Music
Prince's 'Sign o’ the Times,' Part I (A Solitary Genius)
For an ostensible masterpiece, Prince’s Sign o’ the Times (1987) is suspiciously lacking in overt concept.
Music
Books
Photographing a Steinway Piano Being Put Together
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an example of the first 88-key piano model built by Steinway & Sons in 1868, its rosewood case containing an inventive cast-iron frame held aloft by three ornate legs.
Music
In His New Trio of Releases, Frank Ocean Crafts a Mortal Self-Image
At a time when we swipe through thousands of images a day and cruise through thousands of paintings in an hour at an art fair, it's only the rarest of artworks that we return to again and again.
Music
World Music Doesn’t Exist: Aki Kumar, Lakuta, Metin Batur/Mamed Dzafarov, Choose Amore
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.
Art
Digitizing the World's Largest Braille Music Collection
Digitizing braille music isn't as easy as just scanning the page. The tactile notations require multiple steps for accurate transcription, and their history of touch means the dots are sometimes smashed or otherwise unreadable.
Music
Gender Menders: Anohni, RuPaul, Gwen Stefani, Now That’s What I Call Country
Like the idiot I am, I got Grimes’s Art Angels very wrong when it surfaced last year.
Music
Eleven Stories by Brandy Clark
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.
Art
A Hands-On Experience with Harry Bertoia's Sonic Sculptures
After his death in 1978, Harry Bertoia was interred beneath one of his most impressive sonic works: a 2,000-pound, 10-foot-in-diameter silicon bronze gong.
Music
They Might Be Assholes: Jake Bugg, Panic! at the Disco, The 1975, Drake
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?
Music
Chance the Rapper’s Musical Playground
Not since fellow Chicago icon Kanye West’s The College Dropout in 2004 has a rapper invented a totally new aesthetic so happy, so inspirational, so kind and funny and friendly and committed to making everybody feel welcome.
Art
A Permanent Village of Musical Architecture in New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS — Towering pecans and live oaks shade a far corner of New Orlean's Bywater neighborhood which will soon be the permanent home of the Music Box Village, an installation of musical architecture organized by the New Orleans Airlift nonprofit.
Music
Even in Love, James Blake Hovers Somewhere Just Out of Reach
I keep listening because I want to grasp it, and so the music generates the very frustrated desire it addresses.