Anthem Soul
Sometimes you have to travel halfway around the world to find out how American you are. The post Anthem Soul appeared first on Rolf Potts.
View ArticleWhat I’m listening to in the jungle
The walls are a bit thin at my residential hotel here in south Thailand, so I can generally hear what’s going on in room 311 next door — whether I want to or not. Usually it’s just some couple having...
View ArticleRobert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in Rosedale, Mississippi
Last month, while I was driving down the Mississippi River on a magazine assignment, I had a curious experience in Rosedale, Mississippi. As I was eating lunch in a place called Leo’s Market, a...
View ArticleThe Great Rap Censorship Scare of 1990
Cultural criticism: The Geto Boys' self-titled third album rattled America’s cultural gatekeepers, making N.W.A and 2 Live Crew look like a society luncheon. The post The Great Rap Censorship Scare of...
View ArticleThe Slippery Slope of Musical Appropriation
Cultural criticism: Steve Miller had a clear-cut legal case when the Geto Boys used his guitar-hook in their raunchy 1990 single "Gangster of Love." The racial implications weren't so simple. The post...
View ArticleA VHS-Dubbed MTV Memoir of Lollapalooza 1991
For the past 25 years I’ve regarded July of 1991 as being significant for two reasons. First, it was the month I chopped off the “mullet” hairstyle I’d been wearing since 1986 and began to grow out...
View ArticleMixtapes as a Lost Language: A Brief Cultural Primer
Twenty-five years ago my friend Liesl made me an audiocassette mixtape called Rondo Rolf. I haven’t owned a functioning tape player for more than a decade, yet I can’t bring myself to throw Rondo Rolf...
View ArticleEurodance Music Ruined My 1996 Arrival in Korea (and Left Its Mark On K-Pop)
Exactly twenty years ago I was entering my fourth month of living as an expatriate English teacher in Pusan (a.k.a. Busan) South Korea. This was my first experience of living in another country, and...
View Article12 Great Coming-Of-Age Movie Final-Scene Songs
One of the writing projects I’ve been working on this winter is Last Nine, a coming-of-age screenplay I’ve been chipping away at for more than a decade now. Built around a single incident I remember...
View ArticleA Guide to Doc’s Melancholy Music in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row
Cannery Row has been one of my favorite books ever since I first read it as a teenager. John Steinbeck’s gentle depiction of Depression-era ne’er-do-wells in Monterey, California doesn’t typically...
View ArticleRemembering Bushwick Bill (and the psychogeographical power of gangsta rap)
Of all the times I’ve been name-checked in the Washington Post, the most counterintuitive occasion came last month, when it appeared in an obituary for Bushwick Bill, the one-eyed, 3’8″ gangsta-rapper...
View ArticleA “Generation X” take (of sorts) on generational generalizations
In light of the (now possibly passé) “OK Boomer” meme bouncing around the internet in recent weeks, I’ve seen a number of social-media references to a 2017 Vanity Fair article entitled “Why Generation...
View ArticleJane’s Addiction’s “Nothing’s Shocking”: A Personal Testimony
An expanded version of the music-memoir essay that appeared in the 2019 Bloomsbury anthology The 33 1/3 B-sides: Authors on Beloved and Underrated Albums. The post Jane’s Addiction’s “Nothing’s...
View ArticleFive of the best Deviate podcast episodes about music (so far)
From the outset, the “deviate” aspect of my Deviate podcast was meant to give me the occasional pretext to veer away from travel themes and explore my other interests. My five favorite music-themed...
View Article9 Outtakes from Dave Grohl’s “The Storyteller”
1) On the joys of traveling in the United States To really see America, you need to drive it mile by mile, because you not only begin to grasp the immensity of this beautiful country, you see the...
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