Arts & Culture

BROMER | Learning to Fall in Love with the Lyrics

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I have a confession: I don’t often go out of my way to listen to lyrics. I’m well-acquainted with most of the tunes you might find yourself cranking up a car radio — dad jamz, ‘90s hip hop, any song to which your favorite movie characters once lip-synced. Put me in one of those bar mitzvah recording booths and I will bare my soul to the tune of any MIDI-saturated Celine Dion instrumental. If social interaction requires it, I will belt out some Smash Mouth, or whatever, though I’ll probably end up like this dude from a Clickhole Classic™, boldly making indecipherable noises to a song I heard once at a kid’s birthday party. But when it comes to my day-to-day interaction with music, rarely, if ever, will I go out of my way to hear exactly what it is a songwriter is saying.

Football

MEISEL | Understanding the Superbowl

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On Sunday Jan. 1991, 10 days before the commencement of Desert Storm — which kicked off with our noble nation dropping 88,500 tons worth of bombs onto the nation of Iraq — Whitney Houston stepped out to the microphone in a red, white and blue tracksuit. With a powerful voice trained in nightclubs and gospel choirs and accompanied by the Florida Orchestra, she then performed one of the best and most popular renditions of the Star Spangled Banner in U.S. history. It became a hit, actually charting at 20 on the Billboard Top 100. After Sept.