I thought about capturing my thoughts on the current war on Iran, but honestly I don’t think I have a unique perspective… given that there is already an unending wave of pundits all chiming in and covering every last kerfuffle. The musings of a mid-forties Xennial who sees this whole conflict as nothing more than a failed attempt to distract from the Epstein files has most definitely been done before in the blogosphere.
So let me wax poetic about Robbie Williams instead.
Unfamiliar? Let me distill the brash Brit for you! Robert Peter Williams is a fifty-two-year-old ex boy-bander from Great Britain who had a few modest hits in the USA in the late nineties / early aughts, but remains a top-selling artist in the UK and abroad. He got his big break with the group Take That alongside Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, Howard Donald, and Jason Orange. Williams lasted about five years total in the band before being bounced out due to drugs and alcohol. But at the bottom of that well, Williams picked himself up for a spell, found some amazing co-writers and producers, and kicked off a solo career that remains intact.
I personally found Williams when his single Millenium hit the US charts in 1999. While I didn’t have much access to cable television or music videos, I did stumble across Williams’ ode to James Bond — and was immediately charmed. His swagger, accent, and sense of humor were enough to garner snagging The Ego Has Landed, his first stateside LP release. As Wikipedia wasn’t exactly ubiquitous in those days… I didn’t do a lick of research before buying the CD, and letting it become a mainstay in my five-disc changer for the better part of my junior and senior years in high school. By the time I’d eventually found out his boy band roots, I was too much of a fan to fall prey to the potential emasculated panic that teens my age might suffer should they have dared admit publicly they enjoyed… pop music. The horror! Continue reading “So Long and Thank For The Fish, Man 110: Robbie Williams is a Better Man (Than a Monkey)”
Funny thing (to me at least) is as much as I consider myself a pop-culture connoisseur, the one tent of it I tend never to wax poetic on is music. Where I find that in review of print media, film, and TV all lend itself easily to good or bad — with plenty of grey area between the two — music has long felt an area safe from my I’m right and if you disagree you’re wrong mentality. Why? Because from an early age I found it easy to understand the notion of music taste. That certain songs, genres, and formats could be loved by one person, tolerated by another, and loathed by a third.