Get Access to Print and Digital for $23.99 per year.
Subscribe for Full Access

Music critics

Solo Act

by Thomas Chatterton Williams,

A decade ago, when my fiancée and I were living in a semilegal converted nylon factory in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and I’d just published my first book—a coming-of-age memoir into which…

Guerrillas in the Mix

Translated by Jesse Barron,

From comments posted on YouTube about a rap video released in September by the Colombian guerrilla group FARC. The song describes their upcoming peace talks in Cuba and Norway with…

Rockwell around the clock

by James Wolcott,

Awaiting the great synthesis of rock and classical music

Ordinary critics

by Benjamin DeMott,

Immanuel Kant and the Talking Heads

Critics criticized

by Ned Rorem,

Absolutely free

by Margot Hentoff,

Welcome stranger!

by Harper’s Staff,

The jazz cult

by Ernest Borneman,

II. War among the critics

If literary critics wrote like music critics

by Ernest Augustus Boyd,

Opus four, number seven

by Robert Palfrey Utter,

Indulgent

by Harper’s Staff,

Debug