Category: Top 40 Over 40
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Top 40 Over 40.24: Zero Set
1982: I was 12 years old and listening to James Taylor.* Ouch. I could have been listening to an album that came out that year by Moebius, Plank, and Neumeier called Zero Set. That would have been a better outcome for all concerned. Conny Plank (above) would have been 42 when this came out, which qualifies…
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Top 40 Over 40.23: KRS-One Live at Cat’s Cradle
I saw KRS – One live a few months ago, and the musical assumptions of ageism took another body blow for sure. Aging musicians often lose the full power of their stage presence, and / or seem bitter or disillusioned or worn down by the passage of time, or lose the critical edge of their…
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Top 40 Over 40.22: Callaci & Sons reach The End of Night
Sometimes musicians I know tip their hand by commenting on the records they love. For years, Dennis Callaci has circled back to recommending Ornette Coleman’s 1966 album The Empty Foxhole. Ornette recorded the album with his son Denardo Coleman, then only 10 years old, on drums. Not considered a part of the great Ornette albums…
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Top 40 Over 40.22: Mahmoud Ahmed
Universities can be weird places to see shows, musical or otherwise. The setting can make it feel like whatever creative process put forward is subject for intellectual consideration from a distance, rather than communal participation. What’s on offer might be critiqued and dismissed, or fetishized as a deracinated trophy from a frequently subaltern culture that…
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Top 40 over 40.21: Gary Numan live at Moogfest
The first New Wave / Post Punk song I ever fell in love with was Cars by Gary Numan, which came out when I was in 5th grade. I used to listen to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown every week with a friend and we’d write the sequence down in a notebook. Then I would…
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Top 40 Over 40.20: L. Subramaniam live
Sometimes you just gotta trust a friend. Every year Duke Performances has a concert series you can buy into at a package discount. I pick up seats for the shows I wanna see before it all starts, and watch the dates roll forward and wash over me as the year unfolds. At the suggestion of my…
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Top 40 over 40.19: Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali Live in Concert
In this series of posts on musicians doing high quality work after 40, little has been said about their audience. Today’s post will start out with them first. Last October, I went to see the Pakistani group Rizwan-Muazzam perform at the Reynolds Industries theater at Duke University. I knew little about these performers from Pakistan, other…
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Top 40 over 40.18: Peter Hughes and Dipa Ma
I was once listening to an episode of Car Talk on NPR and heard a woman call in to Click and Clack with the following dilemma: she had a Honda that was running perfectly, and that had proven to be very reliable over the years. Nevertheless, she found the car boring. She found herself eyeing…
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Top 40 over 40.17: A Different Kind of Swans Song
Most of the musicians I’ve written about in this series are ones that were important to me when I was younger because of work they did themselves when they were young. I’ve written about records they did after turning 40 that either came close to or equaled the quality I heard in their earlier recordings.…
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Top 40 Over 40.16: Holding It Down
One possible answer to the question I posed in my post on Reckoning with REM – How come their early portraits of Southern life never said anything about the history of racist violence and forced labor in their native Georgia, even on their album Fables of the Reconstruction / Reconstruction of the Fables? – is that…
johnhdavis / inundation records 