John Schaefer

How you respond to the long, long-awaited Guns N Roses album, “Chinese Democracy,” will probably depend on whether you were already a GNR fan. The band has always had a fairly wide fan base, including the hard-rock fans and enough punks, power poppers, and metalheads to fill the country’s ...

Back on November 13, we had the guys from Pitchfork Media in to talk about their list of the 500 greatest songs “from punk to the present.” Now critic and sax player Tom Moon shows up with his list of ...

Dusty Springfield may not have created the subgenre known as “blue-eyed soul,” but she might have been its biggest star in the 60s. Which sounds like a great thing, but it wasn’t necessarily the case. Since Elvis a decade ...

My own experience with marching bands is pretty negligible – see my blog from Nov. 6 for the sad tale. Growing up in New York City, as the rest of the country likes ...

I don’t remember when I first heard Frank Sinatra’s 1965 song "It Was A Very Good Year," mainly because that was grown-up music -- something for old people like my parents, who must’ve been well into their thirties, to listen to. I do remember when I first really listened ...

Poor iTunes. Well, not literally poor… iTunes has become the world’s largest music retailer, selling 50 gazillion songs and bringing in a pile of money a mile high. But everyone seems to hate iTunes. They hate the DRM, or Digital Rights Management, that restricts the devices you can play your ...

The Beatles “White Album” is a mess. Whether it’s a glorious mess or a tedious scavenger hunt for good songs among two LPs worth of filler depends on your point of ...

The term 'Renaissance man' gets thrown around a little too easily these days. If you can sing and you can act, you’re proclaimed a Renaissance man (usually by writers who can do neither). Quincy Jones, though, comes close. One of music’s great arrangers ...

Compiling any sort of “best of” list is a provocative thing to do. Yes, on one level all you’re doing is saying, hey, I like these songs, or these athletes, or whatever the list is about. But on a deeper level, you’re putting the list out there so other people ...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Justin Davidson wrote a review a few years back about the opera “St. Francis of Assisi,” by the ...

I think “Lili Marlene” is a great example of how a song can be appreciated by people for things that were never intended by its author. Liel Liebovitz and Matthew Miller have told the gripping story of how the song spanned two World Wars, and became a kind of unofficial ...

Today’s another installment in our occasional series we call “Who’s On Top – And Who Should Be.” It’s the second part of the title, of course, that’s more interesting. Yeah, AC/DC’s second week at #1 is kind of interesting, if only because of ...

When I was a kid, around 8 or 9 years old, someone in my neighborhood in Queens tried to form a marching band, recruiting kids from Richmond Hill and Woodhaven to play one of three sets of instruments: there would be, ...

After the euphoria of the night before, many Americans woke up this morning with a) a hangover and b) the sobering realization of the enormity of the problems facing our new president. Obama has seemed clear-eyed about the challenges ahead, but he ...

Democracy seems such a basic part of our culture as Americans that it comes as a shock to find that it’s actually quite hard to define. Almost every communist or socialist dictatorship used the word as part of their country’s official name: the German Democratic Republic wasn’t democratic West Germany, ...

Folkways Records did many things, but chief among them was proving that Big Bill Broonzy was right: “They’re all ...

When I was in high school, I found a record by a comedian I’d never heard of – someone who was apparently big in the 50s – named Stan Freberg. Even though I didn’t get all the references to what were apparently pop culture figures and phenomena of the an ...

I’m betting you’ve never heard of Tra La La Blip. Neither did I, until their founder emailed us yesterday. This rural Australian collective makes electronic pop; and all of ...

I’ve been thinking about this whole super fan thing. I like a lot of artists and bands – some I like a real lot. But I would never consider myself a ...

Wal-Mart has become the 600-pound gorilla in the music business. It is the country’s single biggest seller of CDs (antique silvery round things that contain collections of songs – in the 20th century, it’s how we used to get our music before ...