Teenager!

Chris

Chris lives in Austin, TX, where he once shook Willie Nelson's hand.

Related Post Roulette

32 Responses

  1. Jason Tank says:

    Molly is ecstasy (MDMA), in case you didn’t know.

    Definitely love that “Safe and Sound” song.Report

  2. johanna says:

    16 year old daughter is an example of watching a child’s musical evolution although as I did at her age, get stuck for a time listening to music based on the cuteness quotient of said bands. She has been through a pop stage, goth stage, a dub step phase, and is sort of stuck in a kpop phase which until either she gets weary of the music or fawning over the pretty boys, she will again expand her musical horizons.Report

  3. aaron david says:

    The Boy is now 19, and finishing his first year of college, and is now DJ Bea Arthur, hammering it down on the overnights…here: http://www.kcpr.org/#/
    Watching him grow up, moving through pop to metal to hip hop to indie, writing his own albums, forming bands…
    And all the while becoming a person, not just my son.
    Pure awesome.Report

    • Glyph in reply to aaron david says:

      1.) I am listening to KCPR’s stream right now (it’s Pretenders).
      2.) ‘DJ Bea Arthur’ is an awesome handle.
      3.) That said, he may come to regret it. I also had a comical DJ handle for a while, and while it was funny at the time, it’s a little weird and embarrassing when people still call me by it now. My handle here is actually what I was planning on replacing it with, but stopped doing any DJ gigs around that time, so it just got used here instead (many would argue that this handle is no better. At least it’s better than my AVClub handle, which I picked spur-of-the-moment and now wish mightily that I could change, but now it has too much commenting history on it. Basically, I suck at choosing handles).Report

    • Chris in reply to aaron david says:

      Aaron, that is awesome. It really is, for me at least, and I gather for other parents as well, one of the clearest and most exciting ways to observe the development of a child’s personality, particularly over the teen years. I’ve really enjoyed asking him for new songs every few months and getting lists that often differ entirely not just in the songs but in the genres and styles. And given his interest in broadcast media, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him do college radio.

      I’ll have to check your son’s show out next time I’m up that late on a Sunday.Report

  4. dhex says:

    hey chris, have you read this yet?

    http://thequietus.com/articles/14972-nas-illmatic-interview-anniversary-review

    the quietus generally has some of the better longform music writing around, even if every third essay starts with an anecdote about the miners strike and thatcher.Report

    • Glyph in reply to dhex says:

      I think all UK music writers have to include something about Thatcher and striking unions in every piece. It’s the law.Report

      • Burt Likko in reply to Glyph says:

        “Ah, ‘scuse me there, guv’nr, but I notice that this album does not seem to have any content bemoaning Margaret Thatcher crushing the coal miner’s unions and destroying Britain forever. P’rhaps you could point out what I’ve missed?”

        “It’s 2014. Britain’s doing just fine. And this is a new recording of the Brandenburg Concertos.”

        “Oh. Well, maybe you want to have some allegory in the artwork for the cover…”Report

      • Glyph in reply to Glyph says:

        To be fair, there’s an American equivalent. Jason Heller at AVClub started a recent piece on the Sisters of Mercy with this paragraph:

        The ’80s were a disease. It’s not necessary to have been alive in the
        ’80s to know this. For every piece of pro-’80s propaganda still making
        the rounds in pop culture, there’s a stark counterpoint—a reminder that
        the decade was largely a stifling wasteland of conservatism and sameness
        dominated by, to quote Duran Duran, cherry ice cream smiles.

        My favorite comments, quoting this opening paragraph:

        Don Mynack • 2 months ago
        Calm down, William Burroughs Jr.
        13 • Reply•Share ›

        choppernewt Don Mynack • 2 months ago
        No shit. Jesus Christ, Jason.
        5 • Reply•Share ›Report

    • Chris in reply to dhex says:

      No, I hadn’t, but it’s awesome. I had actually thought of doing a post about the 20th anniversary, talking about the importance of the album, but I haven’t figure out an angle to take. I’m not sure to express to non-hip hop people both how good it is and how incredibly different it was, despite the fact that its themes were, in a sense, those dominating hip hop at the time. I mean, watch a Snoop or Tupac video from around the same time — say, “California Love” or “Gin and Juice” or “Gangsta Party” — and listen to how they talk about street life, and then listen to Illmatic. It’s like watching a cartoon and then switching to a hard-hitting documentary. It was a revelation to a lot of people, particularly people who didn’t live anywhere near those streets, to hear the way Nas talked about them. And he did it in a damn near perfect artistic package, which made it impossible to ignore. You had to listen, and you had to hear the words, and it was poetry that opened your eyes.

      Oh, and the essays that article mentions are mostly online. E.g., :

      http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Marc-lamont-hill-critical-pedagogy-comes-at-halftime-nas-as-black-public-intellectual-excerpt-annotated

      and:

      http://adammansbach.com/other/margins.html

      I’d actually read that second one, but hadn’t realized that it was part of a larger compilation. It’s a pretty interesting in depth exploration of the album and its context.Report

      • Glyph in reply to Chris says:

        I had actually thought of doing a post about the 20th anniversary, talking about the importance of the album, but I haven’t figure out an angle to take. I’m not sure to express to non-hip hop people both how good it is and how incredibly different it was, despite the fact that its themes were, in a sense, those dominating hip hop at the time.

        Hmmmm….I think I might have a good idea for this 😉 – have you checked that draft post? If it looks good to you maybe I will throw it up tomorrow…Report

      • Chris in reply to Chris says:

        I thought about that, too, particularly since it’s available on YouTube.

        I have looked at the draft. It looks good to me.Report

  5. Glyph says:

    That Martin Garrix track sounds CRAZILY like early 90’s club music…and that kid wasn’t BORN yet (1996!) Now I am poking around on Ishkur’s site to see where it would have been slotted.Report

    • Chris in reply to Glyph says:

      I know, right! His taste in today’s music has so much overlap with my taste, and the taste of my friends (I wasn’t really a big NiN fan in the early 90s) that it freaks me out sometimes.Report

  6. Glyph says:

    The Browning appears to have gotten their album art from Id Software.

    That dude in Black Light Burns wants to be Trent Reznor in a bad way, doesn’t he? And I had to rewind to make sure I heard a lyric correctly – yep, he said “feculent franchise” (which, coupled with “The Browning”, definitely suggests a theme).Report

    • Chris in reply to Glyph says:

      When I first heard Black Light Burns — because he created a station on my Pandora account for one of their songs, and it popped up the next time I opened it — I thought it must be a Reznor side project.Report

      • Glyph in reply to Chris says:

        it popped up the next time I opened it

        I’ve been meaning to tell you – ever since you did that “Pop music” post, YouTube suggests a slew of Feist EVERY TIME I go there now. No matter how many times I have watched other videos.

        I don’t MIND Feist, but why they gotta be so pushy about it?Report

      • Chris in reply to Chris says:

        I almost made a joke about YouTube being really Feist-y, but thought better of it.Report

  7. Mike Dwyer says:

    I have tried to maintain music as my most solid connection to my 19 year-old but it gets increasingly harder. When she was little it was easy to turn her onto the stuff I liked. Now she has gone off on her own path but we still reconnect over various artists. We both love The Killers and Regina Spektor and Cake. And she went to the Billy Joel concert with me last week, so that’s something.

    And that ‘Turn Down for What’ video is going to get watched by me at least 10 more times this weekend.Report