The many flavors in your ear.
Let us dispense, on this sad steaming Wednesday, with how strange it is to cry hot tears of loss and shame for someone you have never met. Let us take it as read the curious nature of fame, the odd parasocial relationships we develop with the famous, the very notion …
Aretha Franklin died today. All our idols are dead and our enemies are in power, as it’s said in the memes that seem to be our only shared language anymore; and as always happens when someone of such greatness and depth goes away for good, we find ourselves struggling over …
Let’s preface this review by discussing something that made me feel older than anything else has in my entire life: When Straight Outta Compton was released in 2015, AARP — the American Association of Retired Persons — nominated it for “Best Intergenerational Film” and “Best Time Capsule”. This means three things: …
After a seemingly endless hiatus of two entire years, during which this beleaguered country’s weekly exposure to abnormally cheerful handsomeness golem Ryan “Toothpaste” Seacrest plummeted by as much as 30%, American Idol is back! Yes, that’s right, a new reboot/remake/re-release of the original big daddy of televised singing competitions has returned, …
The three pillars of American debauchery are sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Yacht Rock, too, is held aloft by these indispensable ingredients: sex is a constant presence, even when it’s expressed with some degree of bittersweet poetry from the mouth of a fool. And you wouldn’t be reading these …
La La Land has, as I write this, been nominated for an astounding 14 Academy Awards, and it is very likely going to win most, or even all, of them. It has a chance of becoming the most decorated film in motion picture history, and if you follow the absurd …
My origin story with hip-hop still burns in my brain like it happened yesterday. Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell had just been released, and for me — a white suburban kid who’d been raised an only child in a house full of outlaw country and ‘beautiful music’ — it seemed like something being …
I don’t really care for outdoor music festivals. For one thing, I am a hundred and seventeen years old, and it is something that young people do, like smart drugs, the Banana Sprite Challenge, and being a well-dressed neo-Nazi. It also robs being outdoors of its major appeal (peace and tranquility), …
The Coachella Music Festival has been in the news lately, partly because it’s just that time of year and there’s never enough content to go around so somehow an overpriced outdoor concert is transformed into ‘news’, but mostly because of allegations that Philip Anschutz (the owner of AEG, the entertainment …
Recently, a meme was going around that your real age is 100 minus the number of bands playing at the Coachella music festival that you’ve actually heard of before. In my case, this turned out to be 63 — a good number, placing me (as in real life) right at …
Nina Simone was such a singular and remarkable talent that the story of her success seemed almost inevitable. The scientist Stephen Jay Gould once remarked that there was less to interest him in the folds of Einstein’s brain than there was in the near certainty that people just as brilliant …
I don’t really listen to much new music anymore. Partly this is because no one pays me to do it anymore, and partly it’s because I have other things to do, but mostly it’s just because I’m old, and nobody needs another white guy in his mid-40s telling them what …
Some people prefer fiction, they will tell you, because it is infinitely malleable. While history must only tell us what is known, fiction can tell us what is merely imagined, and it can do it in any order; only fiction, some have argued, can tell a truly complete story, because …
Well, the news in this corner of the world — a world that seems less strange and charming without David Bowie in it — is the same as it is all over. He had one last shock in him, and he kept us guessing until the end; I wish like …
Let’s talk about Hitler for a little bit. No, no, not about going back in time and killing the baby version of him. We can all agree that this is nice clean fun, and in terms of using it to retroactively secure our national security, Jeb Bush (pardon me, Jeb! Bush) …
