By: Erik Davis

Back when rock’s head was swelling, when the attention deficit disorder of a Keith Moon could be mistaken for genius, JOHN BONHAM (1948-80) was largely dismissed as a ham-fisted lout. Now we know that the […]

By: Jason Grote

Editor’s note: This is one of the most popular posts, traffic-wise, ever published on HiLobrow. Click here to see a list of the Top 25 Most Popular posts (as of October 2012); and click here […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“To and fro/Stop and go/That’s what makes the world go round…” Ugh. I pity the fool who sees Disney’s 1963 adaptation of The Sword in the Stone (from which these insipid lyrics are quoted) before […]

By: Tor Aarestad

A key theoretical progenitor of Burning Man.

By: Lucy Sante

Witty and brutal, poetic and blunt.

By: Joe Alterio

PAM GRIER (b. 1949) was the Joan of Arc of late-night UHF-TV, when such a thing still existed. Starting with The Big Dollhouse (1971), a film which absolutely must be seen on drugs to be […]

By: Greg Rowland

MILES DAVIS (1926-91) was the son of a dentist, but visited a primal Oedipal rebellion upon the smug bourgeois sadism of his father’s profession. A dentist, as you know, uses your mouth to cause you […]

By: David Smay

I know it’s a bold claim, but JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940-96) just might be the greatest poet ever to be rejected by the Soviet School for Submariners. (Tragically, there were no survivors of the School for […]

By: Joe Alterio

— Text and illustration by Joe Alterio. To view a gallery of Alterio’s HiLobrow illustrations, click here. *** On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or […]

By: James Parker

HiLobrow.com was recently drugged, blindfolded and pushed through a series of strangely booming rooms en route to an exclusive listening party for the new MORRISSEY (born 1959) album. And still we managed to take notes! […]

By: Greg Rowland

FATS WALLER (1904-43) lives in some impossible space between Paganini, St. Augustine, and James Brown. Tracks like “Handful of Keys” show Fats challenging Art Tatum in sublime stride-piano ostentation. But Waller was also fearlessly upfront […]

By: Peggy Nelson

JIMMY STEWART (1908-97) endlessly reprised Everyman… yet his most iconic films are perfect set pieces of horror. Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, supposedly a Christmas classic, is a vicious exposé of the underpinnings of capitalism. […]

By: Mimi Lipson

Look at the way people describe JOEY RAMONE’s (1951-2001) voice: “bleat,” “snarl,” “hiccup.” Would they say the same about Ronnie Spector? His voice was honest, plangent… it was bliss. He left us too soon, yes, […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Although other rock frontmen had been strange before MARK MOTHERSBAUGH (born 1950), none had been so aggressively strange or so brazenly uncool. Devo was the soundtrack of a life spent stumbling on uneven pavement, knocking […]

By: Jason Grote

Parisian composer ERIK SATIE (1866-1925) was the great-grandaddy of ambient music, the distant progenitor of Musak and smooth jazz. In 1902, Satie and friends introduced what they called “Furniture Music” in a Paris Gallery — […]