After we get home from work in the evening, there’s a time frame of roughly an hour where Maura and I are both downstairs feeding the animals and taking care of other immediate concerns. It’s also an ideal window for spinning some records. The downstairs of our home has an semi-open floorplan. What is spun […]

I’ve written about the “death of Disco” more than a few times over the course of Armagideon Time’s lifespan. Though not as flashy a topic as z-list funnybook characters or Atomic Age anxieties, that fad’s late Seventies flameout touches upon several points of retrological interest. Disco bubbled up from the fringes of pop culture, steamrolled […]

If you’ve been reading this site, following my twitter feed, or engaged in conversation with me, then you’ll be well aware about my long-standing fascination with the “death of disco.” It was a social-cultural shift wrapped up in musical one, whose impact still echoes through the present day. It was the culmination of multiple interwoven […]

1970s retrofuture or 1980s retrofuture? Rollerball or Blade Runner? Orange plastic or neon-illuminated chrome? Corporate Syd Mead or Hollywood Syd mead? It’s a tough call to make, as my formative years were evenly split between the two aesthetics and I love both equally. So instead of making an impossible choice between Brunner’s and Gibson’s visions […]

From a commercially pragmatic standpoint, ed the Village People represented a workaround for a pair of persistent problems which plagued the surging disco craze — a lack of identifiable performers and the difficulty in translating club play to mass market airplay. The former was a product of the producer/composer-driven nature of the music, more about […]

“Disco Duck” is what happened when a regionally popular disc jockey leveraged his music industry connections against a mildly amusing concept and an immensely popular fad. It’s the old formula for what we currently know as “viral” success — the right gimmick at the right place at the right time — and one that is […]

I bought my first grown-up stereo system in 1985, information pills not too long after my family moved to Woburn Center and my brother and I got our very own room (as opposed to a doorless niche space connected to the living room of our small North Woburn apartment). My mom had a job assembling […]

There’s nothing quite as humbling or depressing than thumbing through old entertainment trade magazines. Their mixture of breathy optimism, pilule raw hype, symptoms and statisical manipulation is tough enough to swallow when it’s fresh off the bullshit pile; season it with a lashing of bitter hindsight and you have a formula for pure bathos. Anticipating […]