Columns and Opinions

As a lifelong lover of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and all things 1960s, I felt right at home the moment I stepped into the city of Berkeley. Our city is the soil on which this movement thrived, and no place wa...

Music has always been a man’s world. Rock music especially has been and remains a boy’s club. Prior to the 1970s, in fact, any woman who tried to enter the rock scene was easily dismissed. Women like Sister...

Elephant Gym Taiwan’s Accidental Response to an Ok Boomer Generation “Are-are you a fan?” asked the wiry 20-something standing next to my father. There were a lot of wiry 20-somethings standing next to ...

These days, Spotify is as much of a social platform as it is a music streaming service. Spotify’s functional purpose as a social sharing platform — heightened by the ability to see friends’ activity — f...

As cringeworthy as it may sound, my favorite band for a little while was Minor Threat. Yes, that Minor Threat; the somewhat preachy hardcore punk band who coined the term “straight edge.” Now, I’m not say...

In the last quarter of the 20th century, the strength of punk-rock’s influence began to wither away. The caustic demeanor embodied by the genre’s forefront lead singers left something to be desired among Am...

While most people became familiar with Daft Punk in 2013 with the release of their Grammy-winning album Random Access Memories, the duo has been around longer than I’ve been alive. For a quick refresher, Thom...

November 22nd marked another full year that has passed since Kanye West dropped one of his greatest pieces of work, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010). With MBDTF, Kanye created an introspective masterpie...

Cooking and music have always been my favorite hobbies. I have loved to cook before I could even reach the counter and picked up my first instrument when I was four year old. When I listened to the iconic recor...

“I told her that I loved her, She told me that she boo’d me, Man flog gnaw that was trippy, they wanted Frank but it was just me lil' ol' Drizzy” You’ve seen all those tweets, sympathizing poor mil...

To make it clear, I’ve gotten high less than 10 times, and during the handful of times I’ve had a bad trip, only music can calm me down and stop me from feeling like I’m sinking into myself. Electric Gues...

Your days in college are a robust experience where you might find your “study session” turns consensual makeout. Given that you are most likely in your late teens or early twenties, making out with music is...

Kanye West has always thought of himself as a prophet of sorts, a conduit destined to receive divine inspiration from God himself.  This belief, or dare I say delusion, that he has been chosen by the creator h...

In 1721, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a series of six concertos, now considered a pillar of the classical music canon. The power and grace with which Bach crafted and melded each melodic line remains unparallele...

Ravi Shankar is a giant in both Indian classical and world music. From a well-respected, professional family in India, he started his career in the arts as a dancer and later moved to intensive training in lear...