paranoiacs.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Happy birthday to the dude who is always happy to stand (or sit) to my right, the almighty Peter Holsapple!

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

Spoon is such an underrated band, always solid and, more often than not, brilliant. Kudos to @paranoiacs.bsky.social for including them in her Paranoid Style Single Tweet Hall of Fame

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

The best of their '70s fetish records, Spoon’s ‘Gimme Fiction’ is eleven impeccably-imperfect pop songs whose admixture of mysterioso slow burns, half-stoned character studies and Freedom Rock workouts feel as nervous and caustic as vintage Stones. How insane it is getting older.

submitted 12 days ago • 3 comments

Letterman was a huge influence on my peer group's sense of humor in 84 (the year l graduated from high school). What SNL was to kids a decade older, Dave was to us. I really dug @paranoiacs.bsky.social's essay that deals, in part, with Letterman's early years. open.substack.com/pub/theparan...

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

Read and subscribe

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

The always brilliant Paranoid Style, spot on again. The barely lovable curmudgeon Venn Diagram of It's A Late Night World Letterman and Paul asking "How smart are you?", followed by an angry, sneering shout, "How smart are YOU?!", a beat, then a resigned "How dumb am I?" is a perfect circle.

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

Oh damn — this piece gets my feelings exfuckingxactly!!! "He was really a beatnik" is the key to so much... & not just Hunter S. but Dylan, Garcia, my own parents lol... the actually "hippies" were in many ways a media-driven artificial phenomenon described to untooth the ACTUAL 'threat'... etc 🙏

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

There are many great openers in literature, but few to rival “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the hormones began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive....""

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

"As I get older, I inextricably link Letterman and Westerberg more and more in my mind." Over at my substack Please Take My Advice, I ponder the deep mystery of 2 depressed geniuses who have simultaneously aggravated and captivated me going back decades. theparanoidstyle.substack.com/p/stupid-pet...

submitted 13 days ago • 6 comments

Really enjoyed talking about A Complete Unknown and the release of the 1974 Dylan & The Band concerts with the latter's liner notes writer @paranoiacs.bsky.social and @drfarls.bsky.social: www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/02/lgm-...

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

Over at my substack Please Take My Advice, I wrote at length about the deep core of melancholy which runs through the antic truths and devastating horrors of Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas.’ Always my guy, but ended up a caricature. theparanoidstyle.substack.com/p/the-enduri...

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

There's a face in every window of the songwriter's neighborhood Everybody's your best friend when you're doing well I mean good #genius

submitted 29 days ago • 0 comments

Happy birthday to the deeply complicated, profoundly inspiring problem that is Warren Zevon. Perhaps more than any figure, he informed what kind of songwriter I felt I should be. Here's a piece I wrote about him for Oxford American a few years back. Reconsider him. oxfordamerican.org/web-only/mtv...

submitted 30 days ago • 2 comments

In our first episode of 2025, we look back to our favourite new music from 2024, with excellent songs from @ducksltd.bsky.social, @hussalonia.bsky.social, @paranoiacs.bsky.social, @stevedawsonmusic.bsky.social, @cheekface.bsky.social, @wussymusic.bsky.social, @thecure.com and more!

submitted 33 days ago • 1 comment

It's a good day to read @paranoiacs.bsky.social on Crooked Rain Crooked Rain open.substack.com/pub/theparan...

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

We Commander Cody fans speak often of cosmic coincidences. Over at my substack I dove into the discourse about whether Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was the last CCR record and whether the Black Crowes second LP was our final link to Humble Pie. theparanoidstyle.substack.com/p/the-south-...

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

New newsletter at OwenKing.substack.com - wrote about Reacher novels and Midsommar and the stuff we bring with us into stories, talked to @paranoiacs.bsky.social, and announced a couple of appearances for the Self Help graphic novel. As always, if you want to check it out, it's free.

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

Had the Clash only been a cover band, they’d still rank among the best acts ever to prowl the planet. Their covers of “Police On My Back” and “Brand New Cadillac” opened up worlds to me that might have remained secret indefinitely. Their great legacy is as cultural codebreakers. tinyurl.com/mr32x85t

submitted 46 days ago • 5 comments

Elizabeth Nelson @paranoiacs.bsky.social writes about, well, everything, wonderfully. But there's few better when it comes to writing about Van Morrison: theparanoidstyle.substack.com/p/look-at-th...

submitted 52 days ago • 1 comment

Over at my Substack Please Take My Advice, I've made public a series of critical reflections on Mr. Van Morrison in all of his remarkable, impossible, vaguely comic, possibly tragic, utterly transcendent and ultimately unknowable glory. Fair play to you. theparanoidstyle.substack.com/p/look-at-th...

submitted 52 days ago • 0 comments

Track 169. open.spotify.com/playlist/1gm...

submitted 53 days ago • 0 comments

Favorite album that dropped in 2024. Every single track is 👌 The Interrogator from The Paranoid Style @paranoiacs.bsky.social

submitted 54 days ago • 1 comment

Happy birthday to the great Robert Quine, whose playing navigated a wholly novel sonic sprawl between blistered-out beauty and sublime noise. On many days my favorite guitarist. Here is something I wrote about him and Lou Reed on stage together for Oxford American. oxfordamerican.org/web-only/a-n...

submitted 54 days ago • 0 comments

@paranoiacs.bsky.social

submitted 57 days ago • 2 comments

1. This a must-read piece on Bob Dylan and the movies. 2. Music critic/artist Elizabeth Nelson is finally on Bluesky. Give her a follow.

submitted 59 days ago • 0 comments

For my money, Elizabeth Nelson is the best current writer about pop music, and this gorgeous piece about Dylan on film shows why... insightful, hilarious, sympathetic, wised-up but still inquiring.

submitted 60 days ago • 1 comment

Elizabeth Nelson is on here! Huzzah! Also The Paranoid Style had one of the best albums of the year.

submitted 62 days ago • 1 comment

Over at GQ, I wrote about Bob Dylan's cinematic universe leading up to 'A Complete Unknown', and what a radically strange and kinetic landscape that occupies. From Pennebaker, to Scorsese to Dylan's own four hour film noir. The good, the bad and the funny. www.gq.com/story/bob-dy...

submitted 62 days ago • 3 comments

Here’s a splendid piece about Robert Palmer’s fascinating 1980 pop-funk landmark ‘Clues’ from Stephen Thomas Erlewine for Pitchfork’s reliably great Sunday Review feature. My favorite detail is how he used to regale his fan’s with covers of Husker Du’s “New Day Rising”. pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

On "Get Happy!!": "However genuine the group’s affection for American soul music might have been, the album sounds absolutely nothing like its ostensible inspiration. In fact, it barely sounds like anything in the popular canon." via @paranoiacs.bsky.social www.theringer.com/2020/02/19/m...

submitted 64 days ago • 0 comments

My latest Newsletter: the best old music of 2024! A list of 70 compilations, collections, box sets and reissues that caught my ear this past year. sterlewine.substack.com/p/stes-best-...

submitted 66 days ago • 2 comments

It's sometimes difficult for me to fully articulate the countless ways in which 2024 has been my favorite year on earth up until now but certainly inclusion on dangerous Zach Lipez's year-end-best-of roundup is the cherry on the daiquiri from a client state avoiding extradition. tinyurl.com/mtrppktv

submitted 65 days ago • 0 comments

A military grade assault of freak-out solos and mysterious non-sequiturs, Dinosaur, Jr’s “You’re Living All Over Me” simultaneously conjures the musical curb-stomp of Crazy Horse and anticipates an onset-age of epic, blasted-out alienation. Very close, Mr. Spicoli. Nobody knows that this is nowhere.

submitted 66 days ago • 0 comments

What a terrific essay.

submitted 69 days ago • 0 comments

"It's difficult not to feel nostalgic for a forum wherein a majority of people might agree to the proposition of listening to an unfamiliar belief." Over at my substack Please Take My Advice, I discuss 2 new Beatles docs and the band's strange sacrifice. theparanoidstyle.substack.com/p/it-was-six...

submitted 69 days ago • 1 comment

Over at my substack Please Take My Advice, I wrote about the deeply specific genius of Mark Eitzel and American Music Club. This AMC-centric iteration of my recurring feature "And I Love It" takes the measure of their strange, classic LP 'Everclear.' This one's a corker. substack.com/home/post/p-...

submitted 70 days ago • 2 comments

Sharp evocative writing from Nelson about the band that I still guess more people need to hear, Television.

submitted 71 days ago • 0 comments

For everyone who's heard it

submitted 71 days ago • 2 comments

verlaine was kind of an asshole but good god his impact on music. a couple of the later records — warm and cool from 93 particularly, and also around from 2006 — are categorically the best recordings of electric guitar I’ve ever heard

submitted 71 days ago • 2 comments

Hendrix? Clapton? Beck? Page? Nope. Tom Verlaine was the best rock guitarist ever.

submitted 71 days ago • 4 comments

One of my favorite albums, appreciated by one of my favorite writers.

submitted 72 days ago • 0 comments