Tag: The New Yorker

Audible

Will Sia’s New Album Bring Her Out from the Shadows for Good?

I don’t remember if I personally first heard Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ in 2014 or 2015, but whenever it was I was immediately hooked. The album, 1000 Forms of Fear spent significant time in rotation on my music listening device throughout the first half of 2015 and on into the late summer early fall. Now, the recently released follow-up, This is Acting, is picking up right where its predecessor left off.

I love this description of Sia’s sound and style from Carrie Battan’s recent review in The New Yorker:

Which is not to say that Sia’s music feels anonymous. She is one of the most distinctive and acrobatic vocal performers working today, her high-register rasp instantly recognizable. Her songs sit somewhere between balladry and modern dance-pop. Everything is in service of a larger-than-life chorus, each song a vehicle for anthemic catharsis. She is wiser and more world-weary than the girlish Katy Perry, more impassioned than the ice-cool Rihanna, more demure than the slinky Beyoncé. Sia is a balladeer at heart, and she is at her best when she uses her voice as her primary tool.

If you give the new album a spin, check out the first single ‘Alive’, as well as ‘Reaper’, ‘House on Fire’, and ‘Footprints’.

Quoted

Regional

“Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.”

— John Shelton Reed
Locally Notable

The New Yorker Covers NC’s East vs West (Barbecue) Battle

North Carolina’s East versus West battle over barbecue makes this year’s annual food issue of New Yorker. Writer Calvin Trillin doesn’t waste any time setting the line:

For some years, I’m now prepared to admit, I somehow labored under the impression that Rocky Mount is the line of demarcation that separates the two principal schools of North Carolina barbecue. Wrong. The line of demarcation is, roughly, Raleigh, sixty miles west.

Great read and appropriate attribution to long established purveyors of this debate.

Short Cuts

Go Write a Classic

Although he’s certainly not alone in questioning the provenance of Harper Lee’s sequel written before the prequel, Go Set a Watchman, I like Adam Gopnik’s take the most out of all I’ve read so far. It’s tough, but if I had to pick a favorite passage from his piece in The New Yorker, it’s this (emphasis mine):

It is, I suppose, possible that Lee wrote it as we have it, and that her ingenious editor, setting an all-time record for editorial ingenuity, saw in a few paragraphs referring to the trial of a young black man the material for a masterpiece. But it would not be surprising if this novel turns out to be a revised version of an early draft, returned to later, with an eye to writing the “race novel” that elsewhere Harper Lee has mentioned as an ambition.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my all time favorite books (I know, very original), so the paint on the pre-order button barely had time to dry before I was one-clicking Go Set a Watchman into my future life. That future is now here and I don’t care how it might change my opinion of Atticus, I’m excited about checking in on the characters that Harper Lee so masterfully crafted.

Locally Notable

The End Started in North Carolina

Like many other Millenials / GenYers, when I think about the downfall of the music industry, I think of Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and BitTorrent. And certainly those peer-to-peer file sharing innovations played a major role. But dig deeper and there’s a case to be made that the downfall began in our own backyard. In fact, Stephen Witt, in a longform piece for The New Yorker, makes that very case. I especially enjoyed this characterization of early-nineties life in Shelby, North Carolina:

Glover and Dockery soon became friends. They lived in the same town, Shelby, and Glover started giving Dockery a ride to work. They liked the same music. They made the same money. Most important, they were both fascinated by computers, an unusual interest for two working-class Carolinians in the early nineties—the average Shelbyite was more likely to own a hunting rifle than a PC.

In all seriousness, I had no idea that a small chunk of the ridiculous amounts of money I was spending on music in the nineties was coming back to the North Carolina economy. Had I known that there was a literal hit factory in Kings Mountain, NC, I might have tried to spend my summers working there.

Quoted

Food Place

“Once upon a time, food was about where you came from. Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live.”

— John Lanchester