March 6, 2019

The Perils of Revisiting the Past

All that is old is made new again.

Self-consciously reconstructing a bygone style is tricky business. Odds are you’ll end up sounding like a stale nostalgia act, when the goal is to create the illusion of spontaneity. Amazingly, a gifted few pull it off.

Nick Waterhouse
Nick Waterhouse
Innovative Leisure

California’s Nick Waterhouse revisits the slinky, pre-Beatles R&B he does so well on his self-titled fourth album. The cat has a winning recipe: fizzy, catchy songs, plus suave vocals with just a hint of a rasp, topped off by loose, swinging rhythms that don’t stop. But he’s not a tiresome purist or a hipster poseur, adding hints of garage rock, bebop, and funk to keep things fresh. This is groovy stuff, in the best possible way.

Bloodshot Bill
Come and Get Your Love Right Now
Goner

While he hails from the Great White North, Montreal’s Bloodshot Bill delivers an uncanny impression of a deranged southern hillbilly on his seventh album. Mumbling, howling and growling with feverish glee, he echoes ‘50s greats like Carl Perkins and Charlie Feathers, continuing the wonderfully shabby revivalism of The Cramps. Happily, Bill’s stripped-down take on vintage rockabilly never feels contrived, thanks to the obvious delight he takes in these wild-eyed displays. Come and Get Your Love Right Now could raise the dead, or at least your spirits.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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