Today's Online Commentary & Diversions:
• Review: Pitchfork gives the Listen, Whitey! companion album an 8.0, with Stephen M. Deusner writing "Perhaps the most powerful aspect of Listen, Whitey! The Sound of Black Power 1967-1974 — the album and the book, both representing many years' research by historian Pat Thomas — is how they portray a music in flux: Artists such as the Watts Prophets, the Original Last Poets, Shahid Quintet, and Marlena Shaw were only just realizing the potential for cross-genre synthesis and for radical political statement through music…. Thomas is interested in depicting Black Power music at street level rather than playlisting the most popular songs of the era. …[B]y focusing on the range of music inspired by this movement, Listen, Whitey! allows so much of the confusion, outrage, anger, emotion, humor, and even optimism of this music to resonate anew."
• Review: "I had always meant to read Love and Rockets, but it might be possible that I've given myself a gift by waiting until I'm at this point in my life. My reading now, in my 40s might be more nuanced, and less surface than having read them 20 years ago. I'm going to recommend the series. There is an element of sexuality, but not sexism. And there's an element of Bohemianism as well. However, I guess Love and Rockets is like a complicated wine: what you taste at first isn't the taste that lingers as you look a little closer." – Catherine Schaff-Stump, Writer Tamago
• Analysis: More from The Hooded Utilitarian's critical roundtable on Jaime Hernandez, with Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz discussing her personal history with the Locas stories