Updated 12/13/2025

I was asked by my old Beatles buddy, Tim Riley, to contribute something about Motown to his guest-edited special issue of American Music Perspectives , a scholarly journal. What I produced, which is accessible here , isn't overly scholarly; in fact, it might even strike you as readable. Focusing on the 1971 box set The Motown Story: The First Decade , which I've always been drawn to as an artifact, I realized that the story the box tells is also and inseparably the story of D

My review of Errol Morris's new Netflix documentary about Manson, mayhem, and major paranoia.

The new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown , is a (surprisingly) compelling and convincing portrait of the artist as a young carnivore.

Greil Marcus's newest, and probably last, book about Dylan is his best in many years. This is why I thought so.

The Revolver Super Deluxe Box set enables us to hear the album as we always have, but differently. Here's what I wrote about it.

Speaking of Beatles, here's a conversation I had with author Tim Riley (Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary) late last year about the Get...

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), which is coming out from The Criterion Collection, was an altogether not-bad movie, as I recall, whose...

Red-Color News Soldier is a book of text and photographs by Li Zhensheng, who between 1966 and 1980, throughout Mao's Cultural...

At Critics at Large: My piece on the bilious, brilliant books of the Brown Buffalo, Oscar Zeta Acosta.

At Critics at Large: my review of Ryan H. Walsh’s Astral Weeks, concerning Van Morrison, the Lyman cult, and everything weird and...