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Devin McKinney

Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, just published by Harvard University Press.

Recent Articles

Playing the Game

Devin McKinneyMar 25, 2005

On February 28, a shooting occurred outside the studios of Hot 97, New York's top hip-hop station, where Queens-born rapper Curtis Jackson, a k a 50 Cent (at the moment, the genre's preeminent artist), was being interviewed. He used the occasion to publicly disown his protégé, The Game (real name Jayceon Taylor, of Compton, California), for having failed to back up his denunciations of certain other rappers. The Game, as it happened, was being interviewed just then on another local station, and a flurry of calls alerted him to the situation. Game and his gang -- their anger stoked by a taunting phone-in or two -- charged over to Hot 97, but were barred from entering the building.

Outside Influences

Devin McKinneyMar 04, 2005

"Real, pure, unaffected by outside influences." So the Shaggs were described in the liner notes to their legendary 1969 album, Philosophy of the World. In this rare case, jacket hype disguised
truth: Dot, Betty, and Helen Wiggin of Fremont, New Hampshire, had a sound that seemed innocent indeed of any other music then being made, any stylistic dictates outside those of their own sisterly collective. Their sound -- two guitars, two voices, and a minimal drum kit -- was inimitable, inexplicable, and indefensible, a heedless clatter of misaligned rhythms and clueless vocals. Even their enunciations were

Pop Irony -- Past, Present, and Future

Devin McKinneyJan 05, 2005

On an Alex Chilton bootleg called Starcrossed, there's a suite of songs recorded at a Manhattan rock club sometime in 1977 or '78. The singer, supported by a small band, is playing oldies to a small crowd -- Porter Waggoner's "The Rubber Room," Dusty Springfield's "The Look of Love," some Everly Brothers, and Carl Perkins. By this point in time, Chilton has been through the industry mill: He's known success as the 16-year-old lead singer for the Box Tops ("The Letter") and failure fronting the Memphis power-pop also-rans Big Star (three acclaimed but unsuccessful albums). He's less than 30 years old and sings as if his career has been a sour joke.

Other Voices, Other Countries

Devin McKinneyDec 17, 2004

I've never heard a piece of reggae, ska, or rock-steady I didn't like at least a little. The off-beat of Jamaican pop can make anything sound good -- even the tribute album. Most tributes are a waste of time, and from the Hollies' late-'60s effort to the 30th anniversary concert held at Madison Square Garden in 1992, the many extended encomia to the music of Bob Dylan have been particularly sucky. Too much tribute, not enough pleasure. Is it Rolling Bob? A Reggae Tribute to Bob Dylan, Vol. 1 (Sanctuary/Ras) breaks the rule. Here pleasure is continuous, tribute all but incidental.

The Great Crank

Devin McKinneyOct 29, 2004

What did anyone expect, upon hearing that Bob Dylan had written a memoir? What would the style be, what would it want to say? Would it be like those liner notes he wrote in the '60s, full of secondhand Beatitudes rendered superfluous by the real poetry, verbal and musical, inside the jackets? Or would it be a return of that awful Tarantula-speak, liner notes writ large in Dylan's first and only "novel" -- "between the shrieking mattress in the kitchen & Time, a mysterious weekly," etc. -- written in 1966, published in 1971, and read almost never?

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