The legendary soul singer returns to secular soul this fall – he is recording an album in Memphis with Willie Mitchell: “I Can’t Stop” finds Al Green repeating history. He has again teamed with legendary production mate Willie Mitchell, and the album is being recorded at the pair’s old stomping …

Voting is a form of investing in the system – the more people invest in the system the more their needs will be attended to. If more poor and young people voted, the political landscape would look a lot different. Also, by investing in the system, one feels a sense …

Could you function without email? I hate spam as much as anyone but it takes me only a very small porton of my time and attention to delete it – I don’t even have to open 95% of it to know what it is and that I don’t want/need to …

Rob Walker has an interesting take on file sharing in the NY Times Magazine. First, he dismisses the notion that file sharing represents the first step on a slippery slope toward the degradation of capitalism: For that to be the case, a couple of underlying assumptions must be true. One …

Another spectacular, amazing, eye-opening career retrospective from James Brown, the man with a shitload of nicknames: “Soul Brother Number One,” “the Godfather of Soul,” “the Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” “Mr. Dynamite,” and every one of them earned in 50, yes I said 50 years in showbiz. All the …

On his fence-mending tour of the nation last week Attorney General John Ashcroft said librarians were “hysterical” about the U.S.A. Patriot Act. PW Daily reports: During one speech, he said, “Do we at the Justice Department really care what you are reading? No. The law enforcement community has no interest …

Brian Holland (born February 15, 1941), Lamont Dozier (born June 16, 1941) and Edward Holland (born Oct 30, 1939) – all from Detroit – were the most successful songwriter/producers of the ’60s. Their run with Motown from ’61 to ’67 generated 13 No. 1 hits for the Marvelettes (“Please Mr. …

Kevin Ayers’ The Confessions of Dr. Dream is a lost classic, a spunky amalgam of pop and rock styles (recorded at Air in ’74) filtered through Ayers’ avant-sensibility and sung in his startling bass, sounds remarkably modern even today. “Day By Day” opens the album funkily, with Hine on clavinet …

Joy Division was formed in the fall of 1976 in response to the first Sex Pistols appearance in Manchester. Guitarist Bernard Dicken (later Albrecht, then Sumner) met bassist Peter Hook at the show and formed the Stiff Kittens with Ian Curtis on vocals. Soon they were called Warsaw and made …

Formed in 1981, Belgian industrial group Front 242 helped pioneer aggressive electronic “body” music throughout ’80s with Skinny Puppy and Ministry. Front 242 produced two of the genre’s most important albums (Front By Front, Tyranny For You) and arguably, the genre’s most important single, “Headhunter.” The machine-only Front 242 sound …