Devin McKinney

9-11 is an absence in Greil Marcus’s The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice — an absence that gives the book its structure, just as in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 it was a black screen and montage of screams, and in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center an engulfing shadow. It’s the […]

The term “rock ‘n’ roll hero” has been overused in the past, and seldom with much apprehension of what heroes really are or what they go through. “Hero” encourages blind worship, an assumption of divine ordination — but rock stars are as mortal as the next person, and often more fallible. And one hesitates to […]

“Always on My Mind” is the final song on Dumbing Up, the fifth album by World Party — the corporate pseudonym of Welsh-born singer-songwriter-producer-instrumentalist Karl Wallinger. I first heard the song nearly five years ago, after Dumbing Up saw its initial limited, U.K.-only release. I’d spent a year obsessing my way into Wallinger’s work, and […]

At YouTube.com, the popular video upload site, sandwiched between Natalie Portman’s obscene Saturday Night Live rap and the Rolling Stones’ 1963 Rice Krispies ad, are numerous amateur videos of adolescent females lip-synching to Pink’s “Stupid Girls.” This single from her new album, I’m Not Dead, is a forthright denunciation of celebrity-obsessed, fashion-besotted, weight-anxious, cerebrally-challenged young […]

If Van Morrison and Neil Young share anything, it’s nothing much deeper than time, talent, and peculiarity. They’ve been around for the same stretch of years. Both began in other people’s bands, and had their first hits in the same era. Both went solo early, while maintaining long-term affiliations with other artists. Both stood out […]

Some cultural manifestations are like glossy paper: You pick them up, examine them, and put them down again. They’re smooth, self-contained, and leave no residue on those who touch them. An academic essay on Abu Ghraib, for instance, or an opinion column. Others are like flypaper: You can’t touch them without getting stuck to something […]

December 8th was a warm, dampish day in the media: John Lennon had been dead for a quarter-century, and everywhere tears came down. But in Minneapolis it was dry and well below freezing, with heat provided by anger, dancing bodies, and some very loud music. People did their crying in private; in public they raved […]

“Hung Up,” track one of Madonna’s new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, knocks you over the head instantly. Her voice is that familiar mechanical cry, half-woman, half-machine, all sex. The beat is focused and forceful, the melody hooked on one slightly delayed chord change in the chorus — a calculated swerve that gives the […]

Madison Avenue, that locus of all known evil, is at it again. Right now there’s a Tommy Hilfiger commercial that uses the Jefferson Airplane song “Volunteers” as the sound-bed for a montage of hunky, wholesome boys and girls in a summer-home setting, frolicking in stonewashed denims and rugged cottons. The song has been deployed by […]