Real Journalism. Written by Real People.
What does it mean to make an album in 2023? They’re still being made, Billboard magazine still tracks their sales, but just what is that thing itself, the album, and why are they made as albums? The subject on this page each month is jazz, but these thoughts apply to all kinds of music, and are especially relevant to popular […]
The New York Film Festival hits at a strange moment in the calendar. By the time the 61st edition opened on September 29, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto had all hosted their festivals (in May, August, and September, respectively). Many of the year’s banner titles — Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Hayao Miyazaki’s […]
A band everyone should like. There was a time, back in the distant 1980s and ’90s, when recording and distribution outpaced the spread of information. The post-punk DIY movement encouraged artists and fans to seize the means of production and make their own records and zines but there was no guarantee they’d end up in the same places. As a result, […]
Pianist Matthew Shipp has had such a consistent, sustained career, nearly 40 years as one of the foremost free jazz players, that it’s easy to lose sight of what he’s done as a musician. His built a grand discographical forest through his own albums and those on which he’s part of another ensemble—coming up with the important David S. Ware […]
New York is marking the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop at a Bronx block party in 1973 with a packed program of IRL and virtual events, series, and celebrations across the city. (There’s even a special edition New York Public Library library card.) Most of these are centered, obviously, on the music. But at the Museum of the […]
Review of “Kappa,” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell and Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda Did you go on any trips this summer? Traveling has many benefits. You might interact with different people, learn a new language, and discover things about another culture’s values. Whenever you go someplace new, you see the world with fresh eyes—and sometimes the […]
Sonic revival. Concert performances by Sonic Youth were glorious things—transcendent, intoxicating, very nearly overwhelming. Sound systems and synapses couldn’t always handle them but the energy transference was reliably powerful. The band played what is commonly referred to as its last show on the WIlliamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn on August 12, 2011. They actually went on to play already scheduled festivals […]
Archival recordings are tricky to think about critically, in no small part because the contents of any artists archives are always interesting and desirable to fans, and that fan enthusiasm makes criticism irrelevant for most of the people who would even consider buying them. And reader, I am one of those fans—as one example, Miles Davis’ album In a Silent […]
Studs Terkel’s 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a lot of things: a landmark oral history, a monument to conversation, a snapshot of labor across classes and collars at a particular unsettled moment in American history. It’s also a testament to how little things change. Working […]
Review of “J.C. Leyendecker: American Imagist,” by Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler Review by Michael Quinn What are you wearing as you read this? A shirt from Under Armour? Leggings from Lululemon? Sneakers? Flip-flops? A hundred years ago, the world was different, and we dressed differently. But it was around this time that advertising first started to get […]
All the hand wringing and doomsaying around artificial intelligence — in tools like ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E, and Midjourney — has made for some lazy movie comparisons. AI is like Skynet in the Terminator movies! These chatbots are a few dataset away from becoming 2001’s HAL 9000! We’re all destined to be mindless slug consumers controlled by corporate AI run amok, […]
Cindi Mayweather succumbs to pleasure. Anyone who caught Janelle Monáe’s 2018 concert in Prospect Park (and reportedly thousands didn’t and were turned away once the bandshell grounds were filled to capacity) knows what a dynamic performer she is. She seriously enjoyed herself, putting on a tight show, copping moves from James Brown and Michael Jackson and gleefully admitting defeat in […]
Sometimes, things just come together. I’m writing this on July 4th, at the end of a long holiday weekend which saw the conclusion of the HBO series The Idol and, this day, the first of two birthday broadcasts on WKCR—89.9 on your FM dial, or wkcr.org if you insist—for Louis Armstrong. Yes, there are two birthday broadcasts for Louis, who […]