A Website of the Radical Imagination
“New Day” – the song at the heart of Jay-Z’s and Kanye West’s collaborative CD Watch the Throne – is about the prospective joy (and pain) of fathering a…Brother. Samples of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” – “Birds in the sky know how I feel / Fish in the sea know how I feel” – prompt … Read more
“I won’t change my mind…Keep your hand on my thigh tonight!” That’s a line from the chorus of the echt Springsteen track of the past decade. But it’s not by Bruce. The song is Kathleen Edwards’ “Oil Man’s War” – a tale of Bobby (“who wished he was from the past/He said those cars they … Read more
Robert Duncan, one of the key figures of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s in which the Beat Generation surfaced, once said that he didn’t believe there was any such thing as a poet. What happened, Duncan said, was that every so often this or that man or woman became, in the process … Read more
The Boss is Back! The album was on the Prestige label, the first Gene Ammons made after being released in 1969 from Stateville Penitentiary following a seven-year term for heroin possession. With Junior Mance on piano and Buster Williams on bass. Bernard Purdie on drums, Candido on conga, it’s a hell of a record. Ammons’s … Read more
These days when the peoplescape of the music is being changed before our ears, it seems to be rarer than ever we can get to some deeply gratifying Vonz (40’s Bop-really hip stuff). But recently, Amina & I have got to and under some real vonz. That is, we have got to some extra thrilling … Read more
“does any1 know a psychiatrist in Dublin or wicklow who could urgently see my [sic] today please?… Im really un-well…and in danger….I desperately need to get back on meds today” —Tweets by Sinead O’Connor 1) Writer Touré is more an agent of entropy than a journalist or critic, so it’s fitting that the best, really … Read more
I owe Bobby Bland a real debt of gratitude. Not just for the time he always graciously gave me (Bobby was the definition of “gracious”), particularly when I was working on the profile of him that appeared in Lost Highway. Not just for the music he gave the world, which, like Sam Cooke’s, was an … Read more