Music
Usually I mix positive reviews with mixed ones. Given recent events I couldn’t bear to be mean — I'm working up to it, I swear — so here are four albums that I love.
Music
When personal expression is your aesthetic mode, then aesthetic quality depends on quality of personality.
Music
There’s a paradox at the heart of this music: constructing a simulation of hedonism takes extraordinary discipline.
Music
Whether or not he raised popular music to the level of literature — a meaningless claim lazy boomers have been pushing on the younger generation for years — he certainly assumed the role of the Romantic author-genius in a popular context and made the resulting dialectic thrilling as hell.
Music
Faced with the choice between genuine American pop music and the perfect facsimiles crafted by foreign scientist-geniuses running computer algorithms on said pop music (you think I’m exaggerating; read John Seabrook), I’d still pick the American stuff.
Music
The relevant split isn’t rock vs. pop (both are “pop” artists) but expressive vs. functional, always the key distinction in how pop music presents itself.
Music
Since genre is a perceived, externally imposed category rather than an intrinsic musical element, the job of assigning genre usually falls to the critic.
Music
For an ostensible masterpiece, Prince’s Sign o’ the Times (1987) is suspiciously lacking in overt concept.
Music
There are critics out there made so uncomfortable by how foreign music is marketed to Western listeners, especially Europeans, that they’ve sworn off any sort of foreign style.
Music
Like the idiot I am, I got Grimes’s Art Angels very wrong when it surfaced last year.
Music
Country singer Brandy Clark’s new album, Big Day in a Small Town, out since June, is rocking loud and jangling pretty, but the temptation to treat her foremost as a lyricist remains.
Music
The artists featured below have little in common beyond deeply questionable, occasionally revolting public personas and a stubborn willingness to produce compelling art from these personas. Why do some succeed and others fail drastically?