Arts

Music

Rebel Without a Cause

The Met’s new production of Carmen strips away most of the opera’s Spanish flavor, transferring it to an American world of popcorn and cotton candy.

February 22, 2024 issue

J. Hoberman

Outsider’s Outsider

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

March 21, 2024 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Alone in Paradise

George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s opera Picture a day like this illuminates not just the loss of a child but also music’s power to create imagined spaces so alluring they become an escape from reality.

March 7, 2024 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Furious Stasis

Verdi’s sprawling opera La Forza del Destino draws its power from asymmetry, arbitrary juxtapositions, and extreme situations.

April 18, 2024 issue

Daphne Merkin

The Way She Was

“I never thought I was great,” Barbra Streisand writes in her capacious memoir, but the truth seems to be that for a large part of her life she has flirted with the possibility that she was.

April 4, 2024 issue

Just Enough Blues

George Michael’s career was driven by two imperatives: to be the biggest pop star in the world and to be taken seriously as an artist.

February 17, 2024

Nate Wooley

‘Sound Is in My Hands’

The electronic musicians Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood spent their shared life pushing listeners into states of greater attentiveness.

January 25, 2024

Ben Ratliff

Not Not Jazz

When Miles Davis went electric in the late 1960s, he overhauled his thinking about songs, genres, and what it meant to lead a band.

January 13, 2024

The Music of Woodstock

Greil Marcus

The Brotherhood of Rock

“The Band had made, Robertson says, a brotherhood, and in the way that in the songs each man’s contribution shaded and jumped into every other’s, they acted out an ideal of democracy and equality.”

March 23, 2017 issue

Stephen Stills performing on the Dutch television program Toppop, 1972

Lorrie Moore

Ain’t It Always Stephen Stills

For a particular generation, the songs of Stephen Stills were marinated into our minds, our spines, our bones.

August 17, 2017 issue

Adam Shatz

The Beautiful Sounds of Jimi Hendrix

“Hendrix used a range of technological innovations (feedback, sustain, effects pedals) to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.”

January 9, 2014 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Rock of Ages

“Music was scarcely the point by now: this was literature, theater, religion, noise opera, political action, erotic paradise.”

December 16, 1999 issue

The Latest

Walker Mimms

Ted Lives!

The poet and visual artist Ted Joans found a kind of mystical power in jazz and surrealism alike.

October 2, 2024

Peter E. Gordon

Music and Memory

After the Holocaust, classical composers explored music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.

October 17, 2024 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

Mode for Joe

The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was at once a vessel of tradition and a Romantic individualist, a consummate professional in an art form that lionized rebels.

September 6, 2024

Nicole Sealey

Color Me Country

Cowboy Carter is both a country album and a Beyoncé album—the genres aren’t mutually exclusive, nor should they be.

August 7, 2024

Philip Clark

Take Eight

The saxophonist Jon De Lucia brings Dave Brubeck’s overlooked octet back to life.

August 6, 2024

Sam Huber

Circles ’Neath Your Eyes

The men and women in Lucinda Williams’s songs struggle to turn their injuries into something they can live with.

July 11, 2024

David Toop

All That Floats and Drifts

André 3000’s flute album mines an overlooked tradition of Black ambient and exotica music.

June 12, 2024

Joanna Biggs

‘Give Me Joy’

Madonna’s genius is not just for controversy, or for pressing on the fissures in femininity, or for her bold support of once-unpopular causes. It is for doing it all with no apology.

May 23, 2024 issue