BGV Up

Bobby Womack's The Poet -- one of the most perfect albums I know -- is pop music for grown-ups. As such, it feels quite distant from 2018; the cultural space of pop feels, to me, largely conceived of at present as a place of youthful concerns, even if the formerly young continue to reserve their right to be the ones parsing it for broader cultural meaning. (This dynamic strikes me as weird, to put my point as generously as I can.) But popular music, like God, is bigger than our need to restrict it; there is no theme too big for it, no space within which it does not belong. Womack, the author of several timeless pop, rock, and soul tunes (he co-wrote "It's All Over Now," a hit for the Rolli n g Sto n es; he wrote "Breezi n '," first recorded by Gabor Szabo i n '71 a n d do n e agai n by George Be n so n i n '76), had, his whole life, bee n writi n g pop music as if its fu nc tio n were to accompa n y grow n me n a n d wome n o n the...

Gary Numan's glory run was astonishing: eight albums, released during a frenzy of creativity between 1978 and 1984, all essential. The Tubeway Army ones, long prized by students of early punk, deserve their good reputation; they establish the persona Numan would return to for much (though not all) of his career. The next two, The Pleasure Principle and Telekon , are classics by any reasonable standard -- not just "Cars," but "This Wreckage," "I Die: You Die," "I Dream of Wires," "Engineers" -- a young artist had found his zone.  Famously, that zone felt like enemy territory to music critics. So radical was his brief presence on the pop charts that, for many, it has framed him forever. In fairness, his vocal style, instantly recognizable, makes it hard not to say: "Hey! It's the 'Cars' guy!" when you hear a Numan song you haven't heard before. But there was always more to him than that, and evidence is...