“I can hear everything. It’s everything time.” Here we are, floundering at the tail end of the decade, grasping to make sense of the last 10 years, when that ancient quote (actually from...
Sometimes the most pyrrhic ventures prove the most gratifying. Gleaning a decade’s worth of song in 2019 feels like sifting sand with a hula hoop, the enormity of the ever-accumulating archive ...
“I don’t think bells ask questions.” -Mary Ruefle INTRODUCTION I don’t believe that the last decade can be easily summed up. I do believe, however, that how we listen has changed to...
I. On November 22, 2010, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy received the distinction of Best New Music with a score of 10 from Pitchfork, an award more elusive to musicians in the 2...
Mass consensus is a weird phenomenon. It suggests that what people share is more valuable than what each of us keeps close; it’s a Campbellian reflex that we haven’t shaken out of what we do ...
“…like a ship sailing the open sea with a demon for a pilot.” – Evagrius “I want art to stand strong, to display how it manipulates its audience. I want it to take up their expectat...
Released in October on Constellation, COIN COIN Chapter Four: Memphis chronicles Matana Roberts’s continued exploration of histories of violence and dispossession, kinship, and avant compositi...
Video games? Those don’t exist! OK, they might exist. But in the context of music journalism, they might as well be a complete fabrication. Music composed for this medium tends to be ignored by...
It’s telling that the decade’s most memorable innovations in cover art have breached the confines of the record sleeve. It’s a stunt Kanye West famously pulled in 2013, when CD copies of Ye...
“If the relation between artistic creation and our history is so difficult to pin down these days, it is precisely because time is accelerating and, as it were, evading us, and because the over...