douglaswolk:

It’s safe to say that at some point My Bloody Valentine simply became a genre.

Terrific look at how many bands were influenced by Loveless.

Douglas Wolk’s interesting writeup of Lynda Barry’s Picture This and Chris Ware’s new ACME Novelty book:

One way of thinking about drawing style in comics is to reduce it to a single axis: the continuum of styles between “raw” drawing and “cooked” drawing. Those terms are borrowed from Robert Lowell, who, in turn, borrowed them from anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and used them in 1960 to describe two competing schools of American poetry. In comics, it’s not a competition—art-comics are a little too collegial for that. But it’s easy to reframe Lowell’s ideas to describe what cartoonists do. Raw drawing is (or presents itself as) the barely mediated expression of the artist’s impulses: it eschews rules and straight-edges, it flows directly out of the brush, it bubbles over with life. Cooked drawing originates in the conscious mind: it’s precise and rigorous, with a firm distinction between “correct” and “incorrect” execution, and it’s best suited to carefully planned narratives.

Lowell used the terms in his acceptance speech for the 1960 National Book Award. More on that.

BTW, “The Raw and the Cooked” is both the English translation of a Levi-Straus book title and a Fine Young Cannibals album. Thank you, Wikipedia.

If you go by oldies radio playlists and movie soundtracks, it’s easy to think that the golden age of American soul music — let’s arbitrarily call it 1965-1975 — was a lot more limited than it actually was….In fact, that era was an incredible, sustained period of innovation, competition and artistic one-upmanship.