Vampire Weekend, “Oxford Comma” [from the album Vampire Weekend] Following months of blog buzz and an ensuing backlash, it’s a relief to finally have a full-length Vampire Weekend album to either love or loath. Musically, there’s plenty to enjoy — the charming “Oxford Comma” just one of numerous highlights — even if the band itself, or at least how it presents itself in the media, as well-to-do, smarty-pants college kids, can be insufferable.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Saturday Night Fever rewrite set on the outskirts of Houston, TX, Urban Cowboy, released in summer 1980, signaled a turning point in country music, ushering in a so-called “urban cowboy” style that would thrive from that point in time onward, until the eventual rise of new traditionalism in 1986. The film lives on as a cult favorite (”cult classic” would be too generous of a description), and while it retains some of its charm, including a tobacco-chewing John Travolta and plenty of bull riding (a mechanical bull, that is), the soundtrack of the film stands today as the more fascinating relic of its era.

This was a time when country music was crossing over into the American cultural mainstream left and right, as Urban Cowboy was accompanied by other films associated with country music, namely 9 to 5 (starring Dolly Parton), Coal Miner’s Daughter (based on Loretta Lynn’s biography), Honeysuckle Rose (starring Willie Nelson), The Gambler (a made-for-TV film starring Kenny Rogers), and Bronco Billy (a Clint Eastwood film with a soundtrack by Merle Haggard and Ronnie Milsap) — amazingly, all released in 1980, which, fittingly enough, was also the year of Ronald Reagan’s presidential win. These films drew large audiences (Urban Cowboy alone grossed 53 million) and turned legions of new listeners on to a new style of country music, one that was slick and modern, as well as increasingly “urban” in its themes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, Hazel Dickens was one of the inaugural inductees into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame (along with composer George Crumb, singer and songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler, pianist Johnnie Johnson, country singer Mollie O’Day, singer Little Jimmie Dickens, songwriter and fiddler Blind Alfred Reed, jazz saxophonist Leon “Chu” Berry, fiddler Clark Kessinger, and singer Bill Withers), an honor this singular artist richly deserves. Active professionally since the early ’60s, Dickens has always placed her music, a sturdy mix of old-time, bluegrass and classic country, at the service of the overworked and underpaid, and her songs, which are powerful, poignant and deceptively simple, have the kind of social utility that few writers this side of Woody Guthrie have been able to produce. A maverick by nature, Dickens has always understood that music can have a mission beyond entertainment, and if she never has, and undoubtedly never will, show up on any of the pop or country charts, her musical legacy is one to truly marvel at, and thanks should go out to the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame for recognizing that. Hopefully the rest of the world will soon follow along and come to appreciate this criminally unsung artist who exemplifies Americana in the truest and purest sense. Oh, and the rest of the inductees are pretty good, too.

Read the rest of this entry »