Patton Dodd: November 2007 Archives

Forget Matt Redman, MercyMe, Hillsong--the band most important to worship music today is an Icelandic post-rock quartet with pagan leanings and a gay lead singer whose lyrics are often made-up syllables with no distinct meaning. Ladies and Gentlemen: Sigur Ros.

Barry Bonds is busted. He'll probably never own up to his guilt, and his lawyers might successfully get him off or significantly reduce whatever sentence he may receive. But he'll always be an embarrassment to baseball, and he'll forever evoke Sudden Onset Nausea for any baseball fan who has occasion to think of the man who cheated his way to baseball's sexiest title, Home Run King.

Bonds is part of a motley crue of athletes busted recently for naughtily increasing their odds of winning in their respective sports. It seems every organized human athletic competition has seen a hero tarnished in recent months, including baseball, football, soccer, basketball, cycling, track and field--I'm pretty sure cricket and bass fishing fans are mourning their own fallen stars, too. As it turns out, cheaters prosper plenty, but we're doing a pretty good job of nabbing them.

I was not fortunate enough to be alive during the Norman Mailer heyday of the 1960s and early 1970s, when his writing on the American scene—from electoral politics to boxing to the space program to the Vietnam war and its discontents—appeared regularly in periodicals. His work was a heady match for his times, and he seemed to know it all along: if any writer was going to account for that American era, it had to be one with enough soaring intelligence, bravura aesthetic daring, and straight-up end-of-the-world cockiness to take on the wild currents of American life and make 'em make sense. Mailer did it—not with equal success in every moment, but he did it.

Click Here to Listen to "Radio Nowhere" from "Magic"

Doug Howe has already spread the good news of the new Bruce Springsteen album in this space, joining a chorus of hand-clapping reviewers since "Magic" debuted this fall. (A.O. Scott at the New York Times outdid them all, with a fabulous piece that combined reviewery, reportage, and fan-boy worship.) But here at Burn or Burn, we wanted to make sure your iPods, computers, cars, ring tones, and any other preferred listening mechanisms were fully equipped with the Boss, because he's having a rock n' roll revival all his own, and if you love music, you don't want to miss any of it.