Author Archive
September 18, 2023Early death freezes a musician in place. Neither Jimi Hendrix nor Janis Joplin ever had a chance to outgrow their hippie looks, Biggie and Tupac remain forever stuck in their feuds....
August 28, 2023It’s been hard for me to listen to anything other than The Band since Robbie Robertson died. The Band’s contribution to American music is both sonic and...
August 21, 2023If you were looking for a single moment to sum up post-9/11 grunge rock, I’d steer you toward MTV’s 2002 Video Music Awards. If you were watching the 2002 VMAs, you...
August 14, 2023During disco’s heyday, as Michaelangelo Matos points out in his short, sharp We Won’t Settle for Less: Chic at the End of Disco, the music was everywhere, especially the...
August 7, 2023If you were to pick a single avatar for the millennial musical experience, Bethany Cosentino would be as good a representative as any. An ’80s baby from LA, she started off...
June 26, 2023If you’re not a Texas music aficionado, you might be forgiven for being unfamiliar with the music of Doug Sahm. Sahm, who was born in 1941 and died of heart attack in 1999,...
June 20, 2023It’s an awfully strange time to call for an Age of Pleasure. In 2023, governors are making drag shows illegal. Teenagers declare that pleasure is something that’s...
May 12, 2023There are plenty of American film directors with style, but none of them have seen their style become quite so ubiquitous as has Wes Anderson. Anderson’s trademark...
May 9, 2023Way back in 2007, when Bruce Springsteen brought Arcade Fire out at an Ottawa concert, it was a statement about two generations of music. Back in the late-aughts and early...
March 7, 2023Yo La Tengo—who, with albums such as Electr-O-Pura and I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, helped define the sound of ’90s indie rock—found...
February 27, 2023Take Margo Price’s wonderful new record, Strays. In her fourth studio album, Price exists in multiple time periods at once: There’s the current moment, in which...
February 13, 2023The first piece of truly moving AI art I’ve seen has not been from “Jodorowsky’s Tron” or “beautiful redhead in the snow,” but rather...
