Todd Gitlin on Postmodernism

Todd Gitlin has occasionally been skeptical about postmodernism, but in explaining what it is, offers some useful insights. Essentially he argues, correctly in my estimation, against ahistoricismm ("Postmodernism defined, at last!", Utne Reader, July/August 1989, p. 52)

One context for theories of postmodernism is the concept of the post-industrial society, with its notion of a shift to an information economy. The idea of this is that societies would place new pressures and opportunities on the workers, allowing them a greater surplus wealth and more diverse statuses than previously. Arguably, as a result of size, mobility, educational level and widely differing life experiences of their populations, postindustrial societies have relatively various, tolerant and heterogeneous cultures, or, perhaps, subcultures. It has, in addition, been argued that this trend is likely to continue, even though large scale systems may show periodic outbreaks of social conflict and strain. New subcultures and lifestyles will likely continue to develop to meet rapidly changing needs and problems. It is likely that there will be greater emphasis on balancing societal needs with the concern for individual self-fulfillment.

Gitlin suggests that post-industrial society may be most marked by a new, somewhat initially dislocated lifestyle and attitude (what he calls "postmodernism"). Quoting from a leading European theorist, Gitlin states "One listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo, and "retro" clothes in Hong Kong. However, it goes beyond the personal or superficial into broader ranges. Gitlin sees this change as being, ultimately, "a way of seeing, a view of the human spirit and an attitude toward politics as well as culture. It has precedents, but in its reach it is the creature of our recent social and political moment. In style, more than style is at stake. Gitlin then summarizes six theories which each emphasize a different aspect of postindustrial style:

1. The global shopping center -- global capitalism accounts for an ideology which stresses high consumption, ceaseless transformation of style, and an emphasis on surface, packaging, and reproducibility. Even "lifestyles' become commodities to be marketed. Thus, the modern consumer is encouraged to live in the immediate present garnished by nostalgia binges.

2. The scientific method -- However, the advance of science has been accelerating for centuries, yet postindustrial style is no more than two decades old.

3. the television generation -- For those who grew up watching TV and who therefore now simply take it for granted, TV has had a powerful impact on the style and content of the flow of information

4. American eclecticism -- Quotes the essayist Randolph Bourne (1916) "There is no distinctively American culture. It is apparently our lot to be a federation of cultures." Alexis de Tocqueville described American culture 150 years ago as a "marketplace jamboree with amazing diversity striving for recognition", implying that no style, no subject is intrinsically superior to any other.

5. The post-'60s syndrome -- the 60's exploded our faith in progress, which underlay the classical faith in linear order and moral clarity. Old verities crumbled, but new ones have not settled in. Self regarding irony and blankness are ways of staving off the anxieties, rages, terrors and hungers that have been kicked up but cannot find resolution.

6. The yuppie factor -- Such currents run especially deep among people born in the 1950's and 1960's. Pomo as "yuppie outlook", reflecting an experience that takes for granted not only television, but suburbs, shopping malls, recreational (but not religious or transcendent) drugs, and the towering abstraction of money. To grow up post 1960's is to experience everything as having apparently been done. Therefore, culture is a process of recycling; everything is juxtaposed because nothing matters.

Gitlin's conclusion: Postmodernism which is disdainful of history turns out to be all too embedded in it. Because such a variety of forces have funneled together to nourish pomo, it's likely that the tendency will be with us for some time to come.

However, he argues for developing a workable political viewpoint for the postindustrial era, one protective of the environment, and protective of the individual and the social group from domination by larger groups. He last states "The ideal toward which politics strives is conversation -- and conversation requires respect for the other. The fundamental value is that the conversation continue toward the global culture." (Gitlin, Utne Reader 7/8-89: 52-61)

Rem Koolhaas and the Seattle Public Library

This is an interior and exterior shot of the new Seattle Public Library, which was designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, whose highly imaginative work is said to be is as much about ideas as it is buildings, and which opened in 2004. As one can see, it is magnificent. That the people of Seattle would invest in such a structure says much about them and about how much libraries are valued by them.

A while back, I picked up Koolhaas's book Contact, and started reading from it. I found it to be dense, brilliant, and dedicated to both the future, and the imagination. Like sociologists in the field, Koolhaas is preoccupied with how our environments shape us, and with how these environments get transformed. As a builder/creator, though, he occupies a unique position and from here, can experiment with bringing about changes in environments, such as with the Seattle project; and the success of this project can transform our understanding of libraries, and thus our relationship with knowledge and ideas.

Some more Koolhaas links here

Review of The Goddess and the Bull

From the online Marxist journal Political Affairs.Net comes a review by Thomas Riggins of a very ambitious book in archaeology.

An excerpt:

A new book on archaeology makes the claim that "our understanding of our own origins was changed forever" by a very significant dig in Turkey. Michael Balter, author of "The Goddess and the Bull: An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization," is a correspondent for the journal "Science." His book is a semi-official "biography" of an archaeological dig in Turkey. But is more than just that. It is three books in one – a history of the dig and the personalities of the archaeologists and other scientists who have conducted it, a history of archaeological theory over the last forty or so years, and finally, not least, a discussion of what the dig tells us about our past. . . there was a "revolution" in archaeological theory, at least in the English speaking world, and a large part of Balter’s book is dedicated to discussing it.

Hodder discovered that his research on the problem of a particular spatial distribution of archaeological findings could be explained by mutually exclusive interpretations of the data. He asked himself how could "archaeologists be certain that their interpretations of the archaeological record were correct" if even the scientific method led to equifinality. In stead of realizing that archaeologists can’t ever be certain of their interpretations because of the nature of their data, Hodder ended up creating an alternative paradigm to replace the "New Archaeology." Influenced by "ethnoarchaeology" – which attempts to read back into past cultures, such as those of the Neolithic, the culture traits of contemporary "primitive" peoples, and by contemporary anthropologists and some "postmodern" thinkers, he developed what has become known as "post-processual" archaeology (as opposed to "processual" another name for the "New" archaeology). Hodder correctly noted that material culture "is meaningfully constituted" and, as Balter puts it, the artifacts that archeologists find "were once active elements in the living symbolic world of ancient peoples" (a fact well known to Childe). These symbols were not passive reflections of culture put played, as Hodder wrote ("Symbols in Action" 1982) "an active part in forming and giving meaning to social behavior." The problem is not that Hodder is wrong, but that post-processualism doesn’t seem to recognize that we can never know exactly what those symbols meant to past Neolithic peoples nor how they functioned in their social behavior. The best we can do, as Marxism suggests, is try to deduce from the remains of the material culture what Neolithic life may have been like.

What this seems to be indicating is that culture - and our knowledge of it - cannot be separated from the act of interpretation. This is something we have long realized in sociology. I've long been deeply interested in the field of archaeology, and see its findings as compatible with that of my field of sociology. The conceptualization of material and non-material culture seems to be the place where the two fit together.

Ralph Meatyard, Mythologizer of the Mundane

Ralph Meatyard was a great photographer, one who often traded in bizarre images. He lived and died in Kentucky in 1972. I remember visiting Kentucky a year later, and realizing it was a place of dark corners and hidden mysteries. Meatyard was a mythologizer of the mundane, who reflected some of these mysteries. He liked photographing masked subjects. His images were complex signifiers, loaded with meaning.

Here is a particular favorite image, from a series called Romance.

The Problematics of Taste

My wife and I love the show Freaks and Geeks We own the DVD of its entire season, and watch it regularly.

One of the things one can deeply appreciate about this show is that it accurately illustrates the social facts of the problematics of taste within its teen setting. The show takes place in a high school in 1980, and as it turns out, I was in high school from 75-79. At the time, you were pretty heavily judged by your peers on the basis of such things as whether or not you did drugs and if so, how much and what sorts (as well as how well you handled yourself while on them) and related to this, what sort of music you listened to. Freaks and Geeks illustrates this, such as through the main character of Lindsay, a brainy "good girl" who is nevertheless drawn to the "bad" kids, i.e., the freaks. There was also probably less overt racism than in the mid 60s and earlier, but it was (and is) still an influence on how you went about relating to others. Anyway, these things come to mind as I reflect both on the show’s characters as well as on my time as a more or less typical, and sometimes aimless, high school kid in the Carter era, that is typical and relatively aimless by the era’s standards. Although the sexual revolution (pre-AIDS carefree times) was probably at, or just reaching its peak, not everyone was necessarily scoring all the time (particularly those like myself in a single gender Catholic high school, though as Freaks and Geeks depicts public high school life, this was probably the case in such coeducational settings, as well). So, the country's political and economic future was beginning to look shakier and shakier, Carter (now playing peacemaker) was turning further to the right and looking feebler in the process, drugging could result in various sorts of chaos, sex was available in varying degrees, but, there was always Pop Culture - the question being which elements to partake in and identify with.

As I said, one was (and probably always has been) judged by whether one follows one's own idiosyncratic path or goes along with the crowd. In the seventies, for white boys like me, and like Freaks and Geeks music freak/drum enthusiast, Nick, culture came down to this basic dichotomy: rock vs. disco/top 40 and then mainstream rock vs. punk. I realize now that I probably wasted many hours of my life listening to really crappy 2nd and 3rd rate music in the form of concept albums, double live albums, and by even decent musicians, all sorts of crappy filler and gimmickry. Even then, I realized how dull much of it was but I listened, dutifully, while hanging out with friends and acquaintances or even while alone in my room, listening to rock stations on the FM dial. For example - listening to Deep Purple Live in Japan (actually, not a bad record) at a dorm party during a college visit with a buddy. In this example, it's not necessarily that it was a bad piece of music, and in fact, it was probably designed for the use to which my friends and I put it, but that it's excessive and repetitious and encouraged lesser talents to rock out in a totally self-indulgent manner.

There would also be times in someone's car, where someone in the front seat would be flipping the dial around and pass through some funky black/dance oriented station and it would be like inhaling pure oxygen. The dial flipper would then keep going until he landed on some familiar FM rock (Doobie Brothers, Lynyrd Skynrd, Crosby Stills and Nash, Aerosmith, etc.) and that's what we'd listen to. Similarly, I might sometimes be within proximity of an AM radio (back when AM stations still mostly played music) and hear some silly and very catchy top 40 song which I might privately enjoy but publicly disavow. Calling for it to play was generally not worth the hassles.

Finally, punk rock came along and changed everything. But that's another story. Interestingly, the theme song for Freaks and Geeks is Joan Jett’s punkish song "Bad Reputation". It seems as though the show’s creator Jude Apatow was looking for a way to move away from 70s culture and found this way in a song.

Notes on Culture

The social world consists of individuals who communicate with symbols and who come to share perspectives more or less in common. For example, as a member of a western culture, one knows that field mice are not considered "food." One knows the rules which regulate incest or pedophilia. One knows that cannibalism or headhunting would be considered immoral and taboo.

Individuals in society may lack geographic unity, but are held together primarily by this communication. For example, the readers of a particular magazine, or participants on on-line forums create a kind of social world based on shared perspectives and, to a degree, the communication of these perspectives. Based then on identity categories, such as "teens," "the elderly," "Asian-Americans," etc., subcultures form and individuals maintain attachments to them and are influenced by them. Individuals within the boundaries of subcultural identifications can engage in acts of negotiation, both within and across such boundaries, as they attempt to live and act meaningfully in correspondance to the culture's various norms.

Corresponding to such processes, we have what we conceptualize as culture. Culture is a key part of the evolution of society and from a functionalist perspective, provides societal maintenance functions - i.e., the idea that society continues because of shared culture.

Summing up: Culture -
*culture = shared perspective (a shared definition of reality)
*culture = the generalized other (this comes from G.H. Mead, and refers to how we learn, generally when we are young, general rules for living in society)
*culture arises in and through symbolic interaction; to observe this, observe kids at play.
*is central quality in any society
*important social object
*guides individual thinking and self-control
*maintains society
*is ever changing

The empirical challenge is to find instances of these features in real world cases and to study them in detail.

My workplace - Lehman College

This is Lehman College in the Bronx. These are some of my favorite views of the campus.

Some thoughts on the Clash and political punk

Starting in high school in the late 70s, I discovered punk, and The Clash quickly became one of my favorite bands. Along with the Jam's This is the Modern World, the Clash's 1st LP The Clash (the American version, which was all that was initially available to us Yanks; I now own both) had a profound influence on me, and I recall listening to these records over and over again.

Through the Clash and Joe Strummer, through song lines like "the truth is only known by guttersnipes" or through sarcasm about "career opportunities...the ones that never knock," and also through the very Hegelian/Marxian idea of a "clash of opposites," I discovered a kind of critical social analysis, at a time and in a way that made perfect sense to my teenage sensibilities, which has been with me to this day and which sustained me through various future endeavors. In that sense, the Clash were right up there for me as offering the same kind of inspiration that cultural icons like Woody Guthrie, Charlie Parker, The Weavers, Bob Dylan, and others offered to earlier generations.

The first Clash album, The Clash, is without question for me one of the greatest rock albums ever. Along with the much more cynical Sex Pistols, the idealistic Clash helped to define 70s punk, British division, and in doing so, sustained a global influence. They also helped popularize reggae and dub. And they did it all with a great sense of style. Songs (or perhaps I should say three chord musical riots) like Clash City Rockers (from the American version), Garageland, Janie Jones, Career Opportunities, White Riot and I'm So Bored With the U.S.A., in all of their raw sounding glory, are not just songs, but anthems; as anthems, they are songs of praise and glory toward the spirit of punk, a DIY spirit meant to change the world. They are statements of a condition of seeing the world as a really messed up place but of also seeing how it could be made better. In fact, there is a quote on the cover of the book Punk (1978) by Isabelle Ancombe and Dike Blair which states "it's about doing something and getting off your ass saying something seeing what a shitty place this is and what a jam place it could be" and this quote sums up everything I like about the social critiques of punk, a kind of praxis philosophy embodied by Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Terry Chimes and Topper Headon, and later by groups like the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, MDC, Minutemen, Tom Robinson Band, Bikini Kill, and even the likes of Green Day, who speak directly to kids today, about such issues as war, peace and freedom.

99 cents shops

I currently live in Jersey City, a multiethnic and largely working class city in New Jersey. All throughout Jersey City, one can find significant numbers of "99 cent" shops, such as 99 Cent Dreams, on Kennedy Blvd. in Journal Square (there is also one of these in the Tremont section of the Bronx). Essentially, 99 cent shops are general stores that sell general merchandise, such as food, beverages, health and beauty aids (such as Crest toothpaste from Nairobi), stationary, housewares, toys, etc. for $0.99, more or less. While some of the merchandise is quite decent, a lot of it is junky and/or an obscure brand (generic cereals with names like Fruity-Os and Cocoa Crunchies); you get what you pay for, after all.

In Jersey City, most of the managers and employees of the city's 99 cents shops are members of ethnic minority communities, such as Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, and Hispanics. I am assuming that positions at such places pay around, or perhaps even below, a minimum wage.

If stores like Saks and Bloomingdales represent a kind of elite shopping stratum, and Sears, Target and JC Penny represent a middle stratum, and if even Wal*Mart and K-Mart (the Marts) are lower (middle) class/lowbrow, then the 99 cents store occupies its own lower class niche, representing the consumption needs of (primarily) low income inner city dwellers.

Nevertheless, I have come to develop a begrudging respect for the 99 cent store. I shop in them. And sometimes I just go in to browse. I find them no less fascinating a social space than shopping malls, and I find the products that they sell to be like little case studies of global capitalism. And like most people, I also enjoy getting a bargain.

On another note, I love shopping in ethnic food shops, of which there are also many in Jersey City, buying, for instance, meats, breads and cheeses in local Italian delis (salumerias), and Asian rice noodles, seedless dates, pita breads, bags of couscous, and Indian delicacies in the various ethnic foodshops in this town. I'm going to miss these when we move to Beacon, NY next month.

On Celebrity

This is an updated and edited version of a piece I had published in the zine Ben Is Dead originally written in 1998 and entitled, at the time, VARIOUS THOUGHTS ON THE ROLE OF CELEBRITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE


Celebrities serve a variety of functions in everyday life. They can be love objects, lust objects, hate objects, objects of ridicule, objects to be laughed at rather than with, and can signify as political icons, religious icons, hipster extraordinaires, or objects of a cult of personality. When they serve not so much as objects of mass consumption but rather as personally selected icons and as sources of idiosyncratic inspiration, they do so on a smaller and more intimate scale than that used to measure fame. As the idea of a scale used to measure celebrity success indicates, there are worlds of difference between cult and mass stardom. It is often the case, then, that cult stardom represents something like an avante-garde of fame, and that cult stars have the impact of lasting importance, in contrast to the hype strewn success of the more major stars.

The point is that the very notion of celebrity, and its place in our lives, runs deep. Sometimes when we are asleep, we have strange dreams about celebrities; and sometimes we dream that we ourselves are celebrities. Celebritydom is thus deep in our unconsciousness. But one context in which the unconscious fixation with celebrity comes to the surface is in the routine celebrity encounter, a moment in which reality imitates dream. For ordinary folks, such events, when they happen, take on a kind of deep significance. On occasion, as in the encounter between Howard Hughes and Melvin Dummar and its aftermath (celebrated in Jonathan Demme's film Melvin and Howard), a celebrity encounter can itself be celebrity conferring on the ordinary participant to the encounter.

We use celebrities to mark both space and time. I used to live in Boston, where the Revolutionary War heroes are memorialized in various parts of the city. Paul Revere is perhaps the biggest icon - his house is a main tourist stop, there are statues and paintings devoted to him, and there are actors who depict him in costume as part of the annual historical pageants. Sam Adams is a bit less sacred, having had his image appropriated by the Sam Adams Brewery, but is nontheless seen as a Bostonian, and a rather beloved one at that. Meanwhile, informed by Spin magazine, I learned that one of the buildings a few blocks from where I used to live was where Aerosmith used to live. Finally, in addition to mythologizing its revolutionaries (as well as its more colorful gangsters and politicos), Boston also mythologizes its Red Sox. Even Bill Buckner, who was run out of town with death threats after his blunder in the 1986 World Series, is remembered in great anecdotal detail.

Some celebrities seem only to be famous for being famous. I always wondered why they kept reappearing on game shows, TV talk shows or Love Boat episodes, since they seemed to display no noticeable talents whatsoever. Of course, the vacuity of such persons is fascinatingly post-modern.

Some celebrities are famous for their reclusiveness, which seems a bit ironic. Greta Garbo was the icon of this stance. So, too, is JD Salinger, hero of disaffected and literate high schoolers everywhere. The iconography of the reclusive celebrity type is such that stories have been published and filmed about the quest to meet such recluses.

John Lennon fell into a certain sort of reclusivity in the sense that he gave up on the things which had become part of his persona for the sake of some tranquility. Unlike most other millionaire rockstars, however, he avoided seclusion in a remote mansion; instead, he more or less just blended in with the crowd like the city fixture he had become and remained accessible.
But, the normative high level celebrity pattern seems instead to be more cyclical, involving roller coaster like highs and lows, with periods of cooling out. Part of this is market-driven, with fickle audiences continuously turning their attentions to the latest product. And partly, it is driven by celebrity need itself, and by a deep ambivalence about being famous. One could describe a dialectic, by which the audience is initially created through a seductive promise of mutual love and devotion. As the audience grows ever more demanding, and as it is both taken for granted by the established star and its coterie of advisors and seduced by up and comers, the star, torn between work and play, responsibility and hedonism, becomes gradually exhausted and then reaches a crash point. This provides a backdrop for the later triumphant come-back. There are exceptions to this pattern, just like there are exceptions to corporate greed, but it seems to be the established pattern.

One basis for celebrity seems to be the dichotomy of nobodies vs. somebodies: status-mindedness and status seeking are embedded way deep in our consciousness. Every regime, be it the movie biz, the music biz, the arts world, sports, politics, religion, and every high school on the planet, seems to have its high rankers, its promising talented types, its suck ups, its rebels, its weirdos, its fools, and its nobodies. Celebrity seems like an expression of this principle, only magnified.

The overlap between politics and show-biz should thus not come as any great surprise. From Reagan through Redgrave, celebrities have long used their fame as soap-boxes for pursuing pet projects, be it gun ownership or gay rights, anti-communism or support for the PLO, or have shown a great willingness to associate themselves, for a whole host of reasons, with holders of vast economic and political power; one great example is Grace Kelly, who went from stunningly beautiful upper class Philadelphia debutante to Hollywood star to European royalty, where she and her disturbed offspring were then brought down several notches as continuous tabloid fodder aimed at lumpenproletariat housewives (a social class about whom the various entertainment industries, particularly Hollywood, remain deeply confused). Today's Hollywood is filled with power seekers, particularly those operating under the guise of being known for supporting a key, and often chic, cause, be it Barbra Streisand's support for women's empowerment, Richard Gere's promotion of the Dalai Lama, or Mary Tyler Moore's hatred of animal experimentation. Politicians, likewise, have learned to imitate Hollywood celebrities as they seek to reach the masses by projecting images which are partially authentic and partially manufactured. Occasionally, politics can be used as the basis for great art - The Clash's Sandinista, Bikini Kill's first EP, Godard's Weekend, Tim Robbin's Bob Roberts, Woody Guthrie's leftist folk anthems, The Mekons' Fear and Whiskey, The Dead Kennedy's Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables,

Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Diego Rivera's Marxist murals, Michelle Shocked's Short Sharp Shocked all come to mind. (I show my class leveling, leftist-populist biases in these examples.) However, much of the more explicitly political art is crudely obvious and much less effective than it attempts, or pretends, to be. There is, perhaps, a fine line between attempting to inspire or to indoctrinate a mass audience.

The question of celebrities and politics raises interesting questions about the ownership of fame. Who does the celebrity belong to? If fame comes from the masses, does it belong, in a sense, to them? Or is this mostly a free enterprise relationship in which the celebrity (or his/her corporate sponsors) can own his/her own persona and can thus do whatever with it (and with the many privileges it accrues)?


Ultimately, it seems, celebrities are mirrors of the culture that produces and consumes them. They are of, though not necessarily for, the people. They serve artistic and entertainment functions, but also social and political functions of various sorts. Famous individuals may rise and fall, but the idea of celebrity is pretty well fixed in our minds and in our culture. In fact, it seems like the idea of fame itself is likely to become ever more famous as an accompaniment to global capitalism and global pop culture.

My First Blog - About Me

I was born and raised in gritty, industrial Jersey City, New Jersey. After studying sociology and urban studies at Saint Peter's College, where I graduated in 1985, I served as a tenant and community organizer in the Bronx, with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC). I then studied at the University of Wisconsin (M.A.- 1990) and Boston University(Ph.D.- 1999) where I specialized in ethnomethodology, social constructionism, and social problems theory. My dissertation was titled "The Creation and Transformation of Social Problems: Social Constructionism and Social Problems Theory." It was a theoretical study of the foundations of the social constructionist perspective. One of my findings was that that there are various compatibilities among social constructionism, socialproblems theory and the sociology of knowledge. The relativism of social constructionism has shaped social problems theory, and the varying responses to relativism has influenced the course of theorizing within social constructionism.

I started teaching in 1990, and I have taught at Boston University, Curry College, Wheelock College, St. Peters College, New Jersey City University, St. Johns University and Lehman College - CUNY. I have also worked on various research projects, and was briefly employed on a full time basis with the Archdiocese of New York, doing applied sociological analyses, primarily on Catholic parishes. I have been at Lehman since early 2002, where I began by teaching a course on Sociological Analysis, as an adjunct assistant professor with the Sociology Department. In 2004, I was been hired as a full-time member of the department. My other courses there include Social Problems, Political Sociology, and Sociology of Culture.

I have had a number of conference papers, mostly on theoretical topics, such as on symbolic interactionism and phenomenology, and have published book reviews, as well as a case study of some interactional patterns. My academic areas of interest now continue to be largely theoretical and include film and mass media, social constructionism, culture, and politics. I was also involved in planning a hip-hop conference for Lehman which occurred in the fall of 2005. Most recently, I have presented a research paper on political punk at this year's meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society, and plan to follow up on that presentation with some additional research. I have also done research on subcultures, and on political rhetoric and Woody Guthrie.

From an early age, I became a fan of popular music. At first when I was very young in the mid 1960s, I liked the music of Mitch Miller, Henry Mancini, Trini Lopez and Peter Paul and Mary. Later, I was transformed into a fan of rock, at least that in the form of late 60s psychedelic era pop - the Monkees, the Archies, the Beatles, the Turtles, the Cyrkle, the Mamas and Papas, the Association, etc. I can recall my older brother getting an Iron Butterfly record, but I didn't understand it. Later, growing up in the 70s, I went from listening to music on the top 40 and buying mostly singles (roughly 1970-75) to mainstream hard rock and buying more albums (75-77) and then having my musical consciousness ever altered by punk in 1977, buying albums as well as singles. I also made it my business to try to see live my favorite acts and have seen, thus far, among others: Paul McCartney, the Who, Ray Davies, Kiss, Queen, Aerosmith, Peter Frampton, the Tubes, Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Ramones, the Clash, U2, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, Feelies, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Guns and Roses, Metallica, Kronos Quartet, Redd Kross, Buzzcocks, Meat Puppets, Television, Matthew Sweet, Bad Brains, King Crimson, the New York Dolls, Guided By Voices, Yo La Tengo, the Clean, the DBs, Los Lobos, Steven Malkmus, Steve Forbert, Richard Thompson, Hot Tuna, Beck, Belle and Sebastian, the Indigo Girls, Marcia Ball, Pete Seeger, the Chieftans, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, among others. Mainly, I like stuff with originality, energy, passion, personality and integrity and I strongly dislike bland, cookie cutter product which has been created only to make money. While I mostly review and discuss pop music, I also will occasionally offer my thoughts on other related topics.

I have also reviewed music on Amazon, and will repost my reviews from there here; I hope to be published as a record reviewer at some point in the near future, which is something I did, briefly, as a college student.

My favorite genre is rock, and my top 10 performers are, probably, The Velvet Underground, The Kinks, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, The Fall, Yo La Tengo, The Ramones, The Who, and The Clean. All of these performers have, in my opinion, attained greatness, even though in some cases, some of their later efforts may have fallen short (e.g., the latter day Beach Boys).

A favorite subgenre is punk rock, particularly 1970s protopunk (e.g., NY Dolls, Television, Patti Smith, etc.), classic (1976-78) punk, and post-punk from 1979 and the 1980s (everything from PIL to Joy Division to Husker Du, Flipper, Black Flag and the Replacements). However, it would be very hard to narrow down to a single punk rock band and say that it was the best. There are simply too many to choose from.