CapitalistImperialistPig

Despite more than seven decades on this planet, I can't recall hearing a single David Bowie song. That's despite the fact that 80% of my mind is song lyrics and the remaining 25% is mostly celebrity gossip. Pretty much anything that happened in music between 1970 and 2010 escaped me, except maybe for an occasional Broadway show tune. My musicological brain has a giant abyss between Jefferson Airplane, or maybe Woodstock (AKA my 26th birthday party), and Taylor Swift. Go figure.

WB dabbles in Beatles Musicology . See, also .

Written in the Stars by Tinie Tempah featuring Eric Turner is a very catchy song, but really, what excuse can there be for this kind of rhetorical (and astronomical) imprecision: Oh written in the stars A million miles away A message to the main... OK, there is one star several tens of millions of miles away, but the rest we see are at least tens or hundreds of trillions of miles away. And some doubt that hip hop is corrupting our youth. Just sayin'.

Chris Brown is a multi-genre singer whose career took a serious southward turn in June of 2009 when he pleaded guilty to felony assault on his girl friend and fellow singer Rihanna . He was rightly condemned for his actions, but the plot gets slightly thicker. Rihanna was already a star, but she has since become even bigger. The oddity is that two of her monster hits have celebrated the pleasures of sado-machochism. From " Love the Way You Lie :" Just gonna stand there And watch me burn But that's alright Because I like The way it hurts Just gonna stand there And hear me cry But that's alright Because I love The way you lie... And from S&M: Sticks and stones may break my bones But chains and whips excite me Now songs aren't necessarily autobiographical (and Rihanna didn't write them). And you shouldn't beat your girlfriend up just because she says (or sings) that she likes it - but it does cast a somewhat different light on Chris Brown. Both songs...

Paul Krugman takes us back to Grace Slick in the sixties as preparation for tomorrow's column. I was never a doper of any sort - unless you count beer, but this song definitely made a big impression on me when I was a young soldier. Somehow the ambiance transcended both it's mileau and it's own message. Ditto for Hair - it feels like the anthem of my generation even though I was never of it. From Wikipedia: Slick and Tricia Nixon, former President Richard Nixon's daughter, are alumnae of Finch College. Grace was invited to a tea party for the alumnae at the White House in 1969. She invited the political activist Abbie Hoffman to be her escort and planned to spike President Richard Nixon's tea with 600 micrograms of LSD. The plan was thwarted when they were prevented from entering after being recognized by White House security personnel, as Slick had been placed on an FBI blacklist.

Quite suddenly, for me, popular music is again sounding really good - musically interesting and dramatic. If you don't keep up, you might want to check out Love the Way You Lie . Besides the music, we have Megan Fox and Rihanna minus pants (and Eminem and Meriadoc Brandybuck sans shirts) in a rather dramatic video. On a lighter note, there are Taylor Swift and T-Pain laying it down not hardly freestyle.