The October 20 cover of
The New Yorker recasts the masked ball scene from the classic silent film
The Phantom of the Opera as a scene from Wall Street. The phantom, costumed as Death, looms over terrified brokers as the market plummets. You know the gory details: worst financial crisis since The Depression, exploding unemployment, people losing their homes and retirement income. The economic bust has already affected musicians and threatens to further change a musical landscape that has been under assault in recent years.
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Tags: The state of music by Jon O
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I usually don’t write about politics, but Richard Scheinin wrote an article in today’s San Jose Mercury News that brings together music and politics — specifically, the music picks of Barack Obama and John McCain — and the opportunity proved too tempting to pass up. Looking at the “Top 10″ lists the two senators compiled for Blender Magazine, Scheinin makes the interesting point that the choice of music reveals something important about each candidate. [Read more →]
When it comes to artistic creativity, we tend to equate genius with youth. Popular music, with its emphasis on young artists in their teens and twenties, reinforces this attitude. But actually it’s far from true. So says economist David Galenson of the University of Chicago, who examined our assumptions about creativity in his study, “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” 
In Japanese, the sound for death is the same as the sound for the number four: shi. Continuing my celebration of the Halloween season, here are four different takes by Tori Amos on the subject of death. 
