Word: shamelessness
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...meantime, the other smithereen of the Pavement disintegration, led by ex-Pavement guitarist Spiral Stairs (all guitarists should have names this cool) has come into its own under the moniker Preston School of Industry. Preston’s debut album, All This Sounds Gas, is an album of shameless, shambolic and possibly pointless waster-rock, it is also a wonderfully pretentionless record of a band diving head-first into their record collection like one of those big foam-rubber pits and throwing stuff around to their hearts’ content. It is hard to imagine that the School take their...
...Willis’s fans pretend to enjoy his act on a musical level. Rather, they enjoy the comic relief involved in the almost vaudevillian (and certainly pathetic) spectacle of Willis’ psychopathology. They come to laugh at the leper’s festering lesions in a shameless display of Schadenfreude. This in itself is a disease inherent in American culture: We enjoy seeing others flounder and make fools of themselves...
Either way, the point is the same: Someone is laughing at someone else’s shortcomings, which seems, to us at least, to fly in the face of what rock music is all about. Innovation, incisiveness, social criticism, yes; vaudeville and shameless exploitation, no. Then again, who are we really kidding? Great rock n’ roll acts—and their devoted fans—have been the victims of some brand of commodification long before the Jackson Five. Since the advent of commercial radio, music has beens an industry, and the importance of money has at times...
...moments at the MTV Video Music Awards, a spectacle that started low and slithered downhill from there, landing in a lagoon of cheese, with BRITNEY SPEARS' joyless gyrations to her new single Slave 4 U. (She didn't like her boa, it seems.) The most curious aspect was the shameless shilling. Presenters like MACY GRAY, right, Busta Rhymes, Shakira and others were more interested in the "Song of Myself," relentlessly hawking their new releases. At least Missy Elliott (lowered from the ceiling via chandelier) had the grace to remember the singer Aaliyah with an airbrushed portrait on the back...
...mention that most presenters there were guilty as sin of shameless self-promotion—maybe Macy Gray should have spent less time sewing that dress and more time memorizing the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner?...