The martyring of Elliott Smith
The indie-rock artist’s posthumous status as a “torment saint” is an ill-fitting reputation.
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Yo Zushi
Yo Zushi is a contributing writer for the New Statesman.
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Bob Dylan at 80: His world is mysterious – he says everything and nothing at once
Songwriters like Leonard Cohen articulately present their subjective world-view, but Dylan gives us whole worlds to explore.
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Blutch’s graphic novel Mitchum revels in the power of mythic America
In the world of comics, which owes so much to the stateside masters, the American imagination looms large.
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Why we must remember the reality of Hiroshima
Nuclear weapons are treated, like pandemics, as an abstract political debate until they become a very different reality.
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From Neil Young to Prince: the lure of the “lost” album
Some great lost pop albums are great because they’re lost. But once they’re found, can they retain their power?
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The changing face of the ideal man
The ideal man is an archetype that changes with the times. A new Barbican exhibition asks – what does…
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Prince’s The Beautiful Ones: filmic dreams of a life.
The pop icon’s unfinished autobiography offers glimpses of his childlike imagination.
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Daniel Johnston’s heroic self confidence
The artist, who has died at the age of 58, created music in-spite of his mental health issues, not…
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Why the traditions and hierarchies of Japan are not as strange as they seem
In the late 1980s, a couple of years before the end of the Showa imperial era, a group of…
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