Some of the best writing about music does not tell you whether an album is good. That may sound like a dig at music criticism, but it’s not. I love good music criticism. I love the context, the arguments, the genre maps, the strange little grudges. A great critic can make you hear a record…
Some writers mention music to set a scene, whereas Ralph Ellison treated music as a way of knowing. That difference matters. With Ellison, jazz is not just atmosphere. It’s not there to make a room feel cooler, or to place us in a certain decade, or to signal a particular kind of urban sophistication. Jazz…
A tour through the fiction writers who turned amps, afterparties, and guitar feedback into literary language. Some novelists reference music. Others live in it. Their characters walk through the world with tinnitus and old mixtape ghosts rattling around in their memory. Their plots hinge on the moment a band breaks up, a concert sparks something,…
There’s the famous phrase that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, meaning it’s beautiful but pointless, a doomed translation between two incompatible languages. I can personally speak to this difficulty. Some writers, however, have been able to make language listen. They make prose hum with rhythm and insight, turning analysis into art. Among…