<h4>Van Dyke Parks is an American composer, arranger, record producer, instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, author, and actor. Parks worked with Brian Wilson (including as lyricist to the Beach Boys' Smile project), Phil Ochs,  The Byrds, Tim Buckley, Little Feat, Loudon Wainwright III, Rufus Wainwright, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Ringo Starr, and Skrillax, among many others. He also produced a dozen albums of his own, most recently Songs Cycled and Super Chief: Music for the Silver Screen. He lives in Los Angeles and has generously provided incidental music for the Los Angeles Review of Books.</h4>
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<blockquote>
"Well, to me, the tensile strength and the very definition of an artist is something that I would place at the top of a vertical hierarchy. To be an artist is to suffer and to lead a life without shelter. It takes a great amount of daring-do, self reinvention, imagination, familial loyalty, sacrifice, economic uncertainty, and the right to be wrong, the right to fail in order to achieve something of noticeable value. "
– Van Dyke Parks
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Van Dyke Parks

The Super Chief

"I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds." — Dizzy Gillespie

Music

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon

<h4>Lary Wallace is an eccentric-at-large and the features editor of Bangkok Post: The Magazine.</h4>

Lary Wallace

Prince in Perpetuity: Touré’s “I Would Die 4 U”

"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn

Biography &amp; Autobiography

Music 109

Dave Mandl’s writing has appeared in The Wire, The Believer, The Register, The Comics Journal, The Rumpus, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and other publications. He was the longtime music editor at The Brooklyn Rail and an editor at Semiotext(e)/Autonomedia. He hosts the radio show World of Echo at WFMU and plays the bass guitar in various groups.

Dave Mandl

A Master Class in the Avant-Garde: Alvin Lucier’s “Music 109”

<h4>Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an essayist and critic whose&nbsp;writing&nbsp;has appeared in&nbsp;The Paris Review,&nbsp;The New York Observer,&nbsp;Bookforum, Transition,&nbsp;Rolling Stone,&nbsp;and&nbsp;The Best Music Writing of 2012. She has taught at Columbia University, Bard College, and Eugene Lang College. Read her work at&nbsp;<a href="http://the-rachelkaadzighansah.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">the-rachelkaadzighansah.tumblr.com</a>.</h4>

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative

The Rest is Noise

<h4>Glen Roven has four Emmys, played Carnegie Hall three times, has two nephews, and had one great love.</h4>
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(From the LARB Questionnaire:)

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Best piece of advice you ever received?

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When I was twenty-one and conducting the biggest hit on Broadway, I had dinner with Phyllis Diller and Ann Miller. (How's that for an opening sentence, all my novelist friends?) Phyllis looked across her pasta and gave me a piece of advice I have never forgot, a piece of advice I didn't really understand at the time, or rather didn't believe: "Kid," she said, "never expect ANYONE to help you. No one ever will. Trust me on that. You do it all yourself. Every last Goddamn thing. And you do it all the time, every day." Now that I'm 51 all I can say is, "How true, Phyllis. How true."
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Who reads you first? 

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<blockquote>
As I'm primarily (I hope!) a composer, the question really is, Who listens to you first? Easy. For 30 years, my companion, partner, significant other, oh heck, whatever the term is, my sweetheart was the best critic a composer could ever have. Although not a musician by profession-he trained horses--, he had the most critical ear and unfailingly good judgment about music, especially vocal music, of anyone I have ever encountered. What more could someone want? If he liked something, I was golden. If he didn't, it went right into the trash. Most of the time. There was one song I wrote, or rather, one melody, he absolutely loathed. He made me cut it from every show or every album I tried to shoe-horn it into. Unfortunately we never agreed to disagree. He was adamant. Despite me telling him incessantly how Blue Moon and Getting to Know You also appeared in several shows before they landed. He hated the song so much, no matter what new title or lyric I gave it, he would invariably attack my producer and say, "You're not going to let him put that rubbish in your show, are you? That cut-out. That old-news-rewritten crap!" You got to love a man like that. And I did.
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Glen Roven

The Pleasures of Listening

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

<h4>Marjorie Perloff is the author of many books on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, including The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, The Futurist Moment, Wittgenstein's Ladder, and Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Her memoir The Vienna Paradox was published in 2004. She is professor emerita of English at Stanford University.</h4>
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Marjorie Perloff

The Natural

University of Oklahoma Press, November 2010. 240 pp.

Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California

<h4>Grace Krilanovich is the author of the novel The Orange Eats Creeps, published in 2010 by <a href="http://www.twodollarradio.com/" target="_blank">Two Dollar Radio</a>. She lives in Los Angeles.</h4>

Grace Krilanovich

Ambush Haircuts

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors." — Simone Weil

Cultural Studies

Keith Richards with James Fox Life Little, Brown, October 2010. 576 pp.

Life

Greil Marcus is a critic who lives in Oakland. This year, Yale will publish More Real Life Rock: The Wilderness Years, 2014-2021 (May) and Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (Fall).