Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
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One night in Newark with Chris Christie and Bruce Springsteen.
“No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!” he screams over the noise of the crowd, and then screams it again, to make sure I understand: “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!”
Listening to music in prison.
An artist at the end of his life.
Grammy-winning liner notes describing the rise, fall, and rebirth of Roky Erickson, who founded the psychedelic rock pioneers The Thirteenth Floor Elevators before a charge stemming from a single marijuana joint landed him in a Texas mental hospital.
A profile of a “49-year-old man whose father has just yelled at him,” Frank Sinatra Jr., a son living under the longest shadow.
How a Northern Californian rapper ended up facing life after being hired to produce a CD titled Generations of United Norteños – Till Eternity that may have served as a recruiting tool for the prison gang Nuestra Familia.
"The honesty in Perfume Genius’s music has attracted him a devoted audience, and he receives a lot of messages on Twitter from young kids going through the process of coming out, or dealing with their own addictions. “I think people come to my music just to feel less lonely,” he says. “When I write, sometimes I think, What would I have liked to have heard when I was younger?” But on his new record, out this May, he aimed for something a little more developed: essentially, he wanted to make a grown-up album about life after you’ve trudged through the trauma."
A profile of singer-songwriter Will Oldham.
He has settled into character as an uncanny troubadour, singing a sort of transfigured country music, and he has become, in his own subterranean way, a canonical figure. Johnny Cash covered him, Björk has championed him (she invited him to appear on the soundtrack of “Drawing Restraint 9”), and Madonna, he suspects, has quoted him (her song “Let It Will Be” seems to borrow from his “O Let It Be,” though he says, “I’m fully prepared to accept that it’s a coincidence”).
Migos, a young Atlanta rap trio, has decamped to a mansion outside of town to avoid trouble, ride Go-Karts, shop for $2300 backpacks, and continue their streak of red-hot singles.
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A single-page version of Shalhoup’s reporting on the Black Mafia Family, one of the largest cocaine empires in American history.
A melancholic Billy Ray Cyrus on the trauma of being the father of a famous 18-year-old girl, his friendship with Kurt Cobain, and his favorite mullet nicknames (Kentucky Waterfall and Missouri Compromise).
On the county fair and casino circuit with Huey Lewis, who at 61 is “part of a select fraternity of musicians who can draw a couple thousand people in dozens (if not hundreds) of middle-American towns … scattered throughout the country.”
How Mozart’s starling impacted his music.
Tokyo’s reverent “black music” fandom.
The rapper who never grew up.
The where-are-they-now stories of MC Ren, DJ Scatch, Sir Jinx, Kid Disaster, Candyman, and everyone else on the cover of 1987’s N.W.A. and the Posse.
“It is a story that seems almost impossible to believe: a group of female convicts, few of whom had ever played a musical instrument or taken voice lessons, forming a country and western band and becoming, at least in Texas, the Dixie Chicks of their day.”
On a recent lawsuit over Stairway to Heaven and Led Zeppelin’s deep catalog of songs that were revealed to have been written by others.
In need of a new lead singer, Journey settled on an unknown 40-year-old from the Philippines whose clips they found online. Arnel Pineda was perfect: just a small-town boy, living in a lonely world.
A year-by-year walk through of the decade that birthed a mainstream culture called ‘Alternative’ and the bands that were deified and destroyed by it.
The story of Dr. Sherman Hershfield, who became Dr. Rapp.
There was a woman of at least 90 years and a Hasidic guy in a tall hat, which was too bad for whoever sat behind him. There were models, full nuclear families, and even a solitary frat bro. St. Vincent brings people together.
A closer look at the economics of Black pop culture reveals that most Black creators (outside music) come from middle-to-upper middle class backgrounds, while the Black poor are written about but rarely get the chance to speak for themselves.
"Serial systems and their permutations function as a narrative that has to be understood. People still see things as visual objects without understanding what they are. They don’t understand that the visual part may be boring but it’s the narrative that’s interesting. It can be read as a story, just as music can be heard as form in time. The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature."
In March of 1991, Vanilla Ice had the #1 album in the country (To the Extreme), a movie about to be released (TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze), and a dogged belief that his 15 minutes weren’t about to end.
