Ben Ratliff

Ben Ratliff is a music critic and the author of Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (2016) and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (2007). He is a faculty member at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

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 Song of John Berger

John Berger's writing breathes with many mouths: the books fuse letters, poems, polemics, anecdotes, and description.

January 12, 2017

The Beach Boys Enigma

A lot of the allure of the Beach Boys may be about not knowing: about us not knowing them, which is pretty common in the relationship between pop stars and their audiences, but also about them—in some way, if only a performed way—not knowing themselves.

October 26, 2016

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