Rock music

When the Puerto Rican guitarist Carlos Alomar first met David Bowie, he didn’t think a man could turn a whiter shade of pale. The singer looked emaciated; his complexion teetered on translucency, and weighing only 95 pounds, the only signs of life were a pulse and a mop of orange hair. It was the mid-Seventies, and Bowie was touring America deep in the throes of addiction — the “darkest years” of his life — surviving on a paltry diet of red peppers, cigarettes, milk and cocaine. Yet somehow, through the haze of these drug-fueled years, Bowie underwent a chameleonic reinvention of self and sound — and finally broke America. Bowie had cast a sheen of suspicion over America as an aspiring artist, even admitting to hating it initially.

Even rock and roll can have produced few stranger paths than the one that led a then physically unprepossessing, raspy-voiced African-American named Anna Mae Bullock from her early days as a devoutly Baptist sharecropper’s daughter in Depression-era Tennessee, to her final years as a practicing Buddhist living in a whitewashed mansion overlooking the dove-blue haze of Lake Geneva. That was the life trajectory of the artist known to the world as Tina Turner, who died Wednesday at the age of eighty-three.

The title “America’s Radiohead” has been flung around a lot, either admiringly or despairingly, over the past quarter-century, but the Brooklyn-Cincinnati rock band The National have done more than most to merit the description. Like Radiohead, they specialize in doom-laden, portentous but oddly beautiful songs that seem entirely out of kilter in today’s homogenized musical landscape. As with their Oxford cousins, the band contains two brothers. One is an eminent classical musician, while the other has one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary rock. And they are unashamedly, even defiantly cerebral at a time where intellectualism has been surgically removed from the genre.