Van Halen’s ‘1984’ Represents the Past, Present, and Future
The era of hard rock and metal Van Halen ushered peaked and fell when the 1980s ended, but comes back again as classic rock for today’s 13-year-olds.
The era of hard rock and metal Van Halen ushered peaked and fell when the 1980s ended, but comes back again as classic rock for today’s 13-year-olds.
The Piano is a ’90s-era postmodern stew of sensuality and death, realism and fantasy, stories within stories, feminism and psychology, and postcolonial imagery.
In the shadow of the “Happy Together” decade, Bob Batchelor’s the Doors’ biography Roadhouse Blues explores the dark and gloomy side of Jim Morrison and the band.
Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence becomes a way to acknowledge the surrealism that has always pulsated just beneath the surface of American life.
The 1980s began on 10 February 1978, with the release of Van Halen’s self-titled debut album, now celebrating its 45th anniversary.
Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise shows what a movie can do, but mainly what fiction still does better.
How were Rage Against the Machine so far ahead of their time, not just as political bellwethers but with a sound reaching past genres to create something entirely new?
Could the cynicism associated with grunge, Gen X, and early 1990s rock have instead been replaced with sincerity if Soul Asylum’s Grave Dancers Union had been the hit rather than Nirvana’s Nevermind?
In Bodies: Life and Death in Music, critic Ian Winwood chronicles the wreckage of a reckless industry and wonders if there is another way.
Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House is an EDM concert, a prestige drama, a mind palace – and a warning.
Like Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut before him, Noah Hawley hopes his novel, Anthem, can compete with reality.
Breaking form with his latest work, Crossroads, Franzen has not written a social novel. He has written an Antisocial Novel.