You can find million-and-one words in the music press about “supergroups”—the thrills and spills that occur when hotshots from different bands get together to create a new group mixing players who are otherwise leaders of acclaim. Not unlike basketball teams… Read More
100. Nickel Creek – Why Should the Fire Die? [Sugar Hill] Why Should the Fire Die? is both the title of Nickel Creek’s best 2000’s record and very likely the question many fans asked themselves when, following the release of the album,… Read More
Schneider, the Composer Schneider’s status as a highly acclaimed jazz composer has few true parallels in creative music. Unlike the huge majority of jazz composers—Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Wayne Shorter, say—her acclaim wasn’t preceded or accompanied by her success… Read More
15. Placebo – Without You I’m Nothing [1998] Placebo have never really been taken as a serious band. Probably because of lead singer Brian Molko’s ridiculously nasal delivery and the group’s propensity to sing about the recreational drug use. Underlying Placebo’s… Read More
The word “artlessly” has several meanings. It’s usually used as an adverb suggesting something authentic and direct. The implication is that there is no attempt to deceive or exaggerate. In terms of art and literature, the term signifies a work… Read More
Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, frustrated that there was no antonym for the word “catastrophe”, invented the term “eucatastrophe”, something that would describe an explosion of good. Still, I think there is another term: The Pogues. The late… Read More
When the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro caught coronavirus in July 2020, it seemed like a matter of time until Donald Trump followed. Sure enough, three months later, the American president had tested positive. Neither took the pandemic seriously, and this… Read More
This Heat, the innovative trio of Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward, and Gareth Williams, were not short of humor. Naming themselves after a 1976 UK heatwave, they chose a former cold storage room as their studio rehearsal space. Their records harnessed… Read More
Nigerian author Cyprian Ekwensi’s (1921-2007) debut, People of the City was shepherded into the literary spotlight by novelist Chinua Achebe (1930-2013). Achebe chose Ekwensi’s novel as the pioneering selection for the Heinemann African Writers Series, securing the text’s position as… Read More
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, and the maxim is even more accurate for graphic novels. This surprised me when I first started reading graphic literature – in a medium that is so heavily iconographic, surely… Read More