A Website of the Radical Imagination
The date was November 19, 1995. The place was the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. It was there that a two-hour television special was being taped—yes, taped—celebrating the oncoming eightieth birthday, December 15, to be exact, of the preeminent singer of the twentieth century: Francis Albert Sinatra. Broadcast on December 17 by ABC, the … Read more
About 100 pages into David Ritz’s unauthorized biography of Aretha Franklin, Respect, I flashed on Greil Marcus’s tagline for his book on Punk, Lipstick Traces, which he dubbed: “the secret history of the 20th Century.” Ritz’s concept of Respect is less expansive, but his deeply sourced raps on black musicking speak to the “secret history” … Read more
Thirty-five years ago last December, Sam Cooke, the legal father of Soul, was shot to death by an L.A. hotel manager. In a time when pop stars died clean martyr deaths in plane or car crashes, the circumstances were sordid: the married Cooke, near-naked when he died, had been at the motel with a Eurasian … Read more
Jay-Z is a “citizen” in that specialized sense that the movie Starship Troopers – a delirious cautionary fantasy on war and patriotism – distinguished from “civilian.” (“What is the moral difference, if any, between a civilian and a citizen? A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic, defending it with his … Read more
Drive-By Truckers’ new double CD Southern Rock Opera is the most daring and developed expression of rock and roll attitude since the Clash’s Sandinista. The subject of the Truckers’ Opera is the “duality” – their word – of life in the land where blues began. Like (Rhythm &) Blues people, white folks in the South … Read more
One of the greatest treasures in my memory is the night Billie Holiday introduced me to Miles Davis and I introduced Billie Holiday to the Beat Generation. This story begins a woman named Maele. In 1959, [she] was married to Bill Dufty, who was one of my colleagues in the so-called “Poets’ Corner” of the … Read more
The second article I published about the music, in Metronome, was J&TWC. The theme was, broadly, that a fundamental contradiction, sharp, at times antagonistic, existed between American Classical Music, its creators, mainly Black, and the majority of commentators, critics, critical opinion about that music, which historically are not. The cause of this is obvious, whatever … Read more