"Right as usual, sir," music division

"There is an earnestness and a delicacy to playing the saxophone, an irreducible musicality that was out of step at a time when shrugged-off riffs alternated with bashed-out power chords on the rock airwaves. It's laughable to imagine someone smashing a saxophone into a stack of amps, like Kurt Cobain did with his guitar—the instrument seems too refined for the gesture, like trying to talk dirty in Latin. And while '80s metal holdouts like Metallica unleashed elaborate barrages of guitar notes well into the '90s, they framed their virtuosity as viciousness, a trick that's much harder, if not impossible, to pull off with the sax."—Contrarian wunderkind Jonah Weiner, "Bringing Saxy Back," (Christ), Slate, (where else do you go for this particular kind of brilliantly informed cultural criticism?), May 23, 2011.

At left: Peter fucking Brotzmann. Unbelievable, these people.