Tag: Music History

  • Stop Making Sense: David Byrne and the Art of Intelligent Strangeness

    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 popular…

  • Where the River Bends: Memphis and the Music That Changed the World

    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…