Greenspan's biography provides early 21st-century readers with a thick description of the social, political and cultural climate of the disparate but intimately connected contexts of Brown's life. More than a time-line, Greenspan's contextualization calls attention to the cataclysmic events taking place in the world of the renowned abolitionist and writer.
There was something about Mayberry that evoked a kind of Southern nowhere-ness. It was the not the New South of Henry Grady, not the romanticized South of a natural and benign unequal social order like Thomas Nelson page’s. How could Mayberry be that when it had, amazingly, no black people?
We’re all familiar with pain. Ranging from a stubbed toe to a severe injury, some level of pain is experienced on a near daily basis. But many of us are fortunate enough that our experiences with pain tend to be limited to relatively brief episodes that will eventually end, sooner…
The complicated relationship between girls and music, and the mobility that it both affords and denies them, is only legible through conversations with girls. As it turns out, the music of Katy Perry makes that relationship most legible.
There may be songs whose histories are uncorrupted or wholly unrecoverable. “(The) Lonesome Road” is not among them. The road that everybody, including “E.V. Body,” in this story tredges on is crowded with two-way traffic: some stretches are dusty, others are paved with Tin Pan Alley gold or earnest populist intentions, and it is constantly being dug up and laid anew.
On Twitter the entire point is that somebody is watching you. Success is measured in followers. No wonder Sly Stone never seems at home there, and never alights there too long.
If Pokey LaFarge is post-nostalgic, it is only partway. If anything, his music and personae expose the extent to which older, simpler virtues—for worse and for better—survive in St. Louis in so many ways.
Bourbon Street: A History takes a single street as its focus to reveal the multiple overlaps and interrelations of different cultures and different histories. This method has its costs, at times exchanging topical breadth for depth.
Marcus’s chosen form, media's coveted "listicle," is of the moment. But, at first glance, his subject matter is not. Who even talks about “rock ’n’ roll” anymore?
The facts of Bernstein’s story—the scope of his talents, the velocity of his ascent—still amaze. His natural gifts were embarrassingly rich: ferociously intelligent, musical, and social in equal measures. But Bernstein was also lucky—in the right place at the right time again and again and again.