SONGS FROM HERE AND THERE, THEN AND NOW -- Craven Lovelace

Recent Playlists

Every Friday, Craven ambles down the stranger paths of popular culture, sampling music from oh, the past century or so.  From nascent Tin Pan Alley ditties etched onto wax cylinders to bitpop MP3 anthems... from hepcat scat to nerdcore rap... from herky-jerky '80s new wave synthpop to spacey '60s lysergic psychedelia... you can expect it all between 9 am and noon on Fridays.  And presented as bonus features: the Mutant Pop Obituaries, a weekly musical tribute to the artists and celebrities, well-known and obscure, who have shuffled off this mortal coil during recent weeks; and the always popular Monkey & Chicken, wherein Craven plays a monkey song and a chicken song every week, for reasons best left to the imagination.

Weaned on Count Chocula and suckled by Kala the She-Ape, Craven came by his pop culture jones the old-fashioned way -- he passively soaked it up in a blue cathode glow while nestled in the granulated cushions of his living room beanbag chair.  One night during the 1970s, a late-night impromptu marathon film festival comprised of Roger Corman's Attack of the Crab Monsters, Dick Clark's drug exploitation flick Psych-Out! and Liberace's maudlin meller Sincerely Yours unfolded before Craven's wide, glazed eyes and permanently rearranged his neural circuits into the arterial tangle of old pop songs, cartoon characters and dada mischief that he now brings to the airwaves every Friday morning.

For Craven, the insane variety of a pop music universe which can spawn both Kate Smith and Marilyn Manson is emblematic of the pluralism that made America the greatest country in the history of the world, and he intends his aggressively generalist playlist as a political statement.  He believes most human minds are large enough to encompass more than one thought, and, unfettered by the chains of "good taste" and "consistency," he dedicates his weekly, genre-smashing melange to those good souls who, like Mr. Spock, find beauty in "infinite diversity in infinite combinations."

You can read more of Craven's musings at cravenlovelace.com.  Or circle him on Google+ for previews of Notes and the Mutant Pop Obituaries, as well as pointers to the pop culture phenomena currently tickling his fancy.