Category: Music Review

The wild hysterical potential of the early Bruce Springsteen–it’s largely forgotten now, but at the time it had a lot to do with people thinking that they’d found an Elvis with a brain–was exciting but carried with it worries as well: at the time, the early and mid-70s, people were just beginning to get a […]

Observers of popular music never tire of lamenting the artistic dilution that inevitably seems to accompany commercial success. It’s been argued, in fact, that the entire history of pop music since the rockabilly explosion of the early 50s has been one of attrition: a revolutionary musical force is unleashed, it’s co-opted by the recording-industry conglomerates, […]

After graduating from college in May 1985, I worked my way east from Illinois, and by late August I’d landed in New York City. I had grown up in a small northern-Illinois town surrounded by cornfields, and I’d gone to school in an even smaller town in eastern Iowa. I was 22 when I got […]

Guitarist Hubert Sumlin’s music is characterized by an obstinate, almost compulsive individualism. He’s best known for his work as Howlin’ Wolf’s accompanist during Wolf’s Chess Records heyday. His eerie leads, shimmering like steel behind Wolf’s primal roar, alternated between staccato fierceness and an almost hornlike exploratory impetus. Sometimes sounding like he was barely under control, […]

In film and painting, dance and theater, even most forms of music, the deep, wise, elderly artist is a touchstone, a hero. But a mature rock ‘n’ roller is an oxymoron. The only honorable option for an aging rock star is to retreat to some island somewhere and grow old gracefully, but instead there’s a […]

Hyde Park was still a lively, stimulating place when Roscoe Mitchell lived there in the 1960s. He played his woodwinds and “little instruments” all over the neighborhood, from the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall and campus lounges to a church, a school, the small theaters of the day, and on the lakefront at the Point […]

About midway through the Holmes Brothers’ opening set at B.L.U.E.S. a man shouted from the audience, “Where you guys from?” “New York,” answered guitarist Wendell Holmes, adding that he and his brother had originally hailed from Virginia. But the man who’d asked wasn’t really looking for that kind of answer; you could tell by his […]

The most important stories in music this year all concerned the industry. Nineteen ninety-one was a financial disaster for the record companies–sales were off about 10 percent across the board–and they moved in typical fashion to identify the problems. Was the $4 billion-a-year monolith worried about the decline in the CD catalog sales that have […]

On the wide spectrum of rap–from the bubblegum of Vanilla Ice and M.C. Hammer to the bleak, unfriendly visions of the Geto Boys and N.W.A.–L.L. Cool J has staked himself out a comfortable spot right in the middle. Safely street but just as safely unpolitical, musically diverse but never outre, he trades on an easy, […]

With the country’s economic and social fabric seeming to deteriorate more and more each day, it’s easy to see why so many musicians write songs about despair. It’s difficult to find concrete reasons for hope, and it’s harder still to make a positive statement without sounding insipid and naive. What made Bruce Cockburn’s recent appearance […]