Smile

A retrospective of Save the Robot's prized music writer, Matthew Weiner.

Eric Carmen, Boats Against the Current
CBGB's murmurs aside, the late 1970's were, in many ways, a horrendous era for American popular music, as the most corporate of sensibilities ruled the airwaves. In stark contrast to the free-wheeling, if naïve, experimentalism that carried the day a decade earlier, late-seventies Los Angeles was anything but. Disaffectionately and hilariously deemed "El Lay" by American rock critic dean, Robert Christgau, the sound of lazy, uninspired craftsmanship in Southern California was typified by the turgid funk of Joe Walsh-era Eagles, the melodic-but-faceless blanche of Seals and Croft and smack-addled whine of James Taylor, not to mention about a thousand other well-meaning, if totally despicable bands and artists. It was as if sheer talent were the only standard by which musicians were judged and all of the inspiration were somehow filtered out by custom-designed mixing board transistors made of cocaine.

Public Image Limited, Metal Box
What would seem to be the record's first time that Lydon obliquely references his old band is, in fact, the very moment he sheds the Pistols' legacy and announces the path of pop reconstruction Public Image Limited would blaze ...

Jon Brion, Meaningless
Often, a breadth of music knowledge isn't exactly the advantage an aspiring singer-songwriter might suppose. Instead of the informed meta-pop the artist imagines, it's usually less than the sum of its parts and too-cute by half—half-baked melodies with overcooked arrangements, augmented with Beach Boys sleigh bells (for further research, see the High Llamas) ...

John Cale, Fear
1974 is hardly a banner year for pop music. Soft rock rules the airwaves, John Lennon releases the utterly inconsequential Walls And Bridges, punk is still a good year-and-half off, and Elvis is redefining the term "sloth" as he slouches toward the inevitable ...

Gram Parsons, Sacred Hearts and Fallen Angels: The Gram Parsons Anthology
A few exceptions aside, most of the interesting pop music of today is directly informed not just by the obvious, such as the Beatles, Dylan and the Beach Boys, but by less well-known artists of a bygone era. In many cases, as the phenomenon known as the One-Hit Wonder reminds us, the legacy is simply one song. Without our friends at Rhino, Sundazed and Charly, these recordings might otherwise never again see the light of day ...

Gene Clark, Flying High
Conventional wisdom has always held that if Roger McGuinn was the heart of the Byrds, Gene Clark was the soul as well as the best writer ...