With Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull on tour in 2023, we turn to an archive piece from their Golden Anniversary tour, in which we pointed out that the Voice never much liked the lads from England. Is it time to give the old sod on the park bench a break?
Originally published September 10, 2018
“Suicide, especially one as violent as Cobain's, is the loudest possible invocation of silence; it's a perfectly clear way of turning your life into a mystery.”
Originally published April 19, 1994
Twisted tales of surviving the holiday season from Michael Musto, Ann Powers, Lynn Yaeger, Elizabeth Zimmer, and a half dozen other Voice contributors
Originally published December 26, 1995
He mocks liberals who believe a funny conservative is dangerous, and yet this roly-poly marshmallow, who once shied away from television because of his girth, wants the world to know he stings
Originally published December 29, 1991
“Last Wednesday, an enormous mob surged out of control, menaced citizens, pushed through police lines onto city hall steps, and blocked traffic on Broadway and the Brooklyn Bridge. But uniformed cops stood by, smiling — for the marauders were fellow cops, thousands of them”
Originally published September 29, 1992
“How did the energetic upstart who single-handedly launched his own youth subculture in the '80s turn into the messed-up sociopath and accused murderer of today? How did the twisted creativity of the original club-kid scene tip over into outright evil?”
Originally published December 17, 1996
“Just an ordinary bloke with penchant for glitzy cross-dressing and rumpled ironies, Izzard is himself a contradiction in comic terms.”
Originally published October 1, 1996
“These people act like we drink a gallon of blood and hang upside down from crucifixes before we go onstage,” Rob Halford says. “We’re performers, have been for two decades. We do the show and we wear the costumes our audience expect us to.”
Originally published September 4, 1990
“Ostensibly about a Gullah family whose younger generation are making plans to leave their ancestral islands for mainland U.S.A. at the crest of the 20th century, 'Daughters of the Dust' is also an interrogation of Black America's cleft soul, split between the quest for modernity and a hunger for the replenishment of roots.”
Originally published June 25, 1991
“Just as Miami remade itself to better resemble its image in Miami Vice, L.A. may rise eventually to Heat's desolate, sandblasted impersonality.”
Originally published December 26, 1995