Making a list was a Victorian-era parlor game, a way to fill the empty hours, a way to ward off boredom. As I’ve discussed before, there i...

Frank with his daughter Francesca It grieves me to report the sad news that my friend Frank Mazzola, who became one of the most influent...

Note: This blog is an amalgam of observations I've made previously, with a few additional remarks added. It seemed appropriate to (re)...

Actress Tilda Swinton According to the Wiktionary , the term xanthocroi was introduced by biologist  T. H. Huxley, from the ancient Gr...

Tara Murtha’s contribution to Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 series on classic albums, Ode to Billie Joe , is something of a sleight of hand...

Five years ago, in December 2009, I posted a blog, The Importance of the Name , on Hard Meat, a British trio that released two albums on ...

Guest blogger Eric Roberts writes: After a long hiatus, this rolling research project about the history  of John Lennon's white Ro...

The shift from the single to the album in the 1950s and 1960s represented a shift from music for dancing to music for listening. As a res...

George Jones was a great singer for two reasons: he had a great voice, and he knew how to dramatize an idea. But because genre distinction...

It has been four years since my last list of pop aphorisms. I thought it was high time for another. 1. The discovery of the teen idol wa...

The forthcoming Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD release of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980/81) has, predictably, prompted a fair a...