Now playing Derrick Harriott's brilliant reggae version of Tyrone Davis's classic Turn Back the Hands of Time #clockschange
Listen in and hang around for the dub
▶️⏰🇯🇲 youtu.be/OyUviky2tc8

The Replacements Let It Be Review: Minneapolis hellraisers’ finest hour Newly reissued, Paul Westerberg’s rabble’s wayward 1984 masterpiece was a career crossroads and the best of everything the original lineup had to give.

Here's the legendary David Fricke writing in MOJO about the new boxset reissue of the Replacements' 'Let It Be'. Incredible to be mentioned in a piece by someone whose work I emulated. An amazing feeling overall to be a part of this
@Rhino_Records
passion project. www.mojo4music.com/articles/new...

Worst. President. EVER.

Big Paranoid Style news! New single "It's A Dog's Breakfast (for LR)" is available now! Plus new LP 'Known Associates' is available as a Bandcamp preorder! Check out the new tune, a tribute to my hero Linda Ronstadt, with an accompanying essay at Southwest Review! southwestreview.com/track-premie...

A Compelling Document of Sheer Goodness 'Famous Last Words: Dr.Jane Goodall' (2025)

Having chosen to watch a documentary to help my wife and I go to sleep a week or so ago, I ended up so moved and impressed that I felt compelled to spread the news about the late anthropologist Jane Goodall's "famous last words."
robertchristgau.substack.com/p/a-compelli...

Happy birthday to Steve Cropper. Here's a fantastically cool clip of Booker T. & the M.G.'s performing Time Is Tight at Stax Studios. It's taken from a French mini-documentary from 1969, which also features Isaac Hayes, the Memphis Horns etc. Watch it at 📺▶️ youtu.be/ste1KIwjbLE

The Replacements Let It Be Review: Minneapolis hellraisers’ finest hour

Newly reissued, Paul Westerberg’s rabble’s wayward 1984 masterpiece was a career crossroads and the best of everything the original lineup had to give.

George Santos would still be in prison if Kamala Harris was president right now but folks voted for the crazy orange guy instead. 🤷

Photograph of a New York record store with record sleeves lining the walls and ceiling.

The new book by photographers Karla L. Murray and James T. Murray documents the unique character and colourful inner lives of New York's finest – its many and varied record shops

Platters That Matter: James & Karla Murray’s Vinyl NYC

buff.ly/x9Ykw91

Brian Eno's album Another Green World was released on October 17, 1975

Xgau Sez: October, 2025 Let us praise first-rate collections of first-rate songs but let us skip the twenty-four albums awarded some variation of the E grade. Also: albums vs. songs, Mary J. Blige, Geese, and chansons.

Sixty years of great music, the statistically decisive rise of the CD, francais vs. anglais, grading A-to-E, Gratitude, and Geese inspire me to fill out the October 2025 edition of Xgau Sez in my Substack whosawhatsis And It Don't Stop
robertchristgau.substack.com/p/xgau-sez-o...

Consumer Guide: October, 2025 Nearly half an hour of covers that qualify as beautiful, a remarkably warm and rich love album, facing down this grim moment with perky bad-assness, and amorous vulnerability intensified by a croak.

The October Consumer Guide is more about love than about the onslaught of fascism, which I wish I could tell you bodes well for a loving future. robertchristgau.substack.com/p/consumer-g...

YouTube video by remhq R.E.M. - "Losing My Religion" (LIVE @ Athens)

🇬🇷 From Athens (Greece), October 5th, 2008.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wsP...

YouTube video by tommygunx Bar-B-Q Killers - His and Hearse (+Interview)

Such a great film, capturing a beautiful, unique moment in time. The soundtrack is phenomenal, too.

youtu.be/XEXG7FzhE78?...

Jack Kerouac wearing a suit and tie sitting side saddle in a large wooden chair.

A copy of the novel The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.

October 2, 1958: Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums was first published. The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after the events of On the Road.

"I'm not an intellectual at all. I just like music. It's a very great natural force. There's so little time for us all, I need to be able to say what I want quickly&to as many people as possible." Remembering #MarcBolan
#TRex

Jeff Tweedy: Twilight Override Read Elizabeth Nelson’s review of the album.

"All throughout Twilight Override, there is a feeling of grasping and tumbling and reassessment. It’s a stemwinding and treacherous trip. At times it can feel like he’s trying to break our heads." Over at Pitchfork, I wrote about the tremendous new LP from Jeff Tweedy. pitchfork.com/reviews/albu...

The minute Janis came on the room went electric. The crowd was screaming. I remember her pleading with the crowd, “Please, please don’t make me do ‘Ball and Chain’ again!” But they did. I felt as if I’d put my hand right in an open electrical socket.

robertchristgau.substack.com/p/the-big-lo...

Wednesday's 'Bleeds' might be the rock album of the year The sixth album by the North Carolina band, made over the course of a breakup between two of its members, is a masterpiece about life spent clinging to the edge of the abyss.

I believe so www.npr.org/2025/09/22/n...

In writing the liner notes for the amazing 41st anniversary box set of the Replacements' 'Let It Be,' one of the true highlights was outtakes like the rad "Street Girl," featured today over at Rhino. I'll always feel gratitude for how Westerberg wrote about women. Listen here: tinyurl.com/mt7kujcj

Scott Walker Tilt album cover. A hand, two eyes, some feathers, all laid on top of one another. Perhaps an owl's face under the hand.

'Tilt is an album of ghosts, emptiness and terrifying remove. If anyone was living in Walker’s head at this point, it was, simply, the dead, the victims, their killers, the crush of history’s flow...'

David Bowie, #ScottWalker and the 1990s

buff.ly/U85ffvs

Writing a Life Story - Five Things I've Learned Join me in this live two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about telling someone else’s story – in ways that both preserve and pay tribute to their personal history. When I was wri...

I'm teaching another writing class — live + interactive via Zoom — on Sunday Oct 12 at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT.

The last one (which focused on writing about music) was great fun. I'm stoked for this one. You can register below.

#CatchThePhrase
Kills Birds - Worthy Girl

The Big Lookback: Janis Joplin An excerpt from Carola Dibbell's memoir "Young Me: Travels With an Old Self 1967-1970"

This month's And It Don't Stop hands the ball to my wife Carola Dibbell, who as a transplanted Londoner way back in 1968 was knocked out of her socks by this American singer she'd never heard of named Janis Joplin. robertchristgau.substack.com/p/the-big-lo...

YouTube video by ThePsychedelicGroove Margo Guryan -[6]- Take A Picture

Margo Guryan was born on this day 88 years ago. She is greatly missed. Her music soothed my soul and over the phone she gave me grammar tips and love counselling (I needed all of these things). Thank you Margo.
youtu.be/4e6mc9AaNeA?...

Paul Simonon's smashed Fender P-Bass, as seen on the cover of the Clash’s London Calling, to go on permanent display at Museum Of London The bass had previously been shown at the museum's The Clash: London Calling exhibition from November 2019 to September 2020

I got to see the smashed bass when it was on display at the Rock n Roll hall of fame (it’s since moved to the Museum of London - go figure). www.guitarworld.com/news/paul-si...

Remembering Margo Guryan on her birthday. Now playing Numero’s triple LP box set featuring her Take a Picture album from 1968, plus lots of demos and previously unreleased tunes
▶️ open.spotify.com/album/7v4oDV...

Xgau Sez: September, 2025 African American science fiction, Eno before and after rocking, where (or who) in the world is Stephen Malkmus, first musical loves, variants of the art-rock mindset, and listening without prejudice.

Chagrined to report that the new Xgau Sez is marred by an oversight — failed to name the greatest Samuel R. Delany novel: Dhalgren.
robertchristgau.substack.com/p/xgau-sez-s...

A vintage advertisement for SHOCK THEATER starring Ghoulardi. The print image features Ernie Anderson as Ghoulardi, sporting a dramatic goatee and lit by creepy lighting. Ghoulardi clutches a skull in his hand. The print on the ad reads: SHOCK THEATER - 11:20PM FRIDAY 8 WJWTV

With his new movie upon us, it's a great time to remind you that Paul Thomas Anderson's production company is named for Ghoulardi, a horror host portrayed by PTA's own father, Ernie Anderson. Ghoulardi's Shock Theater was a staple of Cleveland television and a foundational creature feature program.