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With Dance You Can Save the Community: The Enduring Inner City Utopia of...
Early in the 1984 film Breakin’, a young white woman named Kelly Bennett drives to Venice Beach with her gay best friend to see a sidewalk performance by a crew of street dancers. She drives her...
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How Japan's New Nightclub Laws Threaten to Decimate Their Club Culture
Photo by Johnathan F. LeeJapan’s fueihō (or "entertainment business control law") code governs everything from dancing, to drinking, to sex work, to nightclubs. Since its inception in 1948, the set of...
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Playlist: A Short History of Songs of the Summer
With Labor Day weekend and the summer shrinking in the collective rearview mirror, deliberation continues over 2015’s Song of the Summer. In the world of music, this honored position in the zeitgeist...
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The 9 Best Artist Snapchats to Follow
Snapchat is hard to game. There is no way to "like", comment, link, or repost. Photos and videos posted to the app must be under ten seconds long, and even the public "My Story" feature lasts for only...
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A Eulogy for the MP3: How Music Got Free Author Stephen Witt on the Past,...
With the launch of Tidal and Apple Music, along with Spotify breaking its own increasingly impressive streaming records on a regular basis, this year is looking to be a particularly pivotal one for the...
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Q&A: Boots Riley Talks Agitprop Rap and the Myth of Black Capitalism
Inside Boots Riley’s new book of lyrics and commentary, Tell Homeland Security–We Are the Bomb, there’s a picture of the rapper as a kid, clutching a copy of Frantz Fanon’s colonialist takedown The...
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Sounds of Black Protest Then and Now
Photo courtesy of NBC/Peter KramerThe sounds Black people make are the brick and mortar of the United States. Literally. The enslaved African’s singing was a driving force for the free labor that built...
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Almost Famous and Gifting Musical Memory
In Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, we see Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs imparting the film’s protagonist, 15-year-old wannabe critic William Miller, a stand-in for Crowe, with some koans of the...
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Merch Table: Ghostly International Henning Sunglasses
As a general rule I try not to get overly emotionally invested in objects, and there are certain types of them that I particularly try not to get attached to. It’s better not to think of "owning"...
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Learning to Love Low Bit Rates
On my 16th birthday, the girl I was dating at the time made me a mixtape. Mixtapes are fail-safe gifts, hers even more so considering she had better music taste and was much cooler than me (and...
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Op-Ed: Women Don't Need a Man to Make Their Mixtapes
This past Sunday night, during the Emmys, Apple Music premiered the first of three advertisements directed by Ava DuVernay and starring Mary J. Blige, Taraji P. Henson, and Kerry Washington. It's a...
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I Made It Through the Wilderness: On Gay Fandom, and Growing Older with Madonna
Photo by Mert and MarcusAs stereotypically gay music experiences go, you can’t go much gayer than attending the opening night of a Madonna tour. I say this fondly, and as a forty-something gay man who...
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No Need to Say Goodbye: Morrissey's (Supposed) Last UK Stand
It’s a peculiar sight to behold: there’s a middle-aged man flouncing and stomping around the stage at the Apollo in Hammersmith, west London, and even though he has 5,000 people hanging on his every...
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Q&A: Silas Howard on the Unsinkable Bambi Lake and San Francisco’s History of...
Photos by Ana GrilloThere’s this song. It’s a piano ballad, one written for the pre-HIV/AIDS era of San Francisco where poverty-stricken street hustlers wandered Polk Street, turning tricks and sharing...
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How Hamilton Sets the Stage for the Future of History
Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton with a cast composed almost entirely of people of color, is finally publicly available, in part. The cast recording, which...
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The Masterful Mockery of Father John Misty's 1989 Jibes
Equally homage and interpretation, a cover song references as much as it reimagines. Yesterday, for a few brief hours, Father John Misty (Joshua Tillman) shared his version of two tracks off Ryan...
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Fetty Wap and the Appropriation of Everything But the Burden
It gets very tiring to talk about the myriad ways in which white people blatantly appropriate Black culture. It's too much to talk about and there's not enough annoyance in the world to take offense to...
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Pitchfork Watches: Empire Season 2 Premiere
After an opening season so resoundingly successful that it basically rewrote the rules on what resoundingly successful TV show look like, "Empire" returns on Season 2, and like Cookie, it’s coming to...
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Pitchfork Decides the Song of the Summer
Photo by Matt Lief AndersonJessica Hopper: Since summer is officially done here in this hemisphere, we can weigh in--officially--on what was the Song of the Summer for 2015. I will leave parameters...
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New Books: Big Freedia: God Save the Queen Diva! and Let There Be Gwar
This summer sees the release of two music-related books: a memoir by preeminent New Orleans bounce diva Big Freedia and a comprehensive guide to heavy metal demons Gwar. Check out our reviews of these...
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