A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Rendered Obsolete LP by Kicker. Since punk rock got started and really began to develop some momentum many years ago, there has been no shortage of upstarts who have come along certain that those who came before them didn’t know jack and threw out the existing rule book which was governing the genre in order to start fresh. That fact may be inconvenient, but that doesn’t make it any less true;...
Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell, & Mississippi Sheiks Document Reissues Volume 4 (Third Man Records) It’s hard being a music fanatic. No, I’m kidding of course. It’s actually really great. If you’re hardcore enough then you start wondering about the history and links in your music. Who begat what? What are the influences in your favorite band? If you’re serious about your music, you’ll want to know where it came from. Music has become just that for me...
Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky It’s hard to pinpoint Noam Chomsky’s specialty because there are so many. The obvious answer would be linguistics. After all, the man is a professor on the subject at MIT. But what about politics and world issues? The reason Chomsky seems to have so much to say on everything is because he’s really only talking about one thing: US aggression. Whether it’s the Israel-Palestine problem, Vietnam, or Latin America, the US affects the fate...
Akira: 25th Anniversary Edition Where do I even begin with a movie like Akira? I first watched it in college on VHS with the traditional dubbing of the movie and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I’ve watched the movie over a dozen times, read the manga (that’s 2000+ pages) twice, had a poster in my room all through college staring at me, and saw the movie in theatres for its 2001 re-release (I dragged several people for my birthday...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the 2016 reissue of the BLACKsummers’night LP by Maxwell. On a superficial level, leaping around an artist’s catalogue can be confusing in a variety of ways; there can be a disconnect in the continuity of the artist’s development and that may mess with the perceptions of their catalogue as a whole. Such a phenomenon is absolutely true of Maxwell’s songbook – when the singer’s started with Urban Hang Suite in 1996, his...
Scharpling & Wurster Live at Third Man Records I mean it when I say that Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster will go down in history as one of the great comedic duos of our time. Maybe the greatest. For those of you who are uninitiated, don’t feel bad because I didn’t know who they were a year ago either. But one thing is certain, if you get what they’re doing, you won’t be able to get enough. What these guys...
Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Nature and the Social Order by Noam Chomsky It’s hard not to sound like a broken record when talking about Noam Chomsky. What can we say that hasn’t been said countless times before? The man has had such an influence and his books are simply imperative reading for any human being. Powers and Prospects collects Chomsky’s lectures in Australia in the 1990s which were supposed to cover East-Timor. But we get so much more. Unfortunately,...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the deluxe 2LP reissue of Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite by Maxwell. It’s incredible how wide the stream of creativity was in the mainstream music scene of 1996. While rock had finally started to get itself worked out following the death of Kurt Cobain (there were a few good rock records that year – Ministry released Filth Pig, Lou Reed put out Set The Twilight Reeling, The Wallflowers released Bringing Down The Horse...
Hollywood Said No! Orphaned Film Scripts, Bastard Scenes, and Abandoned Darlings from the Creators of Mr. Show By Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, and Brian Posehn. Welcome to our new book review column here on Ground Control called “I Wanna be Literated”! We are going to try and keep this column up with not-just music related and not just brand new books. Some will be topical, old, some new, some borrowed, and almost all of them blue. We are proud to...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the High Hopes LP by Like A Motorcycle. There are few scenes that appear in motion pictures which are more worrisome than those where light explodes on the screen and, after the camera’s focus adjusts, viewers realize they’re staring up from the floor of the trunk of a car. The reason that image is disarming is because the trunk is a small space – it is incredibly confined and exists as a...