It’s been seven years since my group of intrepid friends decided to explore the world of perfumes. “If you take five minutes to research them,” my friend Sam explained, “you’ll find that they’re way more interesting and complex than you ever realized.” He was right, and before long, I bought a handful of perfume samples […]
Tag: music criticism
Posted inBlogs
Cowboy poetry, the decline of the critic, Lil Wayne’s boring prison memoir, and more: the week in music writing
The Reader collects some of the best and brightest bits from the past week’s music writing.
Posted inBlogs
The “problem” with jazz, part 343: Chris Kornelis at the Seattle Weekly
A Seattle Weekly writer blames poor jazz record sales on musicians who don’t play to the cheap seats
Posted inBlogs
Shut down the criticism machine, we’re all done here
A gang of eight-year-old Canadian girls review the new Justin Bieber album, destroy arts criticism
Posted inBlogs
Pianist Jeremy Denk: a musician writing about music
Classical pianist Jeremy Denk, who plays Symphony Center on Sunday, writes about music just as well as he plays it
Posted inBlogs
The Bad News About GOOD Fridays
Being “Kanye West” and what that means for all the other musicians in the world
Posted inBlogs
Village Voice Jazz Poll Winners Announced
Pianist Vijay Iyer tops the Village Voice Jazz Critics’ Poll.
Posted inBlogs
Talking Jazz 2009 Online/Hometapes for the Holidays
I’m participating in a new online conversation about jazz in 2009, hosted by New York Times contributor Nate Chinen.
Posted inBlogs
It’s like remembering to chew your food
Michaelangelo Matos’s Slow Listening Movement
Posted inBlogs
Tom Moon’s tunes you need to dig before death
Veteran music critic Tom Moon picks the 1,000 records you need to hear before everything goes silent (and will talk about it with you over lunch for $25).
Posted inBlogs
American jazz: still not dead
British jazz critic Stuart Nicholson is still flogging his bogus thesis that American jazz is dead.
Posted inMusic
The Alternative Universe
Milk It! Collected Musings on the Alternative Rock Explosion of the 90’s by Jim DeRogatis (Da Capo) To Jim—Now It’s Your Turn. Best, Lester This brief inscription, scrawled across the inside cover of his quickie bio of Blondie, were Lester Bangs’s parting words to fledgling rock critic Jim DeRogatis. It was mid-April 1982, and the future […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music-Press Stooge
Bill Wyman: The opening paragraph of your Year-in-rock recap [Hitsville, January 7] is one of the most brilliant bits of ass-forward thought I’ve seen in years. If I read your heavily parenthetical English correctly, you are making the case that Liz Phair, Urge Overkill and the Smashing Pumpkins are somehow unique in rock music because they […]