Critic's Corner
Car Seat Headrest, The Scholars
Popular music seems to be continuously wavering between favoring longer, meandering songs (think Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin) to favoring 2-minute highly-structured poppy cuts (think ’50s and ’60s classics or pop stars like Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus). The former has always seemed a little counterintuitive to me, as somebody who grew up with Taylor Swift as a streaming standard. Pop, for my generation, has mostly been an easy-listing, hyper-engaging genre. But as my guitar teacher has noticed, the pop songs that his students are asking to learn have recently been getting longer and longer.
The popularity of emotional ballads isn’t new, but the trend of longer pop songs definitely is. People always complain about my generation’s seven-second attention span, which may be true, but radio trends …
Bouquets and Brickbats
Brickbat
To US Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Steve Daines of Montana for adding a mandate to President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” that would force the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to sell off roughly 3 million acres of public land by 2030. An earlier version of the BBB included a smaller selloff proposal that would have liquidated nearly 500,000 acres of public land in Nevada and Utah. That proposal was nixed in the House by a bipartisan group of Representatives including New Mexico Democrat Gabe Vasquez and Montana Republican Ryan Zinke — who served as Interior Secretary during Trump’s first term.
The new land sale proposal was announced by Lee, as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The plan would affect public lands in 11 states — Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, …
The Front Porch
Every Fourth of July, after consuming my fair share of apple pie and ice cream, I enjoy setting off fireworks with my children on the hill behind our house. There are golden sparklers and red-white-and-blue rockets mixed in with some more menacing-looking items that go boom — which did an excellent job of scaring the little ones in their younger days. Sky rockets in flight, loud noises, a feeling of some mild danger contained within a curtain of safety forged in partnership with my wife, who still worries about someone’s hand getting blown off… these are the elements of a family ritual that can only be fully appreciated by people who know what the absence of family and protection can feel like. Every Fourth of July we are grateful for one another, and to live in a county where recreational munitions are available for purchase along most roadsides.
After trudging down the hill to the …
