Weekend Reads (June 28): Dr. Demento, Britpop, Daft Punk, Mickey Mouse, Zines
Recommended weekend reading material for June 28, 2025.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
After spending 55 years delighting and amusing listeners with comedy and novelty songs, radio icon Dr. Demento is retiring.
He popularized songs including “The Monster Mash,” “Shaving Cream” and “Fish Heads,” while introducing artists including Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett, Benny Bell, Barnes & Barnes, Spike Jones, Jimmy Durante, Nervous Norvus, Allan Sherman, Stan Freberg and many others to a wider audience.
Demento, who’s now 84, confirmed that his final broadcasts will consist of archive material, ending in a top 40 of novelty songs on precisely the 55th anniversary of his first show. “It’s been a blast – but I have come to the decision that I need to hang up my top hat soon,” he said in a statement.
One of Demento’s most famous accomplishments was launching “Weird Al” Yankovic’s career. Yankovic famously performed such classics as “My Bologna” and “Another One Rides the Bus” on Demento’s radio show in the late ’70s.
Watch Yankovic talk about Dr. Demento’s influence on his music and career.
I’m a sucker for late ’90s-era downtempo and trip-hop, so of course, I’m interested in this collection of downtempo and trip-hop singles that emerged from New Zealand.
Inspired by the sonic shifts, a generation of local producers emerged who were increasingly interested in riding the line between played and programmed music. Using drum machines, samplers, software, and musicians, they combined elements of live instrumentation and studio production. Working at a sedate but hypnotic pace, music makers from all around the country crafted atmosphere-led songs that combined elements of jazz, soul, and quiet R&B with the stylistic affectations of hip-hop, dub, electronica and ambient.
Britpop is experiencing a comeback these days, with bands like Blur, Oasis, Pulp, and Supergrass all touring and making music once again. But what was the original Britpop scene like for women? Louise Wener (Sleeper), Miki Berenyi (Lush), and Sonya Madan (Echobelly), who are also making music again, share their memories of the era.
I remember one journalist beginning an interview by putting his hand on my knee and saying, “Now what are we going to do with you, young lady?” This was not a particularly unusual experience. I remember going on TV after [Sleeper’s 1996 album] The It Girl went platinum. You sit down to talk about an album you’re really proud of and the interviewer might say, “Our cameraman really fancies you — let’s see if you fancy him.” It became predictable. You knew that on radio and TV you might have someone leer over you, or be told you can’t have that front cover if you wear a T-shirt. There was so much control wrapped up in it. You knew if you didn’t join in the game, the engine would just stop.
Andrew Taylor-Dawson picks the ten greatest ambient albums of time, including works from Hiroshi Yoshimura, Aphex Twin, Stars of the Lid, and Steve Roach.
With the 1984 release of Structures from Silence, California native Steve Roach created a truly landmark record of the ambient genre. Comprised of three long form pieces that gently evolve over their extended run times, the album has endured — gaining new fans along the way. Its sound is timeless and in many ways embodies the relaxing or meditative quality many instantly think of when considering the ambient field. While a million miles from an Eno clone, it does have many of the quintessential features of the genre, whereas many of the records on this list have to one degree or another broken away from them.
Structures from Silence is one of my absolute favorite albums, ambient or otherwise; read my review.
Adam P. Newton reflects on the legacy of Daft Punk’s 2001 breakthrough album, Discovery.
Though one could make a similar claim about their 1997 debut Homework, this one has the true career-defining hits. Hell, you don’t get to play Coachella, create the TRON: Legacy soundtrack, or craft the guest-star-packed Random Access Memories without this 14-track, hour-long opus. It’s an iconic collection of electro-pop bangers designed to fill the dance floor and keep people moving. In fact, that is the biggest strength of the album (and the duo’s entire career): They understand how and why people want to dance.
If there’s one band that I truly regret never seeing in concert, it’s Daft Punk. Every bit of footage that I’ve seen from their tours in 2006 and 2007 looks mind-blowing and life-changing.
In recent years, iconic characters like Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh have entered the public domain, meaning enterprising individuals have included them in a slew of really low-budget horror movies with titles like Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey and Popeye: The Slayer Man.
[T]his list must feel like a disappointment to those activists who spent the ‘90s fighting for the right to remix. When you consider all the great adaptations in movie history, this collection feels a little heartbreaking. Just think of what MGM did with The Wizard of Oz after the copyright on L. Frank Baum’s novel expired. Think of how far Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Bram Stoker’s Dracula have come since the 19th century. Consider what Walt Disney himself did with Brothers Grimm (Snow White and Cinderella) and Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Mermaid and Frozen). Recall the countless iterations of Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
Via Kottke.
Other characters that will be entering the public domain in the near future include Betty Boop (2026), Dick Tracy (2027), Conan the Barbarian (2028), and Mary Poppins (2030). If you want to make your own James Bond or Spider-Man movie, though, you’ll need to wait until 2049 or 2058 (respectively).
For nearly 30 years, Adventure Gamers was one of the web’s biggest websites devoted to adventure video games of all shapes and sizes. But now the site is just a shell of its former self, and filled with gambling ads. So what happened?
To briefly share its history, Adventure Gamers was owned and run for its first 18 years by Marek Bronstring, with Jack Allin brought in to work as the editor-in-chief. In 2016, Bronstring sold the site to Ivo Teel, with editing duties continuing under Jack Allin. Come 2022, Allin was no longer editor, and Teel took over editorial duties. That is, until recently. While there has been no official announcement, Ivo Teel recently sold the site to new owners, and the result has been an overhaul to twist it into a festival of gambling affiliate ads.
In amongst the dominating tabs for casinos, betting and poker, all articles are now credited to “AG Staff” rather than their original authors, and they’re buried beneath reviews of god-awful-looking slot machines that contain lines like, “The Da Vinci Diamonds slot machine is a work of art. It draws players in with its beautiful visuals and fun gameplay.” We have no way of knowing for sure, but given the site’s new peculiar use of “In summary” midway through articles and a weird reliance on incongruous bullet point lists, it sure looks like the work of an AI. It’s a sad sight.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in Chile, released some of its first images, and they’re pretty mind-boggling.
Apart from a few foreground stars in our own Milky Way, the myriad specks of light captured here make up a rich tapestry of about 10 million galaxies — just 0.05% of the roughly 20 billion galaxies Rubin will image during its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). By the end of the survey, Rubin will have revealed this level of detail across the entire southern sky.
The bright stars scattered throughout this image belong to our home galaxy. By tracking their positions, brightness, and for some, even their motion over time, Rubin will help map the Milky Way in extraordinary detail — revealing its structure, history, and how it has evolved over time. With observations of never-before-seen stellar streams, dwarf galaxies, and more, Rubin data will help scientists investigate the dynamic past of our cosmic neighborhood.
Given that more and more of our lives exist on the cloud, what should we do to ensure that our loved ones can still get what they need after they’re gone? That’s a morbid question, but Glenn Fleishman has a few answers.
[C]ompanies like Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft had made few plans about the legal and technical aspects of ownership and control, even as they accumulated hundreds of millions of user accounts with petabytes — maybe exabytes — of data. Often, an executor or heir would write a company about a late person’s account only to find that the account was instantly locked down or deleted.
Over time, policies emerged from these companies and others that explained precisely what you needed to provide as an heir, executor, or other party authorized by the deceased to obtain access to their cloud-stored data. That may require a step beyond providing a death certificate: an appropriate party has to obtain a court order, which I’ll talk about more below.
Even though online communication like social media still dominates, old fashioned print zines are making a comeback.
Communication constantly evolves, along with the way people want to receive information. As social media replaced zines, the messages traveled farther, but their permanence dissipated. Friendster fizzled. Tumblr will never be what it was. Posts on X or TikTok get drowned in the churn of what’s trending or what platform owners want to boost. Handmade zines can last much longer. “Writing things down on paper has value,” Spooner says. “It’s more permanent.”
As fears of surveillance and authoritarianism grow, the zine community may provide a means to organize under the algorithmic radar, in a format less beholden to the whims of multibillion-dollar social media companies. A vision of the future copied from the past.
Fun fact: Back in high school, my friends and I launched a print zine called Honor Students on Acid. It only ran for a few issues, most of which I still have somewhere in my office, but it represented my first attempts at writing about music.
Related: Velvet Blue Music, one of my favorite indie labels, has its own zine, titled Small Sounds Press. Two issues have been released so far, and I think a third one’s in the works.
From the Blog
Earlier this week, I published the 8000th post on Opus, a reflection on Psalm 19, probably my favorite chapter in the Bible.
It’s fraught to pick one portion of Scripture over any other. Not just theologically speaking, since all of it’s “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16), but also in terms of personal study and significance. That said, I’ve frequently meditated on Psalm 19 over the years and have always found it inspiring, poetic, and convicting.
At my current publishing rate, Opus’ 9000th post should be published sometime in August 2027.
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One of your best columns I especially liked the tribute to Dr Demento and for you mentioning his mentoring of Al Yankovic