in 2015:

Women

Aretha Franklin

Diana Ross

Donna Summer

Freda Payne, Gloria Gaynor, Thelma Houston, Candi Staton, Maxine Nightingale, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Patti LaBelle, Loleatta Holloway

Dionne Warwick, Roberta Flack, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner, Joan Armatrading

Men

RIP Ben E. King

RIP Percy Sledge

RIP B.B. King

Ray Charles and chess

Marvin Gaye

Al Green, Bill Withers, Donny Hathaway, and Lou Rawls

Real men

Blaxploitation (part 1)

Blaxploitation (part 2)

Boys

Duran Duran

Books

The two most popular blog topics: Sex and motherhood

Sex and motherhood: Still out of stock

Misc.

White like me

Still sacred after all these years

One does not simply walk into Mordor

Pirate ship business model

Honky hoedown

 

The stars look very different today

Posted: January 11, 2016 in music, Record reviews
Tags: ,
8

David Bowie is dead. Why didn’t the world stand still?

In 1976, I bought a Bowie album called Station to Station. It doesn’t matter what kind of music Bowie made on Station to Station or how it fits into his life’s work or that it marked the end of this phase and the beginning of that phase. It doesn’t matter if you, Dear Reader, played it once and ran away. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve never heard of it.

What does matter is that I found this record and that as soon as the needle hit the wax it jumped into my soul. It tilted my brain. It stares unblinking from my eyes. As Bowie sang on another record, “Never no turning back.” I like to think that we all have a song or a book or a movie or a painting or a sculpture or a play that did that to us…if we were lucky.

In all the years I’ve been playing Station to Station, never have I thought, “Not this again.”

I never met the man, saw him in concert, or had any contact with him outside of his music. I have no cool stories to share. But today at work I played 35 of his songs and from time to time I looked out the window as the clouds closed in and broke up and closed in and wondered what kind of person am I in the alternative universe where there was no Bowie.

I’m glad I live over here.

Goodbye, David Bowie. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues!