Ross Scarano

1 week ago | ssense.com | Brian Karlsson |Ross Scarano |Amy Taubin |Patrick Dahl

Last summer, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a restoration of No Fear No Die, an early and seldom-screened noir from the French iconoclast Claire Denis. It’s a spare tale of cockfighting and colonialism set at a tawdry truck stop-slash-nightclub outside Paris. J. Hoberman, that living legend of film criticism, celebrated the release for the “Rewind” column at the New York Times.

3 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Ross Scarano

His 12th solo album, "Golliwog," arrives at a peak in his career as a verbally inventive, independent hip-hop artist. It's also full of horror stories. When Billy Woods was a child, he was afraid of lots of things. Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Zimbabwe, where his father was a member of Robert Mugabe's revolutionary government, the boy who would grow into one of his generation's beloved underground rappers was frightened by a storage room under the stairs in his family's house.

Jan 3, 2025 | letterboxd.com | Ross Scarano

All ★★★★ ★★ ★★★½ ★★★½ More ★★★★ Do the ruins of this world belong to everyone or to no one? (And as all passes into decay, "ruins" encompasses everything under the sun.) He sees the profiles of the dead all over the place, in vases and train cars, and he owes them, each and every one, for pillaging the ghosts of this country that is not his. Kiss your fingers twice, touch your breast, and hope to be peaceful when you're gone and buried. ★★ After it was over I read the Times obit for Roy Cohn...

Nov 26, 2024 | billboard.com | Ross Scarano

Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars: In 2017, Ed Sheeran and Kendrick Lamar Showed How ‘Monoculture’ Was RelativeIn this sidebar to our Greatest Pop Stars by Year article series, we look at how the contrast between Ed Sheeran's and Kendrick Lamar's 2017 stardom showed how diffuse pop culture had become.

Nov 26, 2024 | yahoo.com | Ross Scarano

(In 2018, the Billboard staff released a list project of its choices for the Greatest Pop Star of every year, going back to 1981. Read our entry below on why Usher was our Greatest Pop Star of 2004 — with our ’04 Honorable Mention runner-ups, Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year pop stars at the bottom — and find the rest of our picks for every year up to present day here.)The label was unsatisfied. The Nov.