Tag
Music & Sound
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Boss Poet
Little has changed since Bruce Springsteen explained the origin of his song “Thunder Road” to a seething crowd at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 19, 1978. “There was this Robert Mitchum movie, and it was about these moonshine runners down south,” he said, running a hand through his hair and leaning…
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Rick Moody Annotates David Bowie
In light of the passing of David Bowie, we asked Rick Moody, who’s written extensively on Bowie, to annotate the lyrics of “Joe the Lion.” Click the highlighted words to see his notes. Joe the lion Went to the bar A couple of drinks on the house and he said “Tell you who you are…
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Quiz: Can You Match the Punk Memoirist to the Lyric?
In “The Female Body of Punk,” Ivan Kreilkamp reviews recent memoirs by Viv Albertine, Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Kim Gordon, and Carrie Brownstein. As Kreilkamp puts it, “Although these women position themselves in very different ways in relation to the movement and the music, their life narratives reveal the possibility of a punk history centered less around the…
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The Female Body of Punk
A decade after the Sex Pistols were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the once marginal and vilified punk movement has, for better and worse, been thoroughly assimilated as a major aesthetic and cultural force. One welcome effect of this canonizing process has been a recent wave of new memoirs by some…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Empire”
After it debuted last January on Fox, Empire quickly became one of the most talked-about shows on television. Its Shakespearean portrayal of family life, its stylized window onto the hip-hop industry, and its Timbaland-produced soundtrack helped it earn millions of passionate fans (and more than a few critics). To celebrate the premiere of season 2—which…
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Introduction to The Size Queens’ iBook,“To The Country”
Over the past nine years, The Size Queens have deployed a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, experiments in distribution, and collaborations primarily because we could not exist as a touring band. I’ve lived overseas for most of the time the group has been in existence, and, as its vocalist and lyricist, this has led us to…
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What World? Whose Algorithms?
In an arresting chapter in Carolyn L. Kane’s new book, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, she analyzes the movie Predator, which gives expression to hyperbolic fears about the potentially dire implications of the rise of computerized algorithms, in this case the algorithms that animate digital infrared technologies. In the movie,…
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On The Horizon
“On The Horizon” is a new quarterly feature from Public Books that looks forward to the coming season’s notable events—literary and artistic, intellectual and pop-cultural—in and around New York City. FILM & TELEVISION Film About Elly at Film Forum, April 8–21 From director Asghar Farhadi comes this mystery-thriller, set among a group of Iranian college…
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The Best of 2015
It’s finally spring and we’ve settled comfortably in 2015’s controversies and think pieces, its soundtrack and landscape, its must-sees and many of its premieres and releases. But never fear: There is still so much to live through the year for. Here’s some of the best of what’s come and what still awaits us. Nate Marshall’s…
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Nothing Has Been Done Before
Debate his song selections if you like, but in his latest book Greil Marcus is not out to craft a new Top 40—or, indeed, a Top 10. Instead, he’s out to challenge the basic principles by which the history of rock music has so far been understood. From its opening pages—a visually dense yet ostentatiously…
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Why You Should Experience Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn
If you think you know New York City history, Black history, American history—anything about Brooklyn at all—but you don’t know about Weeksville, then go to the Creative Time project Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn before it closes this Sunday, October 12. There are five major sites specific to this ambitious, neighborhood-spanning creative…
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Summer in Snow Country: A Sound and Photo Essay
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Less than two hours from Tokyo Station by bullet train, the village of Osaki is nonetheless a country backwater. The town lies aside narrow Route 291, which snakes and tunnels its way to Yuzawa, the onsen (hot spring)…
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Little Big-Time Garage
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Virginia. Downtown Charlottesville. A man in a white suit walks down First Street, heading toward the pedestrian mall. Behind him, a woman pushes a baby carriage along the narrow sidewalk. The woman’s dress is the color of sand.…
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Saints on the Dollar
What would happen if you asked Gertrude Stein about the difference between culture and capital? Well, of course, dollar bills would fall from the heavens like flurries, all below would fan snow angels in the leaves of green, and eventually T. I.’s rap song “Bring Em Out” would blast in the background as if from…
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Mysteryland
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “I have come here to lose the smog,” Joni Mitchell sings in her trademark falsetto, “and I feel to be a cog in something turning.” Her imagined destination (and the song’s namesake) is Woodstock, the year 1969. Forty-five…
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Love, Factionally
Since 2003, Continuum Books and Bloomsbury have been publishing a series of short monographs on pop albums under the increasingly anachronistic title “33⅓.” At their best, the 33⅓ books, mostly written by professional music critics and cultural-studies academics, are models of passionate, cerebral fandom. (A rough analogue would be the British Film Institute’s long-running BFI…
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Harmony and Discord
The myth of the inspired musician Orpheus informs some of our most fundamental ideas about the life of the creative artist and performer. Three new novels by Stacey D’Erasmo, Michael Cunningham, and Richard Powers suggest that we can’t stop retelling his story. Orpheus was the first rock star, the archetype of all subsequent sexy, irresistible,…
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The Corner Office
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. At the corner of 60th and Madison, high-end retail logos create an upscale fantasia: DKNY, Calvin Klein, and Bally. Byron Breeze, Jr., also known as “Soulja,” has made this corner the “office” where he does most of his…
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Forgotten Woman
When we think of the ’30s film musical, we tend to picture Fred and Ginger gliding through the polished worlds of Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937). Earlier in the decade, however, Warner Brothers produced a spate of song and dance films that were less willing to deny Depression…
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Was That All There Was to the Left?
In the wake of Pete Seeger’s death in January, eulogies, memorials, and obituaries routinely mentioned his youthful communist affiliation. The famous folk singer had, like many of his contemporaries in the world of arts and music, joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) as a young man. He did so in the late 1930s—a time when not…
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Translating The Magic Flute
When I got a call last year about translating a new Magic Flute libretto for an English-language production at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The Magic Flute had always been one of my all-time favorite operas, though I’d never paid particular attention to the libretto. Mozart composed the…
