Tag: What’s So Special About…
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What’s So Special About New Order
New Order made the most unlikely record in the history of popular music. Three people whose previous band had defined the outer limits of post-industrial English despair, whose singer had hanged himself eight months before the recording sessions began, whose entire artistic identity had been built on darkness and weight and the refusal of consolation…
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What’s So Special About Joy Division
By Bergotte Joy Division made two studio albums and a handful of singles between 1978 and 1980, and their singer Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen in Macclesfield on the eve of the band’s first American tour, at the age of twenty-three. It would be easy — it has been easy, for forty years…
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What’s So Special About Kraftwerk
By Bergotte Kraftwerk did not remove human feeling from music. They did something stranger and more difficult: they found the human feeling inside the machine, and made it audible. The four men from Düsseldorf who spent the 1970s building synthesizers in a converted railway building and slowly, methodically, without apology or explanation, inventing the sonic…
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What’s So Special About Fela Kuti
By Bergotte Fela Anikulapo Kuti built a nightclub in Lagos, declared it an independent republic, married twenty-seven women simultaneously, recorded nearly eighty albums, was beaten, imprisoned, and raided by the Nigerian military so many times that he began to treat the violence as material, and in the process created one of the most original and…
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What’s So Special About Miriam Makeba
By Bergotte Miriam Makeba was exiled from her country for thirty-one years. She was stripped of her passport, banned from attending her mother’s funeral, and prevented from returning home to South Africa by a government that understood, correctly, that her voice was more dangerous to apartheid than most weapons available to the opposition. She responded…
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What’s So Special About Mulatu Astatke
By Bergotte Mulatu Astatke went to music school in London, studied jazz in Boston, played vibraphone in New York, and then went home to Ethiopia and made something that had never existed before. He took the pentatonic scales and ancient modal structures of Ethiopian music — a tradition reaching back centuries, untouched by the Western…
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What’s So Special About Laura Nyro
By Bergotte Laura Nyro wrote some of the most commercially successful songs of the late 1960s. She also made some of the least commercially successful records of that era — records so strange, so emotionally extreme, so structurally unwilling to behave, that the music industry dealt with her the way a mining company deals with…
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What’s So Special About Nick Drake
Nick Drake made three albums between 1969 and 1972, sold almost none of them, and died at twenty-six of an antidepressant overdose in the bedroom of his parents’ house in rural Warwickshire.
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What’s So Special About Joni Mitchell
By Bergotte Joni Mitchell did not simply write songs about her life. She invented a language for the interior life of a woman at the precise moment in history when no such language was thought to be necessary — and then she kept reinventing it, album by album, tuning by tuning, until she had produced…
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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…
