Introduction – The Canon Isn’t What It Used to Be When I first started taking music seriously, I thought there was a holy book of “the classics”. You didn’t need to read it, you could just walk into any record store and see it displayed in the racks. Sgt. Pepper. Blue. Kind of Blue. Nevermind….
Introduction: Stepping Into the Streets of Victorian London Few settings in literature feel as vivid and alive as Victorian London. It was a city of contradictions: glittering wealth beside grinding poverty, reform movements alongside corruption, innovation paired with exploitation. Gas lamps lit the foggy streets, while horse-drawn carriages jostled past barefoot children. For writers of…
When a band begins, they rarely imagine the ending. Yet when the Beatles released their debut, Please Please Me, in March 1963, the seeds of everything that would follow — the screaming crowds, the experimentation, the cultural upheaval — were already there. And when they bowed out with Abbey Road in September 1969, they gave…
Some albums are collections of songs, others feel like whole sound worlds. Rarely does music feel like a novel set to music. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1975) is one of those rare records that plays less like a sequence of singles and more like a novel (albeit a modernist, fractured one). Listening straight…
Introduction: Why We Can’t Resist Epic Family Sagas There’s something irresistible about a novel that doesn’t just tell one person’s story, but an entire family’s, stretching across decades or even centuries. Epic family sagas remind us that identity is never built in isolation. We inherit memories, traumas, traditions, and hopes, often without realizing it. When…
Sharp guitars, brighter synths, the stylish pulse of the 80s. New wave is impossible to mistake. It’s the moment punk’s nervous energy got dressed up, grabbed a synth, and decided to dance a little. What is new wave? A genre blending punk energy with pop melodies, synth textures, fashionable aesthetics, and offbeat experimentation. Who is…
Introduction: Reading in the Shadow of Empire To read postcolonial novels is to enter stories told in the wake of empire, where you find voices writing against the silences, erasures, and distortions of colonial power. These books aren’t simply “after the fact” accounts of independence; they wrestle with the entanglement of cultures, the fractures of…
Introduction: The Sound of 1969 in Context Some years feel bigger than the calendar that contains them. 1969 was one of those. It was the year humans landed on the moon, the Vietnam War raged on, protests filled the streets, and a generation wrestled with both possibility and disillusionment. The music of 1969 didn’t just…
Jazz Lives, Jazz Stories Jazz has never just been a style of music. It’s a way of telling stories that usually relies more on feeling than words, and it’s always had a connection to literature. A trumpet solo can say as much about struggle and joy as a whole novel. A ballad can sound like…
Why Faust Still Haunts Us Some stories never let go. They slip across centuries, putting on new costumes, whispering in new voices. Faust is one of those. The scholar who trades his soul to the devil for knowledge, pleasure, or power has been reborn again and again in plays, novels, operas, and even rock bands….