Welcome to Overture

Hi there. Welcome to our publication. We call it Overture. I’m Ross.

I’m Jason. The idea of Overture came from a conversation about punk and rap and Titus Andronicus and Kanye West.

That’s a wide spread of topics, but that’s kind of what Overture is all about. As we see it, some media topics and questions are too big for most publications (real and digital) to reliably engage with.

We’re looking to examine these questions through a comprehensive lens. Topics of music are seated in and better understood in the context of a broad cultural environment.

And the same can be said of anything, really. We want to provide articles that ask and attempt to answer tough, broad questions about media, but not in a purely editorial fashion. We’re striving to strike a balance between extensive research, good reporting, pertinent issues and considerate, complex opinions.

There’s a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello, “Signifying Rappers,” published in 1990, that examines hip-hop as it was a quarter century ago. The book was molded by Wallace and Costello’s 1989 summer in Boston, as well as by Bobby Brown, Schoolly D, Gang Starr, and so forth. It is dedicated to Lester Bangs, but more so to the spirit of his writing, a force that compelled both Costello and Wallace — “Bangs never lost his faith in pop’s capacity to move us toward connection with one another,” Costello explains.

And now you’ve really got a taste of how broad and nebulous this can get. Jason and I share Bangs, Costello and Wallace’s belief that conversations about media are, above all, philosophical conversations. We want to be your one-stop-shop for concise but complete pieces about the maelstrom of communication that surrounds all of us.

That’s why we’re called Overture — like the overture of a musical, we want to give a full view of an issue’s themes and leitmotifs while still being a brief and enjoyable read. The word also means “opening” or “introduction.” Hopefully our pieces will open minds and introduce ideas. Hopefully they’ll inspire Overtures from others. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

We hope you enjoy the coming articles, though if your visit isn’t brief, we promise we won’t kick you out.