Articles by Michael Anderson

Last night I was watching former Tea Party-backed Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell walk out on the Piers Morgan CNN interview show, and later was reading a series of discussions on an internet game forum in which the two same individuals take opposing views to one another in each thread – and opposing views to themselves from thread to thread, uniting only to trash someone else in a third thread … which required them to compromise their own views from before. The cantankerous political discourse of the last two decades, characterized here as ‘The Politics of No’ can be easily summed…

The depth and breadth of music featured on Saturday Night Live in its first decade is stunning – from Frank Zappa to Miles Davis to Gil Scott Heron and many more, there was seemingly no boundary the show wouldn’t cross. They proved that for sure in May of 1978 when they featured their first extraterrestrial artist – Sun Ra! Jazz musicians are now viewed as being anti-technology, but that wasn’t always so – Quincy Jones recorded the first synthesizer in 1964, Pat Metheny was a pioneer of guitar synthesizers, and in 1956 Sun Ra recorded the first electronic piano recording….

The prevailing pop music form these days seems to be a combination of a singer and rapper, with randomly free-flowing male rap verse and largely disconnected melodious warbling from a female songbird like Rihanna. It has become such a formula that for Katy Perry’s E.T. music video Kanye West was brought in to ramble on top of the track in order to give it ‘cred’ or something. It is as though the big industry execs are afraid to let either genre stand on its own – pop-rappers and pop-singers are being melded as they fear losing the cross-over appeal of…

When ‘Born this way’ came out it was a pretty clear copy & paste of Madonna’s Express Yourself, as I discussed here. No one denies that, not even the artists – they just say that ‘everything is cool’. Of course, Madonna herself has been the subject of many lawsuits in the other direction … but more on that later. Now Lady Gaga is in trouble again, this time accused of stealing ‘Judas’ from a similarly-titled ‘Juda’. You can read some details here, but I won’t go into it anymore right now. What I thought would be more interesting is to…

The first record I bought based on my own taste was Rubberband Man by the Spinners, and have always had a penchant for funky music – but in the late 70’s got swept away from funk in the anti-disco sentiment. So I missed out on the grandmaster of funk, George Clinton, and his Parliament and Funkadelic groups until much later. Recently I was cruising my iTunes Library for recordings celebrating anniversaries this year and came across the classic Parliament recording Mothership Connection, and it has been dominating my iPod for the last few days! George Clinton is one of the…