Music

On June 25, 2004, David Bowie walked offstage at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany, after a set that had been cut short when he complained of shoulder pain. He was 57 years old and in the middle of a world tour — the Reality Tour, one of the most successful of his career, playing … Read more

By 1996, Johnny Cash had been famous for forty years and was, by the music industry’s cold actuarial assessment, finished. His record label had dropped him. Radio would not play him. The country music establishment that he had helped to build had moved on to younger, smoother, more commercially manageable artists. He was 64 years … Read more

For twenty years, the world accepted a comfortable lie about The Beatles. The lie went like this: Lennon and McCartney were the geniuses, Harrison was the quiet one, Starr was the lucky one, and the hierarchy was fixed and permanent and not worth questioning. It was a lie maintained partly by the sheer commercial dominance … Read more

Frank Sinatra performed in public for the first time at age eight, singing along to records in his parents’ saloon in Hoboken, New Jersey, to the amusement of the adults around him. He performed, in some capacity, nearly every year for the next seventy years. He sold out Madison Square Garden. He performed for presidents. … Read more

Jimi Hendrix is the answer most serious musicians give when asked who the greatest guitarist in history was. This is not casual agreement — it is the considered verdict of people who understand what the guitar is capable of and have spent their careers pushing against its limits. Eric Clapton was reportedly so devastated after … Read more

David Bowie did not follow culture. He arrived somewhere, stayed long enough to be identified with it, and left before it became fashionable — moving on to the next thing, the next identity, the next musical territory that nobody else had mapped yet. This is not a myth constructed in retrospect. It is documented in … Read more

By the mid-1980s, the Rolling Stones were not a functioning band. They were a brand — an enormously successful brand — held together by contractual obligation, financial self-interest, and the stubborn refusal of both primary parties to be the one who ended it. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had reached a point in their relationship … Read more

For most of the Beatles’ career, George Harrison existed in a specific and uncomfortable position. He was a member of the greatest band in the world, and he was treated by that band’s two primary creative forces as a junior partner — talented, valued for his guitar playing, occasionally humored as a songwriter, but not … Read more

Everyone gave Lennon the credit for depth. And Lennon deserved it — nobody is arguing otherwise. But somewhere in the decades of Lennon being canonized as the intellectual, the provocateur, the serious one, Paul McCartney got quietly filed under “melodist” — the tuneful one, the commercial one, the Beatle who wrote love songs and kept … Read more

The people who decide what talent looks like are usually the least reliable judges of what talent is. They recognize the familiar and mistake it for the good. They hear something genuinely new — something that doesn’t fit the template, that breaks the expected rules, that sounds wrong in a way that has not yet … Read more