Ars Est Mendacium

In the cold gray hush that sometimes greets a person in middle age, when the world’s edges seem less defined and the wars more internal, there are albums that don’t ask for your attention; they seize it.  Run the Jewels 3  doesn’t arrive politely. It knocks the door off the hinges and walks through with bloodied boots. And still, in its most furious moments, it sounds like a prayer. Not the kind whispered in pews. A street prayer, born of grief and survival, shouted into the wind and punctuated with laughter. You don’t listen to RTJ3 for escape. You listen to it to confront the moment when escapism no longer works. When the truth presses in through every screen, the only real option left is defiance. This album was released on Christmas Eve, 2016. That’s no accident. By the time Killer Mike and El-P handed us this record, the world had already shifted. Trump wasn’t yet inaugurated, but the storm was clearly visible, and in 2025 the albums seem even more essential. RTJ3 is less...

When I think back to Detroit in the early eighties, the nights are always longer in memory than they were in life. The city was both burning and rebuilding, still carrying the ghosts of industry and Motown but already listening for what might come next. The radio was a lifeline then, not just background noise. And if you were lucky enough to find WJLB after dark, you entered the strange, spellbound orbit of the Electrifying Mojo. He was unlike any other DJ, not a salesman, not a hype man, but a curator of the unexpected. He might put Prince next to Kraftwerk, Parliament next to Yellow Magic Orchestra, and make you believe they were all having the same conversation. One night, he dropped the needle, or rather, pressed play, on something I had never heard before, and in truth, still haven’t heard again in quite the same way. It was slow, impossibly slow. A pulse, a few suspended chords, and then space, not the silence of absence, but the space of something being built with deliberate pat...

There's a moment, maybe you remember yours, when music stops being background noise and starts feeling like a mirror. It doesn't happen with the songs that fill school dances or the albums your older cousin swears changed his life. It happens quietly, almost inconveniently. A record finds you, or you find it, and instead of offering escape, it provides exposure. You don't nod along. You pause. You don't feel bigger. You feel seen. Not triumphantly. Uneasily. That's when music becomes something else entirely. It doesn't just fill silence; it replaces it with something heavier. Before you hear your first "real" album, the kind that doesn't just take up space but unsettles it, you think music has a job: to excite, to soothe, maybe to make you feel cool. At fourteen, that was my world. Music blasted from passing cars, rattled locker doors, and soundtracked weekends. It was adrenaline and swagger, drums to bang your head to, lyrics to scribble in notebo...

They were supposed to be over. Twice. Once when Gabriel left, once again when Hackett followed. But there they were in 1982, tight, relentless, and smiling. Not proving anything. Just playing like they belonged there.  Three Sides Live , Genesis’s hybrid concert film and live album, doesn’t just document a band on tour; it captures the strange alchemy of artistic rebirth and a pivotal moment in the history of one of the most influential bands to ever play. Most bands don’t survive the departure of their mythmaker. Genesis lost two: Peter Gabriel, their masked, fox-headed bard, and Steve Hackett, their angular, pastoral architect. The late ’70s should have buried them. Instead, they turned inward, writing not with grand design but raw necessity. The result wasn’t just continuity. It was a mutation. A quiet, self-determined kind of resurrection. Genesis didn’t just pivot, they split their skin. Released in June 1982,  Three Sides Live  straddled two worlds. The double LP co...