Skip to main content

The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones, edited by Victor Coelho and John Covach – review

An academic study of the Stones is tone-deaf both to the band’s music and their mystique

North American academia is currently all over pop culture. A course on Lady Gaga (Sex, Gender and Identity) offered by the University of Virginia is one example of what’s going on; another is the recent slew of tomes on the Beatles, Dylan and even the Clash emanating from campus corridors. Most shed little light on their already well-covered subjects (Why Dylan Matters by Harvard Latin don Richard F Thomas is an exception), and this self-styled “first major academic study” of the Stones likewise comes up short. The group have had many companions down the years, but surely few as dull.

The dead hand of academic prose is one problem; the assertion that the band’s assorted documentaries are “instructive in terms of demonstrating the central influence of the Stones within the world of motion pictures” is barely readable (and a clear misjudgment).

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2maTn2X
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pop's coolest choreographer Marion Motin: 'I want to touch your soul'

The woman who got Christine and the Queens and Dua Lipa moving talks about her switch to Rambert and partying on tour with Madonna ‘I’m a lazy girl,” says Marion Motin, laughing at herself. The French choreographer is sitting back in her chair, smiling, dressed in a baggy tracksuit and mismatched earrings. She is laid-back, sure. But lazy? I don’t believe her. This is a woman who created all the choreography for Christine and the Queens’ Chaleur Humaine tour in just 10 days. Who got through the notoriously gruelling audition process to dance on tour with Madonna. Who founded her own all-female hip-hop crew, Swaggers, 10 years ago, to show that women can win dance battles too (and they did). Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2JbolC5
Post a Comment
Read more

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

A little rain must fall: the tragic secret of a musical movie masterpiece

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a life-enhancing 60s sensation, is about to enrapture a new generation of filmgoers Voguish director Damien Chazelle’s pick for “the greatest movie ever made” isn’t his masterwork La La Land, or even Citizen Kane. It’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Chazelle claims to have watched this New Wave classic more than 200 times, and regards his own not-quite-Oscar-winning 2016 musical as a crypto-remake of Jacques Demy ’s entirely sung-through phenomenon. It wasn’t love at first sight. Initially, Demy’s film, with its strange operatic style, “threw me for a loop,” says Chazelle. On its debut in 1964, it provoked a similarly perplexed response. Yet it went on to win the Palme d’Or and five Oscar nominations; it pulled in more than a million filmgoers in France alone, and became an enduring obsession for those, like Chazelle, who have fallen under its spell. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/37GLogV
Post a Comment
Read more