The Experimental Movement That Created The Beatles’ Weirdest Song, “Revolution 9”

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As of this writ­ing, the Bea­t­les’ “Rev­o­lu­tion 9″ has more than 13,800,000 plays on Spo­ti­fy. This has no doubt gen­er­at­ed decent rev­enue, even giv­en the plat­for­m’s oft-lament­ed pay­out rates. But com­pare that num­ber to the more than half-a-bil­lion streams of “Black­bird,” also on the Bea­t­les’ self-titled 1968 “white album,” and you get an idea…

Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and 1,000 Musicians Protest AI with a New Silent Album

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The good news is that an album has just been released by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Goril­laz, The Clash, Tori Amos, Hans Zim­mer, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiro­quai, and Yusuf (pre­vi­ous­ly known as Cat Stevens), Bil­ly Ocean, and many oth­er musi­cians besides, most of them British. The bad news is that it…

Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” (1969)

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In 1969, Ella Fitzger­ald released Sun­shine of Your Love, a live album record­ed at the Venet­ian Room in The Fair­mont San Fran­cis­co. Record­ed by music pro­duc­er Nor­man Granz, the album fea­tured con­tem­po­rary pop songs that show­cased Fitzger­ald’s abil­i­ty to tran­scend jazz stan­dards. Take, for exam­ple, a ver­sion of the Bea­t­les’ “Hey Jude” and…

What Makes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas One of the Most Fascinating Paintings in Art History

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Diego Velázquez paint­ed Las Meni­nas almost 370 years ago, and it’s been under scruti­ny ever since. If the pub­lic’s appetite to know more about it has dimin­ished over time, that cer­tain­ly isn’t reflect­ed in the view count of the analy­sis from YouTube chan­nel Rab­bit Hole above, which as of this writ­ing has crossed…

When William Faulkner Set the World Record for Writing the Longest Sentence in Literature: Read the 1,288-Word Sentence from Absalom, Absalom!

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Image by Carl Van Vecht­en, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“How did Faulkn­er pull it off?” is a ques­tion many a fledg­ling writer has asked them­selves while strug­gling through a peri­od of appren­tice­ship like that nov­el­ist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkn­er.” Barth “reorches­trat­ed” his lit­er­ary heroes, he says, “in search of…