Art. Word. Thought.
Reviewed by Dan Chiasson
The Philosophy of Modern Song
by Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster, 352pp., $28.93
NYR
Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the accompanying playlists, which its readers have assembled on music-streaming platforms. Professor Dylan lectures a little, then you press play. [Read more…]
The War on Drugs (feat. Lucius)
from the newly released I Don’t Live Here Anymore
by Greil Marcus
Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson
by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow.
Chicago Review, 326 pp., $20.05
Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson
by Annye C. Anderson, with Preston Lauterbach,
and with a foreword by Elijah Wald.
Hachette, 203 pp., $24.99
Love in Vain: Robert Johnson, 1911–1938
by Mezzo and J.M. Dupont
translated from the French by Ivanka Hahnenberger.
London: Faber and Faber, 56 pp., $24.05
NYRB
There’s an old blues metaphor. You know, Robert Johnson found his sound at the crossroad when he made a deal with the devil. It seems to me that the country is at a crossroad, whether we are going to continue to invest and double down on the ugliness of our racist commitments, or [we’ll] finally leave this behind. —Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
The blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1911, grew up in Memphis, and was fatally poisoned by a jealous husband during a performance at a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938. He recorded twenty-nine of his own songs for the Vocalion label in San Antonio in 1936 and in Dallas in 1937. In 1938, with the blues musician Johnny Shines, he traversed most of the eastern part of the country, playing from St. Louis to Chicago to Detroit to Harlem. Later that year the producer John Hammond, who had celebrated his recordings in New Masses, knew Johnson had to perform at his historic “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall; learning of his death, Hammond played two of his songs on a phonograph on the stage. [Read more…]
at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through 15 March)
Reviewed by Seren Sensei
Folk art and folk artists tend to be an underserved discipline in the contemporary American art world. We gravitate towards fine artists with prestigious arts degrees over the more commonplace culture of folk art, and when we do discuss the importance of art born out of folk tradition, as in most artistic disciplines, we tend to highlight white artists. From the music of Bob Dylan to the exultation of Grandma Moses, when we talk about folk art as something born out of Americana or something inherently American, we very rarely talk about Black artists. Yet folk art is historically important as an archive of culture encapsulated within creative expression, and creation by Black American artists is nestled at the center of Americana. [Read more…]
At 77, the youthful fire inside David Crosby refuses to flicker out. The music legend makes this more than evident in the new, reflective documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name. A chronicle of his highs and lows, Crosby impressively allows this to be a work of complete, sometimes stinging honesty. Directed by A.J. Eaton with renowned director and journalist Cameron Crowe producing, Remember My Name leaves few stones unturned in Crosby’s life. In a sense he is a survivor from that last generation of creative minds who were heirs to the Romantic tradition. Born in the shadow of World War II, finding a voice in the tumultuous 60s, there’s more to a personality like Crosby than the mere tag of “old hippie.” From his drug abuse to writing iconic music and touring as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young before the group implodes amid intense squabbles, it’s all laid bare in this film. And that’s exactly how he wanted it. [Read more…]
on Firehouse 12 Records
Reviewed by John Payne
This monumental four-CD box set photographs the one-time meeting of an avant all-star and super-like-minded foursome: The infamously abstruse saxophonist and conceptualist Anthony Braxton partnered with Nels Cline (guitar), Greg Saunier (drums) and Taylor Ho Bynum (brass). It is music that, because of the heavily theoretical predilections of its “bandleader,” might suggest a sound that reeks of a dry formality. It doesn’t. It does present a number of issues and questions. [Read more…]
Will we ever see the likes of Bob Dylan again? It is a question easily inspired by Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a sprawling, indeed thundering chronicle, now streaming on Netflix, of one of the American bard’s most legendary travels across the United States. What made this particular venture unique was the transitional phase the country was enduring, emerging from the tumult of the 1960s, its self-trust scarred, possibly beyond repair. Fittingly, this tale is told by Martin Scorsese, not only a great filmmaker but an artist obsessed with the past. [Read more…]
Nocturne Variations
by John Biscello
Unsolicited Press, 324 pp., $18.00
Nocturne Variations is a twenty-first century presentation of avant-garde literature.
Super. But what is avant-garde? Avant-garde is a French term that means advance guard — people and ideas that are ahead of their time. It’s a concept that refers to artists, composers, and writers whose works oppose mainstream values. As a noun, avant-garde is defined as new and unusual or experimental ideas in the arts. Often connected to political activism (think of Theater of the Absurd, Bob Dylan, and John and Yoko), there exists a misconception that avant-garde must always be politically driven. [Read more…]
at Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC (through November 3)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
The Village Voice is, sadly, now a hallowed memory of the past, but many of its iconic images live vividly on through the work of Fred W. McDarrah, the publication’s first picture editor and its sole staff photographer for decades.
McDarrah, who died in 2007, aimed a powerful lens at some of the most creative and turbulent times in New York City’s history. Eighty of his vintage black and white photographs are on display at the Steven Kasher gallery, in a show that coincides with the publication of the comprehensive Abrams book, Fred W. McDarrah: New York Scenes. [Read more…]
A New Biography By Anthony DeCurtis
Reviewed David Yaffe
An extract from “Lou’s Wild Side,” in the November 23 issue of The New York Review of Books
“Just a perfect day/You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else/Someone good.” These lines—sung indifferently over swelling, glam rock strings—are from “Perfect Day,” an achingly gorgeous and brutally honest song by Lou Reed, who died of liver disease four years ago at the age of seventy-one. Some people thought the song was about addiction—how a junkie escaping from reality also feeds on the escape of romance. But the song could also be about how pleasurable, yet impossible, it is to escape from your true self, and about how easy it is to deceive yourself when you’ve disappointed your own expectations. [Read more…]
A New Biography by David Yaffe
Reviewed by Dan Chiasson
An extract from “Joni Mitchell’s Openhearted Heroism,” in the October 9 issue of The New Yorker.
In 1969, Cary Raditz, a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina, quit his job in advertising and headed to Europe to bum around with his girlfriend. They ended up in Matala, on the island of Crete, where they found a bunch of hippies living in a network of caves. Raditz soon decamped for Afghanistan in a VW bus; when he returned, his girlfriend had bailed, but there was word that a new girl was headed to Matala. Raditz didn’t know much about Joni Mitchell, but “there was buzz” among the hippies, and, soon enough, he found himself watching the sunset with one of the most extraordinary people alive. Raditz and Mitchell shared a cave for a couple of months, travelled around Greece together, and parted ways. That’s where you and I come in, because Mitchell wrote two songs, among her greatest works, about her “redneck on a Grecian isle”: “California” and “Carey.” I’ve been singing along to those songs, or trying to, since I was fifteen. I learned from them what you learn from all of Mitchell’s music, that love is a form of reciprocity, at times even a barter economy: “He gave me back my smile / but he kept my camera to sell.” Mitchell’s songs were the final, clinching trade.
Carey, from Blue
There is a strange sense in modern cinema that to be avant-garde means to be vague, whereas pop entertainment wears its idealisms or opinions on its sleeve. A look at this year’s offerings offers a startling set of comparisons to make this point. Early in the year the surprise box office hit Get Out offered a vicious B-movie critique of race relations in contemporary America, while the arthouse darling It Comes at Night was a somewhat sluggish bore about people in the woods, trapped in some vague post-apocalyptic future without much of a point (or coherent plot). Even Ridley Scott’s latest rehash of the Alien franchise, Alien: Covenant, had more to say about the rise of Fascism in the modern world than anything else released in the season. [Read more…]