Everyone knows that John Lennon's Christmas song is a Christmas song. But is it? And what even is a Christmas song?
Category: Music
Ed Sheeran Didn’t Ruin Anything. Game of Thrones is Rooted in Popular Music
Game of Thrones is Not Sacred. It’s Grateful Dead Fan Fiction The first episode of the seventh season of HBO’s Game of Thrones sparked a multitude of reactions, but perhaps none more virulent and hysterical than how certain GOT fans responded when Ed Sheeran appeared onscreen. The response was so rabid that some speculated Sheeran …
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Stop Misquoting Leonard Cohen and Ernest Hemingway. Start Listening and Reading.
Consider the misquote. It lies in that same realm as citing fake news or reading only the headline. Misquoting is certainly nothing new, but the internet allows a fake quote to be retweeted a thousand times before the truth has even clicked send. I've written about this before, of course. In the summer of 2015, I wrote …
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The Kanye with a Thousand Faces: Exploring the Inevitable Kanye West Musical, Part One
Some things are inevitable: death, taxes, reboots, and musical adaptations. This blog has thoroughly discussed the "dark and gritty reboot," but what about the inevitable musical adaptation? Every person, place, or thing ends up on the stage, accompanied by tunes. This includes films, myths, classic novels (Les Miserables; The Phantom of the Opera) and contemporary …
Did a Grateful Dead Song Inspire Arya Stark and Her Story?
Exploring the connections between the Grateful Dead and A Song of Ice and Fire It's no secret that the Grateful Dead's music has influenced George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books. He first acknowledged it during a 2014 interview with 927 Plus, including indirectly admitting that the spiritual Weirwoods in the world …
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How to Finally Become a David Bowie Fan
It's a strange thing when a celebrity dies. Some people mourn for days or weeks or months. Others feel ostracized when it's someone whose work they didn't know, outside the world of grief. I recall the deaths of Kurt Cobain (I was 8) and Princess Diana (I was 11) with confusion, a sense of not knowing …
“Please stop calling here, Adele.”
A dialogue with Adele, from the perspective of the person she should not be calling. All of Adele's lyrics are from the song "Hello." The Audience's lyrics are invented for this dialogue. Audience: Hello? Adele: Hello, it's me. Audience: Adele? Adele: I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet. Audience: Why would I …
Are Kubrick and Spielberg Renegades? (And Other Odd Film References in Pop Music)
There's a new song on the radio by a band I hadn't heard of. It's called "Renegades" and they're called X-Ambassadors. In this song, they celebrate "running wild and running free" and "living like we're renegades." I like the song a lot more than I would expect to. But hey, I never claimed to have …
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Not Stopping, White Walls, and Double Standards: Miley Cyrus vs. Macklemore.
Note: this blog post is actually something I wrote last summer, but never posted on here. I figured I would share it here now. A few days ago, I heard “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus and “White Walls” by Macklemore on the radio. And I noticed something. Both songs have been around for a …
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