Category: Uncategorized
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The Age of Jazz Queens
Jazz was partly conceived in speakeasies and jazz parlors. Known as the ‘devil’s music,’ it’s always been a kind of underground artform in some quarters. In Tales of the Jazz Azz, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote tantalizing tales of 1920s flapper girls dancing in seedy 18th Amendment clubs and pubs. Of course, Jazz also has a…
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The Artful Renegades: Protest Politics and the Rambunctious Rebellious Musicology of Bob Dylan and Bruce ‘the Boss’ Springsteen
Rebels with a Cause There are those that say there’s nothing worse than rebellion for rebellion’s sake. But music’s premier outspoken troubadours, Bob Dylan and Bruce “the Boss” Springsteen (King of the Rustbelt), are the kind of recalcitrant troublemakers that tend to hitch their wagons to social causes that actually mean something. That is, they’re…
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Cult Fiction: The Kool Aid Kings
Cultivating Cults In this article Sleuth Hound takes a deep dive into the diabolical world of cults. Why do people join cults? What kind of people are drawn to them? Are we all vulnerable to the allure of the Kool Aid Kings? If so, can we safeguard ourselves and others from the pull of these…
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Strange Fruit and the Land of the Delta Blues: A Deep Dive into the History of Jazz and Blues Music
Deep Blue Dive In this article Sleuth Hound takes a deep dive into the archives of history to bring you an overview of some of the beautiful, nuanced and rich stories underscoring the emergence of jazz and blues music particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In many instances these stories are inextricably linked to…
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Tarantino Aesthetic: The Burgeoning Rise of Ultraviolent Cinema
“Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.”― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange From Sam Peckinpah to Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone, audiences’ thirst for ultraviolent content is palpable. Cinemagoers flock to theatres in search of cheap violent thrills. While these filmmakers’ works are unequivocally intoxicating,…
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Headstones or Handcuffs?
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, Rage, Rage against the Dying of the Light – Dylan Thomas Dylan Thomas’ famous poem “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” was written as an ode or perhaps an agonizingly poignant requiem for his dying father. While the poem was specifically about the demise of…
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Bad Men and “Mad” Women
The concept of “madness” has long fascinated famous writers, lyricists and poets. It was Sylvia Plath who wrote “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” an ode to every woman who has ever found herself in a situation of unrequited love. Of course, a more visceral representation of a person’s descent into “molten madness” can be seen in…
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Power, Privilege and Perversion
Men of Power and the Institutions that Protect Them In defense of Monica Lewinsky The year was 1998 and Capitol Hill was abuzz with the cacophonous sound of the rumor mill in what would be dubbed by some “Lewinsky-gate,” “Monica-gate,” and “Sex-gate.” It was a scandal that would set tongues wagging not only across the…
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Mother Fracker!
Behind the Shale Veil Peering out across the Bakken Oil Fields, an area that stretches the vastness of Montana, North Dakota, and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, it is not immediately obvious that here lay the resting places of countless souls lost to the bloodied fracking industry. These are the Killing Fields. Sixty…
Sleuth Hound 