the riley rock report

Yo La Tengo's Textbook Snoot

Drummer Georgia Hubley turns 66 on February 9, a convenient excuse to plug a favorite covers album that vies with the best. Fakebook's map points every which-way but weak

Something Is Happening

Musicologists have avoided Dylan longer than most other academics, in part because of how folk culture enters intellectual frames only gradually. Academics also need to i

John Ono Lennon 1940-1980

John Lennon would have turned 85 on October 9, cue the holiday box set. Some Time in New York City (1972) still gets underrated, as does Rock and Roll (see this), and Len

Springsteen Between Flesh and Fantasy

Peter Carlin and I met while checking out that cringey Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show LOVE way back in the olden times before Obama, and we’ve kept in touch. He was work

Owsley Stanley III's 80-Ton Brain

Grateful Dead books now rival those about Springsteen, Dylan, and the Beatles in the rock publishing market. Brian Anderson’s Loud and Clear chronicles its quest to creat

Taboo Sex Jingles

The January inauguration has thrown everything into twisted new context: trauma gloat turns prosaic, overstimulation mocks innocence. Suddenly, Severance’s cult of Kier f

Hearing Elvis Presley's Memphis

Historian Preston Lauterbach works the backstreets of rock’s story, the many accidental and circuitous paths the music takes before congealing into a popular style. With

From Sweden With Hidden Costs

When you watch the Netflix Playlist series you get a standard-if-sturdy startup story with legal hurdles and tech geeks coding outside the lines. The labels carry all tha

Garth Hudson, The Mighty Wurlitzer

Moondog Matinee, The Band (Capitol, 1973) Garth Hudson, the last living member of The Band, turned 88 on August 8. Hudson’s Lowrey organ gave the Band regal colors, and

Democracy Is Coming

The Boys, Amazon Prime original (based on the Dynamite Entertainment comic book series written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, developed by Eric Kripke) With events

Cynicism Is for Suckers

Two years ago, this Woody Guthrie piece ran on his birthday (July 14, 1912) to boost awareness and renew anti-fascist history. Given Biden’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go

The Thin Side of Led Zeppelin's Heavy

John Bonham (1948-1980) would have turned 76 at the end of this month (May 31). As a drummer he had chops beyond his years, and ears as big as any Page riff. When I cover

College Radio Dropouts

When I spoke with Jewell about her lucid and engaging history of college radio, my Covid case had grown pronounced enough that it bled straight onto the tape. She makes a

Grandiosity Incorporated

Academic presses now fixing holes and taking risks where giants stutter, and the rest of us await the Big Leap Forward in long-form digital narrative… This is a publi

Stick Dancing

The quote that leaps out at me now comes from a violinist, who requested anonymity: “He tries very hard with Mozart and Haydn… But he doesn’t know the meaning of the word

Randy Newman

Watching an episode of Black Mirror ("Fifteen Million Merits," 2011), I looked up the song that Jessica Brown Findlay sang (“Anyone Who Knows What Love Is”), and reeled b

Taylor Swift's Multiplex

You feel flattered watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film, and not just because you catch a contact high from her adoring audience. In a field of immaculate di

If Smiles Could Sing

The master guitarist Ali Farka Touré died in 2006 at the age of 67, widely praised for developing an “African desert blues,” woven from his Malian roots. This Earthworks

Waiting To Be Forgotten

Big fat media blip for the Replacements, a band with a casual brilliance that chafed hard against success. Make sure to read Bob Mehr’s pungent book (Trouble Boys) and cr

Memories Can't Wait for Living Colour

When Living Colour reached No 13 on the Billboard album chart with its fourth album, Stain, in 1993, a lot of seasoned observers talked about watching the Jimi Hendrix ph