The Occluded Eyes, Sinister Postures And Such Are No Longer Symbols At All – They Are Elements Of Surface Style

As YouTube videos and blog sites continue to query Lady Gaga’s connection to the Illuminati, Jeremy Biles tries to unlock what has become another of the Internet’s many celebrity-gazing diversions.

Lady Gaga is no puppet for the Illuminati. She is a highly charismatic and multitalented figure whose symbol-laden presentations are evidence not of occult involvements, but of a strategic, effective, and very canny self-display centering obsessively on one concern: fame and the mechanisms that produce and support it.

Crawled Over Coconut Logs And Corpses In The Coral Sand

As backyard grills fire up, swimming pools unlock their gates, and families head to the shore to mark the beginning of Summer, here’s a song to mark the real meaning of Memorial Day. From their album Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat, here’s Carbon Leaf with “The War Was in Color”:

The Glimmer Twins Now Seem To Preside Over A Mild Outbreak Of Tickle Fighting

Much has been written this last week of the Rolling Stones remastered release of their 1972′s masterpiece, Exile on Main St. Vanity Fair provides a rundown of the many (and many absurd) tie-in merchandise offerings related to the re-release, along with a slide show of unreleased photographs that French photographer Dominique Tarlé took while living with the band at Villa Nellcôte in the summer of 1971. At the New York Times, Ben Ratliff wonders why the alternate take of “Loving Cup” on the newly released outtakes disc never made it on the album proper.

The Birth of the Wurlitzer From the Spirit of Faust

Mute’s Nina Power examines the evolution of film soundtracks — from an organ designed to drown out the sound of the projector in the silent era to today’s pop playlists and brass crescendos.

Commercial cinema’s desire to block out the machine, to smother the jolts and gaps between movement means that music is often seen as a kind of empathetic patch, a device to pretend that the frames and hyper-technicality are always put in the service of larger, smoother, humanitarian wholes. ‘Mickey-Mousing’, the practice of exactly matching music to image, may be something we associate with animation from half a century ago, but this often comic self-consciousness of the relation between the sound and image is far more radical than the surreptitious manipulation of familiar emotions that much of today’s cinematic music pursues. But mainstream cinema remains one of the few places where sounds and music could potentially afford to be brave.

Click here to read the article.

You Used To Be Able To Hear Elvis Breathe, You Know?

Rachel Brodsky interviews Merle Haggard for PopMatters on the release of his critically acclaimed new album, I Am What I Am. Their conversation covers jazz, country music today, the soulless nature of overproduced sound, Johnny Cash, the Great Depression, US presidents, and health care.

What it is is, I had a long line of hits. We’ll call it a hot 25 years. After that big hit period was over, I started to explore, because it didn’t matter. I wasn’t really trying to follow a commercial line of any kind. I went out in a lot of different directions and some of them weren’t so good but some of them were. I just went and did what I wanted to do and kind of turned into myself, I guess.

Click here to read the interview.

It Is Now One of My Great Regrets That We Didn’t Get to Correspond

From the Utne Reader archives comes a pair of letters — one is a self-described “fan letter” from Walker Percy to Bruce Springsteen in 1989 and the other is from Springsteen to Percy’s widow several years after Percy’s death.

Click here to read the letters.

Click here to read a 1995 interview between Springsteen and Percy’s son, Will, transcribed for DoubleTake magazine.

Teepees of Plastic Cassette Casings Littered the Countertop

From using a bulky tape recorder to record the audio to “Grease” off of HBO during the Carter Administration to reluctantly accepting the isolation of listening to today’s music via headphones, Kirby Fields reflects on the impact that sharing music has had in his life.

Click here to read the story.

Writing Out of a Sense of Confusion, With Humility, Is a Way of Raising The Stakes

Robert Loss interviews Griel Marcus on the publication of the cultural critic’s new book, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison:

People who listen to Bob Dylan’s songs and want to know if this song is about Joan Baez and exactly what incident in his relationship with her is it about—this is just a way of keeping the song away from your own life.

Click here to read the interview.

Tunes with Smoldering Intensity and Sass to Spare

Janiva Magness is a favorite here at McSorley’s, and so it is with great pleasure that we announce the availability of “The Devils Is an Angel Too” — her newest album and her second with Alligator Records. But since this is a blog about good writing, here are some reviews worth reading:

• Jim White at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• John Taylor at Blogcritics.com

The Hero of His Own Box-Size Living Room

In The New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Dawidoff takes an in-depth look at The National as they record their upcoming album, “High Violet.” He explores the band’s growth and success over the last several years as the modern search embodied by their music continues to find a larger audience.

Click here to read the story.