Cats in Sunglasses

If there's anything funnier than a cat wearing sunglasses, I don't know what it is. It certainly isn't Jeff Foxworthy.

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WHAT AMERICA WANTS: THE TOP TEN SONGS IN THE NATION: WEEK ENDING MAR 7

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PURPLE RAIN REVISITED: AN UNNECESSARILY EXHAUSTIVE ANALYSIS

Purple Rain, the film, is now streaming on Netflix, and so for no reason at all, here is an unnecessarily exhaustive critical companion. I know you probably don't need me to tell you that Purple Rain is flawed but let's look at it together shall we? If you're a Prince fanatic, please feel free to let me know if I've gotten anything wrong. This film was the first directed by Albert Magnoli, Prince's manager, and despite the fact that as a director he clearly has no idea what he's doing in most departments, the film has a really great look to it, sometimes grainy, very raw looking: not the kind of slick treatment you would expect for this type of film. This is in all great likelihood likely the result of the expertise of director of photography Donald Thorin, given the rest of the their bodies of work up to this point. In any case, I would guess that a great deal of what's presented in Purple Rain came directly from Prince's own vision and that the s
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JACK THE RIPPER featuring John Brookhouse AND What makes a good guitar player?

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Our song Jack the Ripper features a ripping guitar solo by our friend John Brookhouse, of the Boston metal band Worshipper. John will appear again later on the album. His solo plays tribute to Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Steve Lukather - the sort of histrionic yet very musical and melodic masters that were branches growing from the tree of Eddie Van Halen. I don't see anything at all bananas about that last sentence.  I won't say Vai et al are underrated per se - they are very much not underrated to many guitarists - but there's no mention of any of them, for example, on Rolling Stone's list of 100 greatest guitar players, and so according to that list they don't belong in the illustrious company of Steve Jones, Kurt Cobain and Bruce Springsteen. (They're all good guitar players, especially Bruce, but they belong much more in a discussion of what makes a good guitarist, not a list of greatest innovators. When you're trying to winnow such a broad field down to 1
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