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Continue reading →: Ranking ’80s songs which spent most weeks on Hot 100 w/out going top 40
Give Stevie B this: his two-level jhericurled mullet is back, baby. All the cool kids sport one. Whether “Spring Love” and the other freestyle jams whose way up the Billboard Hot 100 was barred by an angel with a flaming sword are remembered today is another story. Although I’ve mentioned…
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Continue reading →: Ranking #96 singles, U.S. edition: 1987-1996
Their only Hot 100 appearance, “Sometimes Always” was no sellout. The production was brighter, and Hope Sandoval as co-singer coincided with Mazzy Star’s breakthrough in the next year, but the Jesus and Mary Chain, whose gifts include vocalizing as if lead poisoning were Vitamin C, sound as much themselves as…
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Continue reading →: The Singles Jukebox: January 2026
In an acknowledgment that Januarys demand a taking-stock as much as a fresh start, The Singles Jukebox reviews 2025 holdovers. Smerz, about whom I haven’t said much, get my first write-up. I was the sole dissenter regarding “Netles,” Ethan Cain’s eight-minute narco-noodle about, I think, doomed love. Among the more…
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Continue reading →: Ranking #9 singles, U.S. edition: 1959
When I think of a hound dog man, or of someone who needs to be turned loose, Fabian does not come to mind. Maybe he got the groupies. At any rate the two #9 singles he earned as the 1950s ended are variable. “Hound Dog Man” hiccups through a rockabilly…
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Continue reading →: Pure insistence: Dry Cleaning and Zach Bryan
In previous reviews I praised Dry Cleaning for updating white scratch-funk with a singer even more nonplussed than my stove. I shared cautious optimism about Zach Bryan’s talent for connecting a lifetime of harrowing rural despair with (post-)adolescent alienation. How do their latest albums work? Let’s see.
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Continue reading →: How to be a good man: ‘Rebuilding’
Josh O’Connor needs to stop it with the performances as wonderful as the one in Rebuilding and go away for a while, give other guys a chance. In his fourth film released in a six-month period the British actor who has mastered several American accents plays Thomas “Dusty” Fraser, a…
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Continue reading →: My Alternative Oscars: Best Actress 2015
The nominees: Cate Blanchett – Carol Brie Larson – Room Jennifer Lawrence – Joy Charlotte Rampling – 45 Years Saoirse Ronan – Brooklyn Loath as I am to continually dis the 2010s acting winners, I see red whenever I skim through a nominees list. By the time Room got a…
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Humanizing The Vacuum 