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Milo Miles

Milo Miles is Fresh Air's world-music and American-roots music critic. He is a former music editor of The Boston Phoenix.

Miles is a contributing writer for Rolling Stone magazine, and he also writes about music for The Village Voice and The New York Times.

  • Over the course of 40 years, Iggy Pop has changed from a noisy brat with seemingly no chance at stardom to a widely respected founder of punk. A new box set, Roadkill Rising, collects many of his unreleased concert bootlegs.
  • When La Lupe, the "Queen of Latin Soul," peaked in the 1960s, she was a regular at the Palladium Club and played Madison Square Garden. By the late 1980s, she was on welfare with no fixed address. Critic Milo Miles says a new retrospective album redeems the forgotten singer.
  • Mac Rebennack, known as "Dr. John," has been a rock and soul ambassador for his native New Orleans since the late 1960s. Although his public profile has risen and fallen over the years, the spirit of his city is a constant presence on all of his albums. Critic Milo Miles talks about how crusading for wounded New Orleans has given Dr. John a jolt of vitality.
  • Afrobeat has proven to be the most durable and appealing fusion of African and American pop styles -- in spite of the death of Afrobeat's creator, Fela Kuti. Critic Milo Miles talks about how some smart, determined Afrobeat inheritors both sustain and build upon the style's foundations.
  • Congolese guitarist Franco is not well-known in America, despite being one of Africa's greatest pop artists. That might change, now that the the African guitarist and band leader's tracks have been released on two albums, Francophonic Vol. 1 and 2.
  • Music critic Milo Miles reviews two new collections of tunes from the late Latin pioneers Tito Rodriguez and Tito Puente. The two were rivals on the bandstand of the Palladium, the epicenter of the 1950s mambo craze.
  • A re-mastered, newly released back catalog of six albums by the Brit-punk band The Subhumans will remind you why people were knocked out by punk in the 1980s.
  • With the release of her sixth album Seya, Oumou Sangare has gone from an outsider who sang about taboo subjects like polygamy and forced marriage to a major national celebrity.
  • Music critic Milo Miles reviews two new albums: Booker T. Jones's Potato Hole, and Allen Toussaint's The Bright Mississippi.
  • Music critic Milo Miles reviews ... For the Whole World to See, an album of previously unreleased material from the proto-punk band Death.