By any measure, David Bowie was a superstar. He first rose to fame in the nineteen-seventies, a process galvanized by his creation and assumption of the rocker-from-Mars persona Ziggy Stardust. In the following decade came Let’s Dance, on the back of which he sold out stadiums and dominated the still-new MTV. Yet through it all, and indeed up until his death in 2016, he kept at least one foot outside the mainstream. It was in the nineties, after his aesthetically cleansing stint with guitar-rock outfit Tin Machine, that Bowie made use of his stardom to explore his full spectrum of interests, which ranged from the basic to the bizarre, the mundane to the macabre.

This suggests a good deal in common between Bowie and another high-profile David of his generation: David Lynch, long one of the most famous film directors alive. “There are many obvious, surface connections and intersections between Lynch and Bowie,” write film critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. “Both have dabbled in film and music, as well as painting, theatre and performance art. Both are actors — Bowie […]

Some founders rest on their laurels, build industries around themselves like a cocoon, and never escape or outgrow the big achievement that made their name. Some, like Dave Smith — the so-called “father of MIDI,” and one of the most innovative synthesizer pioneers of the last several decades – don’t stop creating for long enough to collect dust. You may never have heard of Smith, but you’ve heard his technology. Before pioneering MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), the digital standard that allows hundreds of electronic instruments to play nicely with each other across computer and software makers, Smith founded Sequential Circuits and built one of the most revered synthesizers ever made, the Prophet-5, invented in 1977 and essential to the sound of the 1980s and beyond.

Smith’s keyboards made appearances on stage, video, and albums throughout the decade. Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes used the Prophet-5 on the band’s first album and “virtually every record I have made since then,” he said in a statement. “Without Dave’s vision and ingenuity,” Rhodes went on, “the sound of the 1980s would have […]

There’s never been a bad time for a Kate Bush revival. Those who lived through the 1980s may always associate her biggest songs with their memories. Fans who only know the 80s by way of Netflix know it by proxy and don’t suffer from nostalgia. But whatever Kate’s big, reverb-soaked drums, big Fairlight synths, big hair, and enormous vocals evoke for audiences now, one thing is certain: Kate Bush’s music is timeless.

Rebecca Nicholson sums up the sentiment in a Guardian post on the renaissance Bush is now enjoying, thanks to the use of her 1985 hit, “Running Up That Hill (Deal With God)” in the new season of Netflix hit series, Stranger Things: “If any song can steel itself against over familiarity, it’s ‘Running Up That Hill.’ Whether it is for the first time or the 500th time, you still hear it now and think, what the hell was that? And then you play it again.”

Not to spoil, but the love of a perfect pop song after innumerable repetitions plays a significant role in the plot of Stranger Things‘ Season 4, […]

“I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” — Ira Gershwin

No one ever gave Ella Fitzgerald faint praise. We could point to cuts from nearly any one of her over 200 albums as evidence for why she is the undisputed “Queen of Jazz,” a title for which she worked hard in her nearly 60-year career. But she’s better known by another name, “The First Lady of Song,” for definitive interpretations of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and, of course, George and Ira Gershwin. Fitzgerald’s recordings of their songs played “an essential role in the broader transformation of the Gershwin’s music from show tunes to American Songbook standards,” writes the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative.

What’s fascinating about that transformation is the way in which Fitzgerald’s renditions of popular songs elevated them to eternal mainstream status by drawing on the rhythmic and melodic resources of jazz, a distinctly Black American music sometimes cast as a threat to the U.S. establishment when Fitzgerald began her career. (We need look no further than the vicious […]

Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night is one of the most popular and easily recognized paintings on earth. If you haven’t seen it person, you’ve probably seen it reproduced on a postcard, a tote bag, or a t-shirt.

Musician Sheldon Clarke was a Starry Night virgin when he started working as a security officer at the Museum of Modern Art:

I knew nothing about Vincent or Starry Night before I started working here. And I remember the first time I stood at that painting…first of all, I was so amazed at the reaction of the public. There was always a group of people just fighting to look at it or take pictures or take selfies and I was just curious to know like, who is this painter and why is everyone so excited to see this piece?

Now, Clarke is sufficiently well versed to hold forth on both the nature of the artwork and circumstances in which the artist created it. He is, with Senior Paintings Conservator […]