Teenage alienation is easy to romanticize after the fact. The cigarettes look better in memory. So do the leather jackets, messy bedrooms, loud guitars, dumb fights, desperate friendships, and late-night conviction that if you could only get out of this town, this school, this house, everything might finally begin. From a distance, it can all…
Ranking Mitski albums is tough. Do you want the guitar-burn Mitski, the one who sounds like she is turning humiliation into voltage before your eyes? Do you want the miniature-theater Mitski, where every song is a tiny stage with one spotlight? Do you want the early art-school version, all piano drama and self-conscious collapse, where…
Faith and doubt seem like opposites until you spend enough time with good books. That is what makes the literature of spiritual searching so rich. The best books in this tradition are rarely tidy arguments for or against belief. They are more restless, more honest than that. They are about people who want meaning but…
Freddie Gibbs is one of those rappers people are weirdly eager to explain through his collaborators. Which is flattering, I guess. Madlib gave him the dusty masterpiece. Alchemist gave him the cold luxury-crime records. Curren$y helped turn one of those Alchemist detours into a beautifully upholstered smoke session. All true and worth discussing. Still, if…
Say “French novel” out loud and a lot of readers immediately picture something elegant, chilly, self-conscious, maybe set in Paris, probably involving sex, theory, and somebody staring out a window with highly cultivated despair. Which is funny, because the best contemporary French fiction is often much messier than that. Sharper too. Sometimes colder, yes. Sometimes…
Some albums become difficult to write about because the conversation around them has hardened. Everyone knows the context and the superlatives. Eventually, even a great record can disappear behind the language people use to praise it. Carrie & Lowell has been written about extensively since its release, and for obvious reasons. It is an album…
Milan Kundera is one of those writers who can make you feel very clever and very irritated at the same time. He is brilliant, obviously. He can turn one awkward sexual encounter into a philosophical trap before the character has even finished embarrassing himself. He can write about history without making people feel like props…
I’ve been thinking recently about how some albums seem to work as trilogies even when they’re not specifically framed that way. Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy would be the famous example. So famous, in fact, that I’m not even going to talk about it here. It has already been named, packaged, argued over, corrected, mythologized, and reissued…
Italo Calvino is tricky to describe because he’s one of those writers who can sound insufferable if you do it badly. A novel made of imaginary cities. A book about you, the Reader, trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler. Cosmic stories narrated by an ancient being with the…
Some music has no interest in politeness. It kicks the door open, knocks a lamp over, drags metal across the floor, and dares you to call it a song. At first, you may hate it a little. Fair enough. All that feedback sounds like a mistake. A cracked voice can sound wrecked beyond repair. Free…