Tag Archives: Biography

Every biographer of a musical figure, indeed every writer about music, must deal with the issue of conveying the essence of one medium through the use of another: the “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” conundrum. While we seem to have no trouble feeling the abstracted meaning of …

The sordid, bifurcated life of Bob Crane comes to the big screen. I loved Hogan’s Heroes as a kid: I didn’t much care that a comedy about prisoners of war in WWll was in preposterous bad taste. The fantasy that the prisoners were actually empowered by their situation was the …

We neglected Columbus on Columbus Day (other than a discussion of Mayor Bloomberg’s decision not to march in NYC’s parade). Gary Farber points us to a rather grim assessment of Columbus in the New Yorker: Columbus was one of history’s great optimists. When he read in Marco Polo that the …

Joni Mitchell latest to dump on recording industry: The veteran singer/songwriter, on the promotional trail for a new album, says she is “ashamed” to be part of the music business and may stop recording. “I just think it’s a cesspool,” the 58-year-old folk-rock icon said in the latest issue of …

I love A Confederacy of Dunces, one of the funniest, most empathetic looks at misfits and outsiders ever written, that blessedly never dips into sentimentality. Ignatius P. Reilly is a vexing, troubling, brilliant character who represents the late author’s alter ego, ultimately triumphant. The dialogue is brilliant and dead real …

The NY Times reviews Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso’s new biography: Imagine a singer-songwriter having emerged in the 60’s who combined the poetical and political allusiveness of Bob Dylan, the melodic seductiveness of Burt Bacharach, the good looks of a French New Wave actor, the hip thinkiness of Susan Sontag in …

Mark Prendergrast’s The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance – The Evolution of Sound In the Electronic Age is an enthusiastic and exhaustive tour through a century’s worth of biography of the music’s creators and disseminators. Included are early-twentieth century fathers Mahler, Satie, Debussy, Ravel; mid-century pioneering electronic composers Varese, …

There is an evocative review of the new Carter family bio in the NY Times: Today’s popular musicians, morbidly alive to the anxiety of influence, labor to manufacture strangeness. (Except in Nashville, where they labor to manufacture normality.) But the Carters’ strangeness was just them being them. Like Dock Boggs …

Reviews of the new Dead bio and an assessment of the band's career.