Essay · Comedy & Culture The Force That Arrived at Nineteen Eddie Murphy is the most naturally gifted comedian America has produced in the second half of the twentieth century, and the case for this claim is not primarily about the films, though the films at their best are extraordinary, and not primarily about theContinue reading “Eddie Murphy”
Category Archives: Music
Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1969
Essay · Music & History Four Days on Max Yasgur’s Farm Woodstock was not what it was advertised to be. It was not three days of peace and music — it was four days, the weather was frequently terrible, the organisation collapsed almost immediately, the food ran out, the sound system failed repeatedly, and atContinue reading “Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1969”
Arthur Jafa
Essay · Art & Ideas The Question He Has Been Asking for Thirty Years Arthur Jafa has organised his entire artistic life around a single question: how do you make a Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music? The question sounds like a problem of aesthetics. It is, in fact, aContinue reading “Arthur Jafa”
The Beatles
Essay · Music & Ideas Four Men and the Thing They Were Saying The Beatles did not set out to have a message. They set out to make girls scream, to get out of Liverpool, to be bigger than Elvis, and they achieved all three with a speed and a completeness that left them, byContinue reading “The Beatles”
Albert King
Essay · Music & Lives The Velvet Bulldozer Albert King was six feet four inches tall and played a right-handed guitar upside down and left-handed, without a pick, bending strings that were already fighting him — strung the wrong way, the tension reversed, producing a sound so specific and so irreducible that no one whoContinue reading “Albert King”
Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness
He arrived in New York with a ukulele and a stammer and an idea that pop music could be the vehicle for the most serious questions a person could ask. Fifty years later, the former lead singer of Talking Heads remains the most restlessly curious, most formally inventive, most genuinely odd figure in American popularContinue reading “Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness”
Courtney Love
Essay · Music & Culture The Mess That Was Also the Method Courtney Love arrived in the early 1990s indie scene like something the scene had not known it was missing: a woman who wanted to be enormous, who was not prepared to be grateful for whatever space was made available to her, and whoContinue reading “Courtney Love”
The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America
America has often sung what it could not admit in speech. Its songs have carried grief before the law recognised suffering, desire before society permitted freedom, rage before politics found language, and longing before the country had earned the ideals it claimed for itself. If the American novel is a courtroom of conscience, and AmericanContinue reading “The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America”
The Fire This Time: John Coltrane and the Music That Changed Everything
He played saxophone with the intensity of a man trying to resolve, through sound alone, questions that language could not reach. He was thirty years old before anyone noticed. He was forty when he died. In between, he remade jazz so completely that the music has never fully recovered — or needed to. There isContinue reading “The Fire This Time: John Coltrane and the Music That Changed Everything”
Phil Spector
Essay · Music & Culture The Sound He Built and the Silence It Left Phil Spector invented one of the most ravishing sonic experiences in the history of recorded music and then, across the following decades, dismantled every reason to enjoy it cleanly. The Wall of Sound remains. So does everything else. By Bergotte · LosContinue reading “Phil Spector”
My World of Interiors 