Enter Janelle Monáe
In my last piece about music for Global Comment, I bemoaned the state of contemporary rnb and hiphop, which has few bright spots as far as I'm concerned—a malaise I should hasten to add it shares...
Category: Arts & Literature
How “F” fails
“Education, education, education.” New Labour’s old mantra rings hollow to English teacher Robert Anderson. This venerable warhorse stalks his classroom with the kind of “Dark sarcasm”...
Shonen Knife at Bottom of the Hill – so damn nice
After nearly 20 years in the business, Shonen Knife are still neither bored nor boring. The punk/pop band from Osaka has always been a trio, but there have been quite a few lineup changes over the...
“This Is England ’86″ – a strained parallel universe
Hi guys! If you like our stuff and would like to see us live long and prosper - please donate! Billed as one of the television events of the year, “This Is England '86” feels more like a chance...
Editor’s Diary: theatre directors gone wild at Lyubimovka
When you're doomed to lead a perpetually exciting life, playwriting is not the best way of attaining peace and balance. This may surprise people who only know Russian drama through painfully earnest...
How to hit a woman
You have to do it a way that says - Well, what exactly? It's a speech and a poem, written in free verse, Punctuated thoroughly, Keeping in mind All of the major literary trends of the past century or...
Editor’s Diary: If Moscow doesn’t believe in tears – then in what?
I was clicking my boot heels (autumn has suddenly decided to make its appearance in formerly heat-struck Moscow - with a maniacal vengeance) down the broken pavement, splashing through the puddles,...
Zombies with a French twist: “La Horde”
At the end of “28 Weeks Later”, the screaming British zombies surged through the channel tunnel to upset the Parisians with lack of fashion sense, inadequate language skills (RARGGGHHH) and...
Oil Water Fire
Even the American President is not God. I discover this fact while standing On a nude beach, by a (hopefully) dead volcano. It has taken millions of years to say that certainly, Lava will not...
Before hip-hop died: best of the best in rnb
It's one of the inevitabilities of music criticism that eventually, someone somewhere declares a formerly beloved genre dead. The movement usually goes something like: underground from first...