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...

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...

Is Call of the Wild truly feral? Or merely fascist?

They've always been with us

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...

Although other rock frontmen had been strange before MARK MOTHERSBAUGH (born 1950), none had been so aggressively strange or so brazenly uncool. Devo was...

A year ago this month, I identified a generational cohort of Americans and Western Europeans: the New Gods. Born between 1914 and 1923, the...

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...