Lou Reed, the poet
Lou Reed, member of The Velvet Underground, wrote a poem, “O Delmore how I miss you,” to his college professor Delmore Schwartz in Poetry Magazine. “Reading Yeats and the bell…
Music
1832 posts
Writing on music at The Rumpus!
The Rumpus Interview with Merrill Garbus of tUnE-YaRdS
Merrill Garbus’s music is hard to define or readily summarize.
Ty Segall & White Fences’ Hair
One of the easiest and most annoying ways to sum anything up is to explain it as a dash of this and a pinch of that, but Ty Segall and…
Swinging Modern Sounds #36: This Is Bob Dylan to Me
The Rumpus has made it possible for me to talk to a lot of musicians I might not otherwise have met, but meeting Mike Watt, founding member of The Minutmen,…
Process Talk
At Bomblog, writer Melissa Febos and musician Kathleen Hanna discuss the creative process, collaboration versus doing it alone, writing about sex work, nasty online commenters, and more. “Even while I…
The Rumpus Interview with Alice Bag
“She looks like a Babylonian Gorgon,” a reviewer once wrote of Alice Bag in a show review. Her then-band, the Bags, was at the forefront of the late seventies punk scene in Bag’s native Los Angeles.
Moog on Moog
Google recently commemorated the 78th birthday of electronic music pioneer, Dr. Robert Moog, with a doodle of Moog’s most famous invention, the synthesizer. In an interview with the LA Times…
Rumpus Sound Takes: Coming Apart Together
Various Artists We Are the Works in Progress (Asa Wa Kuru) Songs that belong together make each other better.
Word Count
“Some barriers aren’t as impermeable as we think. Telling a story on a page and telling a story against a backing track certainly are different, but they’re not irreconcilable.” The…
The Rumpus Interview with Jeremy Thal of Briars of North America
I've never been much for scenes… and am not sure what scene I'm in now.
Sound Takes: Lateral Desert Shifts
Laura Gibson La Grande (Barsuk; Jealous Butcher) I recently heard someone on NPR use the term “desert noir” to describe the band Calexico. Having never heard the term before, I…
Rumpus Sound Takes: Take Three
Boris New Album (Sargent House) If, like a lot of Boris listeners in the United States, you were introduced to the band through its heavy yet accessible Pink in 2005,…