February 9, 2023
It’s one of the most gorgeous and mysterious things ever to happen on an electric guitar.
Paul Grimstad
All articles by this author
April 26, 2017
Relating to or Resembling a Peacock
Recent and not-so-recent music
There is perhaps no working musician in whose case the asymmetry between critical accolades and actual musical content is so steep and acute, and so misleading. Stephin Merritt’s music is flat, gray, unmemorable, and “melodic” only in most contrived sense; his melodies seem to scream “I am writing a song in a usually disposable medium that is usually meant for mere entertainment but I am smart and special and this is meant to be real art.”
July 5, 2016
Never a Hippie, Always a Freak
“They write about me like I’m a maniac. I’m not . . . I’m forty years old, I’ve got four kids, a house, and a mortgage.”
When Zappa shows up in a suit and tie debating Robert Novak on Crossfire, the effect is less the ’60s freak who became a normal adult than an uncompromising individual voice channeled into a different format.
April 10, 2014
On Robert Ashley
The sound of Americans talking to each other, or talking to themselves
In 1981, promotional ads for something called “Music Television” started hitting in the US with the tagline: “You’ll never look at music the same way again.” Around the same time appeared a pilot video for something called Perfect Lives: A Television Opera by American composer Robert Ashley. Ashley was light-years from the video hit parade of MTV, but he too wanted to make music television.
May 22, 2010
The idea of a “thoughtful anthology” is quixotic by definition, damned from the outset to reflect reigning orthodoxies.
