Michael Pugliese
On 11/16/05, Mark Bennett <mab at straussandasher.com> wrote:
> The right-wing loons I can handle; it's the insipid music and
> background chatter that drives me mad. . .
The song snippets between stories on ATC can be quite good. Yesterday, I was pleased to hear the piano bits from a song by Sufjan Stevens sympathetic to John Wayne Gacy, the infamous mass murdering boy killer Clown.
<snip>
And Fugazi yesterday on All Thing Considered, too. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, a few days ago.
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I don't listen to ATC much, but when I do I generally hear some Dan Fogelberg-style acoustic guitar noodling introducing the stories. But even if the producers played Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and the MC5 they'd still manage to make it sound insipid. It's all just "atmosphere" and it sucks. They need to take some programming lessons from the VV's 2005 winner for "Best Music on an Economics and Politics Radio Show" . . .
On another note, in the current LRB Rick Pearlstein has a nice write-up of "Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon" by Mary Hershberger: "It's remarkable how many things that we think of as permanent features of American culture can be traced back to specific political operations by the Nixon White House." http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/perl01_.html