About Me
Charles Olney, Associate Professor of Constitutional Law and Judicial Politics at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley (academic website). This is a blog about music, politics, and the law. I also write about women’s soccer at Backline Soccer and Stars and Stripes FC.
Bluesky: olneyce
Soundcloud: olneyce
-
Recent Posts
Greatest Hits
- Beatles from worst to first
- Top 25 albums of the decade
- Top 50 songs of the decade
- Top 10 Bruce Springsteen songs
- Top 10 Modest Mouse songs
- Top 10 Tom Petty songs
- Top 10 Carissa's Wierd songs
- Top 10 Paul Simon songs
- Top 10 Bob Dylan songs
- Top 10 breakup songs
- Top 20 albums of 2005
- Top 30 albums of 2006
- Top 40 songs of 2006
- Top 25 albums of 2007
- Top 40 songs of 2007
- Top 25 albums of 2008
- Top 40 songs of 2008
- Top 30 albums of 2009
- Top 40 songs of 2009
- Top 25 albums of 2010
- Top 40 songs of 2010
- Top 15 albums of 2011
- Top 40 songs of 2011
- Top 20 albums of 2012
- Top 40 songs of 2012
- Top 30 albums of 2013
- Top 50 songs of 2013
- Top 25 albums of 2014
- Top 50 songs of 2014
- Top 30 albums of 2015
- Top 50 songs of 2015
- Top 15 albums of 2016
- Top 40 songs of 2016
- Top 25 albums of 2017
- Top 50 songs of 2017
- Top 30 albums of 2018
- Top 50 songs of 2018
Music links
- Hype Machine
- elbo.ws
- Music for Kids Who Can't Read Good
- Can you see the sunset from the southside?
- Hits in the Car
- A Certain Romance
- Herohill
- Speed of Dark
- Lost in your Inbox
- Vague Space
- Skatterbrain
- I Guess I'm Floating
- Largehearted Boy
- Neon Gold
- Another Form of Relief
- Cover Lay Down
- The Monsters Under the Bed Are Not Real
- Yellow Stereo
- Quick Before It Melts
- Knox Road
- Sand is Overrated
- Shake Your Fist
Recent Comments
Archives
Meta
-
Category Archives: Uncategorized
We’re on a world tour
World Tour (Weezy, Wale, Dre) – Brenton Duvall In the past 16 hours, I’ve had visitors come to the blog from Tehran, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Zagreb, Berlin, Prague, New South Wales, Portugal…all of them looking for a rundown of the best Bruce Springsteen songs. … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
I’ll take the silent treatment
Silent Treatment – The Joy Formidable Some songs are built to pluck every single string in my heart. A pretty double-tracked female voice, backed by a delicate acoustic pluck, rising up and then falling around a single note…yeah, there was … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Top 10 Carissa’s Wierd songs
My favorite band is The Beatles. There are probably tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people who agree with me there. But my second favorite band hasn’t even been heard of by a million people. Carissa’s Wierd only released … Continue reading
I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free
Song For Zula – Phosphorescent Music can impose order on a feeling, channel it into a narrow band. It can harness a feeling, tame it. Or it can impose disjunctures, rip apart the seemingly clear. It can mislead by providing a … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Race and gender in Title VII – a strange history
Poison Cup – M. Ward I just finished Gretchen Ritter’s The Constitution As Social Design, which attempts to connect our Constitutional processes to our conceptions of civic membership, often in very interesting ways. I can’t 100% recommend the book, since I … Continue reading
Short answers to stupid questions: Court stacking edition
Genius And The Thieves – Eluvium Harold Maass at The Week asks: Is Obama trying to stack the courts with liberals? If by ‘stack’ you mean ‘nominate judges to fill vacancies’ – then yes. Yes he is. The nefarious plot here is … Continue reading
Scandal-mania: some thoughts
Bad News – Eels Okay, so the threshold for what makes a scandal really seems to be falling. Only one of these things strikes me as a legitimate ‘scandal,’ and even there it’s a pretty minor variant. It’s particularly telling to … Continue reading
Feel the energy all around me
Brainwash – Cillie Barnes This song answer the question that I never knew I needed to ask: what if Cat Power wanted to combine the smooth lyricism and melodies of late 60s Motown with the liquid feel of modern chilled out … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
1 Comment
It always ends the same
Television – You Won’t So simple, so warm, so great. There almost couldn’t be less going on here musically. It’s the same simple refrain sung again and again – wafting above a slow round of handclaps and a line of nine … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
1 Comment
Just Like Any Other Man, Only More So (a short story)
Transistor Radio – Cloud Cult It is a little known fact that intelligent life is, in fact, alive and thriving on several other planets in our very own solar system. The reason scientists have failed to discover them is simply that … Continue reading