Adam and the Ants ‘Ant Music’ from Subculture to Image Culture
Adam of Adam and the Ant’s original costume is in the Victoria and Albert Museum but you can get Ant-style highwayman and pirate costumes online if you want.
music history
When the Satire Works and When it Doesn’t in Geto Boys Bio ‘Why Bushwick Bill Matters’
For a Geto Boys biography so concerned with Bushwick Bill’s status as a short person, Hughes’ book sure skirts the issue of embodiment.
Punk Rap: The Early Years
When the rebel subcultures punk and rap crossed paths in ’70s NYC, a hybrid was born that endures and reconfigures to this day.
Scholar Peter Stanfield Brings ‘Hate’ to the Who’s Pop Art Period
Peter Stanfield’s ‘A Band With Built-In Hate’ highlights redundancy, aggression, obsolescence, and ambiguity in Townshend’s lyrical stance and the Who’s performing methods.
Folk Punk: Three Chords and the Truth
When coupled with punk in the late 1970s to create folk punk, folk music’s most enduring and endearing traits—DIY, inclusivity, and proud amateurism—shined bright.
Ballad of Big Hair: Los Angeles’ Glam Metal Scene Rises from the Ash Heap
The authors of a new and expansive oral history talk with us about Los Angeles’ 1980s glam metal scene and their book, Nöthin’ But a Good Time.
Aretha Franklin: Preacher’s Daughter
Aretha Franklin, born a musical prodigy, was nurtured by her father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, and his numerous houseguests of gospel and R&B renown.
Is Women’s Art Rock Album ‘Public Strain’ a Lost Classic?
On ‘Public Strain’ (2010), art rock band Women fused sonic experimentation and rhythmic complexity with an intuitive ear for melody.
Cowpunk: A Brief Y’alternative History
Cowpunk is a reaction against conventional country music, yet embodies some of its distant and deepest traits. Likewise, it's also a reaction against punk, yet manifests as one of its purest expressions.
What You Want, Baby, Aretha’s Got It
From January 1967 to January 1972, Aretha Franklin, one of 20th-century pop music's towering geniuses, stood the pop world on its head with a run, inconceivable today, of 11 albums. Tony Scherman's biography in progress about the Queen of Soul covers those years.
Sundance 2021: The Past Sings in Questlove’s ‘Summer of Soul’
Questlove's Harlem Cultural Festival documentary, Summer of Soul, is a propulsive reminder of the ways art and society speak to each other.