10. Chouk Bwa and the Ångströmers – Vodou Alé (Bongo Joe) In Haiti, mizik rasin, or roots music, serves important roles in many culturally engaged movements. It has the capacity to tie together past, present, and future in often spiritually-inflected… Read More
10. Chouk Bwa and the Ångströmers – Vodou Alé (Bongo Joe) In Haiti, mizik rasin, or roots music, serves important roles in many culturally engaged movements. It has the capacity to tie together past, present, and future in often spiritually-inflected… Read More
I love Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis , I love Habibi, and I love Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. However, there’s one word choice that I’ve always hated having to make when talking about these books with other people: Do I tell them… Read More
10. Bridget St. John – Ask Me No Questions (1969, Dandelion) Singer-songwriter Bridget St. John became a British cult figure in the wake of her critically-lauded sophomore LP Songs for the Gentle Man (1971), though it’s in her debut album Ask Me No… Read More
With Eraserhead (1977) there is only ever the first time. Re-watching director David Lynch’s debut feature, the experience is entangled with the impact of that initial viewing. Subsequent screenings lead back to deeper recesses of an experience, remembered as equal… Read More
Losing Sharon Jones to cancer in 2016 felt particularly unfair. Jones didn’t breakthrough until she was in her mid-40s when Dap Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings launched Daptone Records and played a pivotal role in the retro-soul movement.… Read More
It’s hard to imagine why Chris Stapleton would feel the need to start over just now. Five years ago, his debut solo album Traveller put him into permanent stardom (such as stardom ever is), and he’s only followed that with… Read More
By the late 1980s, the Fall were in as stable a place as their confrontational frontman, lyricist, and only constant member Mark E. Smith would allow. Guitarist Craig Scanlon and bassist Steve Hanley, who joined at the same time, had… Read More
Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series has gained a stellar reputation over the years for meticulously and lovingly analyzing classic and important albums. Almost every self-respecting rock music fan has at least a passing familiarity with the more than 150 albums covered… Read More
An out-of-time transmission from the late 1990s, when auteurs were fully embracing genre and pre-millennium jitters was tossing old artistic certainties out the window, Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a spectacular oddity that still confounds… Read More