music | The Smart Set

Shots Fired

Pres. Teape — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s feud felt almost like it started with an inextricable bang and ended with a dull murmur. Everyone resides in the aftermath wondering if this is just a mere ceasefire – a pause before the next clash. But – and I’m just going to speak for everyone here — a fortune […]

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A Year that Defined a Lifetime

Blake Maddux — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Any given year of one’s time roaming the earth unavoidably has some effect on who they are as a person. It is perhaps especially so when a person has just turned 14, been forced the previous year to swap daily life with his family for the company of strangers and is on the cusp of […]

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Loneliness, Love, Hope and the DeBarges

Labeja Kodua Okullu — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 11:30:00 +0000

I peeled a tangerine, left it on the side till its wrinkled orange skin, grew crisp and when it touched my lips it stuck there, like an envelope waiting to be sealed sending a message home, I bit down and the tracing paper crispness retreated to a wonderful onslaught of sweetness. I hope you will […]

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My Cousin Lenny

Paula Marantz Cohen — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 12:30:00 +0000

With the debut of the Bradley Cooper movie, Maestro, we were reminded of writer Paula Marantz Cohen’s testimonial to the inimitable Leonard Bernstein some years back. She and Cooper, though a generation apart and from different backgrounds, were both fascinated by Lenny. Here’s her take from 2017. For our third piece in our Oscar series, […]

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August and Everything After

Michael James — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:30:00 +0000

It’s the natural way of things, that some works of art are remembered, some revived, some forgotten. Nirvana has had a revival among Gen Zs, or at least Nirvana T-shirts. Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, far less so. So far, it seems to me, August and Everything After, the 1993 debut album by the […]

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My Sister’s Bookshelf

Chris Orlet — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Throughout the long-gone days of my childhood a thick, worn paperback sat on top of the lid of the tank of our upstairs toilet. Wilt, a biography of Wilt Chamberlain, the Hall of Fame center for the Los Angeles Lakers. My father had checked out the book on the only trip he ever took as […]

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Arthur Alexander and the Art of Listening

Colin Fleming — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Have you ever learned about a set of recordings and thought, “I would like to love those?” There’s an embedded knowledge you pick up on — a kind of reader’s contact high — that the recordings would match well with who you are, who you wish to be, how you’d like to think of yourself. […]

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Curious Listening

Cameron Carr — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

There’s a familiar refrain from an older generation speaking to a younger one: Why isn’t there any good music these days? It’s often posed like that, as a question, and accompanied by an insincere request for the younger to show the older something good. I can expect to hear it every holiday when I hop […]

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“Children (and Geniuses)”

Sarah Day-O'Connell — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Lucy has never been able to make Schroeder love her. But she has a fail-safe method to arouse his passion: impugning his beloved Beethoven. PEANUTS © 1959 Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Dist. By ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. The Peanuts world is a child’s world, inhabited exclusively by children (and a dog). […]

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[See:] Weed [Read:] Control

Gabriela Denise Frank — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

12. Like perfection or success, weeds are ideals, not units of measure. [See: every artist whose work was appreciated after they were dead. 13. Which is to say artists are opportunistic entrepreneurs searching for nooks and crannies to shelter their idea-seeds, knowing the right conditions will spur internal rupture: the hull cracks, the organism unfurls […]

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