Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Oasis, Rick Springfield, Devo, Blondie

Music grab bag.  First up, news about the band Oasis.  Gil Kaufman (BILLBOARD) reports:


So far, Oasis have let the music do the talking. Liam and Noel Gallagher have just wound up the first round of UK and Irish dates on their sold-out Live ’25 tour and in a testament to the breathless enthusiasm that’s greeted their first round of shows in more than 16 years they’ve hardly had to talk up the dates at all.

In fact, until Tuesday (Aug. 19) neither brother had sat down for a proper interview about the shows at all. But Noel, who like his younger sibling singer Liam, is simply mad about football, called in to his favorite drive-time sports chat show, talkSPORT with Andy Goldstein and Darren Bent, to chat about Man City, and, of course, how things are going with the formerly battling brothers.
Saying he was feeling “a bit shaky” after the band’s two-night run at Croke Park in Dublin, Ireland on Saturday (Aug. 16) and Sunday (Aug. 17), Gallagher summed up the weekend by saying, “there was a lot of singing, a lot of drinking and a lot of talking nonsense… it was quite a night.”

Noel said he’s on “top of the world” at the moment, professing to be “completely blown away” by how the gigs the reunited band have played so far have been received. “It’s difficult to put into words, actually,” said the band’s lyricist. “Every night is the crowd’s first night, so every night’s got that same kind of energy. It’s been truly amazing… I’m not usually short for words, but I can’t really articulate it at the minute.”


It would be great if this was Oasis back together for good.  But I have a feeling when the concert ends in November, the brothers will once again go their separate ways.   Oasis broke out in the 90s.  Let me move over to a big star of the 80s, Rick Springfield. Lauren Gordon (PARADE) reports:

More than four decades after “Jessie’s Girl” first hit the airwaves and became an '80s anthem, Rick Springfield, 75, recently shared the real story behind the smash hit. In a candid new interview, the rocker opened up about the unrequited crush that inspired the song and how it changed his life for good.

"I hadn't had much success, and I'd been recording and writing and recording and touring a little bit, and I started looking elsewhere to make some money," Springfield recently told Hard Rock's "The Song" show.
"I always liked working with my hands, so I started going to a stained glass class in Pasadena with the honest thought of supporting my future family with my stained glass mastery," he continued with a chuckle. "There was this girl there that really caught my attention, and she had a boyfriend."
Evidently his name was Gary, not Jessie, but never-the-less it prompted him to go home and write about his "sexual angst."

"[I] just picked up my guitar and and the song just the story just came from that of wanting her," he admitted.


Rick hit in this country back in the 70s with "Speak To The Sky."  But he didn't really notch up a string of hits.  In the 80s, "Jesse's Girl" kicked off a huge string of hits for him.  When the song came out, he was also popular for playing Dr. Noah Drake on GENERAL HOSPITAL.   It was his first number one in the US and also in Australia (he was born and raised in Australia). He would follow that in the US with 15 more top forty pop hits. I love "Jesse's Girl" -- everything about it, the lyrics, the way Rick sings it and the guitar.  It's just one of those songs that hooks you immediately and forever.

I noted NETFLIX had a documentary on the band Devo last week -- noted it twice last week.  It starts streaming today.  Greta Cross (USA TODAY) notes:

The newest Netflix documentary will surely make viewers want to whip it good.

On Aug. 19, Netflix released its new original documentary, "Devo." The 90-minute documentary provides an inside look at the new wave band known for hits like "Whip It" and "(I Can’t Get Me No) Satisfaction," with interviews from founding members Mark and Robert "Bob" Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale.

In the documentary's trailer, Mark tells the story of how the band asked their record company for money to fund the music video for "(I Can’t Get Me No) Satisfaction." When it debuted in 1978, music videos weren't common industry practice and really wouldn't be until MTV's launch in 1981. A throughline in Devo's career, they proved to be ahead of the trends.

Devo was New Wave.  So was Blondie.  Blondie had four number one hits on the pop chart -- "Heart of Glass," "Call Me," "The Tide Is High" and the first rap song to go to number one "Rapture."  They had five other hits that made the top forty for a total of nine top forty hits.   Matt Mitchell (PASTE) reports:

Right now, Debbie Harry, who recently celebrated her 80th birthday, is dressed down, puttering around her home and “searching through a massive pile of stuff from every tour.” Since the ‘70s? Perhaps. During her spring cleaning in July, she pulls out a photograph of a man she believes to be guitarist Dave Edmunds. But after putting her glasses on, she realizes it’s Nick Lowe. A nearby Chris Stein calls her bandmate, old flame, and dear friend “a luddite” before sharing a laugh with her about it.
But before Debbie Harry was Debbie Harry, she was born Angela Trimble in Miami at the dawn of July in 1945. Three years later, gift shop owners Catherine and Richard Harry adopted her, renamed her Deborah Ann, and raised her in Jersey. She was a tomboy before her classmates at Hawthorne High School voted her “best looking” in 1963. Doo-wop music spilled into high school dances at the local firehouse, she remembers. One of the first songs she discovered on her own was Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Locomotion”; she bought 45s of Fats Domino and Little Richard; Percy Sledge’s “Thief in the Night” was her first favorite song. The radio taught Harry how to move, how to act. “My parents might have been on the edge of thinking, ‘This is never going to last,’” she chuckles.
After a move across the Hudson, Harry worked a number of odd jobs: BBC Radio office secretary, Union City go-go dancer, Max’s Kansas City hostess, Playboy Bunny. “That was quite an education and a real eyeful for me,” she says, referring to her time waitressing at Max’s before becoming a regular performer there. “There was a very illicit, sort of sexy vibe,” Stein notes. “That wasn’t at CBGB.” Harry adds that it’s what she had “always wanted to know about and be a part of,” that she “glorified in it” being a primary hang for New York’s art cohort. She remembers waiting on Andy Warhol (who would later become one of her greatest friends), Jefferson Airplane, and Mark Rothko. “All the artists went there because Mickey [Ruskin] would give them an open tab. At the end, when he would want to collect, he would settle for artwork, which, over time, became extremely valuable.”




For Blondie, 1982 was the year when everything changed. And it wasn’t just about losing steam or figuring out that the unstoppable force of their music had since lost its spark. No, it all came crashing down following a series of tour dates that pushed them past the point of no return. It was so harrowing, in fact, that Debbie Harry once said drugs “were the only way we could handle the stress”.
The Tracks Across America Tour wasn’t just a nightmare waiting to happen because of the band’s recent lack of hits; it was an inevitable disaster from the off, with half-empty venues and dates left unfulfilled because of a lack of ticket sales. As well as using drugs to self-medicate or to hide from embarrassment, Chris Stein’s health took a turn for the worse, and he lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time because of some mysterious disease the doctors had no answers to (this would later be revealed as a rare autoimmune disease that made it hard for him the swallow).

“Chris was wasting away,” Harry later recalled, his deterioration a stone-cold fact that there would be no chance of ever giving their European leg a shot when this was clearly more than just a band in commercial turmoil. The harsh reality was that this was also a group no longer with the means to actually pull off their high-energy shows to the crowds that were slowly but surely filtering out, leaving nothing but a shadow in the place of a success story that once defined the entire new wave scene.
 Closing with C.I.'s "The Snapshot:"


Tuesday, August 19, 2025.  Chump plans to steal the 2026 mid-terms while Bernie Sanders attacks Kamala Harris with lies for the second time this month.  That's not how we pull together and big tent.



Let's start with Reese Waters from yesterday.


And TABITHA SPEAKS from last week.




We are tired of it.  White progressives,' we are tired of it.

We're tired of you lying about Kamal and we're real tired of you refusing to get that Bernie has a Black problem.  We don't worship him like you do, we don't cut him slack for his racism.

A lot of us are trying to do what I am which is big tent, big tent, big tent.  Avoid trashing other Dems as much as possible, work on pulling the party together, stand up to the enemy that is Chump.

But then you get crusty lipped Bernie attacking Kamala Harris.

And let's be clear, though I know some of you White 'progressives' nodded a long with Bernie's attacks, he's lying.  

He is distorting Kamala and her campaign.  

We saw that go down last fall and we have not forgotten.  You need to your old man to stop trying to stir up s**t because this doesn't end well.


Some of you White 'progressives' nodding along with Bernie due so because of the crap-fest that passes for 'independent' media on the left.  

It was something to see in the fall, to watch Kamala be attacked for not doing this or that by White media like COMMON DREAMS when, in fact, Kamala was doing what they were saying she wasn't.  COMMON DREAMS ran an article attacking her for not talking about women's health when she'd just done that -- talked about women's health -- to ESSENCE magazine.  But White 'progressives' apparently can't read a publication if the target audience is Black women.  

We could go though this with multiple examples, but I'm just going to note two.

From the August 29th "Iraq snapshot:"


Starting with the US presidential elections, I believe the whine goes something like this: "Kamala hasn't done any interviews!"





That's what the mail brought me yesterday.  Page 48 kicks off Caroline Wanga's six page interview with the Democratic Party's presidential nominee.  The two discuss a number of issues including the economy.  I'll note this from the interview 


Kamala Harris:  I have been working on that issue for years -- with my colleagues from the CBC [Congressional Black Caucus] when I was in the Senate and now as Vice President.  Why? Because Black women in the United States of America are three to four times more likely to die in connection with childbirth than other women.  And we know that there are a variety of reasons for that.  But we also know that this is a health care crisis of the highest order, and it has received very little attention proportionate to the seriousness of the matter.  So, I worked with my colleagues when I was in the Senate.  We passed a number of ills.  When I came in as Vice President, I continue to work on it.  And one of the things I found is this: For women on Medicaid, which states can provide for postpartum care for two months up to 12 months -- and I realized when I came in as Vice President, only three states would extend Medicaid coverage for postpartum care from two months to 12 months.  I don't have a problem shaming people sometimes, so I challenged the states to extend it.  And now 46 states have extended Medicaid coverage for postpartum care.  There is a direct connection between this and Black maternal mortality.  But back to the other point about freedom of choice.  The majority of Black women in America live in the South You know that in the South, we have some of the highest rates of Black maternal mortality.  In the South, except for the state of Virginia, every state has an abortion ban.  And what I find hypocrisy upon hypocrisy, by some of these extremists, is that the same ones saying they're passing these abortion bans because they care about women and children have been completely silent on the issue of Black maternal mortality.  Don't come to us, gaslighting us about where you've been and where you haven't been, on important issues that relate to what we know every day affects our sisters, our mothers, our aunties, our grandmothers -- and could affect our daughters. 


A few comments.  The interview is not online.  I have no idea if it will be posted or not.  Currently at ESSENCE,  Jasmine Browley has an article about Kamala and the opportunity economy that went up this week and Robyn Mowatt looks at political style.  Second, the cover notes "COLLECTOR'S EDITION."  If you're a subscriber like me, you may grimace.  But they used a real sticker that peels off -- not a paper label that's basically glued to the cover -- and it's very easy and doesn't tear the cover when you remove it.  After I removed it, I scanned for the image above (notice no tear in the lower corner) and took the cover off the magazine.  It's now framed and up in my home office. 


From the October 16th "Iraq snapshot"

At ESSENCE, Melissa Noel reports:


The Kamala Harris' campaign is making its most direct appeal yet to Black men, rolling out new policies, boosting programming and a targeted media blitz to win over a crucial part of the electorate. With Republicans eyeing Black male voters in a big way this election, the vice president's team is on the move and not leaving anything to chance.

On Monday, Harris introduced her "Opportunity Agenda for Black Men." The plan centers on providing up to 1 million fully forgivable loans of up to $20,000 for Black entrepreneurs and investing in training, mentorship, and apprenticeships for Black men in high-demand industries. Harris is also pushing for the legalization of recreational marijuana—paired with a focus on ensuring Black men access wealth and jobs in that market.

"This agenda is a further realization of Vice President Harris' Opportunity Economy. An economy where people don't just get by, but get ahead. Where Black men are equipped with the tools to thrive: to buy a home, provide for our families, start a business and build wealth," said Congressman and Harris-Walz Campaign Co-Chair Cedric Richmond in astatement shared with ESSENCE. 

"Donald Trump could care less about equipping hardworking Americans with the tools needed to get ahead. From being investigated by the Department of Justice for refusing to rent to Black tenants to falsely accusing the Central Park 5 and calling for their execution to spreading the racist birther conspiracy theory against President Obama, at every step of his life, Donald Trump put Black men down for his own personal brand. If he wins in November, he is telling us exactly what he'll do to Black men, Richmond added. 


I'm glad ESSENCE exists.  I'm a longterm subscriber to the print edition.  But it's an amazing, less than a month away from an election, ESSENCE can report on this very important proposal but COMMON DREAMS can't and won't.  Nor IN THESE TIMES.  Nor THE PROGRESSIVE -- an outlet with a token or two but the tokens know what they're allowed to cover, they know who's running the plantation.  That's a very important proposal and it's one that deserves serious exploration.  But so-called news outlets in 'independent' media can't be bothered.


Search in vain for any amplification of that coverage from ESSENCE at COMMON DREAMS, THE NATION, IN THESE TIMES, THE PROGRESSIVE, etc etc.  

The most minor story in THE NEW YORK TIMES will get amplified  but say "ESSENCE" and watch the White flight take place.

Bernie doesn't know what he's talking about.

And how does he help anyone by attacking Kamala to begin with?

She's not in the White House.  Donald Chump is.

That's supposed to be our focus but along comes Bernie to try to beat up the Black woman with lies.

We're sick of it.  Black people have had enough of this s**t.  

I know Black women who plan to site out 2026 because of the way Kamala and we were disrespected by the left or 'left.'  I know Black women who are slowing leaving a staycation and trying to get back involved -- and that group is going to bolt if you don't stop the attacks on Kamala.

White 'progressives' like Sam Seder had 801 topics they cover every week but they refused to cover the very real topic of the attacks on Kamala during the election and the attacks on Black women supporting Kamala during the election.   I'm not referring to the right-wingers attacking, I'm referring to people who claimed to be of the left.


You think you can ignore the topic.  But when you do, you just make clear to Black people how little you truly care about us and our issues.  

Bernie is nothing to praise and I could take him down every day -- his faux support for immigrants, for example, is a very easy stance to expose (he's anti-immigrant and has long been that and we can look at how little support he has given to immigrants seized by ICE in Vermont).  I'm trying to focus on defeating Chump and saving the country.

But if Bernie keeps attacking Kamala, you're going to find out just how angry Black people are -- still are -- over the stunts so many of you White progressives played last fall.  

You want us to pull together as a big tent?  Stop the attacks on Kamala.  Stop lying.  We've had enough and we're not going to take much more of this.

Mike covered this topic in "Katie Phang, TABITHA SPEAKS and more" and Marcia did so in "Olay, pay attention, Tabitha's showing you the strength a real Black woman has" most recently. And if you're new to the way certain elements of the left or 'left worked to put Chump in the White House last fall, refer to "2024: The Year of Betrayal From Inside The Left."


We're supposed to have a common enemy.  If you think that's Kamala Harris, you are part of the effort working to ensure that MAGA remains in power for decades.



On Monday morning, President Trump returned to a longtime fixation, posting on Truth Social that he was “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” by “signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

The post came just after Trump’s Friday summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin—not known for his love of free and fair elections—who allegedly counseled Trump that “your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,” a message Trump promptly relayed to Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Trump already led a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots, helping to push for a spate of anti-voter state laws both in the run-up to the 2020 election and after his loss. But each successive crackdown strips voting rights from disabled and aging voters, who disproportionately rely on absentee ballots and voter assistance laws to participate in democracy.

Some experts question whether the White House even has the power to take further steps to ban voting by mail; a plethora of lawsuits would likely follow any executive order against it. 

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