There’s always something a little bittersweet about Labor Day weekend. Sure, it’s a nice, long weekend, but for many of us, it also marks the start of school. So to celebrate (or to serve as a final distraction) before you are forced to focus, we’ve been providing you with a back-to-school mix over the last [...]

Like a lot of people with caffeinated attention spans, I obsessively create themed Mix CD’s in my spare time as well as my non-spare time. This gives me the pleasurable authority of christening AON’s newest series, MIXOLOGY, an exploratory and anal-retentive glimpse at Themed Mix CD Tracklisting. The last themed CD I so crispily burned [...]

1. (Dancin’!) Barbie & the Rockers!
There was a time in the mid-80’s that Barbie n’ company’s stranglehold on the disproportionately-leggy plastic doll market was in danger of being usurped by the far rawkin’er Jem and the Holograms. Jem’s blonde mane was moussier than Barbie’s, she could swing a mean microphone cord, and she had the [...]

This weekend marks thirteen years since the Ramones released their swan song recording, “Adios Amigos.”
The last few years of the Ramones’ existence almost played out like the final repetitive years of a creatively bankrupt TV sitcom called “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!,” now reduced to paring down familiar notes to their broadest, most applause-garnering catchphrases. Joey [...]

Barney Rubble Co-Opts Black Musician Culture To Steal Breakfast Cereal
In 1955, Pat Boone’s first Billboard number-one single was a constipated white-bread cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame.” (True legend: Boone’s producers talked him out of titling his version “Isn’t That A Shame” in his unremitting disgust for Domino’s improper grammar.) The man’s [...]

HAPPY 15TH BIRTHDAY, “TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE SATELLITE HEART“!
It’s been well over two years since their last full-length album was released, but 2008 has still been a utopian year for Norman, Oklahoma’s own Flaming Lips. Their long-in-the-works movie “Christmas On Mars” finally debuted at the ’08 Sasquatch Fest, just one night before the band’s cataclysmic Led [...]