Page 10 - Current Rock News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Darlene Love performs at a Christmas tree lighting in New York City, 2010. (Andy Kropa/Getty Images) Count on an experienced performer like Darlene Love to save the hits for the end. That's precisely what she does in her 1998 memoir My Name Is Love (buy now), which concludes with a list of the major songs she's performed on: "More hits than Elvis and the Beatles combined," she notes, imagining the narration over an infomercial about her life. Just the highlights include "Chain Gang" (Sam Cooke, 1959), "He's a Rebel" (credited to the Crystals, 1962), "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" (Bob B. ...

You don't expect to get a lot of laughs from a book with a title like This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's Kid A and the Beginning of the 21st Century (buy now). I had a literal LOL moment early on, though, when author Steven Hyden asked rhetorically, "Is it possible that I take Kid A way too seriously?" There is, of course, virtually zero chance that anyone who would even contemplate cracking a book about the music of the 2000s would accuse any critic of taking any Radiohead album, especially that one, too seriously. Both Pitchfork and Rolling Stone named Kid A (2000) the greatest album of...

Michelangelo Matos's 'Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year.' (Jay Gabler/MPR) Michaelangelo Matos and I are almost exactly the same age, and we both grew up in Minnesota, but his childhood was privileged in a way mine wasn't: in 1984, he had a cassette deck that could record straight off the radio. Until I finally got a boom box in '87, I was consigned to holding our tape player up to the TV if I wanted to record the theme to Knight Rider or In the summer of '84, Matos writes in his new book Can't Slow Down (buy now), he hit record and decided to keep the t...