About 10 years ago during a late night family hangout while on vacation in an isolated cabin in Canada, my brother-in-law — the ultra-talented piano player and composer Peer Neumann — took control of the music selection process and put on a recording that I had never heard of before. Strangely enough, Peer stopped pickingContinue reading “The Haunting Sound of Jackie Mittoo’s “Drum Song””
Tag Archives: Jim Jarmusch
“Beat Bop”: Hip-Hop and World-Building in 1980s Downtown New York
Listening to the 1983 hip-hop single “Beat Bop” 40 years after its recording is an act of retroactive discovery. It feels like climbing to the top of a mountain and seeing the future from the perspective of the future. “Beat Bop” features solid representation of early hip-hop rhymes courtesy of a then 15-year old battleContinue reading ““Beat Bop”: Hip-Hop and World-Building in 1980s Downtown New York”
Acid Westerns
The Recliner Notes posts about “Isis” and “Romance in Durango” allowed me the opportunity to build off of the idea of the film genre Acid Western as a musical genre. There are hundreds of songs which fit into the concept. Below is a Spotify playlist of Acid Western songs. Eventually, songs on this list couldContinue reading “Acid Westerns”
Romance in Durango
The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum set the parameters for Acid Westerns as a film genre in his review of Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man. Rosenbaum writes in this seminal piece that Acid Westerns “confound much of our mythology about the western — reversing some of its philosophical presuppositions by associating a westward journey withContinue reading “Romance in Durango”
Isis
The idea of the film genre “Acid Western” was created by the film critic Pauline Kael in her 1971 review of the film El Topo in The New Yorker. She wrote: “The avant-garde devices that once fascinated a small bohemian group because they seemed a direct pipeline to the occult and ‘the marvelous’ now reachContinue reading “Isis”
Recliner Notes 