Finding Meaning in the Music of the Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys
I was born near the water but when I think of the sea it is the fantastical imagery of The Beach Boys' early records, with their dreamy melodies and their lyrics about love, loss, cars, and surfing, that I dwell upon. The music of Brian Wilson, the band’s most important creative force, is a semi-mythologised eulogy ...
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Pop Culture Reviews
In between producing my first feature length documentary and creating content for The Artist in American History podcast series I like to look at new and old films, music, art, and literature. In these reviews and retrospectives, I look at the themes and ideas from a variety of perspectives. I cannot ...
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The Interview – Review (It’s all in the Context)
Circumstances and context can make even the most asinine, rote film much more important than the sum of its parts. That's not to say that one should not try to separate art from the larger narrative, that one should not try to understand and appreciate it purely on its own terms, but to place a work in its true context, ...
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Pink Floyd – Endless Monotony (Endless River Review)
Pink Floyd’s The Endless River is not a meaningful album. Stripped of almost any attempt to engage lyrically, the record falls back upon a series of intriguing but largely uninteresting instrumental tracks which never feel like they justify the decision to keep voices off of the album. That isn’t to say that The ...
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Tracy Chapman – Debut Album (1988) Track by Track Review
Considering just how vapid and empty so much of the popular music produced during the eighties actually was, Tracy Chapman’s eponymous album from 1988 is something of a revelation. Utterly timeless in its production, it captured, over the course of its eleven tracks, Chapman’s deep sympathy for the poor and her ...
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Transformers: Age of Extinction – Textbook Machismo
Transformers 4 drips with misogyny – it practically oozes from the movie’s every pore. It is an utterly overpowering presence in this film, swamping even the titular transforming robots who serve as the canvas upon which direct Michael Bay paints his deeply, deeply sexist colours. To be clear, the issue isn’t ...
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Robocop Under the Microscope – Critical Review
1987's Robocop was a savage commentary upon the state of western civilisation. In the wake of Happy Days, the Beach Boys's resurgence and, of course, Reagan and Thatcher, the power of conservatism loomed large but just as revolutions are prone to breed their own counterrevolutions, the status quo, particularly that type ...
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