Seth Sanders

More than any other part of the American metropolis, it is the mall and the shopping district that appear to offer power and freedom today. At the end of a day of work, stepping out of an office into a busy district, or at the beginning of some aimless Saturday having just hit ...

Rock and the Backlash The Los Angeles Coliseum, October 9, 1981, nearly a year after Ronald Reagan’s election. The Rolling Stones are touring behind the dull Tattoo You album. Their performances are memorable mainly for the way Mick Jagger, wearing football pants, is hoisted ...

Amps for Christ: The Secret of the Almost Straight Line 7″ EP (Westside Audio Laboratories) Barnes was the man behind Man is the Bastard’s gruesome and gigantic howl (they almost made me give up meat; no, I’m MORE cynical than you are). Here the pain comes back as love. ...

Selected Reviews The Germs, GI LP Pure punk rock fueled by hate. Darby Crash does a growl that might be “supposed to sound tough” in a world where pain wasn’t such a big deal and cars weren’t something to be afraid of. But the Germs lived in Los Angeles, and it sucked, ...

A Cosmic Battle for Insanely Low Stakes Hilarious that rock criticism started with critics noticing things bands wouldn’t notice about themselves (ineptitude, accidental references, supernatural side-effects, mind-boggling stupidity) and ended (as it does every day, coughing ...

It’s Business Punks now. Those words went through my head as I saw a broad-shouldered Armani-suited lifer shove a lesser man aside, striding down the streets of his hard-rocking birthright. The city, being white or at least buying it, always buying it, but shopping smart, ...

I used to dislike the Wedding Present; they were the sort of band that inspired not just admiration but FANDOM in others. Fandom’s like pot-smoking: a group of people sit in a room, intensely absorbed in a holy, marvelous object that displays nothing but repetition and a ...