(Photo: Masayoshi Sukita, 1977)
There was nothing truly emotional about Bowie but there was something sincere, and this is no contradiction or put down. Continue Reading…
Never Disappear: Rowland S. Howard
Epitome of a talented early bloomer, Australian art school prodigy Rowland S. Howard came up at 16 with his first great work. Unexpectedly to friends and mentors, it would be in the form of a song called “Shivers”, a deceptively clever and touching tune that would create intemperate devotion in his homeland and continue to be covered worldwide nearly 40 years after its inception.
It is a peculiar thing for a woman to find herself forced to walk the tightrope between preconceived definitions of masculinity and femininity but it has been frequent in popular culture and especially in rock and roll, a noticeably masculine world where the lack of varied female role models endure. Thirty-five years ago, at a time when words like cisgender, normative and most discussion of sexual politics were uncommon if not completely absent from everyday conversation, Chrissie Hynde was the cool rock god-and-goddess on the radio, the one to worship in the mainstream pop world.
Lana’s Adolescent Sadness
This might be #throwbackthursday but Lana Del Rey moves resolutely forward: today she announced the track listing of her upcoming Honeymoon LP and it has hardly been a year since her last album emerged, a record that had left me a little cool despite falling hard for “West Coast”, sound and vision.