Amazing how seven days can change the world’ Nothing could ever replace the sated feeling I had watching those pathetic Santorum children crying as Daddy conceded the election. Boo fucking hoo! Now, back to Virginia where you really fucking live. I’m sure Santorum will end up on some Republican’t committee or something. I’m just happy to have him out of PA’s hair. There’s absolutely nothing Philly about him. He probably thinks the Rocky statue belongs on the Art Museum steps. Fucking loser. And as for “Fast Eddie” Rendell, Nancy Pelosi and all the winning Democrats, I say, congratulations — let’s […]
Search Results for: we know it's only rock n roll
NOW IT CAN BE TOLD: Valania Column Killed By PW For Too Much ‘Old’ Valania And Not Enough ‘New’ Valania; Runs BREAKING News On Azusa Plane Instead
HEAR NO EVIL Sweetheart Of The Rodeo The best album of the ’90s has just been reissued with a live-in-Philly bonus disc. By Jonathan Valania Five years ago, this very paper PW ran the following breathless gush of superlatives from a handsome young go-getter: Lucinda Williams is the beloved revolutionary sweetheart of the alt-country rodeo. All of us literate roots-rock boys daydream about her the same way we used to daydream about Liz Phair. We know all about her because we read The New Yorker. We know about her father’s literary standing and her mother’s madness; we know about her […]
Blowback: CP ‘Prophets Of Rage’ Say Hooray For Doree! Hip-Hip Hooray! And Phuck Phawker!
First it was the Metro, and now this gauntlet-throwdown from the City Paper’s painful example of why taking a badly under-resourced and, as a result, aggressively mediocre alt-weekly on-line only makes for a droopy-dog blog, a.k.a. The Clog. Really now, ‘Prophets of Rage’? Good grief. How high was Hickey when he thought that was funny or clever? Loathe though we are to share some of our precociously large and scandal-driven foot traffic with a cyber-doorstop like the Clog, this sucker-punch-wrapped-in-a-rimjob is just too nakedly jealous and syntactically-challenged to ignore: Rave for Doree Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 11:48 am posted […]
PBR: The Lonesome Horny Death Of PRISM
Big ups to the 700 Level (Even if they didn’t know Joe Morgan played for the Phillies. Hello? The Wheeze Kids?) for posting video of PRISM’s fond farewell. This poignant goodbye from baseball/college basketball analyst Larry Rosen (who I’m certain is still calling hoops somewhere) followed the rarest of occasions — a Phillies victory in 1997. Sadly, I think the channel faded to black about halfway through Larry’s spiel. Anyway, for you youngins and transplants out there, PRISM (Philadelphia Regional In-Home Sports and Movies) was a local cable channel catering to males from the late ’70s through 1997. They broadcasted […]
GRUMPY OLD MEN: A Man Called Francis
Welcome to the second installment of our Grumpy Old Men series, wherein we learn from our elders and soak up their salty yarns like Bounty Quicker Picker-Upper. Yesterday we had Robert Christgau, today Francis Davis. Tomorrow? The Pope. What’s that you say? You never heard of Francis Davis. Oh buddy, it’s good thing you found us! Check out his CV: He has written about music, film, and other aspects of popular culture for The Atlantic since 1984 and was appointed lead jazz critic for the Voice in 2004. He was jazz critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 1996, […]
Grumpy Old Men: Christgau Speaks!
Welcome to the first of installment of our Grumpy Old Men series, wherein we learn from our elders and soak up all their salty yarns like a Bounty Quicker-Picker Upper. Because we here at Phawker believe that both the old and the young are largely disenfranchised by the MSM. More for us, we say. This what they call a Talking Dog Story. It’s not so important what the dog said, it’s that he talked at all. Late last month Robert Christgau, the Dean of American Rock Critics, was knocked off his longtime perch at the Village Voice by the hatchet […]
215 Fest Leftovers: Phawker Tawks With Amy Sedaris
Pretty girls aren’t funny for the same reason that pretty boys aren’t funny: they don’t have to be. Form fits function, and function answers to need. Pretty people rarely need for much, least of all the ability to win friends and disarm foes with a few well-placed yuks. It’s basic Darwin. Lucille Ball? Phyllis Diller? Roseanne Barr? Funny fuckin’ ladies. Pretty? Not so much. Amy Sedaris knows this. Her career puts the lie to that premise, by the way, but to do so she has to put on a fat suit and give herself an overbite, problem hair and a […]
Amazing Grace
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN WE SHALL OVERCOME: THE SEEGER SESSIONS It’s no accident that you don’t really know what Pete Seeger did. That he’s truly larger than life, an American original, the kind that walk out of storybooks, like Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed, but more real. That he more or less singlehandedly carried the burden of pure roll-up-your-sleeves and speak-truth-to-power lefty populism, social justice and humanitarian conscience on his back for the better part of the 20th Century, with amazing grace and without complaint. For his trouble he’s been tarred and feathered, beaten and blacklisted, and officially written out of history […]
Nerds Do It Longer
Stars of Track and Field Still F*ck Like Champs Boy-o-boy, did Joey Sweeney get his underoos in a bunch when I mentioned that a new Belle & Sebastian album was cause for “a legion of cardigan-clad Millhouses to raise their skinny arms to heaven like antennae.” Speaking like a man who’s taken all the locker room towel-snapping he was gonna take for one lifetime, he told me to get my gang together and meet his gang on the playground for a badminton death match. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Sweeney’s shuttlecock, but needless to say I was concerned. […]
Pet Soundz
DISCUSSED: Animal Collective’s Feels Back in college — which was longer ago than I care to admit, so let’s just say some time after the earth cooled but before the Internet — I lived in an old Victorian house that the college owned and subdivided into separate apartments. It was a gathering house for all the freaks and geeks who didn’t quite blend in with the frat-boy-cheerleader-chug-a-lug-date-rape ethos of the main campus. Across the hall my neighbors had set up a de facto commune — some of the guys living there weren’t even enrolled — of 24/7 hacky-sack drum-circling […]
Free Love
Arthur Lee Lets It All Hang Out Arthur Lee, the outrageous auteur behind the psych-pop legend known as Love, was the hippie prince of the Sunset Strip in the mid-’60s. Love’s music was a potent blend of folk, garage-punk, psychedelia, R&B and easy listening, and the band’s incendiary residency at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go drew an overflow crowd that stretched around the block. Lee had enough juice to get a then-unknown band called the Doors signed to Elektra Records. He dressed the part of trippy royalty, decked out in flamboyant psychedelic dandy attire later rendered iconic by Jimi Hendrix. (It was Lee […]
When The Shit Hits The Fans
(Illustration by Alex Fine) WHAT IT FEELS LIKE WHEN THE BAND YOU LOVE HATES YOU We all have bands we hate, really hate — you know, with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. You hate REM, I still hate Journey. There’s a lot of that going around. But how many people can say a band hates them? Tin-eared soundmen, people who jack the gear out of their van while they sleep, and the played jokesters who still yell “Freebird!” — and that’s about it. And when you narrow it down to people who are hated by their favorite bands, […]
Riddle Me This
Reckoning รท Crooked Rain Crooked Rain = Around the Sun? Twenty years ago — let’s just pause and think about that for a sec, 20 years ago — R.E.M. released Reckoning. It was the much-anticipated sophomore release by the underground’s then-favorite sons of the South. The album made good on the kudzu-crusted promise of the band’s bewitching and ultimately confounding debut Murmur, radiating a murky but hopeful aura to an alt-world grown weary of punk’s safety-pinned doom and goth’s spider web of gloom. “I’m the sun and you can read,” they sang, or at least that’s what it sounded like–you […]