My decision for url has turned rather fortuitous, as I can now ascribe meaning to it that I can in the future pretend to have intended from the beginning. You see, the most famous instance of replacing "of" with O' in the rock universe is Prince's landmark double LP Sign O' the Times. This is significant for two reasons:
1. Like The Replacements, the band from whom the "Left of the Dial" part was derived, Prince is from Minneapolis, MN, and released his best music starting in 1984.
2. It symbolically represents a fusion of tastes for both the pop and the underground.
While I'm certainly not the mainstream radio type (especially since about 1998), I'm not such a cultural snob that I would pretend that Meat Puppets II, Double Nickels on the Dime, Zen Arcade, and Let It Be were the only great albums to come out in 1984. Born in the USA, 1984, and Purple Rain were there too. It's just that they had hit singles.
So that is the kind of sensibility I hope to bring in this blog. I will trumpet underground gods like The Meat Puppets, The Minutemen, Husker Du, and the Replacements, who you probably don't know but should, but I will give Springsteen, Van Halen, and Prince their due. The bottom line is that I don't believe that there is a correlation between popularity and artistic merit in either direction. It's just as true that 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong as it is that 50,000 Fall fans can't be wrong.
Just don't ask me to watch Purple Rain: The Movie. I can only go so far.
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