News

Michael Hurley, the beloved eccentric folk singer whose music became a touchstone for a generation of singer-songwriters, has died at 83.

The singer’s death was announced in a statement from his family, and his publicist confirmed that Hurley died in his home state of Oregon after returning home from a series of weekend performances at the Big Ears festival in Knoxville. A cause of death was not provided.

“It is with a resounding sadness that the Hurley family announces the recent sudden passing of the inimitable Michael Hurley,” the statement reads.

When Morrissey attempted to reunite the New York Dolls in 2004 for a performance at London’s Meltdown festival, he thought his odds of success were low. “I expected David [Johansen] to laugh at me and put the phone down,” he said that year. “But he was very agreeable and it seemed like now was the right time. He said, ‘Yes, they are great songs.’ I said, ‘Yes, and that’s the reason why you should sing them. That’s the reason why people still want to hear them.’”

Prior to Morrissey’s call,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSMegalopolis.The 2025 Oscar nominations were announced late last week following multiple delays due to the Los Angeles fires. Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez (all films 2024) received the most nominations (thirteen) followed closely by Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Jon Chu’s Wicked (ten each). The New Yorker’s Richard Brody unpacks the assumptions underlying the Academy’s choices and posits an alternate list of nominees for five categories.London’s Prince Charles Cinema, a mainstay in the West End since the early 1960s, is facing a serious threat of closure after their landlords have demanded “a rent increase significantly above market rates” in their new lease. Zedwell Lsq Ltd and their ultimate parent company Criterion Capital have...

Barry Michael Cooper, the screenwriter behind the influential “Harlem Trilogy” of films New Jack City, Sugar Hill and Above the Rim and the man who coined the term New Jack Swing, has died. He was 66.

Cooper died in Baltimore, his friend the writer and filmmaker and former The Village Voice colleague Nelson George confirmed on his Substack. A cause of death was not immediately available.

After starting his career as a journalist in the 1980s, writing important pieces for The Village Voice and Spin Magazine, Cooper transitioned to penning screenplays drawing on the crime and culture of his native New York. His Harlem Trilogy of crime dramas were among the definitive Black films of the 1990s, and became hugely influential on hip hop music and culture.

Born in Harlem, Cooper grew up in the Little Washington Heights neighborhood and also lived in Esplanade Gardens. In interviews, he has spoken of Harlem’s rich literary,...

It’s so fitting that Garth Hudson was the last man standing from the Band. The beloved organ virtuoso died on Tuesday morning at 87, near Woodstock, New York — just a few miles down the road from Big Pink, the house where the Band and Bob Dylan transformed music history just by jamming in the basement. Garth Hudson was the mystery man in the Band, the silent one, the only one who didn’t sing. He was years older than the others, already in his thirties when they made their classic 1968 debut,...

Genesis are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their 1974 opus, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, with a Super Deluxe Edition featuring a remastered version of the double LP, a new Dolby Atmos mix, a complete 1975 concert from the Lamb tour, three unheard demos, and a 60-page coffee table book with liner notes by Alexis Petridis. It will hit shelves on March 28, 2025.

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was the last album that Genesis recorded before Peter Gabriel quit the band to launch a solo career. It’s a concept record...

The Kinks were heading into uncharted territory in the Sixties. The London rockers blew up in the early days of the British invasion, topping the charts with violently rowdy bangers like “You Really Got Me.” But Ray Davies began to explore a new kind of introspective songwriting, telling stories of everyday heartbreak. “Waterloo Sunset” is his artistic triumph: the delicate 1967 ballad of a lonely man by a train station, watching lovers from his window. This one-time cult favorite has become the Kinks’ most beloved classic, setting a standard that all...

If all Steve Albini ever did with music was complain about it, he still would have reigned as one of its most brilliant provocateurs. But Albini came to make noise — as a punk guitarist, as a producer, as a writer —with rock’s most notoriously savage sense of humor. “I like noise,” he declared in a hugely influential 1986 manifesto in the fanzine Forced Exposure. “I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a fucking jolt. We’re so dilapidated and...

If you turn on classic-rock radio anywhere in America and listen for more than a few minutes, you’re likely to hear a Foreigner song. “Cold as Ice,” “Hot Blooded,” “Feels Like the First Time,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” “Urgent,” and “I Want to Know What Love Is” topped the charts in the Seventies and Eighties, and really never went away. But rock critics never understood their appeal. “I like rock and roll so much that I catch myself getting off on ‘Hot Blooded,’ a typical piece of...

Couch Slut’s aesthetic was firmly established on their debut album, My Life as a Woman, the cover of which featured a black-and-white drawing of a man ejaculating onto a woman’s face. Leandro De Cotis’s artwork is as integral to the band’s branding as Raymond Pettibon’s was for Black Flag’s in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Couch Slut’s music depicts a life so cruel that survival seems like a victory, but it also features a feminist undercurrent, distinguishing it from that of their male edgelord precursors.

Couch Slut doesn’t push their lyrics to the forefront. The vocals are mixed low, and lead singer Megan Ostrozits tends toward a feral cry or alternates between speaking and screaming on tracks like “The Donkey,” from the band’s fourth album, You Could Do It Tonight. Sexual assault and self-harm are recurrent themes throughout the eight...

Almost immediately after its founding in 1955, the Village Voice became the most raucous, irreverent and important alternative newspaper in America. At one point the Voice was the most read weekly in the country, serving as Andy Warhol put it “the entire liberal thinking world.” In her excellent new book The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, Voice veteran Tricia Romano has compiled an oral history of the seminal alt-weekly. Romano’s book is a vital and wildly...

December 12th marks what would have been Frank Sinatra's 108th birthday. Sinatra is unquestionably one of the twentieth century's greatest entertainers. One of the highest-selling musical artists of all time, Sinatra's record sales surpassed over 150 million. In the late 1990s, Time magazine included Sinatra on their list of the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century. Famed music critic Robert Christgau named Sinatra the best singer of the twentieth century.

However, a gravely underrated aspect of Sinatra's career is his acting prowess. Not only is Sinatra an icon of the music industry, but he is also one of Hollywood's premier stars. Many of Sinatra's finest performances rank among cinema's most memorable movie roles.

Anchors Aweigh Was Sinatra's First Role Of Prominence (1945)

Anchors Aweigh

A pair of sailors on leave try to help a movie extra become a singing star.

Release Date August 13, 1945 Director Joseph Barbera , William Hanna Cast Frank...

Bruce Springsteen on Garland Jeffreys in Claire Jeffreys' Doc NYC Audience Award-winning Garland Jeffreys: The King Of In Between: “He’s in the great singer songwriter tradition of Dylan and Neil Young. One of the American greats!” Photo: courtesy of Claire Jeffreys

Claire Jeffreys brilliant Doc NYC Audience Award-winning (and a highlight of the 14th edition) Garland Jeffreys: The King Of In Between has on-camera interviews with Bruce Springsteen, Laurie Anderson on Lou Reed’s support, Harvey Keitel, Vernon Reid, Alejandro Escovedo, Alan Freedman, Robert Christgau, Graham Parker, Michael Cuscuna, David Hajdu, Roger Guenveur Smith, and Phil Messina sharing their insights on Garland Jeffreys, whom Springsteen calls a great singer songwriter in the tradition of Bob Dylan and Neil Young.

Claire Jeffreys with Ed Bahlman and Anne-Katrin Titze on Garland Jeffreys: “He went out with Bette Midler when she was doing The Continental Baths and he dated Alice Walker of The Color Purple.

You could fill a book with all the shady characters you meet in Steely Dan songs. Quantum Criminals is that book. Journalist Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay take a deep dive into the genius of Steely Dan, and the strange world that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker built together. LeMay illustrates her favorite Dan characters, from Rikki to Kid Charlemagne, from Dr. Wu to Peg, all the way to the El Supremo in the room at the top of the stairs. Pappademas gives a mind-bending guided tour of the Steely Dan universe,...

Wakanda Forever! After the tragic passing of star Chadwick Boseman forced Marvel Studios and director Ryan Coogler to rethink their approach for a sequel to 2018’s smash hit, Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hits theaters this weekend. The long-awaited sequel will double as both the latest entry in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and as a tribute to the late Boseman.

Box office projections estimate that the film is set to open to between 175 million and 185 million domestically, putting it slightly lower than the original film’s 202 million opening weekend haul, but making it the third-highest opening weekend since the pandemic, after fellow MCU entries Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which opened to 260 million and 187 million, respectively.

Part of the original Black Panther’s triumphant success was its massive, culturally relevant soundtrack. Curated by Kendrick Lamar, working with producer Sounwave and film composer Ludwig Göransson,...

Director Sacha Jenkins does the most important thing he could do in “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues”: He lets Louis Armstrong be messy.

Armstrong is one of those legends about whom people have had strong, polarized opinions. He’s either the greatest artist of the 20th century, in the esteem of Robert Christgau or Wynton Marsalis. Or he’s an Uncle Tom, someone who sold out and pandered to white audiences, as Sammy Davis Jr. once thought. And of course there’s the third path of corporate America, to sand the edges of someone like Armstrong down until he’s a cuddly teddy bear whose “What a Wonderful World” stands ready to accompany any commercial.

Jenkins’ new documentary for Apple TV+ avoids those absolutes. He’s interested in the man who was Armstrong, and that means a more complete, nuanced picture — a portrait of a human not so easy to categorize.

Click here to read the full article.

It may have been music critic Robert Christgau who once observed that the hardest works to write about are the ones that earn a B+, or are just on the cusp of A-. Mind you, that might have been said by Roger Ebert or a critic for The Hollywood Reporter or any reviewer since the beginning of time. The point is, it’s the imperceptible flaws that curb enthusiasm which are almost as impossible to define as whatever makes something extraordinary. What is the ineffable deficit between very good and great?

In a sense, Dreamin’ Wild is about that margin of error. Based on a true story recounted in a work of journalism called Fruitland by Steven Kurutz, it’s a tale of two musician brothers, Don and Joe Emerson (Casey Affleck and Walton Goggins, respectively). In the early 1980s as teenagers, the boys made an album,...

Larry McMurtry, who won an Oscar for penning Brokeback Mountain, earned a nomination for The Last Picture Show and authored books that spawned Emmy winner Lonesome Dove and Best Picture Oscar winner Terms of Endearment, died Thursday of heart failure. He was 84. The news was confirmed to media outlets by family spokeswoman and 42West CEO Amanda Lundberg.

McMurtry — whose son is the singer-songwriter James McMurtry — won the Pulitzer Prize for writing Lonesome Done, which became a popular 1989 CBS miniseries and spawned a sequel and a syndicated series, and was awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal by President Obama.

McMurtry’s 1975 book Terms of Endearment became the 1983 film from writer-director-producer James L. Brooks. Starring MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Jeff Daniels and John Lithgow, the pic was a commercial smash and led all films with 11 Oscar noms. Along with Best Pictrure, it earned Academy Awards for Shirley MacLaine, Nicholson and...

“In the beginning Man created God,” reads the back cover of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. “And in the image of Man created he him.” The album came out 7 million days later, on March 19, 1971. We’d only recently been told God was “a concept by which we measure our pain,” by John Lennon.

Aqualung is framed by two halves of a concept. The first songs on the first side tell the stories of the outcasts, those out of sight of the eyes of the man who created god. The B-side explains why organized religion blinds us. In between are songs which have nothing to do with either theme. First off, for those who don’t know, Jethro Tull is not a person, but a band. The songs on Aqualung were written by Ian Anderson, bandleader, singer-songwriter, guitarist, occasional saxophonist, and heaviest metal flutist to make Bach swing. Anderson maintained, throughout numerous interviews,...

All but one of the tracks on Bob Dylan’s new album Together Through Life are co-written with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. It’s the most help he’s ever had on a single album, but hardly the first time Dylan has written with a partner. Over the past 45 years he’s shared credit with Tom Petty, Rick Danko, Sam Shepard, Carole Bayer Sager and even Gene Simmons and Michael Bolton. Here are the stories behind five of those collaborations.

“Hurricane” (with Jacques Levy)

Dylan teamed up with New...

If there’s one song that sums up the stoic guitar genius of Peter Green, it’s “Jumping at Shadows,” recorded live in February 1970, at the Boston Tea Party. Green was on top of the world; a 23-year-old rock star leading the London band he founded, Fleetwood Mac. They were the toast of Britain, riding their Number One hit “Albatross.” But “Jumping at Shadows” is a doomy blues ballad, his voice full of wistful dread, his guitar full of delicate pain. “I’m going downhill and I blame myself,” he sings.

Makers, the Verizon Media brand revolving around women, unveiled its latest PBS title Not Done, a documentary that expands on the pubcaster’s documentary series Makers: Women Who Make America. The news came Tuesday during the sixth annual Makers Conference, now underway at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown.

Not Done will air June 30 at 8 Pm on PBS timed to the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. Sara Wolitzky directed the hourlong doc, produced by Alexandra Moss and executive produced by Makers founder Dyllan McGee.

The film surveys the landscape of the multifaceted women’s movement and includes archival and new interviews with activists, writers, celebrities, athletes, and politicians to bring these stories to life and connect the dots between the past and the present moment of transformation. Gloria Steinem, #MeToo founder Tarana Burke, Black Lives Matter Global Network co-founders Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza,...

In the new book 1973: Rock at the Crossroads, writer Andrew Grant Jackson gives a comprehensive account of the year of 1973 and its legendary music and momentous social change. He breaks down the iconic year chronologically, from the release of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy in March to The Exorcist hitting theaters in December. Read a chapter below, titled “Counterculture ’73,’ in which Jackson breaks down the pivotal counterculture moments of the summer.

The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, New York, on July 28 makes the Guinness Book of World...

Nick Tosches, the novelist and music journalist who penned acclaimed books about subjects ranging from Jerry Lee Lewis and Hall & Oates to Sonny Liston and country music, has died at the age of 69.

The New York Times confirmed Tosches died Sunday at his Manhattan home. No cause of death was announced, but a friend told the Times that Tosches had been ill.

In a Rolling Stone review of The Nick Tosches Reader – and an overview of the “Noise Boys” music critics that include Tosches, Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer – Robert Christgau called Tosches,...

Robert Christgau is one of the most influential rock critics of all time. He’s also an invaluable book critic, and now he’s releasing Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading, via Duke University Press, a collection of reviews covering everything from fiction to cultural theory to musicology. In this classic piece, which originally appeared in the Village Voice in 2000, he dives into three books by fellow rock critics: Jim DeRogatis’s Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic,...

In a scathing capsule review of the second studio album (1984's Shout at the Devil) from glam-metalers Mötley Crüe, rock critic Robert Christgau notes "one truly remarkable thing about this record: a track called "Ten Seconds to Love" in which Vince Neil actually seems to boast about how fast he can ejaculate (or as the lyric sheet puts it, "cum"). And therein, I believe, lies the secret of their commercial appeal — if you don't got it, flaunt it."

Flaunting it is all Netflix's Crüe biopic The Dirt, adapted ...

In a scathing capsule review of the second studio album (1984's Shout at the Devil) from glam-metalers Mötley Crüe, rock critic Robert Christgau notes "one truly remarkable thing about this record: a track called "Ten Seconds to Love" in which Vince Neil actually seems to boast about how fast he can ejaculate (or as the lyric sheet puts it, "cum"). And therein, I believe, lies the secret of their commercial appeal — if you don't got it, flaunt it."

Flaunting it is all Netflix's Crüe biopic The Dirt, adapted ...

The Village Voice, which was founded in 1955 and left an indelible mark on New York’s cultural and political landscape for decades, has finally faced up to its daunting business reality and opted to cease editorial operations.

The news bubbled up in reports early this afternoon by Gothamist, the Associated Press and Columbia Journalism Review. Those outlets obtained a recording of a conference call with staffers conducted this morning by Peter Barbey, who bought the weekly from Voice Media Group in 2015.

“Today is kind of a sucky day,” Barbey said on the call. “Due to the business realities, we are going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.”

About half of the remaining 20 staffers were laid off as of today, with the other half winding down operations and focusing on digitizing the paper’s extensive archives. In 2017, the Voice had stopped publishing its print edition but remained online.

In a later statement,...

Legendary musician Chuck Berry has died, police confirm. He was 90.

The St. Charles County Police Department in Missouri confirmed on Facebook that they responded to a medical emergency on Saturday afternoon where they found an unresponsive man.

“St. Charles County police responded to a medical emergency on Buckner Road at approximately 12:40 p.m. today (Saturday, March 18),” the police department said in a statement. “Inside the home, first responders observed an unresponsive man and immediately administered lifesaving techniques. Unfortunately, the 90-year-old man could not be revived and was pronounced deceased at 1:26 p.m.

“The St. Charles County Police Department...

Music industry figure Danny Fields – who knew Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground – is a wry raconteur full of spit and vinegar in this engaging documentary

Danny Fields is one of those mysterious figures in the music industry you often see in black and white band photographs grinning away with his arms around the talent, too hip-looking to be a venue manager, too square to be a dealer. Turns out, he’s an interesting character, a wry raconteur full of spit and vinegar even now in his late 70s, who has had a varied music business career, and who was canny about keeping recordings of conversations , which enrich this documentary by Brendan Toller. A hyper-smart, gay, Jewish boy from Queens who studied law at Harvard, he became a music journalist and was the guy who reported in the Us that John Lennon had said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.

This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor are joined by Keith Enright to discuss Eclipse Series 2: The Documentaries of Louis Malle.

About the films:

Over the course of a nearly forty-year career, Louis Malle forged a reputation as one of the world’s most versatile cinematic storytellers, with such widely acclaimed, and wide-ranging, masterpieces as Elevator to the Gallows, My Dinner with Andre, and Au revoir les enfants. At the same time, however, with less fanfare, Malle was creating a parallel, even more personal body of work as a documentary filmmaker. With the discerning eye of a true artist and the investigatory skills of a great journalist, Malle takes us from a street corner in Paris to...

In early 1971, Leonard Cohen was still a relatively unknown singer-songwriter. Despite releasing two critically acclaimed records – 1967's Songs of Leonard Cohen and 1969's Songs From a Room – the Canadian artist, who previously plied his trade as a novelist and poet, had yet to tour the U.S. He was then living on a farm in the small town of Big East Fork, Tennessee while preparing the release of that March's Songs of Love and Hate. "I had a house, a jeep, a carbine, a pair of cowboy boots, a girlfriend … a typewriter,...

Joel and Ethan Coen drop most of the sarcasm for their deeply felt character study. Everything's a big problem for Llewyn: a girl (Carey Mulligan), various agents, fellow performers, and a cat. I find Oscar Isaac's Llewyn to be wholly sympathetic, and that cat business is deeper than it looks. The terrific extras include a complete concert docu. Inside Llewyn Davis Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 794 2013 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 104 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 19, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Ethan Phillips, Robin Bartlett Pappi Corsicato, Max Casella, Jerry Grayson, Jeanine Seralles, Adam Driver, Stark Sands, John Goodman, F. Murray Abraham. Cinematography Bruno Delbonnel Executive Music Producer T Bone Burnett Produced by Scott Rudin, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Written and Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

If I'm not mistaken this is the first Criterion release of Coen Brothers movie.

“Before Dylan... There Was Davis”

By Raymond Benson

The first Coen Brothers feature to be given the “Criterion treatment” is, oddly, their most recent release—Inside Llewyn Davis, which received (mostly) critical praise upon its release in late 2013. Kudos were especially heaped upon the film’s relatively new star, Oscar Isaac. Sadly, while the picture recouped its investment and made a little money, it wasn’t as widely embraced by audiences as it should have been. This is probably because the Coen Brothers typically don’t make movies for the masses. The auteur siblings create art that appeals mostly to intelligent, hip audiences willing to enter a strange, sometimes disturbing, always surprising, universe that is distinctly Coen-land.

Inside Llewyn Davis is presented as a comedy, but in the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre, “comedy” can mean many things. It can be wild and wacky (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski) or it can...

I noticed that even as 99% of my Facebook friends were eulogizing the late David Bowie in reverential terms, there were a few dissenters. Aside from a non-musical issue*, the most negative thing I saw about Bowie was along the lines of "I never cared/listened/understood the attraction." It's kind of passive-aggressive, since there's not much point to alerting us all to the fact that you are apparently apathetic yet somehow still feel we all need to hear from you on this trending topic, but it's pretty low-key, so whatever.

Then Glenn Frey died, and a much larger portion of the internet decided that this was the perfect time to remind us how much they hate the Eagles, how bad the Eagles' music is, and how clueless the rest of us are for apparently being deluded into liking them.

Hey, it's okay to not like the Eagles. It's also okay...

Anyone who’s ever had their musical ambitions crushed by the ever oppressive forces of real life will find a great sense of empathy within Joel and Ethan Coen‘s great reimagination of the Greenwich Village folk scene, Inside Llewyn Davis. Essentially a dour depiction of the limitations of artistic ambition and musical performance as a viable career, as well as a remarkable portrait of the Village on the cusp being redefined by the arrival of Bob Dylan and the commercialism of the genre, the film stands as a unique companion piece to Don’t Look Back and I’m Not There that pays tribute to what came before with the rye eye of the Coens.

As music producer T Bone Burnett has said, the Coen brothers might be the luckiest filmmakers in the universe, having somehow managed to find both a fantastic actor and a fine musician encapsulated within...

The Criterion Collection will begin the new year by welcoming the Coen Brothers into the fold. Inside Llewyn Davis dove into the less glamorous side of the folk music scene, and showcased a sterling performance by Oscar Isaac. The Criterion home video version features an audio commentary by writers Robert Christgau, David Hajdu, and Sean Wilentz. In a new extra Gullermo del Toro sits down with the Coens to talk about their career. Both Lady Snowblood movies are included in The Complete Lady Snowblood; both are new 2K digital restorations. Wim Wenders' terrific The American Friend will also receive the Criterion treatment. I wrote about the movie here. January will also see the release of Giuseppe De Santis' neorealist Bitter Rice and Charles Vidor's spectacular...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

As I mentioned way back on this post from 2008, as much as I’ve tried to branch out, my tastes are pretty narrow when it comes to reading material.

I’d love to say that I’m broadly well-read when it comes to the more celebrated books of the day, but it’s just not true. If you’re looking to engage in a discussion about today’s most incisive fiction, you’re much better off speaking with my wife (who works in publishing) than one such as I. Truthfully, I’ve pretty much lost my taste for fiction almost entirely. Unless I have some vested interest (like, say, I know the author or it’s about something near and dear to me), I usually cannot muster up the interest to crack the binding.

As a result, whenever I’m perusing through the aisles of a bookstore (when I can still find one,...

Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic By Robert Christgau (Dey Street Books)

After a considerable dry spell, my reading life has significantly picked up (possibly due to a sorely unsolicited amount of "free time"). I’ve hungrily paged through some great books in the past few weeks like Nyhc: New York Hardcore 1980-1990 by Tony Rettman, A Drinking Life by Pete Hammill, Wake Me When It’s Over, the memoir of former Luna Lounge owner Rob Sacher, Diaries 86-89 by Miles Hunt (he of The Wonder Stuff) and, of course, Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Given my particular predilections, I’m obviously still a sucker for oral histories, tomes about NYC lore and good ol’ rock bios. What can I say? That’s just the type of crap I like.

So you can imagine, then, my enthusiasm upon learning about Going Into The City...

In the late 1960s, Robert Christgau helped invent rock criticism. Ever since, he's been among the country's best and most influential arts journalists. In his memoir, Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man, Christgau, a native New Yorker, traces both his own (and pop's) intellectual and emotional development and paints a loving portrait of the city he loves. It's a deeply smart, charmingly gregarious read. This excerpt finds Christgau reflecting on some pivotal moments for himself and the music he loves: the deaths of John Lennon, Bob Marley, and Lester Bangs. [By the end of the '70s] the notion of the rock and roll lifer was taking on a life of its own. For artists but also for scriveners like me and mine, it kept getting clearer that this music for kids could evolve into not just a career but a lifework. Many fools couldn’t see past...

The stakes were high for the Beastie Boys on their second album, “Paul’s Boutique.” The trio’s first set, 1986’s “Licensed To Ill,” had catapulted Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, Adam “McA” Yauch, and Michael “Mike D” Diamond into rap’s forefront with tunes like the bratty anthem, “Fight For Your Right (To Party)”showed three white New Yorkers could steal the rap spotlight. But the bigger question was if they were making novelty music for frat parties or were here to stay. “Paul’s Boutique” authoritatively proved it was the latter. When it came time for “Boutique,” which came out 25 years ago today, on July 25, 1989, the Beasties had split with producer Rick Rubin and turned to the Dust Brothers. The album came with a more serious, dedicated attitude and a quarter century after its release, it is considered the Beastie Boys’ masterpiece. So how was it received when it first came out?...

The Ramones changed my life. It seems incomprehensible that with drummer Tommy Ramone’s death on Friday (11) that all four of the original members are gone (none of them got out of their 50s other than Tommy). I was out of pocket for most of the weekend, but his passing is too significant not to observe it. I was too young—and not cool enough— to get into their music when the foursome’s self-titled debut album came out in 1976. I remember as I got older, seeing photos of them in their matching black bowl haircuts, leather jackets and sunglasses and feeling scared. I was raised on Top 40 pop and didn’t veer outside the lines very much until I got older. They looked like they would push me into a school locker and make fun of me. How could I have been so wrong? It took until I saw...

Happy birthday to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement’s most beloved, most surprising, most perfect album. Even devout Pavement fans were caught off guard by the lush weirdness of it — so devoid of feedback, so not lo-fi, so rock & roll, openly aspiring to pastoral beauty and lyricism and hippie shit like that. Suddenly these art-punk jokers turned into a real band, gushing with almost insultingly gorgeous melodies. It’s Pavement’s most popular album, yet it’s probably their least influential, since if you’re going to copy Pavement, Wowee...

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Pixies' second album, "Surfer Rosa," a seminal LP that has gone down in Rolling Stone history as one of the 500 greatest records of all time.

Every indie rock band of the past two and half decades owes a great deal to the Pixies, the Boston-bred quartet that seamlessly merged psychedelia, noise rock and alternative grunge to create one of the 1980's most memorable music projects. Formed in the collegiate environment of University of Massachusetts, the band -- comprised of Black Francis, Joey Santiago, Kim Deal and David Lovering -- predates Nirvana as a catalyst for the immeasurable rock boom of the 1990s.

Like most indie rock bands, the Pixies were not a chart topping force, but their second album, the lyrically named "Surfer Rosa," earned accolades on its own after its 1988 release. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice dubbed the record "the Amerindie find of the year,...

Noted artsy-fartsy types Tom Waits and Anton Corbijn are releasing a book together. Waits/Corbijn ’71-‘11 contains mostly photos—more than 200 of Waits taken by Corbijn over the past 40 years—as well as 50 pages of Waits’ personal writings and photography. Only 6,600 copies of the linen-bound tome will be pressed. Both director Jim Jarmusch and rock critic Robert Christgau wrote introductions for the book, which is available for pre-order now for a mere $199.99, or the cost of about 10 Waits LPs.

Sitar master Ravi Shankar—who introduced Indian music to Western pop fans at a time when the term “world music” was still just a twinkle in Robert Christgau’s eye—has died at the age of 92. Born Robindra Shankar Chowdhury, Shankar first left India when he was 10, as part of his brother Uday’s dance troupe. Ravi was a gifted enough dancer to become one of the troupe’s star soloists while still a teenager, mastering several instruments on the side. He would later relay his frustration with Europeans who were only interested in Indian music as accompaniment ...

Christopher Andersen's biography of Mick Jagger is little more than an anthology of juicy gossip

Photographer Cecil Beaton knew where Mick Jagger's power resided. "The mouth is almost too large," he wrote. "He is beautiful and ugly, feminine and masculine. A rare phenomenon." In that mouth, granted pop-art immortality by John Pasche's Rolling Stones logo, you see Jagger's voracious, infectious appetite. Although he briefly delighted the left with a spasm of '68 radicalism during which he declared, unbelievably, that "there should be no such thing as private property", he had no real affinity for the utopian side of the 60s. He embodied instead the pushy, hard-charging aspect that said that the time for waiting was over and the time for taking was here. His raw desire had a certain brutal purity, and this Pe teacher's son combined it with a muscular discipline that ensured the band's improbable longevity. As...

"Dirty Jobs" star Mike Rowe calls in and tells us that not only is he getting sued by a prison inmate named over his name -- he also got boycotted this week! Mike tells us his plan to deal with the funniest lawsuit we've seen in a while.Plus, Newt Gingrich is catching heat for saying he wants to put underprivileged preteens to work as janitors -- but is he a victim of media spin?...

Color Me Obsessed: A Film About the Replacements

Written by Gorman Bechard

Directen by Gorman Bechard

USA, 2011

Independent rock music inspires the kind of fandom that defies simple logic, transcending the bounds of what’s meant to represent taking a “healthy interest” in an obscure cultural property. There’s a reason that Michael Azerrad’s book on American indie rock fandom, Our Band Could Be Your Life, features a segment on ramshackle Minnesotan rockers The Replacements – as the diverse lineup of talking heads in Gorman Bechard’s unusual rock-doc Color Me Obsessed attests, the Paul Westerberg-fronted quartet (then trio) bore its way into the emotional lives of its fans like few others.

Over a clearly excessive 123 minutes, Obsessed tracks the band – also featuring mercurial, preternaturally talented guitarist Bob Stinson, his barely-teenaged brother Tommy on bass and “nice-guy” drummer Chris Mars, who were actually the three founding members – from their...

Musicologist and writer with radical views on education

Christopher Small, who has died aged 84, influenced successive generations of students, teachers and musicologists through his books Music, Society, Education (1977), Music of the Common Tongue (1987) and Musicking (1998). He coined the title of the latter in the belief that music was a verb, not a noun, a process of performance and not simply a product such as a score or a recording. Small considered the process of musicking to be an instrument of socialisation in all cultures and "a way in which we explore, affirm and celebrate our concepts of ideal relationships … in ways that talking or reading can never allow us to do".

The youngest of three children of a dentist and a former schoolteacher, Small was born in Palmerston North, New Zealand. His maternal grandfather had been a choral society conductor in the 1890s, but Christopher's parents were determined that he should become a doctor.