Currently viewing the tag: "mixtapes"
Rob Lawson – R. A. Lawson (Ph.D., Vanderbilt, 2003) is a historian of American culture whose new book, Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and African Americans, 1890-1945 is available from LSU Press. His retrospective on the field of blues scholarship, “The First Century of Blues: One Hundred years of Hearing and Interpreting the [...]
We have loved our nation a long time. When we view America as a metaphor, say a woman, the affair starts to take shape through song. Here, interpreting the works of others, is that love affair from 1975 through 2009.
In a highly unlikely feat, Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer Anderson manages to be creepier than Nick Cave in this cover of “Stranger Than Kindness.” That deep, growly, coldly mechanical voice? Yeah, that would be Karin singing, thanks to the vocal manipulation software she favors. Accessible and transparent it’s not—after all, this is the woman who rarely reveals her face, performing in elaborate masks and make-up—but the knotty, twisty darkness of the music possesses a singular charm for those who choose to listen. And don’t bother trying to figure out what the hell is going on in this video, or any of her videos, for that matter; just watch them and hope you don’t have nightmares afterwards.
Song I listened to the summer I turned fifteen: Radiohead’s “High and Dry.” I was studying writing for six weeks at Andover and there was a boy with a guitar singing beneath a tree on the quad. I still remember his name: Jeff Agia. He introduced me that day to Radiohead. What a crush I had. What a silly girl I was. He never knew I existed.
