Bloody Sheets, Bad Sweaters, and Broken Hearts: The Wisdom Of Crocodiles

By Jemiah Jefferson

Jude Law, tasty son-of-a-bitch.

Originally this was going to be a gushing review of a very beautiful, very sexy vampire film that I remember loving the hell out of, but hadn’t seen in a very long time—ten years or so. Within 30 minutes of rewatching, though, this became much more of an exercise in “the golden glow of memory masking the flaws of fact.” Filmmaking, vampire movies, and I were all in somewhat different eras in 1999; we’ve all come a long way, and The Wisdom Of Crocodiles hasn’t really kept up. Unjustly obscure, the film also suffers from having been titled Immortality for its US release, and the shitty production values used when slapping its American title on the screen makes it look like it’s just a very expensive episode of the new Outer Limits.
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Dots to Connect: The Music Of The Prids

By Jemiah Jefferson

Tribute albums can be a tricky thing. Gathering the right combination of bands and artists to do the best work in performing new versions of well-known songs has got to be difficult. This is one of the facts that makes this compilation’s success as remarkable as it is. Not every track is a keeper, but the ones that are stand on their own as showcases for the bands performing them as well as the exceptional songwriting that has become one of the Prids’ trademarks.
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Rest In Peace: Rudy Ray Moore

By Jemiah Jefferson

It was with great sadness that I read about the passing of Rudy Ray Moore, one of the most influential, offensive, brilliant cultural voices of the 20th century. I don’t believe that I exaggerate when I say that. His uniquely out-there perspectives, voice, and performance can be heard imitated and sampled in countless examples from hip-hop and Tarantino; his films are classics of the “completely ridiculous, hilarious, independent cult curiosity” genre. The term “blaxploitation” is a catch-all for movies and culture with a lot of black people acting the fool, shooting folks, acting violent and crazy, dressing loudly, pimping, revenging; the films of Rudy Ray Moore transcend and encapsulate everything about them, but in a way that no one else dares to do. I’ve got a special place in my heart for RRM, if for nothing else than because he is the centerpiece of one of the few films that I just couldn’t get through on the first try. That film was Dolemite.
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1983: Music For Twelve-Year-Olds?

By Less Lee Moore

Remember when you were old enough to like “cool” music but still young enough to shamelessly appreciate crappy music? For me, that time was 1983.
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Summer Music Shorts

By Lisa Haviland
I still get a buzz every time I hear the opening hiss of “Ahhh, push it,” and here I am livin’ in Salt ‘n Pepa’s borough of Queens, New York, twenty years after “Push It” rode the Top 40. Though the track came out in December of 1987, I still associate it with summer; it’s too raucous ‘n wild for winter or the indoors. A friend and I blasted it around the neighborhood during the summer of ’88, far from the parents, though there was the inevitable awkward question from her younger brother as to the song’s meaning: “Ah, they mean push the shopping cart,” an item we happened to have commandeered and also the closest we’d come to pushing “it” at our delicate young ages.
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The Police, Synchronicity

By Jemiah Jefferson

This is the first music that I ever bought in a record store (or, I should say, that I begged my mom to buy for me—I had absolutely no money of my own at the age of eleven, since I never got an allowance as a child. . . or a teenager, for that matter). I bought this on cassette, probably from a Sam Goody or something similar, in a mall. I bought it months after its release, in the fall, after a punishing summer where “Every Breath You Take” kept its stranglehold on the Billboard #1 slot for what seemed like forever. I have always quite disliked that song, and after seeing so many other worthy songs attempt to break through and fail (most particularly “Is There Something I Should Know?”, Duran Duran’s vastly superior single, which topped out at #4, much to my rage and frustration) I learned to hate it, and I still hate it.
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The Kids In The Hall: Live As They’ll Ever Be

By Jemiah Jefferson

Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland OR
May 11, 2008

“What? Are they still around?”
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