George Case's Blog, page 6

Another common fallacy held by music fans, music journalists, and too many aspiring musicians, is that popular recordings and concerts automatically bring lottery-like wealth to the artists.  While of course many well-known performers earned a lot of money, the history of the medium is replete with stars who ended up broke, or at least far […]

As someone who’s researched countless biographies, histories, and cultural analyses of rock and pop music over many years, and as a writer who’s contributed several of my own works to the same literature, I feel qualified to comment on some recurring clichés and unquestioned assumptions which characterize music criticism and music appreciation.  I like listening […]

One of the great things about the cinematic art, perhaps the greatest thing, is its popular appeal. You don’t have to understand the language of film to appreciate individual films; you don’t have to be a film geek to get geeky over your favorite actors, scenes, or filmed subjects. There are no doubt plenty of […]

This week marks the 58th anniversary of Time magazine’s famous cover story, “Is God Dead?” Today, as newspapers and magazines struggle for readership and relevance, it’s hard to imagine how a weekly print journal could much affect popular sentiment, but in April 1966 Time was virtually an arbiter of middlebrow American opinion and morals.   […]

Bob Marley was once asked if he thought any national authority would ever legalize marijuana.  “I don’t know if this government will,” the reggae superstar reflected, “but I know Christ’s government will.”  If Bob’s ghost was to visit Canada today, where cannabis has been officially sanctioned since 2018 and weed retailers have proliferated like Starbucks, […]

After a few rejections by traditional publishers, I elected to make my short manuscript of Dumbing Down Dissent available on the print-on-demand platform of CreateSpace, owned by Amazon, in 2011.  Since the publishing industry was and is being transformed by the internet, it seemed an option worth pursuing:  rather than invest in producing hundreds of physical […]

For all the tributes lately paid to the American television producer Norman Lear, who died on December 5 at the age of 101, I still recall the dissenting opinions offered by Mad magazine in its parodies of Lear’s shows All In the Family (“Gall In the Family Fare”) and Maude (“Bawde”) during their 1970s heyday. […]

In 1986 I was nineteen and, though still residing with my parents, was spending a lot of time with friends who’d moved in to their own places. Young people in those years were entitled to regular government cheques just for being out of work, even if they’d never had a job to begin with – […]

This is that magical time of year when commentators are often heard complaining about putting the Christ back in Christmas, and, more stridently, that there is currently a “war” being waged against the holiday, directed by politically correct and aggressively secular governments. Apparently, in this formulation, the State is determined to negate the particular religious […]

The satirical news site The Onion once ran a piece titled “Area Man Likes to Think of Own Past as ‘Sordid.'” “The low point probably came when I woke up on the couch at my friend’s apartment with my coat over me as a blanket,” the article quoted.  “I could barely even remember what had happened […]