CategoryMUSIC

Maestro opens and closes with two of the most familiarly lukewarm indulgences of the biopic: the epigraph that precedes the action and “real footage” of the “real person” that accompanies the credits. The former, especially when not explicitly a quotation from the subject (Oppenheimer, The Big Short, The Hurt Locker, et al.) serves as an awkward thesis sentence. It consigns the image to the...

November 9, 2023, 1:54pm Everyone knows that Kurt Vonnegut loved music. There’s that quote, you know the one. Vonnegut liked to repeat himself, but here’s how it appears in A Man Without a Country: No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful. If I should ever...

The wooded slopes of the Ettersberg stand in the center of Germany, a few miles north of Weimar. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the area served as the playground of dukes, who went there for hunting, and later as the preserve of poets, who traversed its rugged hills while contemplating the wonders of nature. No less an eminence than Goethe, the greatest of all German poets, traveled often...

The Beatles first stay in Hamburg, between August and November 1960, is the most romanticized episode in their career. Irresistible that vision of brash boy troubadours in their cracked black leathers, blasting out raw rock n roll among the strip clubs and sex shows…fumbling amateurs forging themselves into hardened professionals…the apprenticeship in the underworld without which their later...

Featured image: Bob Dylan, Gramercy Park, NYC, 1963. Photograph by Ralph Baxter. Its a small black imitation-leather dimestore notebook, about the size of a cell phone, like an address book or a day planner or a diary, but a bit more vague. A Daily Reminder of Important Matters, it says on the title page, and the inner pages are ruled. The calendar up front is for 1963, although the book seems to...

Before I became a journalist, I was an academic cultural theorist. If you want to construct a scholarly argument, you cite other people. In journalism, its basically the same. But whatever academics or journalists claim, no matter how many times we do it, no matter how committed we are to sticking to the facts, absolute certainty does not exist. When I was transitioning out of teaching at Yale en...

But Will You Love Me Tomorrow is an oral history of the girl groups of the ’60. The songs that the girl groups created and sang are timeless, and have become embedded in American culture. Songs like “Mr. Postman,” “Be My Baby,” “Chapel of Love,” and “Where did our love go? ” As these songs rose to the top of the charts, girl groups cornered the burgeoning post-war market of teenage rock and roll...

When I first encountered Andrew Chans work nearly a decade ago, my response was akin to that of hearing a great new recording artist: Who is this?! He was writing about Jazmine Sullivans 2014 album Reality Show, and clearly listening to women artists with what James Baldwin, quoting Henry James, might have called perception at the pitch of passion. Since then, weve had a chance to talk about our...

In the winter of 2000, my college roommates and I were on a mission. Originally shepherded together as three athletes—two of us track, one soccer—we were soon united by a common cause: we wanted to download as much music as possible. Our weapon of choice was Napster. We would initiate hundreds of downloads before heading to breakfast, class, practice, or going to sleep, and the songs would...

For nearly two decades, Taylor Swift has gifted us with music for every moment and feeling. There’s the heartbreak and angst she’s most famous for, but true Swifties also know the joy, ambition, wisdom, rage, sincerity, humor, obsession, growth, sense of possibility, and resilience throughout her ten-album discography (not to mention the re-records with tracks from the vault). A truly magical...