Category: Music
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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 who…
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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 American…
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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 is…
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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 · Los…
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Cher and the Art of Outlasting America
Cher has lasted so long, and in so many forms, that she can seem less like an entertainer than like a permanent feature of the culture itself. She belongs to that tiny class of figures who have ceased to be merely famous and become symbolic: instantly recognisable, endlessly referential, somehow both singular and omnipresent. Singer,…
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Where the River Bends: Memphis and the Music That Changed the World
It is the most productive square mile in American cultural history. A city of grief and genius, of violence and transcendence, built on cotton and the blues and the unsettled accounts of race — Memphis made the modern world’s soundtrack and has never quite recovered from the effort. By Bergotte Begin with the geography, because…
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Ivor Novello and the Lost Language of British Glamour
Ivor Novello has survived in British culture in a peculiarly ghostly form. His name remains everywhere, attached to one of the country’s most prestigious songwriting honours, and yet the man himself has drifted into soft focus. Many know the Ivor Novello Awards. Far fewer could say with confidence who Novello was, what he made, or…
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Cool Britannia: Art, Attitude, and the London of the 1990s
It was the summer of 1997 and Downing Street had turned into a nightclub. Tony Blair, barely weeks into his premiership, was playing host not to diplomats but to designers, artists, models, and rock stars. In the garden, Kate Moss smoked cigarettes with Noel Gallagher of Oasis. Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, the enfant terribles…
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In Times of Dragons: Tori Amos and the Mythology of Now
By Bergotte The opening line of Tori Amos’s eighteenth studio album is a command: “Shush yourself, down now.” It comes from the album’s antagonist — the “sadistic billionaire Lizard Demon husband” from whose penthouse the album’s protagonist is fleeing — and it is the most precisely chosen opening gambit she has made since the first…
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Ella Fitzgerald: The Architecture of Song
To speak of Ella Fitzgerald is to speak of precision, clarity, and grace so absolute that they verge on the metaphysical. Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917 and raised in Yonkers, Fitzgerald emerged from poverty and the turbulence of her early life to become one of the most celebrated voices of the twentieth century.…
