Culture

Celibidache was a musical visionary, an uncompromising perfectionist, and my father

3w ago

Adamski Was Fully Formed at Eleven. We Missed That.

There is a version of Adamski's story that gets told in about two sentences: unknown DJ meets unknown singer, records "Killer" in a bedroom, becomes one of...

4 days ago

The ZX 8000 Is Every Era's Shoe At Once

There is a certain type of trainer that earns its reputation not through marketing but through presence, through being in the right place at enough of the...

Madchester: The Beautiful Accident That Changed Everything

There are moments in cultural history that, when you try to explain them after the fact, sound completely made up. Sixty-year-old psychedelia colliding with...

Oasis Came Back and Broke Everything. We Loved It.

Fifteen years of public sniping, two solo careers, one catastrophically expensive divorce, and approximately ten thousand passive-aggressive interviews...

Born in the Ashes: How Chicago House Changed Everything

Picture a city in 1979. Disco is collapsing. A disc jockey who lost his job when his radio station went all-disco has just detonated a crate of records at a...

Killer Was an Accident. That's Exactly Why It Worked.

There is a version of the "Killer" story that gets told as a tidy pop fairy tale: unknown DJ meets unknown singer, magic happens, number one for four weeks....

How Rave Culture Escaped Manchester and Took Over Everything

There is a version of British musical history that gets told with a very narrow lens: Manchester, the Hacienda, a warehouse somewhere off a motorway, a...

Britpop Was Never Just Blur vs Oasis. It Was So Much Bigger.

There is a version of Britpop that gets recycled every few years, and by now we know it by heart. Blur versus Oasis. The chart battle. The lads. The lager....

Britpop Was a Boys' Club. Let's Correct the Record.

There is a version of Britpop that gets told on a loop: Liam sneering into a microphone, Damon being clever about it, the battle of 1995, Knebworth, Cool...

Five White Kids From Long Island Who Named Themselves Black

Not everything in hip-hop history makes immediate sense, and some of the things that don't make sense turn out to be the most interesting. Young Black...

The Stone Roses: The Greatest Unfinished Story in British Music

They formed in Manchester in 1983, released one of the greatest debut albums in British history in 1989, spent most of the early nineties fighting their own...

3w ago