Pop Culture

How did John Lennon write so many excellent songs? The conventional wisdom credits the Beatles’ performances in Hamburg, Germany, where the band played in strip clubs. Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell, who first made his reputation by debunking what he called “the talent myth”, claimed that it wasn’t innate ability that made the Beatles great, but

Chapter 1: Where Does Happiness Come From? Mádé Kuti LegacyPlus 27 July 2025 There’s ambition suggested by the title of Mádé Kuti’s sophomore release, Chapter 1: Where Does Happiness Come From?, that makes sense for an artist of his lineage. As a musically inclined son of Femi and grandson of Fela, multi-instrumentalist Mádé surely has

Since the death of Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell has assumed the crown as the King of Country Music, at least the Americana side of the genre. The 75-year-old former son-in-law of the Man in Black has a complete record of accomplishments and achievements as a singer, songwriter, and producer. Earlier this year, Willie Nelson put

The Making of Five Leaves Left Nick Drake Island 25 July 2025 “Fame is but a fruit tree, so very unsound. It can never flourish ’til its stock is in the ground,” sang Nick Drake on “Fruit Tree” from his perfect debut album, which recently received the four-disc retrospective, The Making of Five Leaves Left.

Music holds many forms, and for Jens Kuross, it’s a vehicle of inner expression, dotted with piano chimes. Curdled instrumentation decorates Crooked Songs, a record bristling with anguished vocals and pulverised piano patterns. Such is the frenzy that Kuross momentarily takes a break from singing during “No One’s Hiding from the Sun” to let out

Long before writing, recording, and performing songs with titles like “Call a Cowboy”, “Counting Chickens”, and “4×4×U”, Lainey Wilson embedded herself in a country-western kind of existence while growing up in the rural northeast Louisiana town of Baskin. Momma Michelle and Daddy Brian gave her and her sister Janna a proper upbringing down on the

Seeing the chairs overturned on the tabletops, we start to turn away, but the owner of the Italian restaurant insists his place is open. We resist a little. He slaps the table: “Sit! Eat!” Eight of us fill a small nook by the front window, and it fogs. Outside, New York City is cold and

Guitarist Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars has carved out a career as one of Generation X’s great modern bluesmen, with a slew of stellar blues-rock albums over the past quarter century, while also earning a reputation as one of the most prolific road warriors of the current era. Known for blending traditional influences

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass The Quay Brothers The Match Factory 29 Aug. 2025 Stephen and Timothy Quay have been the most prominent successors to the great history of Polish animation, following in the hallowed footsteps of Walerian Borowczyk, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Jan Lenica, and a few other filmmakers. With Sanatorium Under the Sign

Margo Price lets the listener know right away; she’s a hardheaded woman. She unpretentiously declares that in the opening acoustic “Prelude”. That doesn’t mean she’s cold-hearted. The opposite is true. She’s hardheaded in the sense that she’ll stubbornly stand up for the things she believes in. Her emotional warmth pervades her worldview and artistic sensibility.

Guedra Guedra, the moniker under which producer Abdellah M. Hassak crafts energetic electronic landscapes, invokes a specific scene in and of itself. Among Amazigh groups indigenous to Hassak’s native Morocco and other parts of North Africa, the guedra is a dance and a cooking pot that can be converted into a drum, embodying music, movement,

On a song named after a popular HBO series, the singer-songwriter Audrey Hobert says, “This isn’t Sex and the City / Nobody’s watching me write in my room.” While emphasizing the solitude of a writer, this observation combines that profession with celebrity. On her debut album, Who’s the Clown? Hobert invites listeners into this contradictory

In our times, just over a decade after Spike Jonze’s 2014 AI sci-fi film Her was released, it has proven to be highly prescient. In the film, lonely and recently divorced Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with a superintelligent operating system named Samantha. “She” projects a voice in his ear, serving as a

Bruce Springsteen’s make-or-break album Born to Run is a tale of resilience and hope, betrayal and perfidy—a rock and roll odyssey complete with a bloody denouement. Magic Rat, the protagonist in “Jungleland” (the last track on Born to Run), travels from New Jersey to New York City, where he ends up trapped and gunned down—dead.

Kathleen Edwards went from running a coffee shop to exploring her freedom and releasing a basic covers EP. That doesn’t sound like a path to becoming a billionaire, yet here we are. Or at least her new release is named Billionaire, an effective title that’s undermined by nearly every cut on it. On her second

Parasites & Butterflies is the first Nova Twins album in three years, and the first since 2022’s Supernova, which made them big names in the UK. The press materials for the new record tout the duo’s gigs opening for Muse, Foo Fighters, and Bring Me the Horizon, and there’s no question that this is a

Big Thief return as a three-piece on their sixth studio album, Double Infinity. Only ten years ago, the former Berklee College of Music alumnae signed with Saddle Creek (eventually transitioning to 4AD) and were well on their way to becoming one of the biggest names in indie rock today. With the departure of bassist Max

Egypt’s Youssef Chahine is among the world’s important filmmakers who remain woefully unfamiliar to audiences in Region 1, so it’s no minor event that Criterion finally brings one of his films to Blu-ray. Perhaps ironically, that film was Chahine’s most notorious failure upon its 1958 release. Decades later,Cairo Station(Bāb al-Ḥadīd) was rehabilitated into possibly the

Wartorn Ukraine might not be the first place you’d expect to find the Dropkick Murphys lead singer, Ken Casey, but that’s precisely where the Boston legend found himself this past summer. After dedicating considerable time, money, and merchandise sales to Ukraine’s ongoing humanitarian crisis amidst a brutal, decades-long conflict with Russia, Casey thought it was

I am going to get on my usual hobby horse about August supposedly being a slow month! And it covers the full spectrum! Starting from the outskirts, Abhorrent Expanse continue to abstract away death metal into drone and free improvisation, while the collaborative effort of Mendoze/fluke-mogul/Perez is a wild ride through the avant-metal headspace. In

My obsession with shoegaze was not immediate. I got through My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow”, with its heavy, driving guitars fine enough, but then the sound on Loveless devolved into disparate, unconnected, almost shimmering bits, no centrality of clear lyrics or three-chord melody propping them up. It was the same with Slowdive, though, being from

Ichikawa Raizô brilliantly brought Emil Cioran’s fatalistic attitude to life when he portrayed Kobuse Takuma in the 1966 film The Betrayal. Emil Cioran, that insomniac poet of pessimism, wrote, “Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”

In 2022, Craft Recordings celebrated the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant musical events of the 1970s, when nearly 100,000 Black Los Angelenos crowded the Los Angeles Coliseum to enjoy Wattstax. Featuring many of the outstanding musicians on Stax Records, the concert commemorated the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots. Seven years prior,

It’s summertime in Berkeley, and that means the time is right for the Tedeschi Trucks Band to visit the historic Hearst Greek Theater on the beautiful University of California-Berkeley campus. The acclaimed 12-member blues rock ensemble are back, and the Greek is packed, as there are few, if any, who do it better when it

Brad Mehldau is a jazz icon who has never done things the usual way. While the gifted pianist has traveled more traditional routes with works like his acclaimed Art of the Trio series, and has released plenty of solo piano albums that certainly fall within expected parameters of the jazz genre (Live in Tokyo, Elegiac

Almost everyone has some sort of COVID-19 memory or story. While it’s not a time in recent history that many want to revisit, it remains tied to our ongoing experiences. Films and books set during the pandemic are beginning to emerge, and yet the subject matter can be a hard sell for an audience. Director

Suede are in the midst of an impressive, productive second act, and their latest goth-infused Antidepressants is a testament to that. Since 2013, three years after their live reunion, Suede have released five studio albums, equaling the total number of records during their first act (ignoring their lustrous B-sides, taking a lesson or two from

A largely philosophical question exists when it comes to supergroups. When can a supergroup shed that cumbersome designation and just be considered a band? Based upon the concept alone, the quite obvious explanation is never. However, the New Pornographers make an interesting case, seeing as how they are considered a supergroup based mainly upon what

Ferocity is an underappreciated aspect of art. If we exclude the more unrelenting forms of heavy metal, where anger and aggression are so endemic as to become slightly tedious, there are few genuine examples of popular art pursuing its project to the bitter end, regardless of audience reaction.Manic Street Preachers are among those few. Nirvana’s

In a way, Exalge, the new album from synthesist, composer, and improviser Matthew Ryals, is a fascinating and uncomplicated way to dive into the artist’s works. A totally improvisational live recording at a venue of the same name in Milan, Exalge is a direct, unvarnished sonic landscape, a real-time performance of the modular synthesizer, divided