Armin Rosen

The decay of the Six Flags America theme park outside Washington, DC, is a painful reminder that America itself may only be a passing moment on the billion-year scale of geologic time. Superman: Ride of Steel is now in danger of being melted into industrial sludge, perhaps to be repurposed as the … Continue Reading

In the autumn glare reflecting off the harsh glass façade of the Minneapolis public library, temporary fencing encloses a once-welcoming arc of wooden planters and benches. During business hours there is an edgy assortment of dazed, hunched-over, or mumbling manifestations of Minnesota’s social … Continue Reading

Buddy Guy, born in a small town on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi river on July 30th, 1936, is America’s last surviving human embodiment of the blues. If, in 2025, you are a director making a 1930s period horror film about a young delta sharecropper whose musical ability is wondrous enough … Continue Reading

“Saloons, mud, no law, sanitation, guns, and other problems led the town’s concerned citizens to draw up in July 1875 the incorporation papers,” per a 1989 document entitled “Our Town — How it Began,” which I find tucked inside one of the neatly organized manilla folders in a filing cabinet in the … Continue Reading

Readers concerned that America is spiraling into a permanently balkanized hellscape might find comfort in the Top 10 of the Billboard country chart. The cold robotic strum of the repeating acoustic guitar phrase in Morgan Wallen’s “Lies Lies Lies” competes with the icy hook in Dasha’s “Austin” for … Continue Reading

As great musicians approach and then surpass their 30s, they reach an event horizon where the lie of youth can no longer be plausibly maintained. It often happens rapidly, and even drugs start to do more harm than good. Then what? A couple possibilities remain for artists on the brink of creative … Continue Reading

Lizzy Grant, known to the weeping masses as Lana Del Rey, takes the first part of her stage name from Lana Turner, a 1940s pinup who was married eight times and played an alcoholic small-time actress made overnight sensation in the pulp classic The Bad and the Beautiful. Turner never had the chance … Continue Reading

Ariel Pink is a test that America might never pass. Between the late 90s and not so long ago, Ariel Marcus Rosenberg, aka Ariel Pink, was the creative and commercial edge of true psychedelic freakdom, playing every instrument on a series of swampy self-released astonishments before penning several … Continue Reading

The kids were mostly asleep when the funniest thing ever to happen on network television aired around midnight on January 12th, 1979. It would be decades before children had portable digital slot machines to unnaturally stretch out their days, and there were no DVRs either, meaning that the moment … Continue Reading

We’ve lived with the Kentucky genius-freak Will Oldham long enough for us to take him for granted, and for his best work to disappear. Johnny Cash covered the title track from I See A Darkness, the bleakest of the American bummer-folk masterpieces that darkened the late 90s, an era when our country … Continue Reading

Hip-hop was born in urban parks and apartment projects, but there’s also a pastoral tradition in rap that long predates Kanye West’s flight to Wyoming. Earl Sweatshirt’s mother shipped him off to reform school on a remote Pacific island at a pivotal early point in the Odd Future boy genius’s … Continue Reading

Green and black do not belong together, and the combination of the two brings almost nothing to mind but the queasy specter of sickness and death. It’s the color scheme of the awful alternate jerseys worn by the New York Jets, who are losers; gold cross-bars prudently separate the Jamaican flag’s … Continue Reading