The arts are not "useful"; they are developmental, and essential to civilisation. Funding the arts is a way of funding civilisation, beyond drab market forces.
It feels endless and anarchic, a riposte to the algorithmically determined monoculture behind everything from the Spotify Recommended section to ghost kitchen-reheated delivery food. Bandcamp, and the half-billion dollars it has paid to artists since its inception in 2008, is real.
Bandcamp is great. It’s refreshing to find a company like this that really does care about artists and music. I’ve built up quite a collection of Bandcamp purchases now.
As co-author (with Phil Smart) of Van der Graaf Generator – The Book in 2005, I was able to interview several of the band’s famous admirers. One of them was Marc Almond, the singer of Soft Cell and a successful solo artist, who had covered a few of Van der Graaf vocalist-songwriter Peter Hammill...
The Pop iconoclast obsessively documented his life, but he also lied constantly, almost recreationally.
The main concern of black people right now isn’t whether they’re standing three or six feet apart, but whether their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers will be murdered by cops.
Over the course of three solo albums on the superlative Clay Pipe label, Jon Brooks has created music with a very distinct and affecting sense of place. The first, 2012’s Shapwick, took inspiration from the eerie calmness of a night-time detour through this sleepy Somerset village; while follow-up...
This virus does not respect Johnson’s delusions of national character, says Fintan O’Toole, columnist with the Irish Times
Great stuff.
...the songs of John Prine feel genuinely radical in their reverence of the specific, the local, the small. They suggest that in amongst the unexamined nuts and bolts and wood chip and whiskey of so-called ordinary working lives you can find the big stuff—hope, love—life even—in all their corniness, and ask us to go on living, in spite of ourselves.