Articles by P.J. Podesta

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original Robin D. G. Kelley Free Press For his entire professional life, Thelonious Sphere Monk was almost universally thought to be weird beyond comprehension, musically (up to the late ‘50s) and personally (all of his life.) He was thought to occupy a dimension of his own, … Read more

THE PARK PLAZA CHRONICLES OF VINCENT LIVELLI Introduction by Robert Farris Thompson Park Plaza essay by Vincent Livelli Postscript by Pablo E. Yglesias Edited by Robert Farris Thompson and Pablo E. Yglesias   Introduction Historians of mambo have established the cultural importance of the Park Plaza dancehall. The late and great New York Puerto Rican … Read more

At the conclusion of a dream that included my descending in an elevator with a hooker and leaping a barrier to catch a subway train, I found myself on a park bench taking out a notebook to describe my collection of .45 rpm records to which I have not listened in thirty-five years. When I … Read more

Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is good enough to deserve a better title. I wish he’d just called it Twisted: meaning strange or perverted, but also, in vernacular usage, confused or misunderstood (as in “don’t get it twisted”). Isolating this double meaning illuminates the double consciousness at work throughout the album, which dropped … Read more

Your editor got to Drive-By Truckers’ last album Go Go Boots late but first time through I fell hard for “Everybody Needs Love.” It took me South to a forever young place. And the journey’s just started because “Everybody Needs Love” is a cover of a song by the great lost soul singer/songwriter/guitar player Eddie … Read more

A universal suburb is almost as much of a nightmare, humanly speaking, as a universal megalopolis. — Lewis Mumford, “Suburbia—And Beyond,” The City in History   I The strobes blinded the viewer as Arcade Fire performed their song “Month of May,” from the album The Suburbs, on the Grammy Awards Show in February 2011. The … Read more

What follows is not a review of the new collection of the late Ellen Willis’s rock criticism,Out of the Vinyl Deeps[1], but a sort of answer record remixed from old and new episodes in my own pop life. Hope it reads half as well as, say, Mouse and the Traps’ “Public Execution” sounded after “Like … Read more