Thanks to a recent Stephen Colbert segment, I went back and found an interesting item that appeared in The New York Times earlier this year. It’s one of the more hopeful stories I’ve seen in a while: The city council in a small Appalachian coal town in the hollers of eastern Kentucky has voted to ban…
I once saw misogyny under every rock. I was in my early thirties and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore had offhandedly described a new movement of all-female punk bands — L7, Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill — as “foxcore.” I wrote a scathing editor’s note for Option in response to it, suggesting he was being misogynistic. Boy,…
“Is there a problem, officer?” “Damn straight, it’s called race.” — Mos Def, “Mr. Nigga” I can’t shake my despair over the Trayvon Martin verdict. It’s not that I was surprised by it. After all, shootings and killings of young black men happen all the time in America, and cases similar to the Trayvon Martin…
Over the past three days, I’ve been asked numerous times how I feel, as a former Rolling Stone editor, about the magazine’s latest cover featuring Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. My first thought upon seeing the image — with the cover line, “THE BOMBER: How a popular, promising student was failed by his family, fell into radical Islam…
Mark Segal Kemp (born April 10, 1960, Asheboro, North Carolina) is an American music journalist and author. A graduate of East Carolina University, he has served as music editor of Rolling Stone and vice president of music editorial for MTV Networks. In 1997 he received a Grammy nomination for his liner notes to the CD…