Last year I started a new ‘Decades’ series by focusing on my birth year, 1972, then 1982, 1992 and 2002, counting down my own favorite albums from each of those years and then 10-15 unfamiliar (to me) albums that received acclaim at the time.
I’m doing the same thing again, backing up a couple of years and focusing on 1970, ’80, ’90 and ’00. The next several weeks will be dedicated to 1970.
Yesterday we got our second random Barenaked Ladies song in a week and today we get our second R.E.M. song in two weeks.
In the previous post, I described the band’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi — the last album to feature drummer Bill Berry — as their swan song. Indeed, they were never the same and never as good after that record.
Last Saturday the Random iTunes Fairy served up a Barenaked Ladies song and exactly a week later she’s at it again. The previous track was from the band’s debut album, Gordon, while this one is from their antepenultimate record, Everything to Everyone.
I’m just happy I get to use the word antepenultimate, which means third from last.
The fifth and final season of The Wire focuses on the staff of The Baltimore Sun, with editors and reporters serving as fictionalized stand-ins for David Simon’s former co-workers at the same publication.
Simon paints unflattering portraits of the paper’s top editors, who are more eager to win prizes than practice ethical journalism. Tom McCarthy (who later went on to direct and co-write the Oscar-winning Spotlight) plays a Stephen Glass-esque reporter who is celebrated by the bosses even when the accuracy of his stories is questioned.
Popular opinion holds that Season Four of The Wire was the show’s best, and I can’t argue otherwise. Show creator David Simon turned his attention to Baltimore’s struggling public school system, as experienced by several teachers and particularly a group of four young friends.
Those boys, growing up in the inner city, are in an environment designed to make them addicts or criminals before they become adults. Whether any of them can navigate that minefield successfully is the question that drives this powerful season.
