The Return of POP ROCKS

For those of you who don't know, Pop Rocks is a column I first wrote for Stuff Magazine, a Boston monthly that later morphed into the bi-weekly Stuff@Nite. When I took over as music editor at the Boston Phoenix (it's an alternative weekly in, yes, Boston), I felt we needed to be more aggressive about engaging our readers and touting the high quality of the content we published. So I set out to recruit the best writers/thinkers I could find, and gave them each a forum — a bi-weekly column in which each could address any anything he or she felt was relevant, as long as it had some connection to music culture. Josh Kun had his "Frequencies" column; Douglas Wolk, "Smallmouth"; Jon Caramanica, "Slanguistics." As for myself, I adapted "Pop Rocks" to the Phoenix format and we were off and running. Eventually, even our initially wary jazz writer, Jon Garelick, got into the game with a column I dubbed "Giant Steps" after the Coltrane tune. Those columns helped create a unique identity for the Phoenix music section and, within a couple of years, the section was broken out of the "Arts" section as a stand-alone magazine within a magazine. Sadly, that came ended shortly before my tenure at the Phoenix came to an end. But the idea lives on, at least in my own mind.

Now I'm in Virginia, a State that most artists assiduously avoid when touring. But I'm writing a weekly column for the paper here and doing features for a Charlottesville weekly (C-ville). In an effort to revive the spirit, if not the form of "Pop Rocks," I'm going to begin this blogging experiment by posting my scribblings, beginning with a New Year's Eve playlist I contributed to C-ville. Too many hours were spent whittling that list down to ten songs that do not include the words "New Year's Day" or "New Year's Eve." And then we'll just see where that leads. . . In the words of Yeats, "The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with a passion and intensity." Or, as Paul Westerberg once lovingly put it, "I hate music: it's got too many notes."