The man who was called the “godfather of hip-hop,” and who took full license from that status, is dead. Afrika Bambaataa passed away in early April, reportedly of prostate cancer, at the age of sixty-eight. His legend is a split one: that of the street griot who molded the genre of the century from the…
Like just about every major tenor saxophonist of his generation, Henderson was influenced by Coltrane, but Henderson absorbed that influence and transformed it into a mark of his own originality. He took on essential elements of Coltrane’s sound—the long low-note honks and growls and high-pitched screeches and wails—and he was inspired by Coltrane’s vehemence, how…
Gallagher’s profane monologue went viral on account of its absurdity—four people on payroll to brew a single cup of tea? But the rocker’s screed contained a truth, one that has substantially shaped the contemporary ticket-buying panopticon. After listeners drifted away from buying physical releases such as CDs and vinyl, starting in the two-thousands, touring has…
Then again, an especially good fictional song can come to feel more real than its story of origin. Lustra’s pop-punk cuckoldry anthem “Scotty Doesn’t Know” has detached from the raunchy teen comedy “EuroTrip” (2004) and taken on a life of its own, as has the impossibly infectious title song from “That Thing You Do!” (1996)….
In 2023, Noah Kahan, a singer and songwriter from Strafford, Vermont, leapfrogged to superstardom following the release of “Stick Season,” a COVID-era LP full of claustrophobic, lovesick folk songs. Kahan has a soft, nasal voice—more Simon than Garfunkel—and he uses it to eulogize relationships that falter for reasons both intentional and incidental. If its instrumentation…
Calace, I discovered, was a Neapolitan workshop that had been making mandolins since 1825, and Raffaele Calace, the grandson of the founder, had been the greatest composer for mandolin in the late nineteenth century. But his music was quite different from the pieces that Paolo introduced me to over the next year, all of which…
And yet the value of a novel isn’t only in its prose. On Amazon, “Shy Girl” has a rating of four out of five stars, based on input from hundreds of reviewers. Many of them praise its premise and ideas—features of the book that it seems reasonable to think were shaped by human decision-making. (One…
