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In Defense of the Velvet Underground's Doug Yule
"Where's Doug Yule?" a DJ asked Lou Reed in 1972, during an interview with WLIR radio.There was a pregnant pause. Lou answered: "Dead, I hope."Most Velvet Underground fans have stopped short of wishing...
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Lowell Brams Discusses Sufjan Stevens' Album About His Life
Lowell Brams was married to Sufjan Stevens’ mother, Carrie, for five years in the early 1980s. She dealt with depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism throughout her life, and initially abandoned...
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Dreck the Halls: A Holiday TV Specials Retrospective
Bill Murray's Netflix adventure "A Very Murray Christmas" is a playful reanimation of one of television's most easily mocked institutions: the light entertainment holiday special, with a...
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Ten Years of "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)"
T-Pain's journey from strip club bard to NPR favorite started with the release of "I'm 'n Luv (Wit a Stripper)" on December 13, 2005. What first seemed like a sweetly risqué novelty hit that was too...
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The Year in Disappointment
The Grateful Dead Toured with John MayerRihanna’s Dumb Album CoverFrank Ocean Doesn’t Care About UsTidalMartin ShkreliThe Fact That Someone Ruined Joanna Newsom’s Record By Calling It a Concept Album...
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Live to Win: The Legacy of Lemmy Kilmister
Photo by Chris Tuite(Listen to an Apple Music playlist with Motörhead highlights here.)Four days after turning 70, Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister died. The Motörhead frontman hadn’t been in good health—heart...
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Six Live Electronic Music Albums That Are Better Than Being There
Photo by Camille BlakeAt the tail end of October, Autechre fans were treated to an unprecedented bounty: AE_LIVE, a concert album comprising not one but four live sets from the duo—Krakow, Brussels,...
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Jens Lekman Released One Song Per Week Last Year—We Reviewed All 52
Jens Lekman's 2015 New Year's resolution was to write and release one song a week, so that we might all remember, "Where we were and when we were there, who we kissed and who we missed" last year....
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16 Essential Vocoder Songs
A scientific tool for those lacking a voice, a means of encrypting voices during World War II, and a way to drop the funk, the vocoder has had many exhale its praises, from General Dwight D. Eisenhower...
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Welcome Back, LCD Soundsystem
Photo by Kathryn YuLast year, writer Dan Brooks coined the phrase “egg manning,” which he described as “the practice of finding a terrible argument from an unknown Twitter user in order to disagree...
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Remembering Pierre Boulez's Radical Legacy
Image via BBCPierre Boulez, who died this week at age 90, didn’t start out trying to make friends. In 1952, the young French classical musician claimed that any composer who didn’t see the value of...
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Should You Practice Black Metal Yoga?
After saturating mainstream American culture, yoga’s now starting to pool into smaller communities, many of them drawn along lines of musical tastes as well as geography. In Williamsburg you can do...
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The Life Changing Power of Discovering David Bowie
Photo by Jimmy KingI fell for pop in the early 1980s, in Britain, and David Bowie was the air it breathed and the earth it walked on. He wasn't the first star to make me love pop, but the first star to...
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In Memory of My Great Gay Saint, David Bowie
There are a million reasons to memorialize the passing of David Bowie, but none more so, at least for me, than because of his legacy as the patron saint of strange gay boys everywhere. Because he...
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Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks Are Spielbergs, Your New Favorite Video...
Alex Karpovsky is best known for playing Ray Ploshansky, the curmudgeonly Café Grumpy manager turned city council member on HBO’s "Girls." He also showed up in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis...
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The Case for David Bowie as Music Video King
No musician understood the power of the image—still, moving, mime, puppets, you name it—better than David Bowie. He was making music videos before MTV would eventually consecrate the form; it can be...
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Carlos Dengler on How David Bowie Gave Him the Freedom to Quit Interpol and...
Carlos Dengler was a founding member of Interpol, playing in the band until 2010. He is currently pursuing a career as an actor and working on a memoir.Dengler is also one of many artists whose lives...
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How the Cold War’s Fallout Shaped David Bowie
Photo by Jimmy KingAs I was born in the 1980s, I didn't experience David Bowie's interest in the communist East firsthand. Instead, I learned to love him via his thrilling, polished pop of the mid-90s....
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What It's Like to Play Guitar With David Bowie
Photos courtesy of Carlos AlomarThe story of David Bowie and Carlos Alomar begins in New York. By 1974, the Puerto Rico-born Alomar had become a guitarist in the house band at Harlem's Apollo Theater,...
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An Interview With the Guy Who Taught Christian Bale to Play Drums for The Big...
In the excellent Oscar-nominated film The Big Short, Christian Bale plays real-life person Dr. Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager who loves metal. He blows off steam playing drums. Ergo: Christian...
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