The Cars were one of the few bands who arrived fully, 100% formed on their first album. The Cars was so confident, perfectly constructed, and jammed with iconic songs that I wrote that it might as well have been called "The Cars Greatest Hits" in my book 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute. I thought I was mildly clever for that. Except, I wasn't the first person to make that observation (it was something the band themselves often said), as I learned while reading Bill Janovitz's much better book, The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told.
While many have accused Jaws of wrecking the serious "New Cinema" of the seventies, many others have celebrated it as the movie that rescued the decade from relentless downbeat antihero drabness. They're both pretty right, though you can hardly say Jaws made cinema dumber, what with its superb script, directing, and acting. The film was so story, dialog, and character conscious that barely anyone noticed or cared that the shark looked like a giant rubber pool toy.
This year marks the historic forty-first anniversary of This Is Spinal Tap, and as everyone knows, the forty-first anniversary is always the most special. So what are we getting from team Spinal Tap this milestone year? What aren't we getting is more like it![?] There will be a new Spinal Tap movie, a 4K Criterion reissue of an old Spinal Tap movie, a new Spinal Tap album, a reissue of an old Spinal Tap album, and a reissue of another old Spinal Tap album. That's a lot of Spinal Tap!
The old line is that the fifties ended when Buddy Holly died, Elvis was drafted, Little Richard found Jesus, and Chuck Berry went to jail. Once The Beatles landed, there was nothing left for rock and roll's original guard but Vegas, the oldie's circuit, or in Chuck's case, a late career number one hit with an awful song about his penis.
The Cranberries were probably the smoothest band to get swept along in the post-grunge alternative tide of 1993, so they naturally became one of the most successful. In a year with several great debut albums (opening salvos from Liz Phair, Belly, Grant Lee Buffalo, Björk...), Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? was a nice one, going 5x platinum on the strength of its Cocteau Twins-lite love songs.
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