Jazz’s Historical Agenda as Protest Music in the Stellar ‘Brassroots Democracy’
The excellent Brassroots Democracy details the beautiful and bleak ways that jazz music created the soundtrack of an emancipatory movement that lasts to this day.
Books
Features, reviews, interviews, and lists about books including cultural commentary and history, non-fiction, literature, and more.
Arthur Russell’s Underground Genius
Arthur Russell biography Travels Over Feeling is an elegy for a generation of underground artists that died too soon and a requiem for a vanished New York.
The Defective Premise of Paula Ramos’ ‘Defectors’
Paola Ramos has more than one “massive blind spot”, which makes the ambitious Defectors not scholarly enough and too good to be true.
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Punk Is a Virus That’s Infected Everything
Tracing punk’s mutations, Iain Ellis’ Punk Beyond the Music is a robust and kaleidoscopic survey of this once-outsider subculture’s continuing, pervasive influence.
A Queer Feminist Storytelling of ‘Jurassic Park’
Hannah McGregor’s book about Jurassic Park is a memoir, a love letter to monstrous femininities and queer kinships, and a pocket guide to reading like a feminist.
Fembot Despair in Olivia Gatwood’s ‘Whoever You Are, Honey’
Olivia Gatwood’s women struggle with feeling that their lives are over after a trauma to their bodies. The fembot in Whoever You Are, Honey despairs there are none.
Music in Haruki Murakami’s ‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’
In Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls, music’s presence and absence are central to the concrete and metaphysical spaces the characters migrate between.
Anders Nilsen’s ‘Tongues’ and the Nature of God
Ostensibly a meditation on Greek mythology, I found more parallels with Islamic eschatology in Anders Nilsen’s sprawling graphic novel think piece, Tongues.
Graeme Thomson’s Revised ‘Under the Ivy’ Captures Kate Bush’s Complexity
While Kate Bush’s work and life defy clichés and easy categorization, Graeme Thomson chronicles her story while conveying its inherent ambiguity and mystery.
You Could Have Written Alex Van Halen’s ‘Brothers’
Alex Van Halen’s Brothers is infuriating for fans of Eddie Van Halen because we’ve read all this before. We don’t need this high school term paper of a memoir.
Rob Sheffield on Taylor Swift and the Power of the Fangirl
Rob Sheffield, Taylor Swift, and Swifties understand intimately that we owe it to ourselves to pay homage to the music that lights our hearts on fire.
‘The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey’ Is Spectacular
Creator of the iconic PBS Masterpiece Mystery! title sequence, Edward Gorey’s artistic sensibility and wicked humor continuously inspires creators across many mediums.