After the symphonies, the room gets smaller. That’s the simplest way I know to think about Beethoven’s piano sonatas at first. The symphonies are public Beethoven, all huge gestures, famous openings, and orchestras pushing the air around, with the Ninth standing there like a cultural monument that keeps a chorus waiting in the lobby. They’re…
At a certain point, Willie Nelson’s discography stops looking like a catalog and starts looking like a dare. You start with the obvious records: Shotgun Willie, Phases and Stages, Red Headed Stranger, Stardust. Maybe Waylon & Willie too, if you want the outlaw-country buddy-movie version of the story. Then you look up the rest and…
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…
I love a giant postmodern novel as much as the next person who has willingly carried around a book large enough to count as upper-body training. There is a real thrill to those huge, unruly systems-novels. Gravity’s Rainbow should feel overloaded. Infinite Jest should feel recursive and slightly unhealthy. Underworld should feel crowded with history…
1980s New York City certainly wasn’t tidy or coherent. It wasn’t one scene, one genre, one politics, one mood, one glamorous downtown myth lit just right for later documentaries. It was too loud for that. Too broke. Too ambitious. Too stylish. Too neglected. Too funny. Too angry. Too wired. Too full of brilliant ideas, terrible…
There is a particular kind of reader who sees a thousand-page postmodern novel and thinks, Excellent. I was hoping to lose contact with ordinary time for a while. The rest of us may wonder whether the book comes with a bookmark, a glossary, and maybe a physical therapist. Postmodern fiction has a reputation, and to…
Avant-garde jazz and free jazz are two terms that seem almost designed to be off-putting, to make a casual or jazz-curious listener immediately think “no thanks, won’t be bothering with that.” As someone who’s listened to a lot of this music for many years now, I want to demystify a bit. For a long time,…
Books about musicians can go wrong in a very familiar way. They turn into prestige montages. The first guitar. The first gig. The terrible manager. The genius. The drugs. The breakup. The comeback. The legend. Everybody gets a dramatic entrance and a carefully placed wound. The prose tries on a leather jacket. Somewhere in the…
You do not need a philosophy degree to feel the existential force of Russian literature. Honestly, it may help if you don’t start with the philosophy at all. Start with a clerk who just wants a decent overcoat. Start with a clever young man who sees through everyone and has no idea what to do…
The Cure are often talked about as if they are two bands trapped in one very dramatic cardigan. There is the dark Cure: rain-streaked windows, funeral basslines, grey skies, songs that sound like they were recorded in a room where nobody had opened the curtains since 1981. Then there is the pop Cure: bright melodies,…