Devin McKinney

OK, let’s go through this again: Smile was meant to be The One. Conceived as the follow-up to the Beach Boys’ groundbreaking 1966 Pet Sounds album, it was intended as the band’s masterpiece, as well as writer-producer-arranger Brian Wilson’s boldest challenge to The Beatles as supreme dictators of progressive mid-’60s pop-rock. For three years prior, […]

At least since the Holocaust and the bomb, there’s been a corner of America’s pop marketplace where the ghouls are allowed to come out to play. Not ethereal spirits whispering from beyond, but lurching zombies and cackling demons. In the ’50s, there were EC Comics and Screaming Jay Hawkins; in the ’60s, Bobby “Boris” Pickett […]

“So he emerges,” author David Thomson wrote of the late Dennis Potter, “as some kind of sprite or devil, from out of the woods …” Potter, certainly the greatest writer ever to take television drama as his primary medium, was born in the Royal Forest of Dean, two hours west of London. It is one […]

Two harrowing hours of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 drew to a close, and we watched as George W. Bush’s brain, on display in Tennessee, got lost in the convolutions of an old axiom: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” That’s what Bush meant to say; but the logic of […]

Music may be a universal language, but many pop fans never study anything beyond a handful of its more common dialects. The mainstream audience remains as segregated by style, slang, and collective sound as a high-school cafeteria, each clique guarding its primacy and its prejudices. Hip-hop history regularly revises itself by referring to any rappers […]