Pavemania

From music video “Big City Nights” for Da Funk, by Daft Punk, 1995. Directed by Spike Jonze by Enrique Lima It is nearly impossible for popular music to represent history. The historiographic imagination is beyond it, I think. Linearity, plot, and telos are too important to the telling of...

The chance entrance to the city before it disappeared. Thoughts hanging like bodies from ropes. The image seems to have been taken from inside a moving car, but this is staged. The windshield wipers are props. The highway is front-projection.

The Knife definitely employs the shock-value of an incestuous theme to further strengthen their mission in creating powerful work. The music duo is comprised of Swedish siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson. They produce and release their music through their own label, Rabid Records, and therefore are in...

As if the name alone weren’t troubling enough, the fact that No New York is, was and forever shall be a compilation proves equally as troublous. More so than anyone else, it was Brian Eno who committed these four bands to wax. So, yet again, an essay explicitly devoted...

Take one look at Clara Rockmore, what do you see? Massive piled-upon Beehive, frail hands, but it is the eyes, and the eyes are fixed upon one predetermined point in the universe, a single ligature, like a somnambulist cheating in someone’s dressing room.

The new, old Rolling Stones film, “Charlie Is My Darling,” played at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre this past weekend, and we joined a mellow crowd of folks carrying beers and popcorn into the main auditorium, most of us probably able to claim that we had been raised on the Stones.

The frame is blood-soaked by the invisible hand of the one who watches over the video. Detached from the flow of images that make up “Carmen,” the video frame serves as an omen revealing—for an instant—that this is not just another music video, but rather a horror film.

Mariah Carey and Whitney Huston From Pitchfork: There was, of course, a lot to love about pop in the late 90s: I was entranced by the weird, warped sound of anything Timbaland had a hand in, from Missy Elliott’s “The Rain” to Aaliyah’s singles– even then, there didn’t seem...

The familiar color bars. A sense of halted, paused time marking the edge-zone moments before or after the next show. The red, red shade of color bar #5 will be sampled and reaffirmed as a rose in shot #3.

Remember this: Thurston Moore came to New York City to be a poet. Tired of driving his old man’s Volkswagen down from Connecticut, it was Gotham Book Mart, not CBGB, that convinced him to make the move in 1977. Bohemia had put down roots on the Lower East Side;...

Perhaps no star’s luminosity glows murkier than Dylan’s in his interviews. Louis Menand, in “Bob on Bob: Dylan Talks” (New Yorker, 4 Sep 2006), a review of Jonathan Cott’s Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, comments on the absurdity of taking any Dylan interview as a gospel light.

by Masha Tupitsyn I cannot lie. I love 80s Madonna, mainly because that period of her music scores my childhood. It’s the only Madonna I like. When I was a little girl I acted and looked like a little boy. It was the first way I knew how to...

From London Review of Books: Before the Second World War, American composers went to Europe. That was the way of the ‘boulangerie’, the group including Aaron Copland who studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. After the war, though, they began to take seriously Charles Ives’s declaration that ‘we have...

The Occident is currently experiencing a massive import of hybridised cultural products from the Korean peninsula. This phenomenon, known as the Korean wave or hallyu, refers to the global rise of South Korean entertainment such as feature films and television shows.

The 90s happened, man. I was there. I saw the mohawks on twelve-year olds being carried on their punk parents' shoulders. I rode in old cars while my friends snorted rids in the back seat, and I got delivered to crowded Warped Tours and saw bands my big sister...

From The New Yorker: Nearly half a century ago, when Elvis Presley was filming “Harum Scarum” and “Help!” was on the charts, a moody, father-haunted, yet uncannily charismatic Shore rat named Bruce Springsteen was building a small reputation around central Jersey as a guitar player in a band called...