People, we need your help. I am lukewarm at best about awards based upon mobilizing voters on your own behalf (or mobilizing bots to do the dirty work for you), but I am even less interested in sucking hosewater in said polls, especially when the vote totals are public and …

I have laid off the digital music wars for the most part of late because all parties — from the small-minded, self-defeating, niggardly record labels, to the disingenuous, spyware and corrupted file-laden file sharing services, to the morally oblique file sharers — share culpability for the current miasma. The legal …

Our mutating legend Bob Dylan, the folk-singing bluesman rock ‘n’ roller, poet visionary gigolo materialist mystic Christian Jew, who has swabbed us with the impassioned dew of youth, stroked us with the dry calm of age, cooed angelic honeyed melodies, and seethed with a “voice like sand and glue.” Dylan …

I have always considered myself a liberal, and while I remain a staunch social liberal, I have become a defense hawk and economic moderate. After the usual heated election rhetoric, including from the New Republic, which painted Bush as a frothing deranged militarist and base incompetent, I am deeply gratified …

Since we have hitched our wagon to their star, I can’t be called neutral, but I think Amazon is a reliable, generally customer-friendly company that has blazed the trail for general online retail for the masses. That they are actually making money at it is impressive and reassuring for e-business …

Though nominally an anti-abortion party, the Republicans are as deceptive as they are smart on this exceptionally touchy subject. The Republicans know that they can speak the anti-abortion rhetoric to appease their most religious adherents — and help drum up social conservative voter turnout — as long as they don’t …

In the jazz and blues recording industry, there could hardly be bigger news if Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis returned from the dead and put on a free show in Central Park. Concord Records and Fantasy announced yesterday that Concord has completed its acquisition …

For years on his Pee Wee’s Playhouse TV show, and most concentratedly in Tim Burton’s classic Pee Wee’s Big Adventure film, Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) walked the razor’s edge between innocence and decadence, willfully ignoring the implications of his determined naivete while the audience howled knowingly at the innuendo …

When I was DJing all the time in the ’80s and early-’90s, few songs enflamed the masses more totally or burned out more quickly than 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny” (’89), a hormone-dripping, vastly catchy exemplar of Miami bass-driven party rap following in the swaggering wake of the group’s …

Now that it’s December in Ohio, it’s getting harder to pretend that the weather doesn’t suck and will continue to suck more or less relentlessly for the next four or five months. This morning it was in the upper-30s (F) with 45mph winds, taking out the power (briefly) and tossing …