Saturday Video Roundup: Men without…

Howdy folks - time now for yet another episode of Scholars & Rogues’ critically acclaimed Saturday Video Roundup! Today we pay tribute to men, mostly. It’s hard to be a man, especially when there are so many things that a man is without. For example, here are some men without shirts.

Lucky Dube and the choice for Africa

Cast your mind back. Some banana republic. Perhaps it was Cuba, or some backwater in India, definitely anywhere in Africa.
You were traveling in one of those beat-up old vehicles that passes for public transport in the most impoverished parts of the world. And they had only one album playing at that tree-splitting [...]

Saturday Video Roundup: Mahmoud Benatar vs. They Might Be Seagulls

Ready to have a little fun? Good, because this week’s SVR is more fun than a barrel of monkees. Doing music videos. Let’s kick it off with an ode to lip gloss. Because, you know, it be poppin’.

Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the MP3s of war

When Napster came on the scene in 1999 and garnished attention in 2000, the music industry’s response was to declare war on file sharing and digital music. And with their massive financial advantage, the music industry was the first to field their army of lawyers, copy-protected CDs, and usage-restricted music formats. But ever [...]

Elvis is king…of his destiny, anyway…and that’s worth a lot….

I saw Elvis Costello two nights ago at (interestingly enough) the Booth Amphitheater in Cary, NC (a suburb of Raleigh). It was an excellent show, and if he’d had a better audience, it would have been a great one.
The amphitheater only holds about 2000, so it was a fairly intimate setting for [...]

King Hip is no more: Joe Zawinul, 1932-2007

A music giant has left us. Josef Erich “Joe” Zawinul—who established a new school of music with Miles Davis and led the seminal Weather Report with Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, et al.—passed away Tuesday in his beloved Austria, appropriately in Vienna, the “city of musicians.” He visited this planet for 75 short years [...]

S&R succumbs to Listmania! Name the 10 greatest American musicians ever

The author of this post, who usually writes about national security and nuclear deproliferation, has decided that, for one day, he’d fiddle while Rome burns. No more immune to the passion for lists than any other American, he presents you, after a brief meditation on the phenomenon, with one of his own.
“Listmania” rules on Amazon. [...]

The next Springsteen?

He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus
But he talks like a gentleman
Like you imagined
When you were young
2003 and 2004 brought us the front edge what I’ve come to call the Nu Wave - a new wave of New Wave, Post-Punk and Technopop-influenced bands. For a guy like me, who hit college in the late ’70s [...]

Saturday Video Roundup: things that make you go “damn”

In this week’s Saturday Video Roundup, a Labor Day Weekend tribute to excellence and innovation in music. First up, courtesy of Founding Scrogue Mike Sheehan, is Klaus Nomi, a unique performer if there ever was one. Voice of a mad castrati, visage from a Dadaist nightmare. He was among the first entertainers to die as [...]

When giants walked the earth…the end of “the age of rock stars…” a personal view…

I think maybe this starts at a Who concert in 1976:
I went to the concert with two musician friends of mine and some women who, for reasons obvious to me at least, shall remain nameless. Toots and the Maytals, one of the great reggae bands, opened the show. In retrospect, they played a nice [...]

RIAA’s legal overreaching is being brought under control

Since RIAA decided to start their misguided anti-downloading crusade, they’ve relied on fear of overwhelming legal fees to get their targets to settle out of court for thousands of dollars. And they’ve used the easily abused Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a means to get preliminary rulings against anonymous targets that effectively extort people [...]

Woodstock nation: all that mud made…swine…?

Today is the 38th anniversary of the ending of The Woodstock Music and Art Fair at Bethel, NY.
For all us Boomers who became what Hunter called “The Generation of Swine” and who’ve elected the likes of Thrill Bill and The Decider as OUR POTUSes, time for a little assessment and reflection on what Woodstock [...]

The inaugural Scholars and Rogues Interview (and our newest Scrogue): Graham Parker

The mid-1970s were a wonderful time for music lovers. For starters, exciting and innovative new music was popping up all over the place. And when it did, it actually got played on the radio.
The UK was especially fertile ground during this period, as scores of punk and New Wave acts emerged (many from the “pub [...]

Fight the Flavor

I think it’s time for me to formally introduce myself to the world. My name is John Crews. I’m an American of African descent, a Capricorn who loves to take long walks… oops, wrong blog. My purpose is to inform the S&R audience on subjects that are near and dear to me. [...]

Day of Silence for Net radio

Your favorite Internet radio station is probably dark today in observance of a nationwide day of silence.
Day of silence protest hits Net radio
- Stations battle royalty hike
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Published Friday 22nd June 2007 23:16 GMTOn Tuesday, more than 10,000 U.S. web radio broadcasters will participate in a nationwide “day of silence”, [...]