Alec Hanley Bemis

Dr. Kool's Pop Quiz

Alec Hanley Bemis
Photo by Larry Hirshowitz HELLO, PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS Molly’s in the beer aisle at a Ralphs grocery in Hollywood. She’s wearing a tennis skirt, pushing a cart, perusing the Bud. A scrawny, longhaired white kid with a patchy mustache rolls by her side. He says, “Yo, what’s up, primetime?” followed by......
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Taking Thee Piss

Alec Hanley Bemis
Punk rock began in Britain 25 years ago with the PR stunts of Malcolm McLaren and his Sex Pistols. Punk rock began in New York City 25 years ago with glue-sniffing simpletons the Ramones. Punk rock began 33 years ago when Iggy Pop, front man of Detroit’s Stooges, rolled around......

Loving and Leaving the Phonograph

Alec Hanley Bemis
Beatrice I love my phonograph But you have broke my windin' chain And you taken my lovin' And you give it to yo' other man --Robert Johnson "Phonograph Blues" LOVE ON RECORD   It's mid-December 1999. Something's almost over and we didn't even know it . . . I'm driving......
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Music-Driven Lifestyle. Positive?

Alec Hanley Bemis
Wow, Summertime is all about striped sweatbands and goggles (never underestimate the versatility of goggles). Grab your dirtbike, strap on chunky kneepads, and outfit your head with a reflective helmet. Rubber tires melt on asphalt as bananna [sic] seats bounce to the ghetto blasted beat. Through backstreet paths we wind......
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Existential Funk

Alec Hanley Bemis
Photo by Bernd Bodtlander Stripped of the security of a past, the hope for a future, the existentialist mopes. “O, the detestability of human existence,” he thinks. “O, to be stuck in this interminable now, all skin and bone, slogging through the air of the present.” Or, to restate: Life......

Anonymity, Misery, Softness

Alec Hanley Bemis
IT IS 2 A.M. OR SO. ELLIOTT SMITH IS BEHIND THE WHEEL of a rental car in Portland, waiting at a stoplight and listening to music through headphones. Maybe it's Nico's The Marble Index -- harmonium, drone, woozy structure -- or the Beatles -- dramatic melodies in deeply panned stereo......
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A for Effortless

Alec Hanley Bemis
Right now is a good time for average joes. The Internet makes irrelevant all guides that once guarded the gates of culture; magazines like Maxim and Details fulfill lowest-common-denominator desires; in academia, whiteness studies is an emerging discipline; and musicians, especially in the rock realm, have shrugged off the albatross......
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The Devil in Miss Spears

Alec Hanley Bemis
“Oh Britney, Britney,” writes a music fan from Hawaii, taking advantage of the Amazon.com forum on which consumers rate their purchases, “how were we supposed to know that something wasn‘t right here?” Like many of the 950 and counting who have turned Britney Spears’ . . . Baby One More......