Motivated by seller’s regret and nostalgia, a journalist goes in search of the vinyl of his youth. And not just copies of albums he loved—he wants the exact records he owned and sold.
music
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
The Making of Janet Jackson’s ‘Control,’ 30 Years Later
The way our studio was set up back then was we had a control room where our mix board was and all that stuff, then there was a little lounge right outside with a couch. She was out there sitting and when I put it on, I could see her starting to move a little […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Gentrification Affects Musicians
In Radio Silence, Ian S. Port writes about the way musicians continue to get squeezed out of cities like San Francisco, Paris and New York.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Remembering the Female Voice of the Blues
Looking at Amanda Petrusich’s 2013 Oxford American magazine story about blues singer Bessie Smith.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Surveying Sin in American Music
What a blast! But there’s danger in the air─someone on the dark floor’s got a gun, and everyone “does his best to act just right, ’cause it’s gonna be a funeral if you start a fight.” In [Billy] Hughes’s terms, folks “struggle and they shuffle” until the sun comes up, delicate diction for a Saturday […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Musical Genius Is a Gendered Idea
But really, what is a musician’s voice if not distinctive? Isn’t that… good? Entire pieces have been written about the voices of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, so American and vital and wise in their manly scratchiness, like unshaved bristle and whiskey and dirt. Man voice make music good. Woman voice music bad: Too high. […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The High School Where Poetry Covers the Walls
Where does musical genius come from? A more reasonable question to ask might be: where did Bob Dylan come from? To find out, music writer Greil Marcus visited Hibbing High School in northern Minnesota, the school where Dylan graduated, and whose legend centers around the school’s striking architecture, lavish decoration and creative influence. Originally printed in 2007 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Broken Pop of James Bond Songs
What can the endurance of the messy, campy canon of James Bond theme songs tell us about contemporary popular music?
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes
Chuck Klosterman on the Success of Taylor Swift, and the Word ‘Calculating’
If you don’t take Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. With the (arguable) exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel—she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, during an era when most […]