Short Reviews
Reviews of the books Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall, Secrets and Strangers, and A Long Day’s Evening, the play My Big Gay Italian Wedding, and the album “The Beatles” by AG.
MoreBrowsing: Music
Blog Posts
On Being on the Road
The anthems of Yes I Am still verge on the overblown, which is why 4th Street Feeling strikes the right chord by hitting the brakes just a bit. With the help of producers Jacquire King (Kings of Leon, Norah Jones) and Steve Booker (Duffy), Etheridge plays all the guitars without overpowering the production.
More
Rufus Maximus
YOU MAY NOT NEED Kirk Lake’s recent biography of Rufus Wainwright to learn that the singer-songwriter has a penchant for peacocks. …
[and Kirk] Lake’s portrait of Wainwright, titled There Will Be Rainbows, is the perfect complement to the Canadian-American’s loud and lavish œuvre and, with its references to Tennyson, Wilde, Kubrick, and Barthes, …
More
Blue Ridge and Red Clay
THE NEW self-titled album from North Carolina’s Mount Moriah announces in its instrumental introduction on the first track, ‘Only Way Out,’ that its roots are planted firmly in the red clay of the American South. …
MorePunk Rock’s Pitcher of Spitballs
IF YOU’RE LIKE ME and are occasionally presented with lists of the most influential gays and lesbians in popular music, you may have found yourself wondering: what about Bob? Best known as the lead singer of Hüsker Dü in the 80’s and Sugar in the 90’s, Bob Mould is a founding but often forgotten father of American punk rock.
More
k.d. lang Has Never Gone Away
SHE DAZZLED just about everyone when she performed live at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Now fifty, Alberta native k.d. lang still has what it takes to bring an audience to its feet. There’s no denying the power of that voice and lang’s unrivaled range.
More
Queen for the Hardcore
In Is This the Real Life? Blake doesn’t seem to have missed a single event in the lives of the men who were Queen.
More
Short Reviews
Reviews of the books: Beat Atlas: A State by State Guide
to the Beat Generation in America, The Fish Child, and I Was Born This Way: How About You?and Animal Prufrock’s album: “congratulations; thank you + i’m sorry”.
Out All Night
WHEN DID Camille Paglia become so old-fashioned? Last summer, the famed feminist and Sexual Personae author decried the death of rock music in a painfully unhip piece published in The New York Times (6/25/10): “Rock music, once sexually pioneering, is in the dumps,” she lamented, since “step by step, rock lost its visceral rawness and seductive sensuality.”
More
When Gay Culture Ruled the World
COMPARED TO MOST musical genres, disco ascended, flourished, and fizzled in a remarkably brief period from roughly the mid-1970’s until the early 80’s. It’s fair to say that disco didn’t even enjoy a solid decade of widespread popularity. Of course, those dates are debatable, and it all depends on how you define disco. And while disco’s reign was quick and fleeting (not to mention conflicted) in the U.S., it fared much better overseas. Alice Echols’ Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture offers a history of the disco era, but as the book’s title indicates, it’s more an interpretive, cultural history than a “who-what-where-when” catalog of disco’s origins, performers, and songs.
More