Swinging Modern Sounds #34: Excesses of Penis
The early, formative period of rock and roll criticism produced three great and indelible voices, three voices that have gone on to influence every writer who has written about popular…
Rick Moody
110 posts
Swinging Modern Sounds #33: The Sweet Spot
For an entire decade, between 1975 and 1985, Brian Eno could do no wrong. In fact, even for the four or five years before 1975 he could do no wrong.
Swinging Modern Sounds #32: An Interview with Mike Doughty
Mike Doughty is a singer-songwriter of a particularly urban sort, whose compositions, though guitar-based and often not terribly far from the ideal of the busker, are, nonetheless, cross-pollinated by just about everything audible in New York City...
Growing Up in Greenland: The Rumpus Interview with Jeanne Tost
Aarhus, Denmark, is the second largest city in that nation after Copenhagen, and a center of the arts and education. I was recently there for a literary festival, and in…
Swinging Modern Sounds #31: Reunion Fever
Like other people who once had a childhood, I sometimes give in to fits of longing for the music I cared most about when young. In particular, I give in…
Swinging Modern Sounds #30: What Is and Is Not Masculine
I’m writing about this profile, because I think this profile is a failure.
Swinging Modern Sounds #29: The Museum of Broken Things
Rick Moody interviews Moby about his obsession with drum machines.
Swinging Modern Sounds #28: Can You Hear Me Crying?
It’s hard not to think a lot about Tucson lately, a place where I have spent a lot of time in the last five years, and which I have written…
Reading Habits of the Service Industries, Part One
Nick Delany turned up at a reading I gave at the Brooklyn Museum in November of 2010. He remarked, during the question and answer portion of the event, that he…
Swinging Modern Sounds #27: All Things Must Pass
On 11/29, a band in Brooklyn called The Universal Thump staged a fortieth anniversary rehabilitation of George Harrison’s monumental All Things Must Pass album.
A Shoe-Seller Speaks
I met Lauren (whose last name we are suppressing here) at a writing workshop in Provincetown almost fifteen years ago. She was shy, funny, brilliant, and very, very talented, and…
Swinging Modern Sounds #26: The Cessation of Miracles
The city of brotherly love is always reinventing itself, coming up with varieties of eccentricity meant to distract from its diet of horrors, for example, a good baseball team.