Hard bop is one of those jazz labels that can sound a little dutiful until you actually put the records on. On paper, it risks looking like a genre term for people who enjoy diagrams. A sub-style. A historical chapter. The kind of thing you’re supposed to know if you want to nod at the…
Ranking Salman Rushdie is really a matter of deciding which kinds of excess you’re willing to trust. I don’t mean that as a joke. Or not only as a joke. Because once you get past the obvious summaries — the verbal fireworks, the historical sweep, the satire, the mythology, the formal swagger, the sheer unstoppable…
A lot of people pitch Lolly Willowes the same way, and to be fair, it’s a very good pitch. It’s a feminist classic. A witch novel. A sly little masterpiece about a woman refusing the life her family has arranged for her. All true and useful. But it doesn’t quite get at why the book…
Ranking Elton John is fun for exactly the same reason it’s difficult: there isn’t just one Elton John. There’s the absurdly gifted early-70s Elton who seemed capable of tossing off masterpieces before lunch. There’s the country-and-Americana dreamer of Tumbleweed Connection. There’s the maximal pop star. The bruised, sprawling auteur. The 80s survivor. The late-career craftsman…
The quickest way to describe Afrofuturism is to say that it imagines Black futures. That’s true. It’s also not nearly enough. Because once you spend real time with Sun Ra and Octavia Butler, the bigger revelation is not just that they imagine tomorrow. It’s that they refuse to let time behave. The past doesn’t stay…
Dev Hynes does not make the kind of catalog where one album is obviously broken, another is obviously overpraised, and the whole thing can be stacked neatly by “quality” as if we were ranking kitchen appliances. Blood Orange records tend to arrive more slyly than that. They drift in. They stain the room. They leave…
From a distance, jazz fusion can look like one giant, slightly stressful pile of 1970s virtuosity: long solos, very serious facial expressions, five-minute stretches where everyone seems to be winning a private contest, and at least one person on a keyboard making sounds that suggest the future happened in a basement. That version of fusion…
Ranking Joan Didion sounds easy. At first, you think: fine, put the famous essay collections near the top, place Play It as It Lays somewhere high because it’s obviously too cold and brilliant not to be, make room for the grief memoirs, and try not to start a small civil war over whether The White…
A lot of writing about loneliness in Japanese fiction settles into the same set of props very quickly. Quiet rooms. Solitary meals. City lights. Emotional reserve. A person staring out a window while the weather does half the literary work. I get why that version sticks. Plenty of Japanese novels do handle loneliness with unusual…
Ranking Cocteau Twins is difficult for a slightly strange reason. It’s not because the catalog is huge, and it’s not because there are embarrassing late-career detours to sort through. The hard part is that Cocteau Twins albums don’t divide neatly into masterpieces and misfires. They divide into different kinds of sonic weather. One record is…