Borderline homoerotic action-packed male bonding particularly when centered exclusively on a Caucasian/African American coupling epitomized Tinseltown’s interpretation and endorsement of progressivism in the Eighties. The Exterminator not only jumpstarted an entire decade of vigilante justice-meets-cultural acceptance, it deftly morphed each component into one storyline of carnage, sexual deviation, torture, and friendship. Its controversial near-X rated …
Tony Conrad with Faust – Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973)
Dear John. I’m sitting here listening to the playback of this copy of Outside. I can hear the tape making noise and dropout. I can hear the old Wollensak sound. I wish it were a better copy. – Tony Conrad to his friend John Cale. Some albums are just a deep dives, the type of …
The Radical Blackness of Digable Planets
The story of Digable Planets begins during the late 1980’s in the culturally rich City of Brotherly Love. Ishmael ‘Butterfly’ Butler was based in Seattle, interning at Arthur Russell’s Sleeping Bag Records in New York, and intermittently visiting his grandmother and father in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, studying at the prestigious HBCU Howard University in Philadelphia, Craig …
Miles Davis and His Musical Revolution – on the 50th Anniversary of ‘In a Silent Way’
by Mark Lager
We are listening to the city at night, but we hear only the nothingness of silence. We are back inside the church as the humming of the organ and the tentative, two-note guitar strum return us to the revival.
What was this truth so deep and profound that it could not be spoken in words but only carried on the night wind through the streets in acts of silence?
It was revolution.
It was that which is called peaceful.