Leigh M. Johnson

In previous iterations of the #30DaySongChallenge, I’ve answered this prompt about “a song you want played at your funeral” before– see here for my 2015 answer, and here for my 2011 answer– but, to be honest, that was before I really started thinking seriously about my own funeral. For the last few years, I’ve been teaching…

It’s a little bit hard to complain about the break-up of Outkast, since André 3000 (André Benjamin) and Big Boi (Antwan Patton) have both gone on to be stellar solo artists, but still… they were soooooo gooooood together. Back in 1996, a friend gave me Outkast’s ATLiens album as a birthday present. The “Dirty South”…

Today’s #30DaySongChallenge pick is a two-fer! And I can’t think of any artist who deserves this kind of double-dipping more than The King of Soul, Otis Redding, an absolutely inimitable performer who always makes you want to go back for seconds. Last year, the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts published a study hypothesizing that there…

The lyrics to my #30DaySongChallenge pick today are not “utterly mysterious” in a strict sense. As a whole, I know what the song is about. It’s stated right there in the title. Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson don’t want you, mamas, to let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Also, don’t let your babies…

It’s really no mystery to anyone who knows me how much I dislike Taylor Swift. She’s my pick for today. Barf. It genuinely pains me to spend any time or space at all writing on this otherwise-respectable blog about Taylor Swift.  I’m sure she’s a nice person in real life, and for charity’s sake I’ll…

First, a clarification: It appears that I misread the prompt list and mixed up Day 15 and Day 16. So, what follows is the post for what should have been my pick yesterday. And you can see yesterday‘s post for what should have been my pick for today. Second, a caveat: I’ve written a lot on…

There are plenty of reasons to prejudicially favor the “original” recording of a song, even when it may not be the “best” version. American pop music has a long and ugly history of artistic appropriation and theft, after all. Sometimes the original version of a song captures a historical moment or the spirit of a…

There’s a lot of music to love, and just as much to hate, from the 80’s.  I love most of the 80’s top-40 pop, but I hate the synthesizer sound. I love most of the glam-rock power ballads, but never really got into the quirky, moody “alternative” stuff. I love 80’s R&B and hip-hop, but…

Nina Simone, perhaps one of the most unique female voices of all time, famously refused the label of “jazz,” once commenting that it was “a white term to define black people.” Instead, she called her sound “black classical music,” emphasizing her virtuosity as a pianist over her stellar talent as a singer, the latter of…