About three weeks ago, I wrote a short blog entry on the famous cynic Diogenes, the great anti-Socratic. Diogenes was greatly admired by Al...

In Chapter 2 (“The Rise of Individualism and the Jazz Solo”) of James Lincoln Collier’s book, Jazz: The American Theme Song (1993), Collier...

Friedrich Kittler ( Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , 1999) argues that from around 1880 on, composers of music have been “allied with engineer...

The long-playing (“LP”) microgroove record, what is commonly referred to as the vinyl LP, which in its final form held about 20 minutes of m...

Historian David Morton indicates in Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (2000) that the first signific...

There’s an old saw that avers suffering transforms the common man into a philosopher, and this may express a certain truth. In one of her po...

According to John Tobler’s This Day In Rock (Carroll & Graf, 1993), Led Zeppelin’s first album (cover pictured) was released 41 years a...

The soundtrack to the film Pretty Woman (1990) contains Christopher Otcasek’s cover version of Johnny O’Keefe’s 1958 hit, “The Wild One” in...

French filmmaker Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) has died, at age 89, and has been widely written about and eulogized, even by commentators who obvi...

Songs with nonsense syllables serve to remind us that American music since the jazz era always has been more a matter of sound than sense—sc...

Were he alive today, this would have been the human Elvis Presley’s 75th birthday. The story is quite familiar: he was born in 1935 to paren...

According to legend, at the point when Aristotle and his students had refined their definition of “man” to a creature having the qualities o...