Frank Kogan
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Male
54 years old
Denver, COLORADO
United States
Last Login:
5/15/2008
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http://www.myspace.com/frankkogan |
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Frank Kogan's Interests
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| Music | Ashlee Simpson, New York Dolls, Debbie Deb, Ying Yang Twins, Eminem, Collipark, Timbaland, Stooges, James Brown, Rolling Stones, Shangri-Las, Midi Maxi & Efti, L'Trimm, Panjabi MC, Boney M, Donna Summer, Slade, John Shanks, Kara DioGuardi, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, Bo Diddley, Cassie, Lily Allen, Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry, Marit Larsen, Stacey Q, Fred Astaire, Electric Eels, Spoonie Gee, U. Roy, Antonina Armato, Tim James, Deana Carter, Toby Keith, Lisette Melendez, Clif Magness, Shirelles, Roxanne Shanté, Courtney Love, Guns N' Roses, Teena Marie, Fannypack, Aly & A.J., Miranda Lambert, Taylor Swift, Don Ray, Cover Girls, Company B, the Wailers, the Animals, the Contortions, Arthur Baker, Electric Prunes, t.A.T.u., Lifter Puller, Kelly Clarkson, Swizz Beatz. Sorry if I left you off, but I've already used a lot of space. So let's just end with the song of the day for March 25, 2008, María Daniela Y Su Sonido Lasser "Dame Más." Mexican electrobrats throw tunage and clatter at us to excellent toe-tickling effect.
(Song Of The Day will now be sporadic and unpredictable rather than a daily feature, as most of the excitement in my online life has moved over to livejournal.) | | Movies | The Searchers, Donovan's Reef, L'Avventura, Letter from an Unknown Woman, In a Lonely Place, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Night Moves, The Shop Around the Corner, Morocco, The Dirty Dozen | | Television | Magnum P.I., My So-Called Life, Rocky and Bullwinkle | | Books | Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Zimmerman (Dr. Z), Brie Larson, Otis Ferguson, Jane Austen, Theodore Dreiser, Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Kuhn | | Heroes | For the time being I'm repeating in my heroes box a modified version of what I put in my first blog post. "Perhaps the reason the Dolls have been so misunderstood is that they don't play to an existing audience; it's an audience that has yet to reveal itself. More than simply latching onto an audience, the next phenomenon will be that which creates its audience. The Dolls have very little choice: they either create that audience or they have none at all. They don't really belong to anything else." (Ben Edmonds, "The New York Dolls' Greatest Hits Volume 1," Creem, October 1973.) Here is something I wrote to John Wójtowicz last year while working on my Marit Larsen review. Obviously, I'm identifying hard with teenpop in that just as I don't see a path for the teenpop girls into the future, I don't see a path for myself either - which isn't to say that there's no future for me, or for them, but my path isn't given, my way isn't clear, so we're going to have to invent one. Current "teenpop" - or the strain within it that most currently is capturing my attention, the part I'll call "rock confessional" - is actually without precedent, kids in their teens and early twenties working with a handful of music pros in their mid thirties, but the kids all included in the songwriting credits and creating (with the aid of those veteran pros) songs that are smarter and more emotionally complex than most of what you're getting from real grownup pop and rock performers (including the grownup pop and rock performers that the veteran pros also work with). But what this means is that these girls have no good models for how to expand and deepen their music as they grow into their twenties, and no preset market or genre to inhabit once they do, unless they create it for themselves. Well, no good models is my opinion. The girls probably all want to be Alanis, not realizing that they're already better. Kelly Clarkson's commercial success is heartening, as she's managed to do her agony and angst without shedding the sugar pop, at least as of last year. But Ashlee, who's the best of the lot, is now only getting middling sales and poor airplay and is probably reliant on the tweeny-market that she'll shortly be losing. Maybe there's a way for Ashlee and the others to carry on with their pop craftsmanship and exuberance yet do Alanis and Fiona and KT Tunstall and Tash Bedingfield and Courtney Love and Craig Finn and Conor Oberst, but without Alanis et al.'s bullshit and obfuscation. Hmmm, don't know why I didn't tell John the truth, which is that I'm hearing in Ashlee the potential to do Jagger or Dylan 1965 but take it somewhere else, since she's basically a "nice girl," which means for better or worse she won't be tied to the alienation of a counterculture, so maybe she'll grow where Dylan and Jagger stopped dead. These are sketchy thoughts on my part, and I don't know how much to credit to Ashlee as opposed to Shanks and DioGuardi et al., except none of what S & D have done with anyone else shows this promise, so I might as well credit Ashlee. Someone's got to. "Ashlee" is an amazing creation anyway, no matter how many hands are involved. But it's our own self-creation that's at issue, meaning the people who actually might read this, and the people like them. The journalism model for rock criticism is broken and can't be fixed, but no paying alternative has emerged. So we've got a rock press that refuses to allow its writers to be heroes, and an Interweb where most writers refuse to be the hero, refuse to think through their thoughts, because they're content to imagine that the real conversation is happening elsewhere, in academia or in the legitimate press. So the conversation I began so long ago is barely sputtering. We have to figure out how to finance this thing, we have to figure out how to do this thing, this mad anthropology of mine. No one's going to do it for us. |
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Frank Kogan's Details
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| Status: | Single | | Body type: | 0' 0" | | Zodiac Sign: | Capricorn | | Occupation: | music critic | |
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Frank Kogan's Latest Blog Entry
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Kogan, Morley Lead Blowout UGA Booksale
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Ashlee Simpson’s "Little Miss Obsessive"
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My Pazz & Jop comments for 2007
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My Country Music Critics Poll Ballot 2007
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My Top 20 Country Singles 2007
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Frank Kogan's Blurbs |
About me:
I'm a rock critic*, but I've got my own way of doing it. I found my calling back in 1986. I was working on a book, and the words were falling dead from my pen. As a break, for fun, I started a fanzine. I'd ask a bunch of questions, I'd get answers back, I'd answer the answers, and onward it would go. And so I discovered that if you ask a question, the world comes pouring in - but it's not the same world as before you asked the question. So that's what we do. We create worlds. I'm a madly provocative anthropologist, really. I gather people and we invent worlds for ourselves on the page and on the Web and we dig at and test the rules of these worlds we've created.I've got a book out, Real Punks Don't Wear Black
 University of Georgia Press ISBN 0-8203-2754-9 paper $24.95 (for the time being on sale for $6.24)
You can find out about it here, and you can comment on it here. Reviews are linked here and here. There's no other book like it; you're only getting my side of the dance, but it's a good dance nonetheless. I'm now doing a blog, since MySpace provides one, but as you might expect, I'm more a chat guy than a blog guy, so for practical purposes in 2006 and early 2007 my real blog was the rolling teenpop thread (which continued here), though as ilX got ever more sour a lot of the convo shifted to my livejournal - well, much more to my friend's livejournals, actually, as I tend to hang out on other people's comments threads; but I still pay a lot of attention to rolling country (2006 and 2007 and 2008). Oh, and we're living in a fabulous time for music, despite its being a dead time for magazines that "cover" the subject. *Even though most of the music I write about isn't rock, a lot of my mentors and heroes were writing about rock originally, and that's the line I descend from; so the title "rock critic" is OK with me. Given what I do, I'd like to hear your music, if you make music. Anyone who wants to send me CDs and shit should mail 'em to:
Frank Kogan PO Box 9761 Denver CO 80209-0761
edcasual at earthlink dot net
A little over a year ago the Village Voice invited me to stop pitching them pieces, and my new gig at the Las Vegas Weekly has me happily intellectualizing up my ass - they're paying me to have fun, and it's great - but I'm generally not writing reviews for them (unless I want to); but I also write for Paper Thin Walls, which is very open to MySpace and CDBaby bands. My Top 8 friends are fundamentally "Last come, first served"; anyway, I keep them varied and shifting. I'm the one guy in a thousand who'd like to change "Who I'd like to meet" to "Whom I'd like to meet."
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Who I'd like to meet:
Mark Sinker
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| Frank Kogan's Friend Space (Top 8) |
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Frank Kogan has 241 friends.
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