The Strokes' Is This It anniversary: Why it's the best album of the past decade. Photograph of the Strokes by Flickr user Mrmatt. By now, everyone from NPR listeners to Slate readers to, bizarrely enough, Republican presidential debate viewers has heard that this September marked the 20th birthday of Nirvana’s grunge monolith Nevermind, the record that brought alternative rock to the newly flanneled masses. Even a lifelong Nirvana agnostic like me—at age 11, I’ll confess, the anarchic fury of the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video had me quaking in my Zubaz—must admit that the attention is deserved. But this tidal wave of tributes threatens to overshadow the 10th anniversary of another towering rock classic, an album that, if not quite as influential as Nevermind, is every bit as dazzling, significant, and stylistically accomplished: the Strokes’ masterly debut Is This It.
Given the Mariana Trench-like depths to which the Strokes’ reputation has plummeted in recent years, this comparison undoubtedly has Nirvana fans struggling to suppress a giant collective gag. In defense of Paul Simon - Music. On Sept. 11, Paul Simon sang a solo acoustic version of “The Sound of Silence” at the 9/11 memorial service in New York City, and for a few days afterward, the YouTube clip of the performance became a viral sensation, shared among fans and listeners as a commemoration of that horrific event 10 years ago. It was remarkable how dramatically both Simon and the song had changed since the early 1960s. His face had grown gaunt with age, his hair colorless around that baseball cap that has become his post-baldness trademark. “Sound of Silence” had developed new melodic currents, and Simon punctuated it with a few ominous strums.
Its innate gravity fit the occasion perfectly, but lyrically the song is an oddly disconcerting hymn to national tragedy, what with its intimations of youthful alienation and derisive lines like, “And the people bowed and prayed / To the neon god they made.” Stephen M. Joe Henry: Engage music's history, don't worship it - Music. “Reverie,” the 12th album by the singer-songwriter-producer Joe Henry, includes one song about the African-American folkie Odetta and another about the late Georgia eccentric Vic Chesnutt. Neither sounds musically influenced by its subject, yet like all of Henry’s songs, both are heavily indebted to the past and the array of artists who came before him.
The weight of American pop history weighs on every note and every word. Throughout his quarter-century career, Henry has learned to shoulder that burden of history gracefully. Lumped in with alt-country in the 1990s, he has since been routinely compared to Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and the Jayhawks, among others. Despite such praise, no one really sounds like Henry. Brandishing a dryly expressive voice and an impressionistic lyrical style, he obsesses over old blues, jazz, folk, rock ‘n’ roll and avant-garde composition, yet works to take those styles out of the past and set them squarely in the present.
Absolutely intentional. Drugs, alcohol and sex: why the Jesuits like Tom Waits - Times Online. Greatest. Indie-est. Band. Ever.: Music. "I suppose you don't like sports, do you? " This is what Stephen Malkmus—the enigmatic architect of Pavement—asks me as he sits in a Thai-sandwich restaurant, waiting for his bacon. He is casually pawing at a local Portland alternative newspaper that features Trail Blazer Greg Oden on the cover; it's the day before Thanksgiving, so Oden's patella is still unexploded. Malkmus seems slightly (but unspecifically) annoyed—his wife's parents are in town for the holidays, he's just spent the last ninety minutes at a school party for his 6-year-old daughter, and now he has to waste two hours with some bozo who probably doesn't know why Greg Oden is interesting.
He keeps his head down as he speaks. At this moment, Stephen Malkmus looks so much like Stephen Malkmus that it seems like sarcasm. "I said, I suppose you don't like sports. " After we talk about sports, I try to persuade him to take me back to his house. "Of course it does, in a way. 1.