// Category Archive for: Culture Shock

Black Sabbath: The Secret History Of Black-Jewish Relations

By Hanna

The goal of Black Sabbath: The Secret History of Black-Jewish Relations, a compilation released by the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation, was to “gather the US history of Black-Jewish relations into a selective pop musical guide.” While a lot has been published about black and Jewish musical influences, there hasn’t been an actual musical guide to Jewish music by black artists, and this is what the Society set out to accomplish.

Of course, it’s slightly less universalist in its approach than that; Black Sabbath focuses on the ’30s through the ’60s, a time of enormous racial oppression for both groups, and also a time when the cultural exchange between the two was especially great. This really shines through in this compilation; for all that it’s only one CD. It is an amazing effort and even more amazing in that it succeeds.
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À La Recherche du Brooding Perdu

By AJ Wood

When I was 20, I was crazy to get out of Los Angeles, the Valley, and all I had grown up with. Being a French and English major at college, I honed in on an escape available to me: enrolling in a program for university students to teach English to French school children in France. Applications were made in stuttering French, time was spent wondering, and then, I got my escape: I went to France, to the smallest town I had ever been in (where cows outnumbered people) to teach French. But: I was 20, and an English Major, which means I was a navel-gazer and I brooded. And I certainly did that too: I brooded in pidgin French: Je brood, tu broodes, nous avons broodé souvent.
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Bob Dylan’s “Wilderness Years”

By John Lane

“Towards the end of the show someone out in the crowd. . . threw a silver cross on the stage. Now usually I don’t pick things up in front of the stage. Once in a while I do. Sometimes I don’t. But I looked down at that cross. I said, ‘I gotta pick that up.’ So I picked up the cross and I put it in my pocket. . . And I brought it backstage and I brought it with me to the next town, which was out in Arizona. . . I was feeling even worse than I’d felt when I was in San Diego. I said, ‘Well, I need something tonight.’ I didn’t know what it was. I was used to all kinds of things. I said, ‘I need something tonight that I didn’t have before.’ And I looked in my pocket and I had this cross.”
—1979 Bob Dylan interview, from Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited, by Clinton Heylin

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I Haz A Flavor: Context

By Matt Keeley

Not too long ago, I read an essay about context in journalism from Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog. It’s very much in the same vein as the Popshifter Manifesto and the Anti-Snark Manifesto that launched The Believer.

There’s something to be said for this, particularly when there seems to be so much criticism in criticism. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it often seems less like helpful guidance and more like hobby-horsing.
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Top Gear: It’s Biblically Good

By Melissa Bratcher

With the American version of Top Gear on the horizon, there is no better time to discuss what makes the British version such a brilliant show. The American version is destined to be dreadful—partially because America makes crap cars. European cars are just better.

Top Gear is a car show for people who don’t particularly care about cars (though after watching for a while, one begins to notice cars in ways not noticed before). The cinematography on Top Gear is as gorgeous as anything one would see in a nature documentary. The people on the show drive supercars and do ridiculous challenges and feats of derring-do, but that’s not the best part. The best part is the strange alchemy of the hosts.

Top Gear in Botswana

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Rock ‘n’ Roll High School 30th Anniversary Special Edition

By Less Lee Moore

Although for many, The Ramones represent the birth of the US punk scene in the ’70s, I was only about three years old when the band first formed in 1974. For me, The Ramones were the four weird-looking, tall dudes who kept popping up in promos for MTV in 1981. Most of the videos in the early days of MTV were fairly bizarre; at that point the channel would show any videos they could and the shift to glamorous, new wave pretty boys had not yet occurred. However, even amongst Loverboy, Meatloaf, Split Enz, and The Tubes, The Ramones looked pretty damn strange.

I didn’t see Rock ‘n’ Roll High School until a few years later, when I’d officially hit my own teenage years. I remember feeling confused and vaguely uncomfortable, not totally grasping why it was supposed to be so great. The news of the upcoming release of a 30th Anniversary Special Edition made me curious to see how the film as aged. Would it be funny? Would it be relevant?

Thankfully, the answer to both questions is, “YES.”
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TITLE?? Q&A With Hiro Hayashi Of POLYSICS

By Matt Keeley

As I mentioned a few weeks ago on the Popshifter Blog, POLYSICS are the best band in the universe.

Their DEVO-inspired, frenetic sound not only made them huge in their native Japan, but also a cult band with ever-increasing presence around the world. After their sold-out concert in Bukodan, which was their last show with Kayo, keyboardist and co-vocalist, their guitarist Hiro Hayashi agreed to do an email interview with Popshifter about his musical influences and the future of POLYSICS.
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More Than Shakespeare Slash: Q&A With Author Myrlin Hermes

By Jemiah Jefferson

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet, the new novel by Portland, Oregon author Myrlin A. Hermes, dismantles some of the best-known works of literature in the English language—the plays and sonnets of good ol’ Willie Shakespeare, most particularly Hamlet—and builds from their parts a unique, steamy, bisexual love triangle between three famous characters.
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Blank Generation On DVD

By Less Lee Moore

Richard Hell got me my first paying job in the music industry. Sort of.
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Béla Fleck, Throw Down Your Heart, Africa Sessions Part Two

By Lisa Anderson

Many people may not know this, but the roots of banjo music actually go back to Africa. Eclectic American banjo player Béla Fleck traveled to Africa to explore this history and learn from African musicians. The result was the 2008 documentary Throw Down your Heart, and the 2009 album Throw Down Your Heart, Tales From The Acoustic Planet, Africa Sessions. Part two of the album was released early this year.
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