Fact is, we’ve come a long ways from yesteryear’s consoles, one of which was the much loved SNES. For our younger readers, over 20 years ago, the SNES gaming console was probably one of the best of its time. But for our older readers, the SNES was like the PS4 of that era, and a mention of it, along with some of its games is sure to bring back some nostalgia. That being said, let’s now take a look back at four of SNES’s best titles.  The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Image credit: Pinterest Digital Trends notes that the entire series carries a reverence among gamers young and ..read more

This week Scarlett Johansson dropped out of a movie where she would have played a transgender character. The movie was “Rub & Tug,” based on the true story of Dante “Tex” Gill, a transgender man who ran massage parlors in Pittsburgh. In the spirit of explaining LGBTQ+ issues as we have in the past with RuPaul’s transgender comments and Janelle Monáe’s reference to pansexuality. So why was there backlash against this movie? Transgender actors lamented that cisgender actors get to play trans roles, but transgender people don’t get to play cisgender roles. So that’s why Johanss ..read more

This is the 111th post in a weekly series. Read about it here and see the list of previous songs here. A new post about a different song is posted each Monday. You can listen to the songs in a Spotify playlist. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh founded Human League in 1977 as an electronic band, but the addition Philip Oakey and Adrian Wright helped expand the vision of the band. After two albums, Ware, Marsh, Oakey, and Wright were divided on where to take that vision, so Ware and Marsh left in 1980, leaving Oakey and Wright in charge of Human League. Ware and Marsh then formed Britis ..read more

This is the 110th post in a weekly series. Read about it here and see the list of previous songs here. A new post about a different song is posted each Monday. You can listen to the songs in a Spotify playlist. In the early 1960s, musician John Kongos had a handful of songs on the charts in his home country of South Africa as leader of Johnny Kongos & the G-Men. In 1966, Kongos moved to England, where he formed the psychedelic band, Floribunda Rose. After a failed single, Floribunda Rose became the band Scrugg. When Scrugg broke up around the end of the decade, Kongos went solo ..read more

This is the 109th post in a weekly series. Read about it here and see the list of previous songs here. A new post about a different song is posted each Monday. You can listen to the songs in a Spotify playlist. By the end of the 1990s, Stephin Merritt had already shown he was a versatile musician, tapping into several musical styles and traditions with numerous projects, chiefly The Magnetic Fields, The 6ths, The Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes. At some point, Merritt later told The San Francisco Bay Guardian, he was in a gay piano bar in Manhattan, listening to a pianist pla ..read more

This is the 108th post in a weekly series. Read about it here and see the list of previous songs here. A new post about a different song is posted each Monday. You can listen to the songs in a Spotify playlist. British band Slade never became became as big in America as in the band’s native England, where there was a time the band was almost as big as The Beatles. That was in part because the band’s number of hit singles rivaled that of fab four. By 1972, Slade had a string of hits, including three that reached Number 1 in the UK: “Coz I Luv You,” “Take Me Bak ‘Ome,” and “Mama Weer A ..read more

This is the 107th post in a weekly series. Read about it here and see the list of previous songs here. A new post about a different song is posted each Monday. You can listen to the songs in a Spotify playlist. Biographers seem unable to agree what specifically inspired Ray Davies to write “Stop Your Sobbing,” which appeared on The Kinks’ 1964 self-titled debut album. But there seems to be some agreement that it was an “old girlfriend,” at least according to Thomas Kitts, who wrote “Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else,” and Rob Jovanovic, who wrote “God Save The Kinks: A Biography ..read more

Over the last eight weeks, the “Love Letters” podcast explored the ways people try to get over their breakups. Meredith Goldstein masterfully wove her own experience in with the wisdom and anecdotes of others who struggled with breakups. I was honored to be on the episode about using music to cope, and made a playlist of songs for people going through a breakup. The last episode of this first season came out today. I won’t ruin any of it for you, in case you happen to be one of those fans who doesn’t listen to the podcast episodes within minutes of being posted. There were many things that I l ..read more

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