history Archives - Sex, No Drugs & Rock'N'Roll

Why Is Our Country So Fucked Up!

December 7, 2021 by L.E. Kalikow Leave a Comment

At the nation’s inception, when the Declaration of Independence declared “All Men Are Created Equal,” it didn’t include slaves, or women, neither of which could vote. The statement was originally set forth to assert that the colonists, as a people, had the right to self-government. It was only in the decades after the American Revolution that the phrase acquired its reputation as a statement of individual equality. The immorality of slavery and the inequality of women were just two of the many contradictions that would then develop.

Austin’s South-By-Southwest SXSW Has Lost Its Soul

March 27, 2017 by L.E. Kalikow Leave a Comment

Austin SXSW

It had been seven years since I last attended SXSW. As one of the original attendees from 1988 to 2010, I’d seen the changes as the internet gradually wiped out the music business, and the festival diversified into film, interactive, gaming, etc. But I really wasn’t prepared for what had happened to Austin itself.

Forgettable Overproduced Grammys Music

February 13, 2017 by L.E. Kalikow Leave a Comment

How Music Got Here

When the new millennium began with record companies suing their own customers for peer-to-peer music downloading, the graffiti was on the wall. Like the industrial revolution before, the digital age wiped out the multi-billion dollar record business we once thought recession proof and timeless.

But the music didn’t die, it simply morphed into another dimension as the infrastructure built to filter, foster, package, market and sell it disappeared. Now music exists in an unfiltered internet ocean requiring navigational tools like Spotify and Pandora. And the vestiges of past record companies, co-opted into entertainment conglomerates, now create brands instead of artists, with commercials, soundtracks, and albums produced, not for the music, but to sell the brand.

When ‘Colored’ Turned ‘Black’

September 11, 2016 by L.E. Kalikow Leave a Comment

As a white teenage civil rights marcher in the 60’s, I remember when ‘Colored’ became ‘Black,’ and suddenly I was an outsider. It was proposed that if we Caucasians could call ourselves ‘White’ and take pride in our various European heritages, former Negro slaves could call themselves ‘Black’ and take pride in their African heritage. However, with that Black and White distinction, an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality was also implanted.

Black Nationalism

This Country Is A Boomer…

August 10, 2016 by L.E. Kalikow Leave a Comment

The book, “Sex, No Drugs & Rock’N’Roll (Memoirs Of A Music Junkie)” is based on the premise that our baby-boomer generation has gone through the same maturation process as the country itself. In the fifties following WWII, we ruled the world and everything was simple. As we entered our teens in the early 60’s and began to rebel so went the country. And as we became cynical in the late 60’s, assassinations, Mayor Daley, Nixon and Watergate fed our disenchantment, all reflected in our music. Then, the complacency of adulthood in the 70’s through the 90’s into creeping old age and the arterial sclerosis of today.

History Lessons Unlearned

July 25, 2016 by L.E. Kalikow Leave a Comment

Monthly News Headlines: “After murdering his wife and mother in their homes, a former alter-boy and Eagle Scout perched atop a 27-story tower at the University of Texas, and killed 14 people, wounding 32 others. In Chicago, 4,000 National Guardsmen were called in to deal with shootings between police and Negro snipers. In Cleveland, a young Black mother was killed by police, triggering a series of riots.” Sound familiar? No this wasn’t just on the news… it was the summer of 1966.

What History We Teach, and Don’t Teach