Pavemania

Fiston Mwanza Mujila was announced winner of the 2015 Etisalat Literature Prize at a grand ceremony in Lagos on March 19, 2016.

As a kid in the 1970s, kicking around the scrubby back lots near Toledo, Ohio, I assumed David Bowie was from Detroit, Michigan, about an hour north of my hometown.

Tommy Ramone the avant-gardist. Buried in a few obituaries and reminiscences about Tommy Ramone were mentions of the sharp, avant-garde angle of vision that characterized the early Ramones. Maybe now — as the last Ramone has died — it’s time to re-think the Ramones as essentially an avant-garde outfit...

On a chilly October day in 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte's army laid waste to Prussian troops on the outskirts of Jena, a university town in central Germany. The sounds of his canons reverberated through the town, providing a sound track for the young philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as he...

Retro-futurism, as we now call it, came out of the closet in the late '70s due to the widespread feeling that there was indeed ‘no future’ any more. Whilst Johnny Rotten waxed apocalyptical, Howard Devoto screeched existentially about his future no longer being what it was. Time seemed topsy-turvy,...

From The London Review of Books: We know all the essential passport application stuff about Bush, and down the years she’s dutifully done the odd unrevealingly bland Q&A, but there’s an immense amount we don’t know. Has she ever taken psychedelic drugs? Has she had therapy? (Reichian, Jungian, marriage?)...

I, myself, was barely six months old when Twin/Tone put out The Mats’ Let It Be. The day, they say, was Orwellian: Tuesday, October 2, 1984.

Naturally, I recall nothing of it.

Growing up, simple arithmetic holds I was 20 when Colin Meloy’s book about Let It Be was released by...

Almost from the start, Miley could hardly have made it clearer that she was not hysterical – that this was not a mental breakdown but instead a rather virtuosic performance of just the sort of mental breakdown made popular by people like her pop predecessor and purported idol, Britney...

This is not another obituary, another retrospective, another "Lou Reed's songs were the soundtrack to my life" essay. It is instead an attempt to find, in the small, quiet pockets of air in Lou Reed's 1975 album Metal Machine Music trace elements of the less obvious ingredients that made...

The rapper DMX is famous for his infamy. Fame came to him through his trademark rapping style and emotionally staggering songwriting, letting him become the powerhouse that has had five consecutive No. 1 albums. Infamy came to him through his continuous trouble in abiding several legal frameworks and law-enforcing...

Juliana Hatfield. Photograph by Christian Kock From The New Inquiry: In the fall of 1991, a 24-year-old Juliana Hatfield had just broken up her college band, Blake Babies, a mainstay of Boston’s fertile indie rock scene, and finished recording her solo debut, Hey Babe, now many years out of...