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How Composing for TV Is Paying Rents and Hurting Bands
Photo via FacebookAs long as there has been scripted television, there’s been someone recording original music to be played under the scenes being acted out. Sometimes it’s a composer and sometimes...
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Hey What's Up Hello: 9 Songs that Say Hi
On her mega hit "Hello", Adele belts out the title phrase with all the subtle, glottal oomph of an avalanche. If you answered your phone and heard someone emoting a greeting like this, you'd gasp....
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Ian Svenonius’s Censorship Now!!
Photo by Cheryl DunnIs Ian Svenonius serious? That question tends to come up in response to his writing. A few weeks ago, when The New Republic published an excerpt from his new essay collection,...
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Everything Deserves a Remix: Baltimore and Jersey Club Meet Vine
Nicolas Fraser’s "Why You Always Lying" was a perfect Vine. His comedic DIY interpretation of Next’s '90s hit "Too Close" quickly became one of the most enjoyable memes of 2015. The dance moves, the...
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Hotline Bling: A Song by Sufjan Stevens
Many of us knew where the night was headed before Sufjan Stevens even took a breath. Pittsburgh wasn't going to be different from Baltimore, which was no different from Jersey City, where his "Hotline...
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How Discrimination Kept Fanny from Being Recognized as Rock Pioneers
On paper, June Millington is an unlikely rock'n'roll pioneer. The singer, guitarist, and educator who co-founded Fanny, the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label, Millington...
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Rebecca Sugar's Cartoon Worlds Have the Best Music on TV
By now, if you aren’t one of "Adventure Time"’s devoted fans, you’ve at least seen a few kids, college students, or adult children wearing gear emblazoned with the show’s characters (Finn, the last...
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Listening to Neil Young's Live Archives
Neil Young fans have grown accustomed to waiting. The mercurial songwriter started talking about his gargantuan Archives project all the way back in the mid-'80s, promising a comprehensive overview of...
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Natural Imbalance: The Threat to Female Field-Recorders
Photo via Jana WinderenUntil late this summer, I took daily research walks across a London marshland to inspire a project relating to the area. That was, until I heard about reports of attacks on women...
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Nick Zinner Tells the Stories Behind 9 of His 601 Photos
Tonight, the Lethal Amounts space in Downtown Los Angeles will host the opening for "601 Photographs", an exhibition from Nick Zinner, the guitarist of Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It’s a continuation of the "501...
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How M.I.A. Is a Lifeline in Times of Terror
Since the attacks in Paris, I’ve been sleeping in pants and keeping a coat and my laptop by the bedroom door. I live on a busy downtown Toronto street, in a row of buildings close to a mosque, and I’m...
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The Weeknd Made a Vape
The perfect piece of artist merchandise is the kind that first makes you think, "I can’t believe this exists," followed microseconds later by, "Actually no, this makes perfect sense." Of course FKA...
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On Joni Mitchell’s Enduring Hissing of Summer Lawns, 40 Years Later
The Hissing of Summer Lawns will never be an initial gateway to Joni Mitchell. Released 40 years ago this month, it marked a turning point in her career. But its somber, romance-jazz-inflected sound...
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Cataloging Frank Ocean’s Obsession with Film
It's hard to predict much about Frank Ocean's new album from its title alone. Surely Boys Don't Cry is a callback to the Cure's 1980 album of the same name, but what if Ocean is referring to something...
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Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood and Shye Ben Tzur Talk Junun Project
There’s an intriguing motif in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun, the making-of film for Jonny Greenwood, Shye Ben Tzur, and the Rajasthan Express’s album of the same name. As a song begins, Anderson’s...
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Watching "The Wiz Live!"
Photo courtesy of Virginia Sherwood/NBCOn Thursday night, less than an hour before NBC’s showing of "The Wiz Live!", the New York Times culture critic Wesley Morris blasted off with a tweet where he...
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Six Takeaways from the 2016 Grammy Award Nominations
It approaches again: the music industry’s annual memoriam of itself, in which thousands of music-industry luminaries (and just as many who’d like to think they are) lavish mucho pomp and drawn-out...
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Material Gain: The Lost History of Rap Tees
In 1995, a lucky stop sign in Pleasant City, a neighborhood in West Palm Beach, found itself draped in a drool-repellent Skyywalker Records varsity jacket. Estimated hang time: seconds. I imagine some...
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A First Look at Archy Marshall's A New Place 2 Drown
A New Place 2 Drown is Archy Marshall's new project, who you might know better as King Krule. He doesn’t go by that name these days, which is nothing new; before Marshall was King Krule, he was Zoo...
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The Curious Career of Klaus Nomi
Born in the German state of Bavaria in 1944, Klaus Nomi emigrated to New York City at the age of 28, doing bits of off-Broadway theater work and moonlighting as a pastry chef. By 1978, he immersed...
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