Peter Piatkowski – The Daily Vault

31 Oct

Her Name Is Barbra

Peter PiatkowskiFeature

Barbra Streisand’s long-awaited autobiography is going to be released next month. Fans of Streisand have been waiting for her book for decades. In the 1980s, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, editor at Doubleday, tried to use her celebrity to get Streisand to pen her memoirs, but the diva demurred, waiting for decades before releasing her story, My Name Is Barbra. A gay icon and showbiz legend for over 60 years, Barbra Streisand is a brilliant singer and a peerless interpreter of the Great American Songbook; she also was one of the biggest pop stars of the 1970s, establishing herself as the…

02 Oct

We Can’t Get Her Out of Our Heads

Peter PiatkowskiFeature

With the massive success of her latest hit, “Padam Padam,” Kylie Minogue has proven that she has longevity and is still able to do battle on the pop radio with starlets who grew up listening to her music. Like her peers Madonna and Janet Jackson, Minogue has created some of the most indelible and fabulous moments in pop music. She’s a camp pop queen adding a dash of the ridiculous to her music, making her a favorite among gay audiences. Her 2023 album Tension is the latest in a series of late-career triumphs that highlights a talented and gifted artist…

27 Jul

Sinead O’Connor: A True Pop Maverick

Peter PiatkowskiFeature

Sinéad O’Connor has died, leaving one of pop music’s most divisive and challenging legacies. An unequivocal talent, O’Connor weaved politics, social critique, and activism into her formidable career, often risking her lofty popularity by embracing issues or putting out statements that would prove to be controversial. Throughout the noise of her confrontational image, O’Connor possessed one of the most beautiful voices in pop music: she had a pure, powerful tone, able to stab listeners with the pain manifested in her preternaturally gorgeous instrument. Like most women in the public eye, she endured reductive, sexist media and press outlets seeking to…

22 May

The Queen Of Dance

Peter PiatkowskiFeature

On April 14, 2023, Janet Jackson embarked on her tenth concert tour, Janet Jackson: Together Again, celebrating the singer’s 40 years in the music industry. The epic concert includes over 30 of Jackson’s biggest hits while paying tribute to a career that has created some of the most memorable moments in pop music history. Jackson is a song-and-dance woman and a brilliant performer who lights up the stage with her charisma and stage presence. With her longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Jackson wrote inspiring and moving songs with perfect pop hooks and indelible melodies. She sang the songs with…

27 Feb

She’s So Unusual — and So Fabulous!

Peter PiatkowskiFeature

In February 2023 the latest batch of nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was announced, and among the group is singer-songwriter Cyndi Lauper. If she is inducted, this honor would be a high point for a strange and remarkable career. Lauper defined MTV ’80s pop with her glittery, sparkly New Wave-inspired dance-pop. She packaged her charming, distinctive talents in a cartoony thrift-store aesthetic that took inspiration from different cultural influences, including the Downtown New York art scene of the late 1970s, early 1980s drag and queer culture, and the dizzyingly creative punk and New Wave scene. She…

13 Feb

Liza Minnelli and the Perfect Work of New York Art

Peter PiatkowskiFeature

Liza Minnelli’s recently reissued concert album, Live in New York 1979 (titled initially Live at Carnegie Hall), isn’t merely a concert album. It’s an artifact of 1970s celebrity culture, particularly 1970s New York celebrity culture. Gotham in that decade was a very different place from the gentrified Wonderland it is today. The city faced some of the worst financial stagnation in its history and saw rising crime waves. In a New York Times article, Edmund White wrote that New York the 1970s was “the last period in American culture when the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow still pertained, when writers…

18 Jan

She Was More Than Just Elvis’ Daughter

Peter PiatkowskiFeature

Lisa Marie Presley died on 12 January 2022 at the age of 54. The news was met with shock, given the (relatively) low profile that Presley maintained in the last few years. She interrupted her hiatus with her promotional efforts on behalf of Baz Luhrmann’s film Elvis, the musical biopic about her father, the late/great Elvis Presley. Her final public appearance was at the 80th Golden Globe Awards, which she attended with her mother, actress Priscilla Presley, in solidarity with the film, which was up for several awards that evening. Presley lived to be 54 years old, gifted over a…

12 Dec

2022: A Challenging Year With Fabulous Music

Peter PiatkowskiBest Of

The year 2022 was a great year for veterans like Bonnie Raitt, Dolly Parton, Madonna, and Judy Collins, who made some of their best music in their later careers. Superstars like Harry Styles and Megan Thee Stallion each made a bid for legendary status with excellent releases, building on the successes of their relatively young careers. It’s been yet another challenging year, in what feels like a challenging era (seriously, since 2016, we’ve been cursed to be living in interesting times), music has been a source of escapism and fun in the face of some grim headlines. Though some artists…