Kadir Nelson’s “The Soloist”
When the news is especially distressing, it can be easy to feel like art is futile; that you should, instead, focus your attention on all the suffering in the world, such as the cruelties…
Tag
musicians
The Lush Pain Music of Nourished by Time
Marcus Brown’s voice is a crooner’s voice, a baritone, emanating notes from some spot in his body deeper than his chest. Biologically speaking, this is impossible. But taking in his vocal,…
How to Survive Your Song Going Viral on TikTok
If you’ve heard the 2019 hit song “Tek It,” by the New York City-based band Cafuné, there’s a good chance it’s not the version that the group originally created. A clip on YouTube with…
Ethel Cain’s Anti-Pop Stardom
Midway through the music video for “American Teenager,” a feel-good pop song that has been streamed more than a hundred million times, the camera cuts, for an instant, to two children…
King Princess’s Homecoming
After the Civil War, the German-born Jewish businessman Isidor Straus moved with his family to New York City. Straus was enterprising and handsome, with small round spectacles, an angular…
The Musician Bringing the Bagpipes Into the Avant-Garde
One night this past spring, the audience members at a bagpipe concert in Red Hook, Brooklyn, could be organized into two neat categories: people who knew little to nothing about…
Barbra Streisand on “The Secret of Life”
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox. Barbra Streisand has been a huge…
Sly Stone’s Political and Musical Awakening
In May of 1971, Marvin Gaye released what many consider to be his masterwork, “What’s Going On?” A song cycle told from the point of view of a Vietnam veteran returning to the United…
Taylor Swift’s Master Plan
In retrospect, that Tumblr post might be one of the most important things that Swift has ever written. It has all the qualities of a good Taylor Swift song, conjuring an image of an…
Kanye Gave Twitter an Exclusive Hit Single
One of the year’s most talked-about new songs, from one of the planet’s most influential musicians, is not available on Spotify, or Apple Music, or YouTube—not officially, anyway, although…
25 Famous Actors Who Looked So Much Like The Musicians They Played, I Had To Do A Double Take
25 Actors Vs. The Musicians They Play In Movies 1. This is Bob Dylan, who's widely known as one of the best songwriters of all time. And here's a side-by-side of Bob Dylan and Timothée…
Jeff Bridges Is Digging It
The interior of Jeff Bridges’s garage, in Santa Barbara, California, has the ramshackle ease of an extravagant dorm room: a tiger-print rug, a potter’s wheel, guitars, a rogue toothbrush,…