Culture

On Friday nights at the Old Snack Bar, the sound of music can be heard as the Hillsdale Hepcats Swing Dancing Club meets for a swing dancing lesson, followed by open dance. Lots of behind-the-scenes effort goes into planning each event, from selecting music to putting together a lesson for those interested in expanding their swing dancing repertoire. The club’s...

It’s a race against the clock. The paper must be wet as the artist quickly mixes his paints. It’s matter of working with the medium instead of against it. Lines can bleed. Colors can stray. For many students in Professor of Art Samuel Knecht’s Advanced Watercolor class, taught every other spring, this is both the joy and challenge of working...

It can be painful to realize that we can’t turn back time. As I was going away to college, I remember thinking, “So that was high school.” And then, turning twenty: “So those were the teenage years.” Sometimes it hits me that those are years I’m never getting back. By no means do I miss them, but I also know...

“To Pimp a Butterfly” is a contrived album. Let’s begin there. On his sophomore LP with a major label, Kendrick Lamar plunges his hands into the history of black music and pulls out heavy, ambitious themes of racial iniquity, cultural appropriation, Afrocentrism, and self-loathing in the African-American experience. As he stitches together fabric borrowed from funk and jazz, Parliament and...