Music

Showing 85 – 96 of 103 results

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Tony Wilson: The Postmodern Mythmaker

A Factory Sample Too, 7-inch EP. Design by Mat Cook, Intro. 1995.Tony Wilson, founder of Factory records, died on last Friday, August 10. He'd been fighting cancer for some time. Wilson had many claims to fame: he was a successful television presenter; a music industry impresario of …

Liz Brown|Essays

Phil Spector vs. The Wall of Sound

Until 1966, producer Phil Spector was an unstoppable machine, churning out "symphonies for little kids." Then came "River Deep, Mountain High," where the combination of Tina Turner’s raw, unbridled passion and Spector’s orchestral swoon was a total disaster. …

Richard Turley|Essays

Off the Grid

Photo: Martin Godwin/GuardianSo there we were. Standing in a vast field at the Worthy Farm, the home of the Glastonbury Festival, armed with a laptop, rain pouring down, sodden jeans, welly boots welded to our feet, the ground turning into molasses before our eyes. Our mission: to …

John Corbett|Slideshows

Sun Ra, Street Priest and Father of D.I.Y. Jazz

Sun Ra, photographer unknown, circa 1950, Chicago.The space-voices got me on a space wisdom beam, and the beam led me to Chicago.— Sun Ra, 1962April 13, 1956, Chicago. Sun Ra and his friend and manager Alton Abraham arrive at Balkan Music Co., a small record and musical supply …

Adrian Shaughnessy|Essays

Are JPEGs the New Album Covers?

Black to Comm "Levitation/Astoria." 7" Lathe-Cut Picture Disc, design by Marc Richter and Renate Nikolaus. Dekorder Records.Over the past few months I've been researching a book about current record cover art. Besides hunting down examples of stimulating music graphics, I've also …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Cheap Music and Commercial Art

You wouldn’t know it from Dreamgirls, but Motown staff songwriters Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland were examples of how art is created under pressure.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

I'm Not Ready to Make Nice

It's a tough time to be a critic. Everyone's got an opinion they're all-too-eager to deliver, and in today's wiki-esque maelstrom of information sharing, we're all supposed to be equal. In the best case scenario, knowledge aggregation is a good thing: we're all part of a dynamic system …

Alissa Walker|Essays

War Is Over! If You Want It

Yoko Ono and John Lennon with peace campaign poster against the Vietnam War, 1969. Photograph by Frank Barratt/Getty Images.When the star of the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon is asked by a reporter what he thinks Nixon should do to end the Vietnam War, Lennon stares incredulously …

Michael Bierut|Essays

Vinyl Fetish

A meditation on the joys of vinyl.

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

More Rules

Cover art for The Information by Beck. Art direction and design by Matt Maitland/Gerard Saint at Big City Active with Beck. Sticker art by: Jody Barton, Beck, Juliette Cezar, Estell & Simon, David Foldvari, Genevieve Gauckler, Michael Gillette, Jasper Goodall, Mercedes Helnwein, …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Broadcast vs. Broadband

Remember the early 1990s, when techno-evangelists promised that television as we know it would soon be replaced by a searchable database of streaming video available at any time on your computer? Today, with the near-ubiquity of video-on-demand services (including iTunes) …

Michael Bierut|Essays