The last time “Cold Little Heart” singer Michael Kiwanuka visited Seattle, I mistook the 7 o’clock start printed on my concert ticket for the doors-open time, only to arrive as he performed the “Big Little Lies” theme . . . and bid the audience goodnight. I sheepishly assured my husband that was OK; we’d catch his next tour.
Cut to a September 2026 interview with The Guardian, a month before his fifth album, “Fudge,” was due to come out: Kiwanuka revealed he’d suffered a hemorrhagic stroke in July 2025. He’s rehabilitating but still struggles to speak, in addition to other impairments he’d rather not make public. Suffice it to say, no one knows when Kiwanuka will tour again. His full, peaceful recovery comes first, of course. This news also reminded me to never take anything or anyone we cherish for granted.
Until we can applaud the performer’s return to the stage, attending a vinyl bar’s listening session for “Fudge” is about as close to that elating experience as a person can get for now. That’s what I did last week, driving across town to hear it a week before its release.
No recording can ever replace the feeling of hearing a singular talent like Kiwanuka live, although his music’s airy psychedelia stirs the soul whether it plays through headphones, tinny car speakers, or the most modest of home sound systems. But top-of-the-line audio equipment allows his work to truly soar.
Kiwanuka is a sonic artificer of the highest level, capturing lofty hope and languid melancholia in liquid waves that crash and surge around his voice. That comes through magnificently on “Fudge,” which was modestly engineered compared to 2024’s “Small Changes.” That was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Inflo and Danger Mouse, whereas this came together in a simple Southampton studio in the U.K. As such, a close-to-home comfort infuses “Fudge” with real tenderness without sacrificing any of Kiwanuka’s signature sonic luxuriance.
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Kiwanuka’s latest is a sun-soaked daydream of an album awash in afternoon light. It’s easy to get lost in its layers of strings, to chase a cello’s lusty glide past innocent piano notes. But it also has a purposeful solidity, announced by a snippet of an interview with jazz legend Chick Corea that leads into the nostalgic “Summer Clothes.”
“The simplest thing to forget is that what music is about, and any kind of art form is about, is creating the kind of things that you think are beautiful,” says Corea. With “Fudge,” Kiwanuka has certainly done that.
The pseudoscientific self-help book by Rhonda Byrne rode a 2006 Oprah Winfrey endorsement to the tune of tens of millions of copies sold. It pushes the “law of attraction,” the idea that the universe is built on positive and negative energies, and that like sticks with like. In short, if you think regularly about the things you want and maintain a positive attitude, those things are more likely to come your way.
That’s the gist, anyway. Honestly, I never read it. But its ubiquity in the aughts, its reputation for being largely composed of quotations and the relative unoriginality of the premise — which adds a bit of woo-woo to the idea that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar — makes it feel like I have. Even if I was completely unaware of the New Thought movement, or if I’d never heard the name Norman Vincent Peale, I’d have some idea of what Byrne was on about. I’ve been a Jay-Z fan for most of my life.
The rapper has been manifesting his second act as a power player for nearly his entire career. Outside of some early, Das Efx-indebted features in the early ‘90s, Shawn Carter has been manifesting moguldom across his discography.
It’s right there on the cover of his 1996 debut “Reasonable Doubt.” The black-and-white photo and early computer-assisted graphic design look chintzy now, especially when held up to the art-directed and museum-curated sheen of his later work. But there’s no mistaking what Jay-Z is going for with his fedora, scarf and cigar. This kid from Brooklyn’s Marcy Projects is no street-level striver. He’s a boss.
It carries into track one, where a middleman is warning some lackey not to cross Carter. The first thing anyone hears about Jay-Z is in reverential tones, fit for a short-tempered kingpin. You get the sense that you might get to meet him someday, if you play your cards right. But for now, he’s out of your reach and your tax bracket. What follows is nearly an hour of opulent sh*t talk, laid over lush soul and jazz samples handpicked by producers with names like DJ Premier. It sounds slick and established. It sounds expensive. Most importantly, it sounds unhurried and in control. This was oligarch rap from the latest king of New York.
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In 1996, Jay-Z was far from the billionaire multihyphenate we know today. He was co-owner of Roc-A-Fella Records, but at that time the label was mostly a means to release his debut after being turned away by several majors. He kept putting out the idea that he was already a magnate to anyone with a Walkman, while still scrabbling behind the scenes.
Case in point: Two platinum records weren’t enough to convince the copyright holders of the musical “Annie” to clear a sample for Jay-Z’s third album. The multi-billionaire of 2026 might have flashed a wad of cash. ‘90s Jay Z (sans hyphen in several ways) wrote a letter.
It’s just the latest example of Jay-Z putting what he wants out into the universe and getting it back.
“I made up this story about how when I was a seventh grader in Bed-Stuy, our teacher held an essay contest, and the three best papers won the writer a trip to the city to see ‘Annie,’” he told Grantland in 2014. “I wrote that from the moment the curtain came up I felt like I understood honey’s story. Of course, I’d never been to see ‘Annie’ on Broadway. But I had seen the movie on TV.”
That album went platinum six times over, but even in the heady pre-Napster era, that wasn’t private yacht money. You wouldn’t know that if you saw the “Big Pimpin’” video, though. Jay-Z kept up the facade of globe-trotting mogul through several more albums, and that fantasy inched closer to reality with each release. He launched a clothing brand. He opened a nightclub. He was still talent, though, calling for the suits to “pay us like you owe us” on his hit “Izzo.” More than a decade later, Jay-Z would make good on the idea that “money talks so talk more bucks” when he launched a streaming service that paid higher royalty rates than its competitors.
On mic, he started referring to himself as the “best rapper alive.” Knowing that hall-of-famers go out with a bit of ceremony and their jersey in the rafters, he announced a short-lived retirement with “The Black Album.” Briefly free from a grueling release schedule, he bought a stake in the NBA’s Nets and pushed them to move to Brooklyn. He became the CEO of Def Jam Records. His mogul dreams made real, Jay returned to rapping with the flair and distant remove of a bored emperor. He was a moneymaker first and foremost, not a businessman but a business, man. He’d spoken it into existence 16 bars at a time.
In that context, it’s not at all surprising that Jay-Z may have hand-selected himself to headline next year’s Super Bowl halftime show. Puck broke the news that Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment conglomerate, had tagged the rapper for the championship game. Roc has produced the halftime show for the NFL since 2019, and Jay-Z is currently touring to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his debut album. It would be a natural fit, even without the hitmaker’s behind-the-scenes ties. He’s already a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer. He just wrapped up the release of an eight-part docuseries with producer/guru Rick Rubin on HBO Max.
Pressed on the leaks, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell took on the tone of intelligence services, refusing to confirm or deny the news.
“I am not aware of a leak,” Goodell said in a news conference earlier this week. “I’ve been in the committee meetings. So, I’m not sure it’s a leak. We haven’t announced anything. Until we do, we won’t make any comment on that.”
If it turns out to be true, it’s just the latest example of Jay-Z putting what he wants out into the universe and getting it back. He turned down an offer to perform at the halftime show over a decade ago, telling The New York Times that he did not appreciate the way the league negotiated. Per Jay-Z, the NFL’s offer hung on bringing along Kanye West and Rihanna, who were two-thirds of his 2009 hit “Run This Town.”
“Of course I would have,” Jay-Z said in 2020, “but I said, ‘No, you get me.’ That is not how you go about it, telling someone that they’re going to do the halftime show contingent on who they bring. I said forget it. It was a principle thing.”
Jay-Z got the last laugh. After the 2019 halftime show landed with a thud, he was brought on to produce the event and has helmed it since. Rhonda Byrne told readers that “your thoughts become things.” Jay-Z told us that he would always pick himself. Who does he know fresher than Hov? Riddle him that.
Early on a Tuesday evening, I arrived at a local dive bar for a show by Dream Syndicate. There’s no opening act (or rather, as Steve Wynn will later joke, the Dream Syndicate are opening for the Dream Syndicate) and a blissfully early 7 p.m. start time. I greeted the door woman, bought a bottle of water, grabbed a bar stool against the far wall, and opened the book in progress on my phone until the show started.
At the end of September, I walked into the Majestic Theatre to see the Michael Shannon/Jason Narducy R.E.M. tribute. It’s a GA venue that holds a little over 1,000. When the doors opened, I headed for the barrier for no other reason than the volume at that proximity helps drown out what jamband fans refer to as “chompers” — people who view concerts as suitable background for their conversations. Delightfully, I found myself standing with four other women. We killed time before the show talking about what other concerts we’d been to recently, and took turns watching each other’s spot when someone needed a bathroom run. (There was no line at the women’s room for that show, a big reason I wanted to be close so I didn’t run the risk of standing near a dude needing to explain R.E.M. to me, like the guy at the bar where I was eating dinner before the show.)
A few weeks earlier, I pulled up at Trinosophes, a coffee shop / artistic consortium that regularly hosts more experimental / less mainstream musicians — Marisa Anderson played a gorgeous show there earlier this year — to see BASIC, an amazing trio that’s a mix of minimalist jazz and experimental rock. I paid the dude at the counter, who was in the middle of pulling a shot of espresso, and then decided to kill some time at People’s Records, the record store attached to the space, along with other show attendees and a couple of musicians in the opening act. I sat in exactly the corner of the room that sounds the best for my damaged hearing and thoroughly enjoyed the sets.
We absolutely need to abolish the concept that going to a concert alone is any kind of abnormal or undesirable behavior.
What all of these concert activities have in common is that I attended them by myself. And this should absolutely not be news of any kind, but recently a leading music magazine posted a news story that announced: “Going to concerts alone is a top-tier human experience.” The story wasn’t actually about that, but was rather a mashup of reporting on how Phoebe Bridgers’ recent phone-free concerts meant that when an attendee spotted a celebrity at the show, they couldn’t report to a gossip publication that this person was supposedly standing alone in the line for the bar (while there are actually many reasons you could be at the bar by yourself despite arriving with an entourage of a dozen people).
But the writer’s reasoning for why it was okay to be going to a show without a date or a friend(s) actually didn’t make a believable case for it. They offered an awkward and overly exaggerated blather about how solo concertgoing means that you can better participate in “the oneness of things,” which made you wonder if the person writing it had actually been to a concert, much less attended one on their own. And I didn’t realize we had to justify or defend this, or that it was anything out of the ordinary.
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What they got wrong is that the “top tier human experience” is simply going to concerts, full stop. (As Neil Young once said, “Live music is better/bumperstickers should be issued.”) The idea that going to see one of the most important concert tours of the year by oneself is “sad” is so idiotic that it should never have been entertained as any kind of news story. And we absolutely need to abolish the concept that going to a concert alone is any kind of abnormal or undesirable behavior.
I’m biased. I’ve been going to concerts alone since I was 14 years old. This wasn’t necessarily by choice, but rather that I wanted to do something important and no one else I knew wanted to do it, and I wasn’t going to let that minor detail stop me. And as I have moved through my life, sometimes I had a friend or companion to go to shows with me, and sometimes — as it happens to normal people in the course of normal life — I did not. If I only attended a concert when I had someone to go with, I would have missed out on far too much. This is a stupid requirement, clearly determined by people for whom live music is just another thing you can do on a given evening, and these are not people anyone who genuinely loves music should be taking direction from.
The first time I went to a concert by myself (which was my second concert), I was dropped off at the venue by my mom (who later would explain that she allowed it because she thought it would “get it out of my system.”) It was not difficult to follow the letters and numbers on my ticket to find my seating location, and when I sat down, the women on one side of me immediately and excitedly introduced themselves, while the two dudes on the other side of me managed to tell me within the first two minutes that they’d be glad to buy me a beer “if you don’t have your ID on you,” wink wink. Everyone was excited to see Bruce Springsteen, even if we were roughly a million miles away from the stage in the upper reaches of the New Haven Coliseum.
Everyone except me had concert stories to tell. Everyone talked about what other concerts they were going to, what radio stations (and which DJ’s specifically) you could count on to be Springsteen-friendly or provide the best info, and everyone swapped information about what other bands were going on tour based on what they had read or heard. I was dropped off when the doors opened, and I thought it would be a long and painful wait until the concert started, but instead I had a dozen new best friends within 15 minutes.
When the concert was over, the girls sitting next to me gave me their phone numbers and told me to call if I was ever going to a show in Hartford. This was an experience that would repeat itself in different formats forever all across the United States, Canada, and multiple European countries, and still happens now if you want that to be your experience. You can also decide you are going to rock up when you feel like it and occupy your time reading a book and not talk to anybody. Or you can limit your socialization to the time-honored tradition of watching someone’s space while they run to the bathroom. This is all incredibly normal, accepted behaviour which anyone who attends a concert regularly already understands.
If I only attended a concert when I had someone to go with, I would have missed out on far too much. This is a stupid requirement, clearly determined by people for whom live music is just another thing you can do on a given evening, and these are not people anyone who genuinely loves music should be taking direction from.
Let’s be honest: while as a teenager I dreamed of the day when I could attend every concert my heart desired with every friend who also loved the band in question, the reality always shook out differently. As an adult, it remains challenging to coordinate schedules and availability, not to mention alignment with other critical details like preferred arrival times and seating/standing location. Sometimes it is far, far easier and more convenient if each person manages their own tickets and concert experience. If you want to hang with your pals, then coordinate a post-show meet-up at the bar or the diner or on the way to the subway. There is absolutely nothing about concert attendance that requires accompaniment!
Admittedly, times have changed, and yes, everyone has a small computer in their pocket and myriad ways to occupy their time before the show starts. And these days, a concert isn’t one of the only ways you’re going to meet people who share similar interests as you. But I hear from younger friends who are going to shows by the likes of Harry Styles or Taylor Swift, and I witnessed myself very recently at a Bikini Kill show locally (where I was one of the older people in the front GA section), the kids are still doing the same thing that I did in 1978: they talk to each other, they swap social handles, they exchange important information. It is all still happening if you are open to the experience, and it should reassure anyone who is hesitant about buying a ticket to a concert if they don’t know anyone else who wants to come with them.
The only way going solo can have a negative impact on you is during the ticket-buying process for reserved seating events. That’s because these days, Ticketmaster will not let you buy one of a pair or will tell you you have to select an adjoining seat (even if there is no adjoining seat at that moment, a thing that has happened to me and countless of my pals). Buying a single ticket used to be the way to game yourself to the best possible seat, as there would always be a leftover hanging around; even if I was going to a show with friends, we still might try for individual tickets as a way to better optimize our chances for a better seat. Thank you, Ticketmaster, for continuing to find ways to make this process painful!
(Caryn Rose) Going solo
The only real downside to solo concert attendance is if you are a single woman and a man in your vicinity has decided it is his solemn responsibility to interrogate anyone who doesn’t look like him to determine their worthiness, e.g., the kind of guys who would talk to whatever man I brought with me to a show and, despite them telling him, “She’s the fan, I just came with because I was interested in checking them out,” there is no way we could possibly be worthy of the space we were occupying. (But that is a completely different essay.)
I’d argue that it is actually an expression of supreme self-love and self-awareness that you’re comfortable enough with yourself to be absolutely content going to a concert as a party of one. Honestly, no one should be waiting for another person to do anything they want to do (except, I dunno, tandem bike riding). But what we absolutely should stop doing is paying attention to other people living their lives the way they want to live them, and that includes making a decision to go to a concert without an entourage. Buy the ticket. Go to the show. I’ll see you there.
He might look like something found in the dumpster at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. He might shamelessly plunder the sonics of decades of deep-fried and gravy-smothered hits. But despite everything about his presentation and performance, Kid Rock is not actually southern.
If he were, he might have done the friendly thing and warned Eminem off of collaborating on “Heal My Faith,” a song on his recent Christian album “Halfway 2 Jesus.” He might have stopped his longtime friend and fellow Michigander from irreparable reputational damage. Instead, he let Slim Shady learn a hard lesson that true southerners know: You lay down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
“Heal My Faith” is genial to the point of being unmemorable, a bit of cringy Christian pablum that encourages loving someone even when you’re outside of the pit. It’s student-athlete core, a mish-mash of choirs, electric guitar noises over pounding drums that all sound like keyboard presets. Kid Rock’s contributions are entirely lifted from inspirational T-shirts, table scraps from rejected Jelly Roll songs. The result is that “Heal My Faith” offers very little to chew on — until Eminem shows up.
The boilerplate praise chug of the song has one upside: It forces the “Rap God” to slow down. Left to his own devices, middle-aged Eminem has been the hip-hop equivalent to masturbatory guitarists, his late-stage work full of technically impressive displays of chops that nonetheless lack the fun and melody of his radio hits. Hearing him enter the song with a flow that’s not indebted to a J.J. Fad outro offered a glimmer of hope. But it was short-lived.
On “Heal My Faith,” the rapper who first gained mainstream attention by lighting the pop chart’s sacred cows afire wonders why we can’t all just get along. It’s shocking stuff from the rapper who famously mused about dropping an “awfully hot coffee pot” on Donald Trump in a freestyle at the BET Hip Hop Awards in 2017. Now, Slim Shady seems to be saying, “We might believe in fundamentally opposed directions for this country. We might differ on the idea of extending dignity to all people, but can’t we put that aside for the sake of a new single you can buy?”
You don’t need to hear it. You’ve already heard it. It’s the realm of purple state campaign ads and Earthbound Trading Co. bumper stickers. It’s junk, and Eminem seems to know it.
How else can you explain a verse that is 90% throat-clearing and preemptive dodges of the backlash he knows is coming? Eminem spends bar after bar defending his decision to even appear on the song, touting his decades-long friendship with Kid Rock and their intertwined history in the music industry.
He talks about their shared roots in Detroit’s music scene, and how their paths crossed again and again. He details an early CD release party at length, where the more established Kid Rock showed up to lend support to the emerging rapper. It isn’t until the closing lines of his verse that Eminem turns to God and the brotherhood of man.
“Liberal and evangelical can agree,” he raps. “It’s God first, home of the free.”
Reputation-wise, the collaboration does far more for Kid Rock than it does for Eminem. The former has long been fully consumed by Trump World, becoming more of a standby entertainer for MAGA events than a rock star. Eminem, on the other hand, once told fans who supported Trump to stop streaming his music.
(Ke.Mazur/WireImage) Kid Rock and Eminem during Experience Music Project Opening Gala at Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington.
Rock told Billboard that he hadn’t planned to “drag [Eminem] into my political world,” but he had to have known that was impossible. The nod from a supposed Trump critic removes a small bit of the stain on Kid Rock, but it also transfers directly to his collaborator.
Eminem might have been hoping to build a bridge with this collaboration, but at least according to his Instagram comments, his fans aren’t ready to get over it. One commenter assured him that it’s okay to cut off a friendship “over moral differences.” Another said Eminem’s line in the sand against Trump must have been “brushed back into the beach.” The rapper’s newfound neutrality, one wrote, still amounted to “choosing a side.”
You can’t feel too bad for Eminem, who’s had plenty of opportunities to see that who you rap with is who you are. After all, more than a year after her breakout single “What I Want,” which she recorded with the controversial country music star Morgan Wallen, the pop singer Tate McRae is still being confronted by fans and interviewers with questions about the pair’s collaboration.
Wallen, who’s been given about as many second chances as gold records, has never explicitly identified himself as a supporter of the MAGA movement. But his history of using slurs on camera, the general nastiness of his dejected young man music and a massive social media tiff with “Saturday Night Live” have solidified him as an anti-woke warrior in the popular conception.
“It’s crazy to think that one song could define a whole person,” McRae told W Magazine earlier this month.“There are many aspects of my personality that three-quarters of my audience has no idea about. You hope one day you figure out a way to show all aspects of it.”
There’s little chance that Eminem will face such questions in the future, if only because his career as a hitmaker is basically over. He was something exciting and fresh when he pantsed the pop culture landscape in the late 1990s, but joking about how much everything sucks is a young man’s game. Coming from an older man, it just sounds bitter and out-of-touch.
Different listeners draw the start of his decline and the end of his relevancy at different points. Most agree that the zeitgeist of rap started to shift away from the stubbornly anachronistic rapper sometime around the end of the aughts. In 2013, he released a well-received album seemingly purpose-built to cap on his career, and then he just kept going. The 23-year-old McRae, on the other hand, will have her past decisions dug up by what remains of the music press after each new chart smash. Eminem may well be staring down a future where his regrettable decision to record contemporary worship dreck with Kid Rock generated his last real headlines.
It’s something the culturally savvy clown of Eminem’s early career would have been smart enough to avoid.
When it comes to box sets, Elvis Costello’s 49th-anniversary edition of his debut album “My Aim Is True” is a dream compilation for completists. The original 12-song LP clocked in at a swift 33 minutes, while the special edition features a whopping 104 tracks, along with Costello’s 72-page essay about the album’s origins. It’s a veritable feast for the ears, and “My Aim Is True” is a worthy subject for all of the attendant attention.
Released by Stiff Records in 1977, Costello’s debut took full advantage of the burgeoning punk movement. To commemorate the anniversary, such as it is, “My Aim Is True” features a fully remastered edition of the album. Stateside listeners will be delighted to learn that the edition concludes with “Watching the Detectives,” the searing track that was appended to the American release. The balance of the LP was recorded at North London’s Pathway studio with Clover, a California-based country rock band, and produced by Nick Lowe, Costello’s fellow Stiff Records colleague.
As presented here, “My Aim Is True” is every bit as explosive and exciting as the original release, an album that featured a clever blend of punk, rockabilly, pop and new wave sounds. With standout tracks like “Welcome to the Working Week,” “Less Than Zero,” and “Waiting for the End of the World,” it could hardly fail. Meanwhile, “Alison,” “(The Angels Wanna Wear) My Red Shoes,” and “Watching the Detectives” were early classics among the Costello canon.
What makes the 49th-anniversary box set particularly special is the inclusion of the extra discs. When “My Aim Is True” originally saw its release, Costello was at a crossroads. Working by day as a data entry clerk, he was contemplating different futures for his artistic self, as evinced by disc two, for example, which is entitled “The Blue Print” and is comprised of 17 acoustic demos for future tracks on such LPs as “Armed Forces,” “Get Happy!!” and “Trust.”
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A third disc, “The Stranger in the House,” finds Costello imagining another potential career for himself as a professional songwriter. Like “The Blue Print,” “The Stranger in the House” is made up of demos and outtakes he created for his fantasy life as a working songwriter — possibly even in faraway Nashville. Meanwhile, a fourth disc, the best of the lot for fans of his longtime backing band, is entitled “Becoming the Attractions” and finds Costello, keyboard player Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bass player Bruce Thomas transforming “My Aim Is True” for mass consumption.
A fifth disc, “Covered in Clover,” takes the story of “My Aim Is True” full circle with Costello’s 2007 live performance of the LP with Clover. A benefit performance for victims of Prader-Willi Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, Costello’s reunion with Clover demonstrates one of the singer-songwriter’s greatest strengths: the elasticity of his music and his uncanny ability to remake himself across the decades. Indeed, it is the variety and profundity of his music since 1977 that continues to make him one of his genre’s most intriguing artists.
Nik Cohn’s “Corner Boy: Loiterings New and Old” is alive with mystery, intrigue and revelation. An exquisite anthology of Cohn’s writing from his early days through the present, “Corner Boy” bristles with the electric, contrarian voice of a working cultural critic.
But as Cohn pointed out to me during a recent interview, the notion of being considered a critic has never felt comfortable to him. “I never thought of myself as a critic, really. And certainly not at that time. I saw myself as a pop writer.”
While his work associated with The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones would see him branded as one of the premier rock critics of his day, he vastly preferred pop’s egalitarian “ethos,” admitting, “I didn’t really identify with rock very much. I liked rock ‘n’ roll, in the ’50s.”
But as rock grew and changed as a genre, it became “torturing” to Cohn’s ears, with bands competing in terms of their comparative loudness and audacity. And besides, he says, “I liked singles. I didn’t like albums.” For Cohn, pop, unlike rock, offered “a quick hit,” in contrast to album-oriented fare. When a new single comes out, says Cohn, “you’re walking down the street, you’re driving, and you hear something coming out of a window, out of a basement, and it knocks you out. And it’s over, and for three months, you can’t listen to anything else.”
Conversely, with an album, you take it home, “keep it for 20 years and contemplate its tracks,” says Cohn. “What I wanted was the physical buzz, the immediacy, and that’s a single, that’s a jukebox. It’s this kind of moment of immediacy that exists in a certain space and time. If you go to the jukebox and you play the song, while it’s the recording that we may all know and love, it’s happening to you in that very instant.”
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When Pete Townshend debuted “Tommy” for Cohn in the late ’60s, the rock opera lacked that same sense of immediacy. “Pete starts writing,” Cohn recalls, “and he comes up with his whole concept. He worked in the studio for months, and finally, he wanted to play something to me. And it was very, very serious.” Not mincing words, Cohn told him that “there’s some interesting things here, but there’s no excitement.” And that’s when the idea for “Pinball Wizard” came to the songwriter, who used to play pinball at the local arcade with Cohn and The Who’s producer Kit Lambert. “So he wrote ‘Pinball Wizard,’ which he knew I’d be a sucker for.”
Cohn is perhaps most famously known as the writer behind “Saturday Night Fever,” the film that captured the disco era for a generation. The movie was based on Cohn’s New York Magazine article on the “Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night.” Back in those days, Cohn recalls, “New York was crumbling, was in terrible shape. And that’s when disco came out as a trickle in Black gay clubs in Harlem, and from there, it came downtown, and then spread to the boroughs.”
Smelling a story, Cohn took a taxi out to Brooklyn’s 2001 Odyssey club. “It was the dead of winter, and there was this 18-year-old, I would say, standing in the doorway, hunched over against the cold.” For Cohn, “something echoed there” in the image of the young man, who reminded him of the young, wayward Englishmen of the 1950s. The next evening, Cohn made the long slog back out to 2001 Odyssey, but the young man had disappeared. “I didn’t find him again. I didn’t find anybody there. So, what to do?” Desperate to capture the feeling he had experienced the night before, “I made it up, really. It was a work of fiction.”
As with his mother, who wrote tall tales during his Northern Irish youth, Cohn resorted to literary imagination and exaggeration to bring the story to life. “It’s just a little magazine story, and not my best work,” says Cohn. “I mean, I knew even then, it wasn’t my best story. It was something that I immediately wanted to take back and do over again.” But in short order, Cohn’s New York Magazine article was adapted into “Saturday Night Fever,” a blockbuster film and one of the bestselling albums of all time.
For Cohn, the entire experience was transfixing. “It was completely discombobulating. It seemed to be unreal for me. It was as if it was happening to somebody else. It was great to have that amount of attention. But at the same time, it wasn’t what I signed up to do when I became a writer, and I kind of lost contact with myself with disastrous consequences.” Those disastrous consequences included a drug bust in the 1980s at the hands of the FBI. Although the charges were later dropped, the whole experience forced Cohn to reconsider his place in the world. “It made me put my foot on the brakes and think, ‘What are you doing with your life here?’” He stopped using and quite literally met his future wife at the jailhouse door.
But as “Corner Boy” so presciently reminds, Cohn has never given up his contrarian voice and his yen for anti-complacency and ferreting out new experiences.
If you stayed up late on Sunday nights to watch MTV’s “120 Minutes,” if you made sure your VCR was correctly set up to record IRS Records’ magazine show “The Cutting Edge,” if your record collection is mostly vinyl because that was the superior format of the three that were available at the time and not because “you’re really into vinyl,” you are probably aware that actor Michael Shannon and guitarist Jason Narducy have been leading a project where they tour the country playing the songs of R.E.M., the former leaders of the original alternative nation. It began with a one-off playing “Murmur,” and they recently finished touring “Lifes Rich Pageant” and came through Detroit at the end of September.
The musicians in front of you are not the humans who originated the music, and that matters because the energy is not the same . . . That might have been part of my personal resistance, that my relationship with the material was based on the people who wrote it, and I’m not big on nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.
There is no way this story isn’t personal; no telling that can leave out my specific interest in this body of work. I saw R.E.M. for the first time the night I graduated high school in 1981, when I took myself and my fake ID to a club in Mt. Vernon, NY, to see the Gang of Four. Someone standing near me asked who was opening: “R.E.M. They’re from Georgia.” I knew who they were; I’d heard the single on WNYU, maybe for once the opening band wouldn’t suck. They didn’t. In my 20s, I ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard in order to see as many R.E.M. shows as I possibly could. I published one of the first R.E.M. fanzines, sitting at my kitchen table in my third-floor Hoboken tenement walkup with an X-Acto knife and a glue stick. I later ended up posted at a Warner Brothers office overseas where I got to work on the beginning of that era of albums.
And yet I found myself strangely apathetic and at times resistant to participating in any of the hoopla around the Shannon/Narducy ensemble. Every time someone tried to sell me on how great it was, all I thought was some version of: I saw R.E.M., I saw the actual band. Yes, I knew very well that the actual band had given their ringing endorsement to this effort. This was not about that. I wasn’t sure what the reluctance was, but then they announced a Detroit date, and I no longer had the excuse that I wasn’t going to travel to see this.
“Lifes Rich Pageant” opens with “Begin the Begin.” If I were a baseball player, I’d think about using the intro to that song as my walkup music. It’s so immediately distinctive: 0 to 60 in five seconds, instant energy, a handful of guitar notes before all of the instruments rev up. There’s gritty distortion and glorious feedback, and if you, as an audience member witnessing this performance, weren’t sure how this was all going to land in your body 40 years later, those 10 seconds will completely reassure you that you have nothing to worry about. You don’t have to think about it; your subconscious will reconnect those severed wires immediately. Or it’s less severed than simply dormant, temporarily out of use. You react the way you always reacted. It is involuntary.
There was a point in my life where I listened to the entirety of the R.E.M. catalog constantly, when there was always a tape of a live show in my Walkman, when the intro to “Underneath the Bunker” was my outgoing answering machine message. It was the era when you brought the album home and immediately recorded it onto both sides of a Maxell XL-II 90 so that when you got to the end of the album you could just flip the tape and immediately start again and not have to wait to rewind.
I did that with “Lifes Rich Pageant” and remember falling asleep as “Hyena” faded out only to bolt upright the minute I heard Michael Stipe chanting, “I’m so young/I’m so goddamn young,” and it felt like he was standing there hitting a giant gong in my tiny bedroom that had room for a bed and a small shelf for my stereo. Of course that reference is from the B-side of Patti Smith’s “Gloria” 45, the live cover of “My Generation” recorded in Cleveland in 1976, waving the standard of, “WE CREATED IT; LET’S TAKE IT OVER.” We already knew what side R.E.M. were on in the Punk Rock Wars, and we also knew that “Hyena” existed long before we arrived at “Lifes Rich Pageant” because it had been a setlist stalwart since “Reckoning.”
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See? We are still working through the first side of the record, and the memories are an avalanche at this point. But the musicians in front of you are not the humans who originated the music, and that matters because the energy is not the same. Which means you have to find your emotional connection, and that’s likely going to generate from whatever synapses are firing up in the memory bank. That might have been part of my personal resistance, that my relationship with the material was based on the people who wrote it, and I’m not big on nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.
I never pined for a R.E.M. reunion the way I might have (for example) wished for the chance to see The Clash just one more time. I don’t understand people who don’t care if Bruce Springsteen never releases another new record as long as he keeps touring. I saw a handful of those Replacements reunion shows in 2015, but I remember towards the end of that run thinking that unless there was going to be new music, I didn’t need to see any more. But I also know that I might be a little bit of an originalist in this regard.
Shannon and Narducy have built these outings around the R.E.M. catalog, with each tour centering on an album which is performed in full, from start to finish. That’s a tricky decision to make, because the criteria for impactful album sequencing are not at all the same for a live show. (It’s easier for one-offs, but it’s much harder if you’ve committed to doing it night after night.) “Lifes Rich Pageant” is from 1986, so musicians were still thinking about sequencing their records to have two sides, and there’s a “Dinner” and a “Supper” side of this record — which Michael Shannon will make reference to later in the evening, the kind of reference I’d remember in 1986 but definitely did not recall in 2026.
When I came home and pulled the record out and realized what he was referring to, I gave myself a break for not remembering it because I have not been consulting the texts as recently as Shannon (and if you read any of the interviews he has given on this subject, it is very much that for him). That is the level of dedication to this project, which becomes obvious once the ensemble activates their full powers. Because getting up there to simply execute the songs competently would not have been sufficient for this effort, nor would it have attracted the (admittedly deserved) enthusiasm that it has.
Shannon and Narducy have built these outings around the R.E.M. catalog, with each tour centering on an album which is performed in full, from start to finish. That’s a tricky decision to make, because the criteria for impactful album sequencing are not at all the same for a live show.
“These Days” comes next in the track listing, with the beautiful lyric: We are young despite the years/ we are old despite the times. I think Jason Narducy did half a leap or at least a leg kick in the place that Peter Buck would have been kicking his impossibly lengthy daddy long legs (and credit where credit is due, every once in a while second guitarist/Rickenbacker wielder Dag Juhlin did as well). When you go see a band often enough, you know where to look and when to watch, and then the trick is to unlock the next level.
Next level for R.E.M. is trying to sing the Mike Mills harmonies, and it’s not surprising that Narducy, the man who is the definition of an alt-rock journeyman, is spot on. I don’t know what words he is singing, but the notes are correct, and the color is right, and that’s what matters here. There is a certain amount of impressionism that is going on. There’s a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief to an extent; you can’t be going to see these shows if you are going to be a trainspotter. Or you can, but you’ll miss the point. Of particular note was his amazing imitation of Patti Smith’s vocal part in “E-bow The Letter,” later in the set. It wasn’t identical, but it was still absolutely perfect.
On “Hyena,” again, Narducy has to play guitar and sing the bass player’s vocal harmony, which isn’t a harmony so much as a counterpoint; it is meant as a third dimension, and that is much harder to execute than simple harmony. Also important on “Hyena” is how the rhythm section interacts. I have watched Jon Wurster behind the drums for many, many musical acts, and there is a reason he is in demand: he is very technically accomplished and is some kind of chameleon because he’s never imposing; that’s not often what he’s been hired for, but he isn’t some kind of bland, soulless session dude.
Which absolutely matters in the case of R.E.M. because Bill Berry was an underrated element (and a great songwriter). He was always solid and effortlessly executed these perfect yet almost imperceptibly complex rhythms while also singing harmony vocals. Wurster does not have to sing, but he has to do the rest, and he never ever missed: specifically, I watched as he intricately kept time on “Pilgrimage” later in the set, a song full of beats off the syncopation of the rest of the band, and I knew he’d pull it off, but it was a delight to witness.
The bass is covered by Wilco’s John Stirratt, and while Stirratt doesn’t have to also handle Mills’ vocals, he’s not getting off easy. The melody lines of the bass in R.E.M. songs are singularly melodic and distinctive, with a fluidity that makes them seem simple when they are not. It’s not a traditional rhythm section, but if anything were out of alignment, it would throw the entire entity out of order. You’re still having to learn a vast repertoire of another band and accommodate your style as a working professional and acclaimed musician of many years into someone else’s.
“Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up,” Michael Shannon steps out of character briefly to offer additional emphasis to that key line of “Cuyahoga,” but it’s also not exactly inaccurate — It’s a perfectly Stipean ad-lib. At some point when this project was afoot, someone was trying to sell me on it by telling me that “Michael Shannon is a very good Michael Stipe imitator” — which made me recoil in horror because that is the absolute last thing I would ever want to see, and also not at all what is happening.
What Michael Shannon is very good at is acting, and that doesn’t mean that his performance is about artifice or that it’s inauthentic; it just means this project is decidedly not trying to be a cover band; they’re not performing “Lifes Rich Pageant” like a “Rocky Horror” shadowcast. The band is staying true to the songs as they were written and performed without being exactly matchy-matchy on the things that don’t matter but being very certain to land the moments that do. And that’s what will resonate with you if you are an OG. There was a wave of excitement in the crowd when Michael Shannon picked up a bullhorn, one of Stipe’s favored devices. It’s hard to use a bullhorn in rock ‘n’ roll without looking stupid or overly dramatic, and it’s another testimony to Shannon’s presentation that you just nodded: of course there would be a bullhorn.
At some point when this project was afoot, someone was trying to sell me on it by telling me that “Michael Shannon is a very good Michael Stipe imitator” — which made me recoil in horror because that is the absolute last thing I would ever want to see, and also not at all what is happening.
Album sequencing versus live sequencing: “Underneath the Bunker” works to close one side of an album, just like “Flowers of Guatemala” works to open side two, but those songs back to back is a little challenging energetically. Live, R.E.M. used to follow “Guatemala” with its next song, “I Believe,” and that still works a treat: “I believe in coyotes/and time as an abstract,” as the song goes, and it is a certain kind of amazing that this information still resides so robustly within my personal memory banks. Also, let’s shout out the perfect banjo intro courtesy of keyboard player Vijay Tellis-Nayak. It’s the kind of moment where everyone in the room knows what’s next and everyone is eagerly awaiting for the action to commence.
When the band finished with the album, I realized that because I had not paid attention, I had no idea what was next. I can’t guess because it’s not based on known data such as decisions the band had made about what they were and were not interested in playing this tour. This group of musicians could do whatever they wanted to and that’s exactly what they did, veering all around the catalog like a Tilt-A-Whirl. The latter-day “Lotus” went into “Chronic Town’s” “Gardening At Night.” “Harborcoat,” from the sophomore album, segued into “How the West Was Won” from a later era. Shannon made a comment about how the songs were grouped together thematically — plants and flowers and I forget the third element, which struck me as a thoroughly R.E.M. way of doing things.
“Burning Down” (which Shannon correctly attributed to the 1987 outtakes record “Dead Letter Office”) was in the mix, and I wrote “when did they ever DO this” in my notes and after checking, the truth is, not very often. I never saw the song performed live, but everyone knew about it because R.E.M. played it at a 1984 show in Seattle that was recorded for a syndicated radio show called “The Source.” If you didn’t tape a copy off of your local FM station, it wasn’t hard to find somebody that did, and it became one of the first commercial R.E.M. bootlegs.
There was a wave of excitement in the crowd when Michael Shannon picked up a bullhorn, one of Stipe’s favored devices. It’s hard to use a bullhorn in rock ‘n’ roll without looking stupid or overly dramatic, and it’s another testimony to Shannon’s presentation that you just nodded: of course there would be a bullhorn.
That’s a perspective I hadn’t considered, that they’d play songs that many people had never seen performed live. There was a palpable wave of holy sh*t, a sharp collective intake of breath, when “Fretless” began. (I told a friend, “I think I stopped breathing.”) The song was on that stellar example of movie soundtrack sequencing, Wim Wenders’ “Until the End of the World.” It remains one of R.E.M.’s strongest compositions, an entire sonic landscape that morphs instantly into a whole other world. That means it’s an ambitious choice. I did not stop to think, “This is one of my favorite songs and I’ve never heard them do it so please don’t fu*k it up.” They gave us reason to trust them almost instantly.
The one element that seemed slightly off was that Stipe’s vocals have both power and fragility, and towards the end of the set, some of the delicate touches weren’t as sharp; Shannon would apologize during bows, explaining that he was getting over an illness, and that would certainly explain it. But this is also the one critical note I could find. The one.
This outing is, clearly, an homage, but by the end I have concluded that it is simply an art project, which is a fully legitimate reason to do something. No one on the stage is hurting for work; they’re doing this for the joy of it, and probably because it’s a challenge. These are not easy songs to play, nor are R.E.M. songs any kind of simple noise to generate. I think about that aspect later in the evening during “Star 69,” which from the outside seems like a simple rock ‘n’ roll song, very loud guitar matched by breathless, insistent loud vocals. But!
The breakneck pace of the guitar chords is measured and deliberate; the drums are measured, consistent; as usual, the bassline is its own melodic counterpoint. This song was on “Monster.” This wasn’t something they just fell into. Listen to how the band signifies the second verse, how there are separate, neat, clean guitar riffs coming off of the chorus, featuring the accusation: I KNOW YOU CALLED / STAR 69 / gorgeous naked guitar solo continues riffing. And let’s not forget how, in this particular song, what’s happening is that Mills is singing the same lines as Stipe, just a beat or two slower; it’s not an echo, it’s dissonance. And Shannon and Narducy et. al. manifest all of this onstage.
If you’ve never seen R.E.M., I can’t tell you what it will feel like if you decide to go see next year’s recently-announced “Document” outing. But you do have to see the show to understand why this outing is so strongly favored. I believe it is because it is true and earnest and respectful, but it is also hella fun. R.E.M. always had a sense of humor that felt like it got forgotten or overlooked once they were playing stadiums. There is precision here, but there is also abundant joy. And joy is a thing all of us could use right now.
With all apologies to David Lynch, in “That Thing You Do!” the film isn’t the thing.
Tom Hanks’ directorial debut, which was released to critical praise but was a box office disappointment, doesn’t hinge on the charming, passable performances of its lead actors. It doesn’t get by on its script, which tells the story of an out-of-nowhere rock ‘n roll band and their earworm of a hit song. Written by Hanks, the screenplay is so thin that the star lists out the stock types of each character in the third act. It definitely doesn’t get by on studio glitz; even if the production team did a bang-up job of recreating the early 1960s, they can’t get around the fact that much of this movie is set in a dreary Erie, Pennsylvania. Whether “That Thing You Do!” works for audiences — and the cozy, quick story of a flash-in-the-pan band has resonated with a ton of people since its release in 1996 — depends entirely on if the title song lands.
Credit for that has to go to Adam Schlesinger, the late pop-rocker and bassist for Fountains of Wayne who wrote the track with nothing more than the film’s title and a few hints at the story. He needed to recreate the sound of the thousands of teenagers who had their heads rearranged by The Beatles and immediately ran to their garages to pick up guitars — and he nailed the teenybopper perfectionism of early Lennon-McCartney joints. The song’s backbeat is crisp. The bassline struts. The emotions are big, dumb and messy, but no one told that to the harmonies. Even the brief imitation of Lennon’s “losing control” scream is laser-precise, meant to boost the song’s momentum and carry it through a cheery and lazy surf solo. Give it a listen; it sounds like it was written by committee and by four bored teens in equal measure. It’s lightning.
“That Thing You Do!” had to be that good, because no fictional rock band has ever leaned harder on their hit. The film follows the whirlwind, two-month career of The Wonders, a group so replacement-level that we first meet them arguing over “The” band names that are already taken. Drummer Guy Patterson (Tom Everett Scott) is the star of the film but the bassist joining him in the rhythm section, played in the film by Ethan Embry, doesn’t even have a name. (He’s listed as T.B. Player in the credits.) With lead singer Jimmy Mattingly III (Johnathon Schaech) and guitarist Lenny Haise (Steve Zahn) out in front, they go from local sensation to Billboard chart-toppers in weeks and implode just as spectacularly. Across that timespan, the audience is treated to “That Thing You Do!” in part or in full eight times, once every 13 minutes. Whether that’s the result of a threadbare script or just Hanks knowing what he had is up to the viewer to decide. What’s certain is that “Thing” never gets old.
Unlike The Wonders, Schlesinger’s ability to write a world-beating earworm was no fluke. He pulled off that trick multiple times. Just give a listen to “Pretend to Be Nice” from 2001’s “Josie and the Pussycats.” He’s the pen behind 2005’s “Just the Girl” by the Click Five, which laid a mall-emo whine and reverb-heavy drums over The Wonders’ tried and true formula. If you’ve heard of Schlesinger at all — and aren’t a power-pop geek or a “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” superfan — it was likely through his band Fountains of Wayne and their 2003 hit “Stacy’s Mom.” Though that’s not his band’s best — that honor goes to “Radiation Vibe” or “All Kinds of Time” depending on the mood — it’s more proof that Schlesinger had a direct line to the idealized past in his brain. He could channel an undeniable pop hit out of that ether whenever he wanted.
Talent like his is in short supply in 2026, especially after Schlesinger himself passed away in 2020. Watching “That Thing You Do!” climbing the charts throughout the movie is a peek into an alien musical world, one that was both more regional and more monocultural than the one we inhabit today.
The song starts as a word-of-mouth sensation, filling a local restaurant as more and more teenagers hear about this new band and their soon-to-be hit from their friends. They press vinyl to sell at shows, and it gets into the hands of disc jockeys at ever-larger radio stations with an increasing number of watts behind their broadcasts. A labelman, played with equal parts tenderness and sleaze by Hanks, swoops in to take the boys on a tour of state fairs. When the song outgrows the blue-ribbon crowd, they’re flown to Los Angeles for one nationally televised performance before falling out in a bit of dressing room melodrama.
The Wonders’ origins and skyrocketing fame built by the ability to press a record locally and impress radio programmers who curated their playlists by hand, are practically a fantasy in the consolidated media landscape of today. The idea of one song taking hold among the entire nation’s teenagers is even more ridiculous now that streaming has fractured the musical monoculture. Global connection came with a kind of dispersion, diluting shared connections closer to home while allowing for worldwide discovery.
For proof, just look at the (Wonder-less) Billboard charts today. Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” just broke the record for most weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100. Meanwhile, the chorus of people who claim to have never heard the song grows louder every single day. The debate whether this is a mark of country music classism rages in the pages of the Rolling Stone, itself a bit of a relic from those more culturally unified days.
“That Thing You Do!” hides its nugget of pop music consensus inside another bygone bit of shared culture: the afternoon cable movie. These easy lifts don’t ask you to think too much. They get in and out in under two hours, often starting as minor hits that become part of the cultural fabric through repetition; they’re on in the background and there when you need them. Films like “That Thing You Do!” are neither notable nor offensive to the typical viewer, and they never make you wonder “Who is this for?” If that question was ever asked, the answer is simple. It’s delivered in three-part harmony in the opening seconds of The Wonder’s lone pseudo-hit, gorgeous and unmissable.
Who wants to listen to this Beatles pastiche, dreamed up to get Tom Hanks’ film studio off the ground? You.
I couldn’t help but notice some people on social media dunking on a post from @nicksaraev, a self-described entrepreneur helper, who boldly proclaimed on X a few days ago: “I am not joking when I say this. Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over. AI music is now very, very good. You just don’t know yet because all AI music circulating today is from ~2-3 generations ago. Suno v6 pro et al has solved infinite personalized music.” He followed it up with “Yes, this probably hurts your feelings. It’s still going to happen.”
While my feelings are unhurt, and I don’t really know what “infinite personalized music” means or how it could be “solved,” at the same time, I can easily guess what is implied here and I don’t actually want to know more. As one Bluesky user observed, the inherent idea here comes “when you have no concept of how people engage with music.”
The only thing I can think of that’s worse than getting stuck on Greatest Hits or Top 40 is pushing a button and generating “infinite personalized music” with no human influence.
Nonetheless, we don’t seem able to escape this trend. I have a friend who has, on a few occasions, sent me AI-generated raps with his name or a joke inserted as the lyrics. They can be technically proficient, maybe even a little funny, but there is always an underlying cadence of the uncanny valley that I still doubt Suno v6 pro et al. or whatever has totally overcome. Please don’t send me examples; I actually don’t care. It’s not that I’m offended by the idea of generated art; it’s just that it bores me. I’m having plenty of fun engaging with music made with human ears, hands and minds.
Way back in the Bush II and Obama years, I volunteered at my college radio station in the Music Procurement Department or whatever it was called. Our job was to sort through the massive mailer box of padded envelopes and bubble mailers that came in from record labels, big, small and in-between. It was like Christmas every Wednesday afternoon as we shredded packages and stacked CDs, occasional stickers and vinyl, splitting the spoils and loading them into our computers — by hand even! We made notes about what should get added to the radio catalog as fodder for our aspiring DJs — and what should get chucked out or given away for free at radio events.
If we didn’t already know the band, the way we chose which albums to review was often based on cover art, the promo materials we skimmed, or a sticker on the front that read RIYL: Recommended If You Like. Almost every artist would put something like “RIYL: Jay-Z, Radiohead, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Talking Heads.” Sure, totally random indie label from Seattle, all of your bands sound exactly like Nirvana. It could be a pretty boring, sometimes horrifying process — I’ll never forget the thrash metal song we received about Shannen Doherty that sounded like it was recorded in a blender. I still can’t get over the inane lyrics: “Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / You’re in my head. Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / I like bread.” I wish I were making this up.
But the crate digging, which I also did in physical record stores, was always worth it when you found your new favorite band or heard the summer’s hit track long before any of your friends. I was introduced to so many artists, many of whom I still turn to today. Hot Chip, Sea Wolf, Fleet Foxes, to name a few. It taught me to always give music a chance, no matter how ugly the art or how crusty the jewel case. Usually, you can listen to the song up to when the vocals kick in before giving up or listening longer. By then, you usually know if you’re gonna hate it or not.
I have no doubt AI music will keep improving, at least to a point, but I predict few people who actually love music are going to listen that way because it has lost its essence.
I still devour new music this way, clocking a daily average of four hours of tunes familiar and novel. It helps me write and focus and relax and otherwise temper my mood throughout the day. I’m always looking for new artists to try. And I hope I always consume — I hate that word, but there it is — music this way, instead of becoming a curmudgeon who only appreciates the tunes from their youth and thinks anything modern is trash. If you think that, you aren’t digging deep enough.
The only thing I can think of that’s worse than getting stuck on Greatest Hits or Top 40 is pushing a button and generating “infinite personalized music” with no human influence. It bores the sh*t out of me. It’s not just the lack of discovery, though that is critical, maybe because it scratches those deep primal hunter/gatherer itches. It’s more about the lack of anything personal behind the music. No history, no struggle, no catharsis, no exploration, no humanity. I listen to music because it’s flawed, raw and human, not just noise to fill my day. I have no doubt AI music will keep improving, at least to a point, but I predict few people who actually love music are going to listen that way because it has lost its essence.
Yes, I have streamed plenty of AI music on YouTube, often unintentionally when the vaporwave or atmospheric DnB mix I’m vibing to autoplays some slop channel. I can almost always tell when it’s generated. There’s a flatness, like an echo of a song you heard a long time ago, something better. It puts me to sleep and I inevitably switch it off. Maybe it’s gotten better lately. But I still think I’d notice. At any rate, I’d never seek it out.
As a child I was once gifted a “custom” cassette tape with songs “written for me.” Every single track on the album was centered around “Troy,” with my name mentioned as often as possible. I listened to that thing over and over again, until I spilled a bottle of soap in my tape deck and ruined it. But anyway, none of the songs were actually produced with me in mind. It was made by a company called Kidselebration that in 1986 made “personalized” cassette tapes like these for a whole boatload of names. The songs never changed, someone just dubbed in a different name into the song for Kyle, Sarah, Robert, etc. I can’t imagine how much friggin’ work this must have been before Pro Tools, but it was probably just the ‘80s equivalent of a lot of cut-and-paste.
You can listen to the one for “Jessica” here if you really want to. Every time they say “Insert Name,” it sounds totally awkward and weird. But even as a kid, I suspected on some level that this tape wasn’t really for me specifically. Something always felt off. If infinite personalized AI music doesn’t give people the same vibe, maybe they’re not listening hard enough. And please, don’t send me your robot music. Send me anything else.
When it comes to The Beatles, “Rubber Soul” is the album. They may reach arguably loftier artistic heights with “Revolver,” “Sgt. Pepper,” “The White Album,” or “Abbey Road” — take your pick — but “Rubber Soul” embodies the group’s decisive turn towards self-conscious greatness. As far as The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was concerned, “Rubber Soul” marked the invention of the album as a long-playing musical format. And more than six decades later, with the release of the latest Beatles box set, “Rubber Soul” — incredible as it may seem — has never sounded better.
The album’s title harkens back to “I’m Down,” the B-side of the “Help!” single. At the end of the first take of “I’m Down,” Paul McCartney famously quipped that the band sounded like “plastic soul,” a joking but revealing phrase that captures The Beatles’ relationship to American rhythm and blues. Their British approach to R&B prized tightness, clarity, and buoyant precision over the loose, improvisational grit often associated with American soul. “Plastic soul,” then, becomes a conceptual shorthand for The Beatles’ chameleonic ability to absorb a genre’s core qualities and refashion it into something distinctly their own.
That idea became the musical firmament for “Rubber Soul,” which was recorded in a tight four weeks across 17 studio sessions and released in December 1965. Fittingly, The Beatles’ new box set captures the fervor which characterized the LP’s original construction, including early takes of a spate of classic songs ranging from “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out” to “Girl,” “Nowhere Man,” and “Michelle.” Being able to listen to various attempts as the band and producer George Martin build “I’m Looking Through You” from the ground up, for example, is a wonder to behold.
As with so many of The Beatles’ signature albums, “Rubber Soul” proves to be an embarrassment of riches. The box set reaches its apex with a generous three takes of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” one of John Lennon’s most enduring and sophisticated compositions, as well as the debut of George Harrison’s sitar, the microtonal instrument at the heart of Eastern music. Meanwhile, with “In My Life,” listeners are treated to multiple takes in which Martin transforms the song’s Bach-like keyboard interlude from a Hammond organ solo into a piano flourish for the ages.
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Much has been made about the box set’s inclusion of “Little Girl,” a previously lost Lennon demo. In many ways, it is difficult to associate the song, with its sophomoric romantic lyrics, with the “Rubber Soul” era. The composition’s primitive lyrics seem to place its genesis much earlier, likely around the time of “With The Beatles” or “A Hard Day’s Night.” But at the same time, listeners will hear what sounds like the early strains of “I’m Only Sleeping,” a standout track from “Revolver.” In this vein, “Little Girl” fully belongs on the “Rubber Soul” box set, a collection that points towards the bold sense of artistry already taking hold of the band. In its finest moments, the box set captures the astonishing level of musical development that will energize the remainder of The Beatles’ career, a period of unparalleled pop-cultural ambition and stylistic experimentation.
Confession: I was never a Beatles girl. Put away your pitchforks, people – a lack of love doesn’t preclude appreciation. After all, without The Beatles, The Monkees wouldn’t exist. And in one of those head-to-head, “One has to go” challenges the internet is so fond of, I’d tell Ringo and the rest to kick rocks every time.
Not long ago some music purists would have called that sacrilege. Some still would, I’m sure. Bear in mind that I didn’t grow up in a household where a Beatles album ever graced a record or CD player. But we had TVs in the kitchen, the family room, and my parents’ bedroom, and that meant that on any given weekday after school, you could find me in one of those places hanging out with Mike Nesmith, Peter Tork,Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones.
I’ve had The Monkees on my mind recently because yellow buses are rolling through my neighborhood again, and because this month marks the 60th anniversary of their show’s 1966 series premiere. But I was also reminded of their cultural impact all these years later by a Rolling Stone story that came out this week titled “Seven Reasons Why You Should See Harry Styles Right Now.”
Styles is one of the 21st century’s pop supernovas whose musicianship and charisma evolve with the times – “the kind of pop spectacle that leaves feathers all over the floor and hysteria lingering in the air,” gushed the magazine’s Rob Sheffield in his May review of the performer’s tour-launching show in Amsterdam. He’s also the most successful member of One Direction, a boy band created by and for the British edition of “The X Factor.”
That show didn’t magically endow Styles with talent, but it gave him one of the world’s biggest stages to showcase his gifts. That’s similar to the way producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson brought together four unknowns and accidentally formed one of the last century’s most influential pop bands.
Nobody expected that, though. Schneider and Rafelson initially sought to build a show around Jones – the Harry Styles of his generation – and recruited the rest of the band with a Hollywood Reporter ad that read, “Madness!! Auditions. Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running Parts for 4 insane boys, age 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview.”
Tork, Nesmith and Dolenz were among the 437 who responded. They also happened to be talented musicians.
The once-in-a-century specialness of The Monkees, a made-for-TV creation that became a pop culture force, cannot be overstated. For example, years after “The Monkees,” NBC tried to capture some of The New Kids on the Block’s audience share with the short-lived sitcom “The Guys Next Door.” It only takes listening to a few of their songs to realize why most people don’t remember they ever existed, which probably suits recording artist Damon Sharpe just fine. Before he became a Grammy- and ASCAP award-winning producer, songwriter and DJ, he paid the rent with this short-lived gig.
That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Many boy bands are created by enterprising producers looking to manufacture stardom using renditions of a well-worn formula of dreamboat archetypes. They are live performers first, though.
(Michael Ochs Archives via Getty) Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith, Davy Jones
In Schneider and Rafelson’s initial vision, Peter, Mike, Micky and Davy were simply characters living out whimsical two-dimensional adventures built around musical interludes. Ask me to describe any episode’s plot off the top of my head, and I couldn’t. But their music is forever.
“The Monkees” ran for only two seasons, from 1966 to 1968. During that period, the quartet disparagingly nicknamed the Pre-Fab Four made music history, even influencing movies with their post-TV series feature “Head,” the Jack Nicholson-written and produced film that eventually achieved minor cult status.
People still sing along to the Neil Diamond-penned “I’m a Believer,” “The Last Train to Clarksville” and “Daydream Believer,” all of which shot to No. 1 on the charts. Those interludes also foreshadow the music videos that defined the 1980s.
But the musical cuts that earned them cred as stealthy proto-punkers are “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone” and Dolenz’s “Randy Scouse Git,” thrashers that had grade school kids leaping off their parents’ couches for reasons they may not have understood until many years later.
These details are crumbs of the fascinating lore surrounding The Monkees. What impresses me most is their ripple effect on TV and music. Without them, “The Partridge Family” may never have rolled out of their driveway. The Archies and Josie and the Pussycats may never have become American animation classics, with the former snagging a radio hit with 1969’s “Sugar, Sugar.”
Much of the appeal of “The Monkees” was that its live-action stars were as animated as every other show in the after-school TV blocks that programmed it. They were eternal cool kids, which people celebrated and mourned when Jones’ sudden death in 2012 sparked a multitude of ruminations on what he and the band meant to a generation. Tork died in 2019, followed by Nesmith in 2021, leaving Dolenz to carry the band’s legacy to this day. He’s still touring.
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However, in a recent interview with AARP, Dolenz emphasized that The Monkees were never a group in the conventional sense. “It was a musical comedy television series about these four guys that wanted to be a band,” he said.
He noted that on the TV show, the band never actually became famous. “It was the struggle for success that was important, and I think helped endear it to all these kids around the world,” he said, “which does, of course, beg the question of how we could afford a Malibu beach house. But that’s Hollywood.”
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