Turns out Meat Loaf needed a little extra time in the oven, but we’re finally back to discuss the late vocal powerhouse’s 2000 memoir To Hell and Back. Join us as we ponder Meat’s many concussions, his suitably operatic relationship with the also-recently-departed Jim Steinman, and how he’s easily in the top five of anti-maskers we would have been okay catching COVID from. We’ll be back around the middle of next month for a special Jheri Curl June miniseries on Morris Day‘s On Time: A Princely Life in Funk!
(more…)Tag: elvis costello
-
12 Months of Mike Month 7: Austin Powers in Goldmember
Since the very beginning of this ill-fated project, we’ve been dreading a rewatch of Austin Powers in Goldmember, and let’s just say it didn’t disappoint. Join us as we discuss how Goldmember makes Fat Bastard look like one of the great characters of literary history, and why we’re relieved that there’s still (knock on wood) no sign of a fourth movie on the horizon. We’ll be back by the end of the month with a movie that, somehow, seems like a breath of fresh air at this point: The Cat in the Hat.
(more…)Podcast: Play in new window | Download
-
12 Months of Mike Month 5: Austin Powers – The Spy Who Shagged Me
Well, folks, we watched the second Austin Powers movie and lived to talk about it. Join us as we discuss infuriating anachronisms, the decline of Mike Myers’ side characters, and of course, the “Urkelization” of Dr. Evil. And then join us next month as we examine the first of… Jesus Christ, are we really watching four Shrek movies?!?!
(more…)Podcast: Play in new window | Download
-
Podcast: Dystopian Book Club vs. George Clinton’s Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?
Zach and Callie reconvene in (by our standards) record time for another Dystopian Book Club Official Selection: Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You? by Parliament–Funkadelic maestro George Clinton. Enjoy as we discuss our love of P-Funk and the book’s disappointing lack of hot deets on the Super Mario Bros. movie.
(more…)Podcast: Play in new window | Download
-
Women’s History Month: Wanda Jackson’s “Hard Headed Woman”
Wanda Lavonne Jackson was not the first woman to sing rock and roll music; but she very likely was the first white woman to release a rock and roll single, and that was an achievement in and of itself. One barely needs to scratch the surface of 1950s moral panic to recognize that the “danger” of rock and roll was its perceived threat to the moral sanctity of white womanhood. But there was Wanda, in her red fringed dresses and high heels, tearing through racy–and “race-y”–rockabilly songs with the kind of blitzkrieg energy a punk rocker would envy.
Given the time and place in which she originated–Oklahoma City in the mid-’50s–it’s unlikely that Jackson explicitly thought of herself as a feminist trailblazer, much less a transgressor of racial lines. But she didn’t need to: she broke those boundaries simply by existing. Take, for example, her 1961 version of “Hard Headed Woman.” Written by Black Rhythm & Blues songwriter Claude Demetrius and recorded, most famously, by her ex-boyfriend Elvis Presley for the King Creole
soundtrack, it’s frankly a sexist song in its original incarnation: little more than a light-hearted rundown of Biblical stories (Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah) presented as evidence that “a hard-headed woman is a thorn in the side of a man.” But Wanda clearly takes a defiant pleasure in identifying with “that evil Jezebel”; and her hellion vocals sound just as raw today as they did 55 years ago.
-
Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Memorial Day, 2015-2016
With every passing week, 2016 feels more and more like a never-ending, real-life Grammy Awards tribute montage. We couldn’t even go the six days between recording and posting the podcast without losing another pop music icon: this time, Marshall Jones of the Ohio Players, word of whose death regrettably reached us only after we had finished editing. Clearly, this is a trying time to be a music fan. And, as I’ve found myself saying more than a few times in the past several months, the sheer volume of notable musicians’ deaths starts to feel overwhelming to a small site like ours. I’m not a full-time obituary writer, so even many worthy artists who passed away have inevitably gone unmemorialized.
That’s why, in the spirit of the real Memorial Day holiday, we’re taking the time to commemorate those the music world has lost since last May. Unfortunately, this will almost certainly be a recurring feature: the cruel realities of the human lifespan, combined with the generational ebb and flow of American popular music, means that things are only going to get worse in the coming years. And sadly, even this tribute isn’t truly exhaustive–even aside from the aforementioned omission of Marshall Jones, we’re only really talking about musicians of whom we have some miniscule level of knowledge, so plenty of important people are still going unmourned (at least by us). But we did our best, and we at least tried to do everyone justice. Here’s hoping we get a break, at least for a couple more weeks.
(more…)Podcast: Play in new window | Download