Common People
A wonderful new book by Stephen Wade, America’s greatest living folklorist, chronicles the history of the country’s folk music.
Ronald Radosh
· 16 min read
Music
A collection of 74 posts
From Atmosphere to Empire
U2 reconsidered at fifty.
David Cohen
· 12 min read
Red Reign
A thrash-metal classic turns forty.
Noel Yaxley
· 9 min read
Strong Opinions
When critics start issuing dictates, they end up excluding broad swathes of art and culture as well as whole areas of human experience.
Stephen Akey
· 10 min read
How a Hidden Songbook Survived the Holocaust
The extraordinary story of how a fragile Holocaust songbook, hidden for decades in a Sydney cupboard, came back to the world.
Joseph Toltz, Anna Boucher
· 14 min read
Lists, Damn Lists, and Critical Correctness
Love them or hate them, lists are now firmly established—along with cats and porn—among the apex predators of the modern internet.
Dave Thompson
· 12 min read
Never Neverland
The new Michael Jackson biopic and the campaign to whitewash the King of Pop’s reputation.
Andrew Hammel
· 32 min read
Frampton Comes Alive! at Fifty
The improbable story of rock’s greatest live album.
Jacob Bielecki
· 13 min read
In the Air Tonight
How Phil Collins created the pop sound that defined the 1980s.
Jacob Bielecki
· 12 min read
Parallel Kingdom
Nick Cave’s beautiful and tragic music brings redemptive catharsis to a grief-stricken city.
Mark Mordue
· 10 min read
Arrest and Moral Pageantry
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Mick Jagger, and the theatre of degradation.
Julia Friedman
· 8 min read
“These Songs Are Timeless”
Forty Years on, Dire Straits’ bassist John Illsley talks to Quillette about the band’s 1985 masterpiece, ‘Brothers in Arms.’
Hannah Gal
· 9 min read
Folk, Feedback, and Fury
Neil Young is eighty.
David Cohen
· 16 min read
I Will Find a City
Jonathan Gould’s new Talking Heads biography recalls a once-thriving and now disintegrating independent media network that could elevate eccentrics with potential.
Matt Hanson
· 7 min read
Ballad of a Song and Dance Man
An unorthodox new book by one of America’s finest nonfiction authors tries to make sense of Bob Dylan.
Ronald Radosh
· 20 min read