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American Band, Drive-By Truckers (2016)
Honest political art must walk the line between ambiguity and conviction. Sloganeering, no matter how righteous the fight, eventually ends in middle-aged exhaustion. This is especially the case…
4 min read
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The Second Creation, Crease and Mann
Crease and Mann write in the afterword of The Second Creation that they sought to tell the history of the Standard Model through the words of those most…
4 min read
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I Have No Everything Here, Zomba Prison Project (2015)
Dostoevsky, in House of the Dead, wrote that the character of a society can be judged by entering its prisons. It would not be fair to lay the…
4 min read
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Ola Wave, Zane Campbell (2017)
Zane Campbell is the real deal. A royal Appalachian music bloodline, a life torn apart by drink and drugs, undeniable lyrical genius, a refusal to conform to country-music-as-beer-commercial.…
4 min read
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Original Sufferhead, Fela Kuti (1981)
Few artists can credibly lay claim to inventing a genre. The genre Fela Kuti created, Afrobeat, remains difficult to define. The word connotes musical influences (Nigerian traditional music,…
4 min read
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Middlemarch, Eliot (1872)
Middlemarch depicts a very particular people, place, and time: the English provincial middle-class of the 1830s. Eliot cares about detail. The speech of the characters, their behavioral decorum,…
4 min read
