I’m not here to defend “We Built This City,” though I hardly think it’s the worst song of all time. Instead, I’m here to urge every music fan to dig deeper and interrogate his or her own definition of what makes a song terrible. I feel like we pile on “We Built This City” because […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Unapologetic Women
The Rise of ‘Mama’
“Like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of white, upper-middle class women who call themselves ‘mama’ seemed to happen slowly, and then all at once.” Elissa Strauss explores how the use of “mama” helped rebrand motherhood for the modern mother.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
STAT: My Daughter’s MS Diagnosis and the Question My Doctors Couldn’t Answer
Is there a dietary treatment for multiple sclerosis? And if so, why is the medical establishment ignoring published academic research that started in the 1950s proving it?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What’s Behind the Surging Popularity of Music Festivals?
In its growth, Governors Ball is benefitting from and contributing to the festival explosion of the past decade, a trend that a new Eventbrite study (on the “Top 2014 Music Festival Trends and Insights”) claims has resulted in one in every five millennials attending at least one festival per year. Though big, multi-day productions have thrived longer […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘The Good Is Elusive and Transitory in This World’
Artist and illustrator Maira Kalman on mistakes, optimism, and how art (and dogs) warm the soul.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Romantic Love: The Dominant Subject Matter of Western Popular Music
[Ted] Gioia shows that song lyrics about love, sex, marriage, and fertility can be traced all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, and that once Jewish and Christian religious leaders came to terms with the iron determination of their own people to write and sing about romantic love, it quickly emerged as […]
Posted inQuotes
On White Hip-Hop Artists Performing for White Audiences
In 2013, for the first time in the 55-year-history of the Billboard Hot 100, not one black artist lodged a number-one single. (Of the eleven songs that held the spot for some portion of the year, four were hip-hop, and four featured black singers or rappers in guest roles.) There’s been round, sustained clamor over Macklemore’s […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Can an Outsider Ever Truly Become Amish?
One of the rarest religious experiences you can have in America is to join the Plain.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium Helped Launch Led Zeppelin
Whether by accident or design, [the Fillmore Auditorium’s Bill Graham] has succeeded in launching most of the international pop groups whose claim to fame is musical rather than fashionable. Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Who all owe a great deal to his fanatical championship. And at the beginning of January, he promoted a new group […]
Posted inNonfiction
The Box and the Basement
“On the last day of my old job, I stumbled out the door, holding aloft that iconic emblem of termination: The Box. Though from the outside it might look wholly indistinct, we who have felt its symbolic weight know this is no ordinary box; this is a box that can make grown men cry.”
