Sam Belkin graduated with a BFA from the Clive Davis Dept. of Recorded Music at NYU. He is an active follower and critic of the entertainment industry, and plays regularly with his NYC rock band Nobody Can Dance. Contact Sam here.
See Part 1 here
Continued from Part 2
......Anthony Kiedis’s lyrical content is the basis for much of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ criticisms. He’s the kind of lyricist whose idea of a refrain is...
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...Like many of the original New York punk artists, some members of RHCP had serious heroin addictions. Anthony Kiedis has struggled with drug abuse for almost his whole life, and heroin addiction ended up being fatal...
The Red Hot Chili Peppers became notorious in LA after the first three minutes of their first show in 1983, before they had even written a complete song. The band was billed as Tony Flow and The Miraculously Majestic Masters...
There’s nothing bad about The Natural History’s 2003 album Beat Beat Heartbeat. There’s just nothing particularly great about it either.
Despite positive reviews that congratulate the band on their Britpop panache, this album is...
"Pieholden Suite" by Wilco, Summerteeth This is one of the slower songs on the album and in terms of songwriting could have been on Pet Sounds, right next to “Don’t Cry (Put Your Head On...
Researching the great creative minds of the modern world, one might tend to equate Genius with a certain type of Madness. He or she could point to the sociopathic reclusiveness of J.D. Salinger or the self-mutilating tendencies of...
When I was younger I knew who James Caan was. He was the villain from Bulletproof, of course, starring Adam Sandler and Damon Wayans—a movie I thought was hilarious and risqué, right before I hit puberty.As...
It is important to remember that this is not just any ol’ rock n’ roll record, but that it draws from centuries of musical tradition, and that it is an artistic construction of an alternative reality rather than...
The song that really hooked me onto the Temptations was “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World is Today).” I can remember first hearing the soft, ominous creep of the bass line, then a bizarre...
I’m ashamed I once took for granted that the wacky Beatle’s drum parts were simple, moronic, and possibly redone in the studio by a dissatisfied Paul McCartney. To me it seemed that Ringo did essentially the...