When the Band decided to hang it up with one last show in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day 1976, they threw a wake rather than a funeral. Directed by Martin Scorsese right before he dove into Raging Bull, this concert film is, first…
What was Talking Heads’ strategy for their euphoric, propulsive 1984 concert film? “We didn’t want any of the bullshit,” drummer Chris Frantz told Rolling Stone. “We didn’t want the clichés.” Eschewing pandering audience shots and focusing instead on evocative lighting and imaginative set design,…
Impossibly beautiful, incredibly smart, surprisingly candid and fiendishly calculating, the Madonna of Truth or Dare is adept at soaking up every inch of the spotlight. Director Alek Keshishian’s documentary about the singer’s Blond Ambition Tour purports to offer a closer look at the…
You can never discount the importance to documentary filmmaking of being in the right place at the right time, and from June 16-18, 1967, that place was the Monterey County Fairgrounds. With his cameras roaming through the crowd in the hands…
If Metallica had a love of the absurd, you could accuse them of staging their sessions with band therapist Phil Towle as an attempt to make their own This Is Spinal Tap. But when Lars Ulrich starts fielding grievances from his longtime bandmates…
Scores of music industry insiders including the artists Nile Rodgers, Nadine Shah and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, as well as songwriters for stars such as Kylie Minogue, have hit out at an “archaic” streaming model that allows major labels…
Sarah Hart has always had an eye for the covert ways mathematics permeates other fields. As a child, she was struck by the ubiquity of the number 3 in her fairy tales. Hart’s mother, a math teacher, encouraged her pattern-seeking,…
Taylor Swift is telling me a story, and when Taylor Swift tells you a story, you listen, because you know it’s going to be good—not only because she’s had an extraordinary life, but because she’s an extraordinary storyteller. This one…
By 1900 industrial processes had begun to reshape all lives and all culture. Popular music was about to be transformed. Stephen Foster in the mid-1800s was the first writer of songs that were recognizably pop, tunes that would later be…
This article appears in the November 13/20, 2023 issue, with the headline “Louis Armstrong’s Last Word.”“Iget this question all the time,” Ricky Riccardi admitted. The director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong Center looked at me carefully. “Just last…