Culture & Media

Singer and guitarist George Benson and vocalist Al Jarreau are no strangers to the Grammy Awards. Each has earned his share of Grammys over the years. The duo's first album together could be one of the big winners at next month's ceremony.

Today at the MIDEM global music conference, Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERICY) and The Orchard announce a global agreement to distribute full track downloads and master tones from The Orchard’s independent labels across Ericsson’s global network.

Holmes On The Range by Steve Hockensmith has got to be one of the best stories published in 2006. This is Mr. Hockensmith's first novel.

The most recent addition to our understanding of our difficulties in Iraq, State of Denial by Watergate reporter Bob Woodward deals less with military insights and operations than with the conflicts and tensions among the personalities involved.

Awards from major critics groups, including the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Golden Globes help make Forest Whitaker a leading contender for the Best Actor Oscar. The Hollywood veteran is earning all this "buzz" for his portrayal of Ugandan president Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland".

A story with relatively few words but full of meaning, The Music of Life is the life of a frustrated musician. The story is told by a narrator who meets the musician in a train station probably in Siberia and in a snowstorm.

Why Hip Hop is so popular world wide? What separates Hip Hop from other genres of music and why it’s the best form of music to spread a message?

Denny Doherty, a founding member of the 1960s folk-rock group the Mamas and the Papas, has died at the age of 66.

Can you talk to your online buddy if you are away from a computer? Well, if you have a Sony PSP, you can. A new service now allows you to use AOL Instant Messaging on a Sony PSP. Appropriately enough, this service is called AIMonPSP.

Among the most illuminating, and hence the most damning recent volume about the war in Iraq is Fiasco, by Thomas E. Ricks. Like other recent books, the author describes in detail the dysfunctional decision-making that has plagued our endeavor in Iraq. But he highlights the lengthy series of critical turns and cross-roads that we have taken in the nearly four years since the invasion--any of which might have led us away from disaster and toward a stabler and less uncontrollable occupation.

Hasn't conventional wisdom always held that liberals are champions of the poor and conservatives are generally indifferent to the poor? Haven't we learned anything from role models such as Barbra Streisand and Al Gore? Learn the truth about those often referred to as religious fanatics.

American columnist Art Buchwald, who took humorous jabs at Washington politicians for decades, died Wednesday at the age of 81. He'd been in a hospice for nearly a year, having decided to forego dialysis treatment for kidney disease.

Renowned jazz saxophonist and composer Michael Brecker died January 13 of leukemia in a New York City hospital. He was 57 years old. As VOA's Doug Levine tells us, Brecker's impact on today's generation of jazz hopefuls is immeasurable.

The first wave of Punk contained two distinct streams: the aggressive, nihilistic working class movement and the intellectual development of the situationists.

“Sometimes a subject just chooses you and it’s impossible to look away. When that happens, you just have to approach the subject honestly and hope others can find value in it.” Filmmaker Ben Coccio gave this explanation for choosing the subject of high school shootings for his first feature length film, a fictional account of two teenaged boys planning and carrying out a deadly attack on fellow students.