Back in the New York Groove
plus a playlist of Matthew Sweet's greatest hits, Franz Kafka: TikTok star, new music from Wednesday, Jac Jemc on her new novel, Mark Eitzel's off-Broadway musical, and more
Largehearted Boy is once again sharing new author playlists and daily book & music news. The site’s second redesign in 21 years is hopefully cleaner and more user-friendly (especially for mobile users). I will be tweaking it further, please feel free to be in touch with any issues. The look has changed, but the heart still bleeds ink and beats.
Largehearted Likes
Matthew Sweet’s greatest hits, an annotated playlist from I Will Dare (and all of Jodi Chromey’s “greatest hits according to me” collections)
Reality Check: The boom — or glut — in streaming documentaries has sparked a reckoning among filmmakers and their subjects.
A genre that had always existed in part to inform and enlighten was now primarily a commercial product. That meant documentarians had more work, which was nice, but the projects often came with shorter deadlines and notes from streamers pushing directors to juice opening sequences with a little extra tension, as if these were spy thrillers that could be punched up rather than representations of real life. A decade after journalism suffered through its own period of disruption, its onscreen cousin entered a kind of clickbait era of its own: Make it fast, see what works, repeat.The Surprising Greatness of Jimmy Carter
A conversation with Carter’s biographers Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird.
U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy on her favorite albums (and liner notes)
Like many musicians her age or older, she grew up pouring over liner notes, and that physical reference-point is one reason why her Baker’s Dozen features so many of those current collaborators. “This exists for most records that are made, and that’s why I think liner notes are important,”, she says. “Within a record is this endless discography of people who worked on it, and I think that’s a really cool way to find new music”.Aquarium Drunkard’s interview with Radiohead’s Philip Selway
Atoms for Peace’s Amok album reconsidered after 10 years
The whole thing sounded futuristic, exciting, experimental. But in some ways, even more so than the weirdness of a RHCP x Radiohead crossover event, the long process of creating Amok overshadowed the album itself, or set it up to be… not quite as mind-blowing as its premise suggested.Untangling the Knotty Politics Behind Reggaeton’s Rise in Spain
The genre’s continuous rise in Spain has raised urgent questions about cultural ownership, colonialism, and race as a result of centuries-old social hierarchies between Europe and Latin America. While some fans and industry stakeholders consider this phenomenon a valuable cultural exchange and a natural outcome of the genre’s global ascent, reggaeton’s rise in Spain has also frustrated many Black and brown Latin Americans, especially Caribbean ones. The issue is layered: There is concern about Spanish artists profiting off the music of Afro-diasporic cultures once colonized by Spain, sometimes even eclipsing the visibility of those who founded the movement.
Largehearted Links
Owen Pallett discussed their five favorite tracks from their discography
Never let it be said that Owen Pallett doesn’t like a challenge. When asked to choose the five songs from their catalogue that they are most proud of, one theme that comes through is that sometimes the hardest, weirdest work turns out to be the most rewarding.Aquarium Drunkard’s interview with Jason Stern and Don Fleming of the Lou Reed Archive.
Charif Shanahan on writing poetry
All of my poems typically come from the same place: the ruminations of my day-to-day life, the unanswerable questions I’m pondering. Usually, when the language of the poem comes out of me, writing a poem is the furthest thing from my mind. It’s not conscious making, at first; it’s thinking. I just let the language pour out into my Notes app or a Word document, then throw something like a title, but not a title, at the top. It’s more like a summary note. An entrance or a door back into the language, in time.Asale Angel-Ajani’s recommended novels about immigrant mothers who defy societal expectations
“The End of the English Major,” an essay by Nathan Heller
The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight.Read an excerpt from Priya Guns’s debut novel Your Driver Is Waiting
If you’re going to be a driver, you’d better hide at least one weapon in your car. Especially if you’re a driver that looks like me. Not because I’m dashing or handsome, but because I am a woman, of course. I think it has something to do with tits even though not all of us have them. I sort of do, but that’s beside the point.
Last Week’s LHB Feature Posts
Asale Angel-Ajani’s Playlist for Her Novel “A Country You Can Leave”
Colin Winnette’s Playlist for His Novel “Users”
Erin Keane’s Playlist for Her Memoir “Runaway”
Luiz Schwarcz’s Playlist for His Memoir “The Absent Moon”
Nazlı Koca’s Playlist for Her Novel “The Applicant”
Nic Brown’s Playlist for His Memoir “Bang Bang Crash”
Tara Ison’s Playlist for Her Novel “At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf”