I’m In lunch bag let-down mode. Had too much fun in May, what with all the activities and gigs, and June has so far been one of the worst clunkers of the year, weather wise. I even apparently missed the biggest (ooh!) sports news this week when LeBron James accidentally flashed 18.5 million viewers during the NBA Finals.
Yeah, yeah, it’s been a week since the Saturday Night Live (SNL) special, and Bob’s given his views on the pros and cons. But I’m still thinking about what the show meant to me, in its heyday, and occasionally, since.
Hey, faithful readers. Welcome back to a new year and a new blog for 2015. The hope of our illustrious leader, Mr. Segarini, was that the DBAWIS Writers Guild might come up with ‘best of’ lists for 2014 to ease us into the new year. Alas, I’ve got nothing.
This year it falls to me to be the last voice of DBAWIS 2014. Still decked out in my new holiday outfit, and digesting our early family Christmas dinner,
Back at the turn of the Millennium (which was 14 years ago!) I worked at Sam The Record Man’s flagship store at 347 Yonge Street on the third floor. I was the content editor of their fledgling on-line shopping store. It was my job to review the newest releases coming in from the record labels – most specifically Canadian content. I had been hired to deal with CanCon due to my online presence with the Canadian Pop Music Encyclopedia. It was usually kept to a few dozen albums. It was a dream job.
Well, we survived 2013. Most of us anyway. The entertainment industry lost nearly an entire generation of scenemakers from Jackie Lomax to Ray Manzarek to Slim Whitman to James Gandolfini to Annette Funicello to Peter O’Toole. The people making some of the greatest art of the last century have left it up to us to carry on without them. And we’re failing to do so at an alarming rate. Can you imagine anyone mourning the 
loss of a Jonas Brother or Paris Hilton in 50 or 60 years time other than their families? The global glue that connects us through the arts has been replaced by the transient flypaper brought to us by Snatch Chat and Twatter. No wonder we hold onto our pop icons from the past for so long. Once they’re gone, we might very well lose the soul of music, film, stage, etc., forever. And that’s not just me spewing my usual dramatic hyperbole. I usually say let sleeping dogs lie while the new generation wages their own rebellion. Except the new rebellion wears designer logos, auto-tunes and sues the estates of dead soul singers pre-emptively in case the estate sues them first for stealing said dead soul singer’s music [Yeah, I’m talking about you Robin TheDicke].
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 