Coverwall

Here’s a clue for the clueless generation: If you’re going to worship someone, you ought to know what she looks like. Outside the Mercury Cafe Brewhouse, in Denver, where Alanis Morissette is playing a club gig, a desperate young man approaches the singer in the hopes of buying an extra ticket, unaware that he’s talking to the headliner. It’s a few hours before show time, and already’ a crowd of ticketless fans – a mix of intense young women, bookish lads and preppy couples – has gathered to try to buy scalped tickets to this sold-out show. Just because fans of Morissette connect with her heartfelt, earnest songs – in fact, they seem on the verge of anointing her rock’s Generation X-rated diva – doesn’t mean they could pick their heroine out of a police lineup. They’re not to blame: The hit clip for that ultimate bad-breakup anthem, “You Oughta Know,” is so atmospherically photographed as to make its … [Read more...] about Alanis Morissette: The Adventures of Miss Thing

The window shades are drawn against the late-summer sun, transforming the suite in Manhattan’s genteel old Carlyle Hotel into a lonesome oasis of resignation not unlike the sitting room of a sanitarium. It is perfectly quiet within –— no, there is the faint wheeze of labored breathing. Hunched in a stuffed easy chair at one end of the long living room is a pillowy mound of a man dressed in crisply pressed cotton pajamas and a linen bathrobe, his small feet reposing in scuffed leather slippers, his thin hair neatly combed. He appears to be asleep, his round, pink head pitched forward, chin upon the barrel chest, plump arms laying against his thick waist. If not for his size and the silvery stubble that coats his jaws, he might be one of Maurice Sendak’s man-faced infants, dreaming inside the frames of the illustrator’s pleasantly baroque picture fables. How does one awaken James Cagney, one of the finest and most versatile talents in the annals of cinema? … [Read more...] about James Cagney: Looking Backward

There’s a drink they make at the Soho House in New York that Lorde likes – she had one when she was there last week, but she can’t quite remember what went in it. The Soho House is a big-bucks members-only club with outposts in the world’s fancier cities, and tonight she’s at the Los Angeles chapter, gazing out from a sumptuously upholstered booth at the city lights stretching onward to the Pacific, trying to describe the drink to a waitress. “A sort of fancy-lemonade situation, with a cucumber?” she says. “I don’t know if it’s lemonade.” The waitress furrows her brow. Lorde is in L.A. to drop in on Ellen and perform her transfixingly hushed, sneakily catchy single, “Royals,” which is currently the most popular song in America – it beat out Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” for the Number One spot. Learn How Lorde and Kanye West Became Friends … [Read more...] about Lorde’s Teenage Dream

Daft Punk’s Paris studio sits on an ugly, bustling thoroughfare on the south side of town, near a train station and a hospital, behind a green garage door. To enter, you press a buzzer and present your face to a security camera, at which point the door lurches upward to reveal a lovely cobblestone courtyard and a cluster of beige buildings covered in whorls of ivy. On an early spring afternoon, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter – lifelong Parisians, longtime friends and the compulsively secretive musicians behind the Daft Punk robot masks – are standing on the cobblestones, blinking in the sunshine like they’ve emerged from a deep cave. Which they sort of have. “It’s the first beautiful day we’ve had in weeks,” de Homem-Christo says. Nodding toward a windowless room where he and Bang­alter have spent untold hours hunched over synthesizers, chasing new sounds, he musters a resigned Gallic shrug: “We’re … [Read more...] about Daft Punk: All Hail Our Robot Overlords

Editor’s note: Jazz innovator Ornette Coleman passed away today at age 85. In remembrance, we’ve posted this list of Coleman’s five key albums, which originally ran in the December 13th, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone. He will be missed. The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) Here’s where Coleman scrambles the rules of jazz into vibrant, revolutionary code. Driven by the idea that melodies need not be attached to fixed chords, Coleman creates beautiful, dejected themes (“Lonely Woman”) and daredevil courses (“Congeniality”) that shift shapes and colors constantly. A road map to the future. Still. At the “Golden Circle,” Stockholm Vol. 2 (1965) Several years after the uproar surrounding his groundbreaking double quartet (Free Jazz), Coleman electrifies a Stockholm club with just bass and drums behind him. It’s Coleman un­plugged, tearing through frantic, thrilling and surprisingly hard-swinging solos. Science Fiction … [Read more...] about Ornette Coleman: 5 Essential Albums