culture Fall 2023

On the Sly

IN THE AWARDS-SWEEPING 2021 documentary Summer of Soul, a man named Darryl Lewis recalls his first Sly and the Family Stone encounter, at the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969. In those days, he says, “When you saw a Black group, what you expected to see was, generally speaking, all men, all dressed in matching suits, ready even before they hit the stage to perform.” But here, Sly and company “kind of saunter out,” men and women, Black and white, a living quilt of psychedelic patterns, knit caps, and sundry frippery. “The instruments weren’t tuned,” Lewis says. “You wonder, What are they doing

culture December 14, 2021

Greg Tate (1957–2021)

Greg Tate, a longtime contributor to the Village Voice and other publications, died last week. Here, four critics pay tribute to Tate’s influential, hyper-referential, bumptious, and generous writing and conversation.

FOREVER ON DUTY

By Daphne A. Brooks

Every conversation began in medias res because the truth of it was that he so clearly lived his life like a brother who had been chopping it up with you for centuries already, as if you and he had always been in the deep-water groove of one long, rolling and roustabout, everlasting, in-the-round, in-the-midnight-hour session, one that even

culture June/July/Aug 2021

Southwest Side Story

RICKIE LEE JONES’S BLOND HEAD IS ATILT as she lights a French cigarette, crowned with an off-center red beret. It’s that image of the artful-dodger “duchess of coolsville” (as Time dubbed her) on the cover of her eponymous 1979 debut that became iconic to a public who still recalls her mainly for that year’s jazzy top-10 single “Chuck E’s in Love.” It was a sell, but one close to the reality of this former teen street kid and, more recently, poverty-line Venice Beach bohemian. Jones rejected the 1970s “glamour-puss” gloss that was being urged on her and brought her own wardrobe and sensibility

culture Mar/Apr/May 2021

Daze of Our Lives

RICHARD LINKLATER IS A DIRECTOR I CARE A LOT ABOUT, but, sacrilegiously to some, his sprawling 1993 comedy Dazed and Confused, about the misadventures of Texas high school students on the last day of school in 1976, isn’t one of my favorites. I might feel bad about that, if Linklater didn’t agree. “I think it’s middling,” he tells pop-culture journalist Melissa Maerz early in her new book. “I don’t know why people latch on to it.” Despite poor initial box office, the film’s cult built up through video and its popular hard-rock soundtrack until it became a recognized classic, complete with a

culture Summer 2020

Pass the Alt

“In Athens, Georgia, in the 1980s, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible,” Grace Elizabeth Hale opens her new book Cool Town, about how the B-52s, R.E.M., Vic Chesnutt, and scads of lesser-known alternative-rock artists sprang out of one small southern college town four decades ago. My first impulse was to substitute the line Tolstoy might have written if Tolstoy had been really into rock bands: All local music scenes are the same, but every music scene is local in its own way. Young people coalesce around a few emerging performers or spaces or

culture Feb/Mar 2019

Stardust Reveries

Ashes to Ashes, the second volume of Chris O’Leary’s song-by-song chronicle of David Bowie’s work, reaches its title track around page 155. Of 1980’s “Ashes to Ashes,” which was Bowie’s second-ever No. 1 single in the UK—the first had been “Space Oddity,” to which “Ashes to Ashes” was the mischievous sequel (We know Major Tom’s a junkie)—O’Leary remarks that it is, “in a way, his last song, the closing chapter that comes midway through the book. Bowie sings himself off-stage with a children’s rhyme: eternally falling, eternally young.”

In mundane truth, at that point the reader is about

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2017

Chords of Inquiry

It’s 1984 or 1985, Prince and the Revolution are in California, and they decide to drive out to Joni Mitchell’s house in Malibu for dinner. All devotees—Prince says his favorite album ever is 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns—they chat and admire her paintings, and then Prince wanders to the piano and starts teasing out some chords. “Joni says, ‘Oh wow! That’s really pretty. What song are you playing?’” as band member Wendy Melvoin later recalls. “We all yelled, ‘It’s your song!’” Prince will perform his gorgeous arrangement of Mitchell’s “A Case of You” in concerts up to the final month of

culture Apr/May 2017

Polymorphously Purple

Remember "masturbating with a magazine"? Not the actual act (though that, too), but the opening scene of the late genius Prince Rogers Nelson's 1984 "Darling Nikki," in which our hero catches the title character in a hotel lobby, in solo flagrante with the glossy pages of an unnamed publication. As the critic and novelist Ben Greenman reminds us in his new book, Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince (Henry Holt, $28), that line led directly to Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center's congressional crusade against "objectionable" music, making

culture Dec/Jan 2017

Stardust Memories

Glam rock, the trend that put the roll back in rock 'n' roll after the psychedelic burnout and beardy

earnestness of the twilight of the 1960s. Glam, the gender-bent dress-up cabaret that helped smuggle queer liberation into mainstream pop culture. Glam, precursor of punk, but perhaps also early warning of today's hall-of-mirrors celebrity culture . . .

. . . Or, as many Americans might say, Glam rock, what is that? You mean, like, hair metal?

The easiest reply would be: No, more like early David Bowie. But who else was ever like David Bowie? In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds has more than

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2015

Star-Maker Machinery

Are you a music lover who’s spent twenty years wincing whenever you hear the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Rihanna, Ke$ha, or Katy Perry th-th-thumping out of passing car radios? Or are you someone who does enjoy chart pop, but mainly as an emotional off-ramp during your afternoon commute or as a launching pad for a dance party?

Either way, you might side-eye the notion of an entire book by a New Yorker staff writer about how hits like “Umbrella” and “Since U Been Gone” were enabled by a cabal of moguls, producers, songwriters, and radio programmers, a disproportionate share of them from

culture August 31, 2015

East of Intention: Cat, Camera, Music

In “Chat écoutant la musique” (“Cat Listening to Music”), a two-minute, fifty-five-second video posted to YouTube on December 21, 2010, a black, white, and gray tabby sprawls across the keyboard of a Yamaha DX7. He sleeps and stirs, seeming to enjoy the pellucid, lapping notes and chords of a piece of piano music playing in the room. We watch the cat’s paws depress the keys soundlessly when he arches and stretches.

In “Chat écoutant la musique” (“Cat Listening to Music”), a two-minute, fifty-five-second video posted to YouTube on December 21, 2010, a black, white, and gray tabby sprawls across the keyboard of a Yamaha DX7. He sleeps and stirs, seeming to enjoy the pellucid, lapping notes and chords of a piece of piano music playing in the room. We watch the cat’s paws depress the keys soundlessly when he arches and stretches. We notice his ears perk and twitch. When the music briefly intensifies, he raises his head and glares fiercely into the middle distance; then, as the tune eases off the tension, he

politics June/July/Aug 2015

Music for Nothing

The title of Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free is ultimately more interesting than the case that gets made inside its pages. Early open-source-data activists used to say that software should be both “free as in beer and free as in speech.” Witt sticks mostly to the first meaning—i.e., gratis—in his account of the process by which online file sharing since the late ’90s has toppled the once enormously profitable proprietary model of the music industry.

The book never follows through, however, on the second implication of “how music got free”—free as in libre.

Witt’s title hints that music

culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

Pop-Ed Pages

Saint Etienne is a long-standing London-based pop group, founded in the late ’80s by two pop writers turned musicians, merging post-punk fanzine culture and the rave idyll. Its sound is a self-consciously cosmopolitan mix of acid house, folk, blue-eyed soul, Parisian yé-yé, and CinemaScope sound tracks; charismatic blond vocalist Sarah Cracknell evokes soft-edged 1960s UK singers such as Dusty Springfield and the early Bee Gees. A few singles (“You’re in a Bad Way,” “He’s on the Phone”) nudged the UK Top 10 in 1995. But since none of the band’s Euro-cool influences carried remotely the same

culture Feb/Mar 2014

Memphis Agonistes

People in the arts talk about talent all the time: who has it, who discovered the person who had it, its peaks and valleys, and when it has been “lost” or “wasted.” It’s all said as if we know what talent is, when we don’t. It is more than aptitude or being a quick study. It is more than skill, and closer to ease or sparkle in the skill’s application. It somehow forms a trinity with effort and inspiration, but without talent, those two can seem like sad and misguided cul-de-sacs.

But there is also a talent to having talent, and to living with it. Talent can seem like an alien invasion of the

Carl Wilson