More than 250 music insiders and six New York Times critics weighed in on who defines the new American songbook. Here, in an unranked list, are the artists they chose.
Nile Rodgers
The titles tell the story. “Good Times.” “I Want Your Love.” “Lost in Music.” “Everybody Dance.” “My Feet Keep Dancing.” “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah).” The songs of Nile Rodgers distill the spirit of disco’s heyday: long nights, bright lights, romance, sex and, above all, the communal rapture of bodies moving in unison, following inexorable grooves to a distant plane where the laws of physics seem no longer to apply — at least until the cops show up.
Together with his songwriting partner, the bassist Bernard Edwards (who died in 1996), Rodgers co-founded Chic, the de facto house band of New York’s late-70s disco boom. A legendary hard partyer, Rodgers was both a habitué of Manhattan’s club scene and its shrewdest chronicler. In the songs he and Edwards composed for Chic and other artists, the gritty glamour of the local demimonde — Black and white and Latino, gay and straight and in between — became a global ideal, immortalized in anthems of freedom and transgression that rippled across the planet.
Those songs traveled so well because they were one-size-fits-all: The only people not invited to Rodgers and Edwards’s bash were wallflowers who refused to hit the dance floor. Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” was unmistakably a queer rallying cry, but its mantra — “I want the world to know / I got to let it show” — made room for just about everyone. Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” (1979) was likewise taken up by the gay and Black communities as a statement of solidarity; but it was also a sibling song, performed by real-life sisters Debbie, Joni, Kim and Kathy Sledge, and embraced as a theme song by countless families, biological and chosen. The songs carried sneakier messages as well. The lyrics were packed with historical references — to 1920s catchphrases and Depression-era hits like “Happy Days Are Here Again” — which linked the stagflation-era disco craze to an earlier age when Americans coped with hard times by dancing the night away.
Lucinda Williams
Whatever anybody means about a song’s texture turns tactile with Lucinda Williams. Sweat salt. Ice crunch. Oyster grit. Matches. Grease (bacon, engine, hair). She must know this. She titled one masterpiece album “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” Her half-century of music-making began on a kind of texture tour. She passed through some country and, as many a singer-songwriter has, through Black music, discovering what distinguishes affect from affinity. Williams, who hails from Lake Charles, La., started as a blues stencilist, covering Robert Johnson and Melvin “Lil’ Son” Jackson. So nothing is counterfeit about, say, the zydeco that dusts her first recording of an original jewel like “I Lost It.”
Williams evolved into the kind of synthesizing stylist and major storyteller whose genre becomes herself. She is a musician’s songwriter and a critic’s ideal: wry, deceptively complex, confident, confident-sounding.
By the time she was in her mid-30s, she was coming up with the sundress-and-Stetson floor-stomper “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad” and the chug-a-lug peace-out of “Changed the Locks.” Who’s got a better sad-and-horny song than “Unsuffer Me,” wherein Williams wonders whether a man can be her Lexapro, or a more concrete boy-loses-girl tune than “Six Blocks Away,” or a love song as vampirically abject as “Essence”? She can write great hellos and superb goodbyes. She can practice observant empathy. Like the finest blues and country folks, she’s also a comedian, a comic actor — hear Williams as a stalker on the heavily grooved lust-at-first-sight track “Hot Blood,” horny-whispering and hiding in the bushes: “I saw you in the laundromat / Washin’ your clothes / Gettin’ all the. Dirt. Out.”
Stevie Wonder
No sane person begins a tribute to the greatest living bard of the human heart with the song “Part-Time Lover.” Not when he’s the composer of some of the most harmonically and chromatically complex music ever composed, music you probably can’t fully grasp without a math degree. You can’t start with “Part-Time Lover” because “Part-Time Lover” isn’t “If You Really Love Me” or “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” It isn’t “Happy Birthday” or “That Girl.” Nor is it “Until You Come Back to Me” or “Tell Me Something Good” or “I Can’t Help It” (songs he wrote that Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Michael Jackson made theirs). Nor will you find it on the five-year spree of magnum opus albums that made Stevie Wonder immortal by the time he turned a flabbergasting 26 years old.
You can’t, because this song isn’t holy or wholesome, because it doesn’t sound holy — and this is a man who started, as a boy, with dreams of being a preacher. You can’t, because “Part-Time Lover” is about cheating spouses. That, of course, is the whole reason to start an encomium to Wonder with “Part-Time Lover,” because it’s probably not even the 75th best song he has ever written, and yet — Lord, and yet — it is such a melodic powerhouse that to hear it once is to hear it for all time.
Jay-Z
Even as a rookie, Jay-Z spoke with the voice of experience. He was 24 when he released his first single, in the summer of 1994; he sounded far older, wiser and worldlier. The song’s title, “In My Lifetime,” had a valedictory ring, and though the chorus looked forward, not back (“In my lifetime, I need to see a whole lotta dough”), it was clear the rapper wasn’t wishing or hoping — he was laying out a plan. He says as much in the opening line: While others “are shootin’ stupid, I’m carefully plottin.’” This was the credo of a tactician, a weigher of costs and benefits, who had no patience for child’s play.
What was truly precocious was Jay-Z’s writing. “Reasonable Doubt” (1996) is one of the greatest debut albums in any genre, a testament to dazzling skills as a stylist and storyteller. Jay-Z’s verses stacked up rhymes in intricate configurations — end rhymes, internal rhymes, half-rhymes, even nonrhymes that he twisted into rhymes through tricks of inflection. The language was dense, full of puns and double and triple entendres, but Jay’s delivery was easeful, conversational; he rapped slightly behind the beat, giving the songs a subtle swing, a feeling of relaxed authority that lent credibility to tales of street hustling and forecasts of glory. His gifts were audible on “Brooklyn’s Finest” (1996), a duet with the Notorious B.I.G., which offered a study in contrasts: Biggie landing his punchlines at steady intervals, with the brute force of a heavyweight champion; Jay reciting rhymes offhandedly, as if engaged in casual chitchat. He sounded like he’d never broken a sweat, in a recording booth or anywhere else.
That combination of sangfroid and swagger established a new way for rappers to self-present, maintaining street credibility while pursuing both pop success and a more audacious kind of crossover, from performer to executive to tycoon. It was all predicated on chops that were second to none. Jay-Z wowed studio collaborators by writing quickly to new beats and instantly committing those bars to memory. More than any previous rapper, he foregrounded the music of M.C.-ing, determined not to repeat himself as he sought fresh flows and odd points of entry to the rhythmic pocket. At times he did it through ventriloquism. He ghostwrote one of rap’s most illustrious singles, “Still D.R.E.,” channeling the voices of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg; he ghostwrote for Bugs Bunny too, in a witty soundtrack song for “Space Jam,” the 1996 movie starring Michael Jordan.
Paul Simon
They call him Rhymin’ Simon. Or rather, that’s the moniker he gave himself in the title of a 1973 album, winking at both the nicknames of old-time sports heroes and at his own reputation as a pointy head — a New York intellectual with an acoustic guitar, a reedy tenor voice and catalog of brainy, indelible songs.
It’s true that Paul Simon is a wordsmith. That was clear from the start, on Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 debut single, which announced the poet’s arrival with a lapel-grabbing opening line: “Hello darkness, my old friend.” In its way, “The Sound of Silence” was as forceful as two other landmark songs much played that same year: “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Its stark sound registered generational disaffection; its lyrics picked up tremors of the coming ’60s youthquake: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls / And tenement halls.”
First album, first song, first verse: “He said the way my blue eyes shined / Put those Georgia stars to shame that night / I said, ‘That’s a lie.’”
It was all there at the very beginning for Taylor Swift: romance, nostalgia and the occasional popping of shiny bubbles of emotion, all within the pristine economical package of a pop-country song. She was 16.
She has never stopped chasing that initial Nashville impulse — a four-ish-minute distillation of the biggest feelings imaginable, threaded through a melody that won’t leave you alone. Sometimes she brings country phrasings to electro-pop, or pop rigor to indie rock; she might let her rhymes and verses go shaggy or bring a bridge back like a chorus. Such are the perks of having mastered the form early, while amassing the cultural capital to remake pop in her image.
Brian & Eddie Holland
What was love before Holland-Dozier-Holland? Well, there were the American songbook chestnuts: classic, classy, dreamy; notes so long they needed maids of honor to carry them; singing that was oh-so-proper, consummate and clear. The brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, along with Lamont Dozier, who died in 2022, made a crucial innovation to the songbook’s tremors. They invited us to feel those feelings — like, in our bodies, on dozens and dozens of hits.
You could be here all day just naming titles. But let’s take a moment to try. There are most of the Supremes’ mellifluous chart-toppers (“Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”) and the Four Tops’ biggest bangers (“Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “Bernadette,” “7 Rooms of Gloom”). They made two apex Martha and the Vandellas records, Kim Weston’s “Take Me in Your Arms,” Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” and Marvin Gaye’s “You’re a Wonderful One.” Tip of the iceberg, but enough for now.
Missy Elliott
If you want to come to terms with the songwriting greatness of Missy (Misdemeanor) Elliott, there may be no better place to start than these nine, um, words: Ti esrever dna ti pilf, nwod gniht ym tup. It’s a lyric, or the mirror-image inversion of one: the big hook of Elliott’s 2002 hit “Work It” — “Put my thing down, flip it and reverse it” — which Elliott and the producer Timbaland literally flipped and reversed, running the audio backward to create a cascade of chirps, slurps and phonemes. The trick transforms Elliott’s rapping into demented scat-singing. It sounds like spirit possession, or like extraterrestrial Esperanto. Or maybe Elliott is just cracking a raunchy joke? The flipping and reversing may refer to switching up sexual positions; the backward vocal sample winks at the gibberish that lovers yelp in the throes of passion. As Elliott also puts it in “Work It”: “Sex me so good, I say blah-blah-blah.”
There’s another way to hear that line, though. It’s a statement of purpose and of principle. Elliott’s music is an elaborate exercise in flipping and reversing: upending expectations about how songs can and should sound; discombobulating the English language; subverting clichés around gender, sexuality and power; calling into question what’s silly, what’s serious and whether there’s a meaningful distinction between the two.
Lionel Richie
In the late 1970s through the mid-80s, there was a certain kind of hit song that sauntered up on you quietly but not sneakily. It put its hands on your shoulders, brought its forehead down into the nape of your neck. Gently swayed you to and fro as its warmth oozed through you like lava.
Each and every time, it seemed, Lionel Richie had written that song. His litany of urgently treacly smashes was the soundtrack of that era, both a master class in minimal form that updated the mercenary structures of the Brill Building and Frank Sinatra, and also a cool and controlled reimagining of the sensual soul music of the late ’60s through the mid-70s. Richie proposed R&B could do even more while sweating far less.
Dolly Parton
Every so often, a seemingly miraculous legend about Dolly Parton goes viral: The enormously prolific songwriter and cross-generational cultural icon supposedly wrote two of her greatest songs, “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” on the very same night. That feat would certainly be impressive, but to anyone with a true understanding of Parton’s songwriting — or perhaps of the miracle of songwriting itself — not particularly surprising. As is true for so many of the greats, songwriting is, for Parton, a kind of spiritual practice (“That’s my time with God,” she has said), an entrance into a flow state where time and possibility expand infinitely. Parton has cultivated a reputation for being down-to-earth while also seeming connected to some kind of higher power. “I’ve watched Dolly writing one song while she’s singing another,” Emmylou Harris, Parton’s collaborator in the supergroup Trio, once marveled. “I’ve never seen anyone so spontaneously creative.”
For too long, Parton’s beloved star persona distracted from the quiet craft of her songwriting. But the two have long been entwined: Consider the famous story that finds Parton on the set of the 1980 comedy “9 to 5,” idly tapping her long acrylic nails as the crew moves between camera setups and — eureka! — realizing she has just created the clackity-clack rhythm, like secretaries at a typewriter, of one of her greatest hits.
Young Thug
Should hip-hop be melodic? Should hip-hop be structured? In its early years, the genre wasn’t really sure. This uncertainty began as a tug of war between rapped verses and sung, often sampled hooks; then those things found common ground; and then eventually, in the form of Drake and his acolytes, they became effectively one and the same. By the 2010s, rap music — which for years fended off allegations that it was not, in fact, music at all — had become the flame keeper for pop melody, its tools spilling over into country, reggaeton, K-pop and everywhere else.
That ubiquity created ample opportunity for a poststructural dissenter to come along. In stepped the Atlanta surrealist Young Thug, whose main gift to songwriting has been his ease with dismantling its norms. Rap music had become accepted and palatable. Young Thug made it wild again.
Diane Warren
The stats simply argue that she’s undeniable. But what makes her great?
Josh Osborne, Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally
For some, songwriting is a waiting game. Inspiration comes when it comes; the task is to remain vigilant, scanning the skies for a flash of lightning or an incoming squadron of muses. But on Nashville’s Music Row, the mecca of the country music business, they have a different theory. There, songwriting is a discipline and a day job, a gig you show up for, often several times a week, pushing out as many songs as possible in sessions with fellow writers. The practice rests on a hardheaded mathematical calculation — the more songs you write, the greater the odds you’ll come up with a decent one — and on a particular ideal of creation: a belief that the best songs are team efforts, in which skilled professionals, working quickly and collaboratively, make magic by pooling their talents.
Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne are Music Row pros par excellence, brilliant practitioners of the time-honored tradecraft: crisp hooks, witty wordplay, brisk storytelling, songs that click and whir like little machines. They are also disrupters of tradition. For the past 15 years or so, they have been part of a loose collective — including star performers like Kacey Musgraves and Sam Hunt, and a number of other behind-the-scenes writers and producers — whose work has jolted country, pulling the genre in new directions stylistically, sonically, even politically.
Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow” (2013), written with McAnally and Clark, is a jaunty ode to nonconformity — in matters of sexual orientation, church attendance, weed intake — that lobbed a cherry bomb at country’s conservative mainstream. Hunt’s sexy 2014 smash “Take Your Time,” written with McAnally and Osborne, reupholstered the country boudoir, bringing lush, woozy production and R&B-style vocals to the top of the charts. In an era when the genre was dominated by bro-country clichés — add equal parts beer, truck and dirt road, stir and serve — Clark, McAnally and Osborne brought varied subject matter, richer emotional shadings and more cosmopolitan leanings. McAnally and Clark’s catchy, clever songs turned out to be a perfect fit for Broadway: They wrote the score for the musical “Shucked,” which earned nine Tony nominations in 2023.
Fiona Apple
It’s true that in 30 years, Fiona Apple has released only 56 original songs, on five albums, but she packs in more interpersonal danger, impassioned candor and radical tenderness than artists with triple her catalog. Whatever’s lacking in quantity is exceeded in payload. “You fondle my trigger,” she sings on “Limp,” “then you blame my gun.”
So many musicians have trod the roads of love that we’re probably desensitized to the experience of the journey. Or: Not enough songwriters have the facility, dexterity, observational sagacity — no, no, the courage — to ensure that “in love” means something. Apple’s songs invite us back to the euphoria of attraction and the nausea of repulsion. The heart in her music seems like a place one resides. She’s on one side; he — whoever he is — occupies the other. Is there a wall? Does the wall have a door? Who’ll unlock it? Who’ll smash it down?
Babyface
History, as they say, does not repeat — but it rhymes. The career of Kenneth Edmonds, better known as Babyface, offers one of the clearest expressions of that truism: a body of work that echoes the past even as it reshapes the present.
The lineage begins well before him. In 1955, Otis Blackwell, a Black songwriter working in an industry that often obscured Black people’s contributions, wrote “Don’t Be Cruel.” Recorded by Elvis Presley and paired with “Hound Dog,” the single spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart, setting a benchmark that would stand for decades.
Edmonds emerged from a longer Midwestern tradition than is usually noted. Cole Porter left Peru, Ind., for Yale, Paris and Broadway. Hoagy Carmichael left Bloomington, Ind., for Hollywood. Both men turned plain-spoken origins into a studied sartorial and lyrical elegance. Edmonds, born in Indianapolis, followed a similar arc and shared with them a gift for collapsing big feelings into diamond lines. Porter’s “Night and Day” (1932) makes time itself an act of longing. Edmond’s first band, the Deele, and their hit “Two Occasions” (1987) arrive at a near-twin distillation 55 years later: “I only think of you / On two occasions / That’s day and night.” Psychic baton: passed.
Stephin Merritt
Stephin Merritt likes a writing prompt. In 2014, with his 50th birthday approaching, the singer-songwriter-bandleader behind the New York pop ensemble the Magnetic Fields and other indie groups conceived an autobiographical song cycle, with one song for each year of his life. “50 Song Memoir” (2017) was followed three years later by “Quickies,” a collection of ultrashort songs, whose running times ranged from 13 seconds to a sprawling two minutes 35 seconds.
Since the early 1990s, Merritt has based his songwriting on the kinds of formal constraints we associate with conceptual artists more than pop singers. He recorded an album whose song titles all begin with the letter “I,” sequenced alphabetically from “I Die” to “It’s Only Time.” “Distortion” (2008) submerged Merritt’s sly, tuneful ditties in a tsunami of feedbacking guitars, cellos and accordions; “Realism” (2010) stripped back the production and restricted the accompaniment almost entirely to acoustic instruments. Merritt’s most celebrated stunt was the epic “69 Love Songs” (1999), which wowed critics and fans with its singular sound and mix of reference points, blending lo-fi pop and queer-downtown sensibility with tunes and lyrics worthy of Rodgers and Hart. His songwriting brief for “69 Love Songs” captures its flavor: He envisioned a “theatrical revue with four drag queens.”
Romeo Santos
The first true hit for Aventura, the Dominican American bachata group — boy band, if you will — was called “Obsesión,” a gingerly paced 2002 ballad about desperate longing, the feverish flirtations of a panting young man. It appeared on the group’s second album, “We Broke the Rules” — a declaration of war on the strictures of bachata.
Before the rise of Aventura, bachata — Dominican folk music of the working class, which traces its roots to the 1960s — was largely a cloistered concern. But Aventura’s frontman and primary songwriter, Romeo Santos, was raised in the Bronx on hip-hop, R&B and pop. And his vision of bachata brought the genre boldly into the present, and also set an unwitting template for how Spanish-language music could firm-footedly interface with pop’s other streams, arguably laying the groundwork for Latin megastars like Bad Bunny.
Carole King
To stratify the 400-song catalog of Carole King, let alone choose her shiniest song, is an exercise in foolishness. It’s impossible, yet there is that pull for one tune to be the fullest, most heartbreaking, most illustrative of her totality. And the finest song of King’s career may just be “Way Over Yonder.” It has been described as expressing a desire for peace and homecoming, but is more truly the soundtrack to a home-going — one of the most rhapsodic descriptions of heaven’s terrain in the history of American pop.
There’s the “shelter from a hunger and cold.” There’s the easy embodiment of, and escape from, trouble and worry. There is the glory of knowing exactly where you are bound. The through line in King’s work is the way she isolates near-unnameable feelings and then charts them plainly.
Outkast
A world-warping career started with an assignment so undignified that it could have been sabotage: Write a Christmas song. The premise that Outkast — the duo André Benjamin (later André 3000) and Antwan Patton (Big Boi), then barely out of high school — landed on was simple enough. “Ain’t no Christmas in the ghetto,” as the producer Rico Wade put it.
The result was “Player’s Ball” (1993), which became a No. 1 hip-hop hit by cracking open the motel door to show the world a Southern hustler culture of pimps, dealers and customers against a Yuletide backdrop. “I’m wide open on the freeway, my pager broke my vibe,” Big Boi raps, “’cause a junkie is a junkie three sixty-five.”
Mariah Carey
Pop, in the American sense, is democracy in melody, consensus in chorus. And Mariah Carey, having written or co-written 18 of her 19 No. 1 singles, stands at its summit, right up there with the Beatles (with 20 No. 1s), translating feeling into something lushly intimate and vast.
In 1990, she steps into a crowded field — Janet Jackson, Madonna, En Vogue, Taylor Dayne — with “Vision of Love,” threading gospel sinew through R&B muscle. By the time she reaches the effervescence of “Dreamlover” (1993) and “Always Be My Baby” (1995), she’s refining a lexicon of longing: the phrasing, the internal rhymes, the way sleek aria deftly delivers desire.
Then comes the stroke of authorship as cultural force. With the 1995 “Fantasy” remix featuring Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Carey institutionalizes hip-hop’s marriage to pop soul. Without that instinct and that push through the closed-mindedness of the era, there is no modern hybrid of rap and pop as we know it today. “Honey,” “Heartbreaker” and the sublime “We Belong Together” — they all carry that hybrid DNA from a songwriter thinking in moods and collisions: “Bobby Womack’s on the radio / Saying to me, ‘If you think you’re lonely now’ / Wait a minute this is too deep (too deep) / I gotta change the station / So I turn the dial trying to catch a break / And then I hear Babyface: / I only think of you.” Carey claims everything. Her pen moves with the same agility as her voice.
Willie Nelson
What kind of songwriter is Willie Nelson? He’s a country tunesmith, of course, the crafter of some of the most beloved entries in the genre’s golden songbook. He wrote Patsy Cline’s signature song, “Crazy,” sometime around 1959. According to legend, he wrote two more standards that same week: the barfly anthem “Night Life” and the sneaky “Funny How Time Slips Away,” a breakup song that hides a switchblade in its cowboy boot.
Nelson might have secured immortality merely on the strength of that early stuff. Of course, he didn’t stop there. He became a country superstar: the genre’s definitive “outlaw” and a revered singer-composer, with a catalog of hundreds of songs in a career spanning 69 years and counting.
Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar’s songs hunger to mean more than everybody else’s. They’re X-rays of his behavior and also yours. They’re vivifications of Compton, Calif., his psychic epicenter. They do passion, sex, recrimination, uplift, letdown, guilt, pride, money’s elemental contagion — with vulgarity, ruthlessness and heart. He’s rapacious and voracious. The songs often have eyes bigger than their stomachs. But Lamar’s velocity reflects his ambition. The rhymes hurtle out at double and triple time. The rapping matches the writing: pure spandex, sometimes with absurd leaps into anxiously higher vocal registers (try “FEEL.” from “DAMN.”).
The music driving these songs often combines pop, rock, soul, funk, crunk, street-corner church, bounce and quiet storm; on something like “i,” it’s most of those at once. Lamar recombines himself, too, from different points of view: his parents, his women, his subconscious, his people, his enemies. There’s what they call conscious rap — music determined to stroll sidewalks rather than thrive in the streets. Then there’s what Lamar is up to: subconscious rap. He’s our great out-of-body rapper. The songs are these one-man shows of self-reckoning (Lamar’s writing loves a mirror) and wreaking havoc. Occasionally, they reckon with havoc, or they’re brutal re-enactments of it, the way he and the actress Taylour Paige do with stunning vulgarity on “We Cry Together.”
Valerie Simpson
Simpson grew up in the Bronx, and her musical life took shape when she joined the choir at Harlem’s White Rock Baptist Church and met Ashford in 1964. They became songwriting and singing partners — and a decade later, husband and wife. A trained pianist with gospel roots, Simpson anchored the harmonic and musical structure, while Ashford, who died in 2011, often generated lyrical ideas and thematic affect — though their roles invariably overlapped. The pair recorded together, but it was when they shifted their focus from performing to songwriting that they began to blow up.
Bob Dylan
If you were to claim — as many have, and many more undoubtedly will — that Bob Dylan is the greatest songwriter of them all, a question arises: Which Bob Dylan? Is it the Greenwich Village greenhorn, wrangling folk song tropes and visionary protest poetry into generational anthems? Or the rock ’n’ roll hero, armed with a Stratocaster and a sneer, howling, “How does it feel?” Is it the crooning back-to-the-lander of the Woodstock years, the raging minstrel of “Blood on the Tracks” or the born-again Dylan, handing down homilies from a crooked pulpit? Is it the 1980s Dylan, making peace with synthesizers and chorus-effect pedals, or the Dylan of the 21st century, a trickster in his twilight years, scavenging the archives of the American unconscious to mash-up the Titanic disaster and the Kennedy assassination, “Moby-Dick” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street”?
Source:
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