Pop Culture

The year 1991 was one of astonishing riches in the best hip-hop, landing (depending somewhat on your definition) somewhere in the middle of the genre’s “golden age”. Building on the innovations of Marley Marl, Ced Gee, and others, the producers of the early 1990s, among them Pete Rock, Diamond D, Large Professor, and DJ Premier,

I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that a first-time listener’s immediate reaction to the line, “I’ll fuck you ’til your dick is blue” off Liz Phair’s “Flower”, is not “Wow, that was vulnerable.” More likely, it’d be something like “woof” followed by disgust at the vulgarity or possibly appreciation for the sexual

When a movie has been making the rounds in fuzzy eyesore prints on fly-by-night labels or YouTube, and you finally get a chance to see a beautifully restored print, it makes a difference. Case in point: George Marshall’s slapstick caper Hold That Blonde! (1945). I’m afraid we’re stuck with that exclamation point. This Paramount B

Jazz composer and trombonist Javier Nero might be thought of as a modern traditionalist in the music. His new album with his big band, the Javier Nero Jazz Orchestra, Alkebulan, was just released and features music rooted in the large-ensemble tradition. It also incorporates a variety of more modern elements: rhythmic groove that traces back

Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinctis saturated with sexual tension and psychological gamesmanship, but nowhere is this more concentrated than in the iconic interrogation scene. Sharon Stone’s character, Catherine Tramell, turns a police interrogation into a calculated display of control and seduction, using her legs—and specifically the climactic moment of crossing and uncrossing them—as

Little girls and gay boys the world over love pop music because they once loved playing dress-up. It is the Olympic-level world championships of dress-up, wherein the women who’ve mastered the art of fantasy and disguise are toured through coliseums across the globe to sell whatever new and beautiful dream they’ve invented. A woman stands

Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live Talking Heads Rhino 6 March 2026 A new Talking Heads compilation acts like a scrapbook, looking at the nascent band’s early years as a trio before they exploded onto the New York scene and around the world. This three-CD collection is compiled from several sources recorded when the group consisted

Australian country songwriter Morgan Evans sets out to explore his childhood memories with this one. “Forgiving You For Me” maps out his internal souvenirs set to a pedal steel riff. The candour set the tone for the rest of the record: polished hooks, splendid serenity and sincerity over metaphor. Evans is a master at creating

Listening to Fallows, the latest release from acclaimed jazz saxophonist Caroline Davis, is like entering a portal into another dimension. That sounds like a cliché, but it’s accurate. The sounds she conjures on her alto saxophone, aided by a processing mechanism called an organelle, form a unique and often mesmerizing combination. When accompanied by odd

If there ever was a woman who personified 1960s cool, it was this willowy British transplant who became the unlikely archetype of the “quintessential French woman”. Jane Birkin was a teenage model who would go on to become a revered actress featured in more than 70 films and a musician whose most famous song was

National Book Award Finalist Andrew Krivak’s new novel, Mule Boy, is a lyrical exploration of the unending burden of childhood trauma. Apart from its first three pages, the story is told in first-person by Ondro Prach, a solitary man in his 70s who, as a 13-year-old, was the sole survivor of a 1929 Pennsylvania coal

“This should have been an album of mourning,” Jorge Drexler said of his new album, Taracá, noting that his father died last year. Drexler said that though his father was a child of the Holocaust, “he was a very celebratory person. And so this is a celebratory record. I think it’s a way of mourning.”

Dark Horse Comics’ graphic novel The Midnight: Shadows knows that nostalgia has many reputations: as bait, faulty lenses, and a hell of a drug. Nostalgia is the tarnished memories we reinterpret as golden or irretrievable innocence ossified in time. “Back then”, kids were known to scuff their knees on sun-drenched sidewalks, undomesticated by algorithms and

It’s spring equinox Saturday night here in the People’s Republic of Berkeley on 21 March, and the people are fired up for Jesse Welles’ triumphant return to the Bay Area. The truth-telling troubadour from Arkansas has been winning hearts and minds across the nation with his wry, sharp-edged musical critiques of America’s decline. Welles is

It’s fair to say that anticipation for the debut album from New York duo, Fcukers, is pretty spectacularly high (you can decide how to say it in public:“F-c-u-kers” in the staff room at work or how you think it’s said if you’re itching for a disciplinary). Since the New York-meets-Berlin house of “Bon Bon” and

Sunbeam of No Illusion Ben Seretan and John Thayer AKP Recordings 27 March 2026 The title Sunbeam of No Illusion, the first recorded collaboration between musicians Ben Seretan and John Thayer, is derived from actual correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, as Emerson praised Whitman’s writing. This quote serves as an acknowledgement of

My introduction to Shawn Colvin wasn’t through her smash hit single “Sunny Came Home”, which reached number one on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and received the Grammy Awards for Record and Song of the Year in 1998. It wasn’t through her equally successful debut studio album Steady On, either, which won the Grammy for

Following shows in Toronto and Montreal, Irish dream-pop singer-songwriter Maria Somerville recently performed in Vermont for the first time. With opening support from solo act Colle, Somerville’s Burlington performance marked the first stop on a North American tour bookended with dates in Canada after the release ofLuster (Remixes)EP in January 2026. I arrived at Higher

Everything All the Time (20th Anniversary Edition) Band of Horses Sub Pop 20 March 2026 I couldn’t have been the only one who assumed Band of Horses’ “The First Song” was their introduction to the world, a rather fitting way to launch a career. Of course, I wouldn’t have heard that song or any other

In the 1990s, Girls Against Boys were all swagger and grime, delivering several essential records’ worth of dispatches from New York City nightlife through the characters and scenes of Scott McCloud’s lyrics. It’s a perfect soundtrack to your 20s, but nothing lasts forever. On his first solo release under his own name, he’s stripping all

Most Americans are familiar with two notable events of the early 1970s: The downfall and resignation of President Richard Nixon and the breakup of the Beatles. What is not widely known is that the contributing circumstances of these events occurred at Disney World hotels. Within three years, Richard Nixon, John Lennon, and Disney World would

A supergroup of 2010s hardcore bands, Climates, Casey and Napoleon, Exit Dream released only three singles. Casey’s reunion had stopped them in their tracks, and now only vocalist Wes Thompson remains. Never letting go of that supergroup status, they instead include Ashley Green of Holding Absence, as well as Luke Shadrick and Murry Deaves, best

One World Human Rights Film Festiva 11-19 March 2026 Organized by People in Need, the Prague-based Jeden Svět (One World Human Rights Film Festival) treats human rights as a problem of form, attention, access, and public speech. The 2026 edition brought together 106 films and 126 debates over nine days in Prague before continuing in

A Dawning Ólafur Arnalds and Talos Mercury KX 10 May 2025 Missing from the valuable end-of-year lists I digest with interest is the category of best collaboration in music. Were there such a category, my enthusiastic nominee would be Ólafur Arnalds’ A Dawning (2025). Arnalds is a genre-busting composer of ambient, soundtrack, and song music,

It takes Bill Callahan just a track or two on My Days of 58 to start a song with the first-person “I”. The song in question, “The Man I’m Supposed Be”, serves as a decent bellwether for the highly autobiographical material that surrounds it. Callahan, who murmured for much of the 1990s and 2000s under

Arlo Parks’ third album, Ambiguous Desire, bears little resemblance to her previous record, My Soft Machine. My Soft Machine, though, only felt tangentially connected to Parks’ Mercury Prize-winning and Grammy-nominated debut, Collapsed in Sunbeams. Sunbeams, for its part, felt like a sad, confessional R&B album with folk elements, while Machine brought in more downtempo rock

There was a guy who lived in the apartment complex where I grew up who everyone—and by everyone, I mean the six or eight other kids I more or less ran with—said had been on Death Row, but who had been released after he’d survived the electric chair three separate times. The rumor was that

Less than a year after her luscious solo debut, Pacífico Maravilla, Nidia Góngora returns, this time as the frontwoman of Nuevos Ríos. Alongside her are members of her longtime group, Canalón de Timbiquí, and Toulouse-based Reco Reco, an ensemble that focuses on plugged-in renditions of South American styles. Together, the collective perform lively, electrified versions

Iowa Ohyung Ohyung / Trans Music Archive 6 March 2026 Composer and performer Ohyung (Lia Ouyang Rusli) takes an impressionist approach with real depth on the new experimental album Iowa. Created based on her 11-month stay in the album’s namesake state, Iowa, is an act of counter-cartography. Against the grain of static pastoral heartland narratives,

The jazz world lost some fine drummers in the last year. Roy Haynes was still playing in his 90s before he passed in November of 2024, and Jack DeJohnette left a giant hole in the music when he died this past October. Al Foster will also be sorely missed. Though he died in May of