Real Life Rock Top 10: May 5, 2025

Reckonings occur in a baseball park, the Gang of Four writes history, witches take over a high school, Lana Del Rey reads from “The Great Gatsby,” and Will Ferrell commits more crimes against humanity

1 “Pere Ubu’s David Thomas Dies at 71”—Pitchfork (April 24). Howard Hampton writes in: “Damn. It was love—‘THAT WAS FATE’—from the moment the needle hit the first radio-waves of ‘Non-Alignment Pact.’ Then ‘The Modern Dance’—‘Our poor boy . . .’ ‘Laughing’—everything the Lettrists and Situationists would later represent for me boiled down to a single-line motto-manifesto, ‘We can live in the empty spaces of this life.’ ‘Street Waves’—under the paving stones . . . And ‘Chinese Radiation’—where does a song like that even come from? The bookends of ‘Life Stinks’ and ‘Humor Me’—the latter a bottomless joke, jape, patois cri de couer FOR THE (DARK) AGES encompassing Tapper Zukie and Randy Newman and Eraserhead.”