A Website of the Radical Imagination
A universal suburb is almost as much of a nightmare, humanly speaking, as a universal megalopolis. — Lewis Mumford, “Suburbia—And Beyond,” The City in History I The strobes blinded the viewer as Arcade Fire performed their song “Month of May,” from the album The Suburbs, on the Grammy Awards Show in February 2011. The … Read more
What follows is not a review of the new collection of the late Ellen Willis’s rock criticism,Out of the Vinyl Deeps[1], but a sort of answer record remixed from old and new episodes in my own pop life. Hope it reads half as well as, say, Mouse and the Traps’ “Public Execution” sounded after “Like … Read more
“New Day” – the song at the heart of Jay-Z’s and Kanye West’s collaborative CD Watch the Throne – is about the prospective joy (and pain) of fathering a…Brother. Samples of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” – “Birds in the sky know how I feel / Fish in the sea know how I feel” – prompt … Read more
“I won’t change my mind…Keep your hand on my thigh tonight!” That’s a line from the chorus of the echt Springsteen track of the past decade. But it’s not by Bruce. The song is Kathleen Edwards’ “Oil Man’s War” – a tale of Bobby (“who wished he was from the past/He said those cars they … Read more
Robert Duncan, one of the key figures of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s in which the Beat Generation surfaced, once said that he didn’t believe there was any such thing as a poet. What happened, Duncan said, was that every so often this or that man or woman became, in the process … Read more
The Boss is Back! The album was on the Prestige label, the first Gene Ammons made after being released in 1969 from Stateville Penitentiary following a seven-year term for heroin possession. With Junior Mance on piano and Buster Williams on bass. Bernard Purdie on drums, Candido on conga, it’s a hell of a record. Ammons’s … Read more
These days when the peoplescape of the music is being changed before our ears, it seems to be rarer than ever we can get to some deeply gratifying Vonz (40’s Bop-really hip stuff). But recently, Amina & I have got to and under some real vonz. That is, we have got to some extra thrilling … Read more