Clik here to view.
Frank Ocean’s Blond: 6 Things to Know
On Friday, for the first time in four years, there was a new Frank Ocean album. Two days later, there was another one. Blond, the official follow-up to Ocean’s magnificent, bar-raising opus...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Outkast's Idlewild and a Decade of Disappointment
Sometime in the spring of 2008, I was sitting under the bleachers of a high school track-and-field stadium in South St. Paul, Minnesota. There were still a few hours before I was scheduled to run the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Emo Patron Saints American Football Discuss First New Album in 17 Years
Mike Kinsella, Steve Lamos, and Steve Holmes recorded American Football’s only LP in their final days at the University of Illinois in the late 1990s aware it would probably be their only one. “When we...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Aesop Rock Thinks Social Media is Kind of Terrifying
Our interview series Icebreaker features artists talking about things—some strange, some amusing, some meaningful—that just might reveal their true selves. This edition features indie-rap vet Aesop...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Questlove On Why Music Festivals Matter and How to Do Them Right
The following story is featured in the latest issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review. Subscribe to the magazine here.Good drummers know that time is plastic. The beat must go on, but you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Ballad of Big Freedia: How the New Orleans Bounce Icon Was Betrayed By...
On August 25, Big Freedia will be sentenced in federal court, facing up to 10 years in prison and a quarter-million-dollar fine. In March, the New Orleans rapper and bounce music icon pled guilty to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Music Is Art, OK: Why Chicago’s Absurd Nightclub Shakedown Matters
In November 1996, the county surrounding Chicago adopted an amusement tax. Under the relevant municipal code, Cook County collects three percent of what people pay for just about any type of public...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Revenge of the Memes: The Best and Worst of the 2016 VMAs
“MEMES MEMES MEMES MEMES MEMES MEMES MEMES!”So spoke Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, taking the form of Statler-and-Waldorf-via-Twitter-egg personae LizardSheeple and TheShamester, summarizing the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Every Music Fan Should Read Imagine Me Gone
Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone is a novel told by a family of five. It centers mostly around Michael, the eldest son and a deep music fan. Michael suffers from a host of mental issues, and he...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The 10 Best Soundtracks from Skateboarding Videos
Earlier this month, it was announced that the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo will feature skateboarding as an official sport for the first time. Which made me wonder: Will this new manifestation of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The 10 Best DJ Mixes of August 2016
This month's most unusual mix—or pair of mixes, actually—comes from a record store in the Hague in Netherlands called Wichelroede. It’s a mixtape published on an actual, honest-to-goodness cassette,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dueling Potato Brothers: The Collected Oasis Fights and Insults
With just three syllables expressed in all-caps, Liam Gallagher made a compelling argument back in May that Oasis might be more entertaining apart than they were together. “POTATO”: What an amazing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Albums That Empathize In Times of Cancer and Loss
A few weeks before comedian Tig Notaro was set to perform at her regular gig Tig & Friends at L.A. theater Largo, her doctor broke the news that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. It was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tracing the Rock and Roll Race Problem
The premise of Jack Hamilton’s deep new study Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imaginary seems like something that’s been on rock history’s tongue for a long time without ever quite...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Krakow’s Unsound Festival Gets It Right
The following story is featured in the latest issue of our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review. Subscribe to the magazine here.Deep in a cavelike basement in the medieval old town of Krakow, Poland,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Circular Otherness of Neurosis
“This circle was a temple which had been devoured by ancient fires, profaned by the miasmal jungle, and whose god no longer received the homage of men.” So wrote Jorge Luis Borges in his short story...
View ArticleClik here to view.
So, About Losing the iPhone Headphone Jack
When Apple introduced the original iPhone in 2007, the first-generation device technically had a headphone jack. However, the port was set so deeply inside the phone’s body that it didn’t work with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kanye West vs. Fashion: The Harshest Yeezy Burns
Yesterday, when Kanye West sent gasping, dehydrated models down a grassy knoll in full-body Spanx, it still only fell somewhere near the midpoint of the most ridiculous spectacles ever to grace the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Slacking About Maybe Reviewing the New Lady Gaga Single
This morning, after nine nights of near-insomnia, I got up not feeling like complete trash. There's a new Lady Gaga song in the world, and I have not heard it. I'm going to make coffee, do some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Link Between Whitney Houston and the Rise of Auto-Tune in North Africa
Jace Clayton, the writer and musician who releases geographically dauntless mixes asDJ /Rupture, recently published his first full book,Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. Out...
View Article