newcritics

I must admit it thrills me –as a Columbia University alum AND as a dweeby, over-educated white guy–to wake up in a world where Vampire Weekend is the IT indie rock band of the moment (making the cover of Spin on Internet hype and a fan circulated CD-R before the January release of its debut […]

It’s undoubtedly an oversimplification, but to me there are two fundamental models for rock bands–the first involves a style that is tight, punchy, and carefully arranged, the second involves a more ad hoc approach, a style that wheels and sprawls played by a band coloring outside the lines, piling lick upon lick, squealing uncomfortably to […]

I always found it odd that of all pop music, it’s Sheryl Crow’s that is most likely to send my 16-year-old into paroxysms of abhorrence.
On it’s face Crow’s music is unexceptionable: it’s unpretentious and catchy; well written, well played, and well sung (even my daughter would admit). Perhaps for some, Crow’s Sara Lee quality is […]

I’m a channel surfer, especially when I’m driving in my car. It’s a fundamental, deeply ingrained behavior and the primary way in which I still stay in touch with pop music. Call me old school.
Over the past year, the voice that has stopped my wandering finger most often belongs to Alecia Beth Moore of Doyleston, […]

2007 was a dark year for people who once made a living selling recorded music.
A couple of data points to put it in perspective:
The average weekly sales of #1 albums this year was 284,000–a 45% decline from the average weekly sales of #1 albums in 2000
While digital sales grew year over year–46% growth for digital […]

It’s a world turned upside down where Roger Clemens is likely never to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame,  but Leonard Cohen has been elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The two Halls, of course, reflect very different cultural streams in American life, particularly when it come to the electorates. The sports […]

I hate the Grammy Awards. Actually, my loathing for industry awards ceremonies more or less extends to the entertainment industry’s whole nauseating annual orgy of self-congratulation and narcissism from the Oscars to the Emmys to the Tonys to the Obies.
But among industry awards ceremonies, the Grammys remain the worst–the least likely to reward the most […]

Todd Haynes wheeling, kaleidoscopic Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, is so dazzlingly fresh and original that it makes me wonder what went wrong with movies over the past thirty years.
How did cinema turn from an enterprise entered into by the bravest creative minds–people like Welles, Fellini, Buñuel, Goddard or even Warhol, people willing to […]

What set New York’s Funniest Stand-Up contest winner Wil Sylvince apart from the rest of the field during Monday night’s finals at Caroline’s was the Haitian material.
The material was funny–particularly the bit about Haitians making lousy pimps because of their elfish, pipping speech and squeaky falsetto voices.
But what made the material fly was the way […]

This week, newcritics kicks off its first ever blogathon, devoted to the subject of all things funny, timed to coincide with the New York Comedy Festival (and its ancillary programming at The Paley Center for Media). While newcritics’ writ is large, the focus of the comedy fest is narrower: standup comedy, and so it’s here […]

New York City in the early 1970s was a grim and pitiless place–filthy on its surface, venal and corrupt at its core. Riven by poverty and racial strife, it was a town that pushed its inhabitants to the wall–either you were a hustler or a mark, a hipster in the know or a rube so […]

This is the time of year when I get caught up on records I missed and my old new record of the moment is Bright Eyes‘ Cassadaga, released this past spring.
This is an enchanted record. A confessional, grandiose, oratorical, piece of Americana that mixes the pretentious and the personal in the grand, Whitmanesque tradition. It’s […]

nation’s capital ascends over
trees colored for my dream
along yr highway life
Kerouac is dead at 47
on radio
and McCartney alive
(we lost)
-Jim Carroll, from Highway Report
It’s amazing that 50 years after it’s publication, On the Road remains a book that can create controversy. Its reception to this day is like the concert hall reception that 70 year old […]

If there’s a soundtrack to the dying summer for me so far it’s Bruce Springsteen’s great new song, Girls In Their Summer Clothes– one of the four or so remarkable, Brian Wilson-esque songs from the Boss’s forthcoming album, Magic.
The song is truely wistful, a warm-day-in-September rumination on age and youth slipping by. It opens in […]

New jazz has receded so far from the commercial center of pop music that these days, more often than not, the best new albums of any given year are archival issues of previously unknown performances by dead giants.
It’s been an enormous boon for jazz fans, who in recent times have gotten their hands on historically […]

When Max Roach was on the bandstand, it always seemed like he was the smartest guy in the room.
Roach, who died Thursday at 83, carried his intelligence as dignity, not conceit.  It was displayed in a CV that everyone watching him knew, a CV characterized by restless innovation and, yes, a degree in composition from the […]

Ryan Adams is perilously close to becoming the Lindsay Lohan of rock: a precocious talent, a prolific (but spotty) resume, a public burnout.
It doesn’t help that Adams, and once and future manager John Silva, are hyping Easy Tiger–Ryan’s nineth and newest album–as the North Carolina native’s “clean and sober” record complete with the artist reminiscing […]

In America we don’t really produce great rock and roll bands. Great rock bands are more of an English thing.
The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, The Clash, the Sex Pistols, The Smiths, U2 (–ok, so U2 is Irish, Americans don’t know the difference anyway). In fact, next to men dressing in […]

Brad Paisley is the most talented pop music star since Prince.
As a guitar player he’s as good or better than, say, Albert Collins, Richard Thompson, Danny Gatton, or any guitarists’ guitarist you can think of. Although he writes most of his songs in collaboration, he’s a great a songwriting collaborator, like Elton John, and as […]

I’m an audiophile…but as with everything else I do, my audiophilia is of the hands-on, DIY-type.
Other than my phono cartridge, every piece of gear in my home audio rig is modified. I’m particularly fond of budget Chinese gear as a platform for mods–China is like the US in the 1950s, cranking out, among the sweatshop […]

You’ll have to excuse Hank Jones if his fingers aren’t as nimble as they once were. At 88 years of age, performing three months after quadruple bypass surgery, his stiffness is only ocassionally audible, like when he reaches for an Earl Hines-style, ragtime, triplet bounce up the keyboard during his first solo on Kids: Live […]

There’s a moment midway through Down in Mississippi - the first song on We’ll Never Turn Back - when Mavis Staples begins to testify. Her testimony concerns an incident in her childhood, when she unintentionally led the desegregation of a laundromat in Forrest, MS.

She tells the tale in a preacher’s cadence, the way she must […]

For a brief moment, as the Carter years slipped somnambulantly into the Reagan years, it looked like Warren Zevon was going to be a real rock star.
It was the heyday of laid back LA rock, when the Eagles were king and Linda Ronstadt was queen. And Warren Zevon was Madcap Prince Hal–a boozing good time […]

The Big Chill generation has high expectations for its rock stars. To satisfy, the greatest of them must at least aspire to the mantel of “spokesmen for a generation” or at least to the kind of social relevance that is the raison d’etre of John Mellencamp’s new album, Freedom’s Road.
The idea that every Elvis […]

I belong to that white, suburban, middle class, middle-aged cohort that finds Norah Jones irresistible. We’re the kind of folks who still buy CDs instead of trading ripped files, so it’s unsurprising that Jones’ third CD, Not Too Late, debuted this week at the top of the Billboard charts.
There are a few reasons why Jones […]

Bob Dylan is a master of many things, perhaps chief among them is the craft of cultural appropriation. It’s a trickster’s craft - an art best practiced by a thief and a changeling, someone who can walk out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa on his student’s easel with no one raising an eyebrow […]

The domestic sitcom may be the signature American narrative form of the second half of the 20th century. Certainly it is the most dileberately reflexive - casting back to its audience an image of itself sometimes idealized, sometimes realistic.
The domestic sitcom functions as a catalog American life in the postwar years -most obviously in […]

Among the people in the world that I truly idolize are David Simon and Edward Burns. Simon had a 22 year career covering the police beat for the Baltimore Sun before writing a book length piece of journalism Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets that inspired the NBC cop show, Homicide.
Burns spent 20 […]

I’ve interviewed governors and mayors, shaken the hands of a couple of vice presidents, dined with famous athletes, and hung out backstage with rock stars. But the greatest thrill of my professional life was the chance to interview James Brown.
It was a phone interview–I was in New York and Mr. Brown (the only name I […]