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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 4m

My uncle, a former Huntington bartender, writes to remind me that “bottle of red, bottle of white” was also a drug joke.

Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

And then I thought about Long Island, where my dad grew up and I visited every summer—what it looked like to me as an outsider, and what it means for a musician to be part of the culture of a place.

Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 12m

Ok fine I will finally read Michael Clune’s “Writing Against Time” but I’m going to pretend it’s music criticism

Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

Which made me think about how art, as a permanent thing captured in a piece of media but also an unsettled thing in terms of what it means to an individual, is a kind of vehicle for time, and becomes one of the ways we experience time through our limited window of consciousness.

Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 58m

Hey kids, wouldn’t you rather listen to a guy yowling about nanobots in vaccines? No?

Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 59m

The kids have gotten into Danny Go, which I do not want to talk about, and requested this song at school dropoff. I think it’s the first time search results for a kids’ song has turned up other tracks I would much rather listen to.

Three Spotify results for “creepy crawl”: Danny go, be your own pet, and viagra boys

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Reposted by Mike Barthel

Elizabeth Boyle @thecelticist.bsky.social · 3h

Reminds me of this excellent sign that I saw at the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia.

Piano, which once belonged to Little Richard, with a sign on it saying "Do not attempt to play Little Richard's piano. He will know."

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Reposted by Mike Barthel

Maggie Serota @maggieserota.bsky.social · 1h

Thinking about all the Free Press links CBS employees must have been Slacking each other over the past few weeks

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 1h

My enjoyment of Swift fell off rapidly after Red—I think she’s a far better crossover country artist than pop star—so Folklore made me think “oh great, maybe every third album or so will be for me” but after this last one I feel like maybe that was a forlorn hope and she’s strictly a fan artist now

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 2h

To me Bucks Fizz is something I’m aware British people like but I’ve never personally experienced, like cheeky Nandos.

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 2h

It was a time!

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 2h

Over on FB a former DJ at Uncle Charlie’s in NYC posted his setlists from 1983 and 1985—you can see the shift from disco to electro happen. www.facebook.com/share/p/1F5p...

A setlist of songs including Gloria Gaynor, Vicky Sue Robinson, and Barry Manilow

A setlist of songs including A-Ha, Dead or Alive, Madonna, etc.

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Reposted by Mike Barthel

All Hallows' Leask (Hallowle'ask) @leask.bsky.social · 3h

I find the quest to make the dryest or filthiest martini to be exhausting in the same way I wish they'd stop piling shit on caesars/bloody marys or milkshakes, so I appreciate @jayasaxena.com's piece on wet, sweet & floral martinis having their day slate.com/life/2025/10...

One of the Greatest Cocktails Has Been Ruined by a Nasty Trend. But There’s Hope on the Horizon.

The era of bracing bravado is coming to an end.

slate.com

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

Anyway, I like this one a lot, I hope you give it a read. ihavethatonvinyl.com/essays/life-...

Life in a Glass House

All of which is to say that I loved Billy Joel because I loved my dad. I loved that he’d moved 300 miles away from Farmingdale to some little rural town (the Hudson River line would only take you part...

ihavethatonvinyl.com

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

I wrote about half of this stuck in bed with a sick kiddo who needed my presence for comfort, so I was thinking too about the shared social reality of families—how they’re relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but hugely important to the individuals within them.

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

I wanted to suggest a different theory of popularism, not pegging music as reflective of some other social or political trend, but as meaningful because popularity makes it part of our shared reality, of the social fabric, makes it real. (It’s kind of a prelude for the Miley book.)

It is also my lucky song. As a teenager, I won a massive stuffed flamingo at a carnival game while "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" was playing. (Saying that I grew up in a place where the carnival played 70's Joel songs tells you more than saying I grew up in northern New York State.) This is not a meaning that's part of the song, because it's only a meaning for me. But the fact that it could become part of my life, that Joel's story could become part of my own story, is something that can only happen with popularist art like Joel's, and this is something that critics sometimes forget, too, in our need to tell one story about art rather than the multitude of stories that emerge from the audience's experience. It's rare for a piece of art to be known by millions of people, and when it is, it sticks around, which means it shows up in lots of people's lives at lots of different times— romance and its end, dances and graduations and births and deaths-like toothpaste, or carpeting. But I don't remember the toothpaste I used the morning I won the flamingo, I remember the song that was playing, because songs have emotional resonance and narrative.
Which means that a popular song accrues a collective meaning that would not exist were it not popular.

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

Which made me think about how art, as a permanent thing captured in a piece of media but also an unsettled thing in terms of what it means to an individual, is a kind of vehicle for time, and becomes one of the ways we experience time through our limited window of consciousness.

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

And then I thought about Long Island, where my dad grew up and I visited every summer—what it looked like to me as an outsider, and what it means for a musician to be part of the culture of a place.

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

I saw the stuff about his dad, and their complicated relationship, and I thought about how my dad had given me Joel, and his artistic values, and where those came from, and how they influenced the way I think about art as a critic.

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

Thank you! One for the Barthels.

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 3h

Joel is my entree to pop, and I’ve always loved his music, even though few people I know (critic or non) feels the same. So I started off wanting to write about how the documentary both recontextualized his music and explained why he and the critics never really got along. But then…

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 4h

Alarms and Surprises! A Happy Hardcore Tribute 2 Radiohead 😀

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Mike Barthel @mikebarthelauthor.com · 4h

As promised/threatened! More in a little bit.

bring on the headless horses @ihavethatonvinyl.com · 7h

today at IHTOV:

@mikebarthelauthor.com goes long and deep on billy joel in a beautiful, gorgeously written essay on being a joel fan. you're going to want to read this one. put a few minutes aside. it's good ihavethatonvinyl.com/essays/life-...

Life in a Glass House

All of which is to say that I loved Billy Joel because I loved my dad. I loved that he’d moved 300 miles away from Farmingdale to some little rural town (the Hudson River line would only take you part...

ihavethatonvinyl.com