For The Record- 30. December. 2023

Gotta groove to the vinyl 'til the record makes a final sound

Dec 30, 2023

Welcome to another edition of For The Record, a good old-fashioned link drop and benefit for paid supporters of On Repeat. For this last post of the year, I’ve dropped the paywall.

As a reminder, On Repeat is 100% reader-funded. And as always, there are 7-day trials for anyone looking to test the waters.

This week, we’ve got news on a new Prince exhibit, John Schneider and Song Exploder.

All that and a LOT more, including Spotify drama, boygenius, and a few more ‘Best of’ lists.

Let’s get to it!

As 2023 comes to a close, I want to thank each of you for making this such an enjoyable year here at On Repeat. This current iteration of the project turned two this past fall, and every minute of it has been a joy!

Whether you’ve been here since Day 1, just recently showed up, or this is the first post of mine you’ve ever read, I’m glad you’re here.

This community continues to flourish beyond my wildest dreams and continues to grow in new & exciting ways. All of that is because of support from readers like you—thank you for making this community what it is.

And thank you for sharing it on social media and with your friends & family. If you’re sharing it with your enemies? Well, thanks for that too. Over the past year, our little corner of the internet has nearly doubled in size, even after a couple of rounds of saying goodbye to cold subscribers.

Because of your recommendations, On Repeat is now read in 48 states (we’ll work on North Dakota & Wyoming in 2024) and 71 countries across the globe. That never ceases to amaze me and is incredibly humbling.

Perhaps more importantly, it proves that there is an appetite for sharing the music we love with people, for subverting algorithms, and for indie music journalism.

In case you missed them, here are the year’s top posts:

Most Popular Posts from 2023 (as determined by readers):

The On Repeat & Friends Top 10 Records of 2023 Part 1.

Sound Advice- 16. November. 2023

Flashback: ‘Give ‘Em Enough Rope’ by The Clash

From The Archives: The Go-Betweens

ZZ TOP's Degüello

Remembering INXS’ Michael Hutchence

My Personal Favorites:

An Evening With Yo La Tengo

Ivy's Apartment Life at 25: A Forgotten Album Gets A Second Life

Jeffrey Silverstein- ‘Chet’

God Speed, Rollo Steele

You Make Me Wanna Shout!

The Replacements: Tim (Let It Bleed Edition) Album Review

I also want to take a quick second to share my appreciation for every guest writer, collaborator, and co-conspirator from the past year. I hope you had as much fun reading these as we did putting them together!

One of my goals for the coming year is to increase the frequency of those. There are already a few on the drawing board and more to come. Please let me know if you or someone you know has something you think would be a good fit! Reply to this email, and we’ll get the ball rolling.

This is a dynamic page and will continue to iterate & evolve, but at its heart, On Repeat is a place with music discovery and sharing music as its north star.

It has been an incredibly meaningful year for On Repeat. Thank you again for being a part of it.

Various Artists:

What’s old is new again; how some of the best “new” music of the year wasn’t new at all.

“I wouldn’t listen to Prince’s music.” A museum exhibit featuring Prince is run by teens who don’t much like him.

At a large gallery space in downtown Newark, where the art exhibition “Remembering the Purple One: A Tribute to Prince Rogers Nelson” has just been extended to Dec. 31, the writing is on the wall: This is not a show put together by Prince fans.
“I wouldn’t listen to Prince’s music,” reads large purple text under a set of three ’80s-era portraits of the artist.
Several docents freely admit they don’t understand his music or his style. It’s not because Prince’s music appealed to a younger generation — just the opposite. The curators are high school students — born long after Prince’s 1984 album “Purple Rain” was released — and many of them did not know much about the artist until now.

We lost Laura Lynch, one of the founding members of The Chicks, this week.

Singer and former Dukes of Hazzard star John Schneider is being investigated by the Secret Service after tweeting that President Biden should be ‘hung for treason.’

Dee Snider says the Spotify CEO Daniel Ek should be “taken outside and shot.”

Meanwhile, Ozzy Osbourne would like us all to know that he is very much still alive.

boygenius is having the time of their lives.

The music press often calls them a supergroup — which is technically correct, because all three are successful indie solo artists with fan bases of their own. But “supergroup” conjures images of ego-mad 1970s dudes in their cocaine phase, capturing a little magic on record before discovering that they hate one another. And this particular supergroup is made up of women who actually like one another, and who get off on reimagining what a rock band looks like and what it feels like to be in one. “There’s a very specific framework of the history of dudes and rock,” Dacus says. “People just know it, so it’s easy to play with.”

The lawsuit against Nirvana for their ‘Nevermind’ cover has been revived by an appeals court.

Former drummer Dave Grohl was the guest on Song Exploder, where he shared the Foo Fighters’ track, ‘The Teacher,’ and how it’s the most important piece of music he’s ever written.

New tour dates have been announced by Iron Maiden, Lainey Wilson, and New Kids on the Block.