Aretha Franklin is very easy to praise and surprisingly hard to sort. Praising her is the easy part. You hear the voice and the discussion is basically over. There are great singers, and then there are singers who make greatness sound like a physical force. Aretha could take one line and make it feel like…
Obsession rarely announces itself like a villain walking into a room. Most of the time, it starts with something ordinary. A person wants someone back. Wants an answer. Wants revenge. Wants to be pure. Wants to know what really happened. Wants to return to some earlier, better version of life that probably never existed in…
There are A Tribe Called Quest albums fans defend with their whole chest. The Low End Theory? No hesitation. Midnight Marauders? Put it in the rafters. People’s Instinctive Travels? The joyful, weird, wide-eyed beginning. We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service? The farewell none of us were ready for, especially after Phife…
Patricia Highsmith gets called a crime writer, a suspense writer, a psychological thriller writer. None of those labels are wrong exactly, they’re just too neat for what she actually does. At her best, Highsmith is not mainly interested in puzzles, reveals, or the clean machinery of “what happens next.” She is much better at something…
Aldous Huxley is one of those writers people think they’ve solved after reading one book. And, to be fair, Brave New World is a pretty convincing introduction. It’s sharp, memorable, endlessly quotable, and so absorbed into cultural shorthand that “Huxley” can start sounding less like a writer’s name and more like a warning about where…
Ranking Lana Del Rey gets much more interesting once you stop asking which album has the best aesthetic and start asking where the writing feels most alive inside the aesthetic. Because the early Lana construction was powerful for a reason. Born to Die didn’t just introduce a singer. It introduced one of the strongest pop…
A lot of people hear the phrase experimental music and immediately brace themselves. I get it. It sounds like homework. It sounds like you’re about to be handed a reading list and a warning that this next part is “challenging but important.” It can sound less like music you fall in love with and more…
I don’t think Roberto Bolaño is a writer people read in a calm, orderly way. You can discuss him calmly, maybe. You can teach him calmly, assign him, historicize him, line up the usual phrases: exile, violence, poetry, failure, drifting men, literary obsession, fascism, Mexico City, Europe, the whole ruined republic of letters. All of…
Travel often gets sold to us in a very narrow emotional key. Say the word and suddenly everything is freedom, reinvention, the open road, a train window, a notebook, and some supposedly better version of yourself waiting a few hundred miles away with excellent hair and no inbox. And yes, sometimes travel really does feel…
The trick with ranking The Cure is that you are never ranking just one band. You are ranking at least two bands that keep haunting each other. There’s the Cure of empty rooms, slow dread, cold air, spiritual depletion, mascara running through the wallpaper. The Cure who can make despair sound architectural. The Cure people…