Culture

Culture

Thursday

Alexander Larman

The golden years of David Bowie

This year marks the anniversaries of two of David Bowie’s most compelling and powerful albums: 1976’s Station to Station and 2016’s Blackstar. Given that they are often – rightly – described as Bowie’s crowning artistic achievements, amid severe competition from his other releases, they also have the intriguing fillip that both were originally released in January: a fortunate time for the musician, who was born on January 8, 1947, even if it was also the month in which he finally departed this Earth. Yet the comparisons between Station to Station and Blackstar, which came out 40 years apart, are far more pervasive – and persuasive – than the serendipity of their release dates.

david bowie

Tuesday

Joseph D'Hippolito 

This Christmas, listen to Mary Did You Know?

A popular and poignant Christmas song, written late in the previous century for a church’s holiday program, incites passionate criticism from those who disagree with the way it phrases its message. Since first being recorded in 1991, “Mary, Did You Know?” has been performed by soloists and groups ranging from Carrie Underwood and Dolly Parton to Pentatonix, CeeLo Greene and Kathleen Battle. The lyrics are a series of questions to Mary, Jesus’s mother, asking whether she knew during his infancy about the profound impact he would make as an adult. Yet that powerful literary device annoys those who believe the song demeans its subject.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Arcade Fire extinguished

Amid the many disappointments and commercial flops the music industry saw this year, perhaps the most egregious was the complete failure of Arcade Fire’s album Pink Elephant. The failure represents not merely the probable end of the band, but also the death of Obama-era rock. Pink Elephant received dismal reviews and didn’t even chart on the Billboard 200. Given that their last album, We, reached #6 as recently as 2022, and their previous LPs, Reflektor and Everything Now, topped the charts, this is a near-unparalleled fall from grace for a once-mighty act. That the married pair who compose the nucleus of the band, Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, announced their separation a few months later was the particularly rancid icing on the already-stale cake.

arcade fire
bob dylan
Isaac Sligh

When Dylan went folk

For all the billions Taylor Swift has made from guiding her career into carefully delineated “eras,” it was Bob Dylan who pioneered this career path. With practically every new album, Dylan traded one persona for another. There’s the folkie hobo of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the pill-popping beat poet of Blonde on Blonde, the cleaned-up country crooner of Nashville Skyline, the Christian revivalist of Slow Train Coming and many, many others. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s The Basement Tapes, a tranche of previously unreleased hoedowns, goof-offs, shaggy-dog stories and barroom ballads that was never meant to be a proper album, but might be the closest we can get to seeing the man behind the mask.