Some time around the point in my life where I started to actually use the internet — maybe late 1999 or early 2000 — I also started to get into electronic music. Previously, I was fully all into grunge (I was late to appreciate that whole genre, but purchasing Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins had changed that and I spent the second half of the 90’s listening to all that stuff). Towards the end of the decade, I picked up a copy of Spin Magazine [https://www.spin.com] that highlighted the t…
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On the theme of music, I loved this overview of the life and times of Weird Al. > As his name suggested, Weird Al’s comedy operated right at the hot spot of my childhood agonies: weirdness versus normalcy, insider versus outsider. What a Weird Al parody did was enact a tiny revolution. It took the whole glamorous architecture of American mainstream cool — Michael Jackson’s otherworldly moves, Madonna’s sexual taboos — and extracted all of the coolness. Into that void, Weird Al inserted the leas…