Sade Is Punk as Fuck
...as a tactic of the singer, a "smooth operator" pedaling deceptively smooth music as complacent background noise, thereby immediately transforming it into a stealthy abrasive. Unlike such clumsy and obvious...
Everybody Have Fun Tonight
...lyrics, performances, and products create a parallel reality. LMFAO describes their music as instructional, a how-to-party-rock guide, and their performances offer no shortage of cues to perform various party actions....
Beauty Blogosphere 2.10.12
...the Lana Del Rey thing, meaning I understand neither the vitriol directed in her direction nor the passionate defenses of her—rather, I don't understand why her music has spurred such...
Convenience of Streaming Services
...selective musical taste superfluous. Not there is anything wrong with that; musical taste's centrality to identity seems a peculiar quirk. Nonetheless, taste in commercial music comes down to what music...
The innocently readable novel
...by hand, producing top-quality, artisanal sound systems. Since the boom years in the 1990’s, when (Western) classical music was still revered and a skilled audio technicians were in hot demand,...
The Art of Promotion (1)
...need to wipe our the profanity and violence portrayed in music that is greatly influencing our youth. Our young people are being drawn to drugs, gangs, and other illicit behavior...
Death and Life in Great American Cities
To bury a loved one from Queens is to confront displacement in the here and beyond
Hollow Inside
...that eradicates the humanist pleasures of culture — thus seems misplaced. We haven't been "depersonalized" but hyperpersonalized by the ways technology has abetted consumerism. So his concerns about people becoming...
A Game Is Being Beaten
...influence from outside beloved gaming, comics, and sci-fi culture is often scorned outright, when something seems to “work,” is popular, or oft-discussed, it will surely be repeated. Making the player...
Army of Un
...a culture of such outlandish misinformation that the Western media and its audience often respond with laughter. Incredulous, horrified, uncontrollable laughter, more indicative of disturbance and fear than amusement. As...
American Saints
...Street Journal would ever locate one source of America’s culture of innovation in the agricultural ingenuity of the Sikh communities of early twentieth-century California. For their success challenges the idea...
♫ Roxane ♫
...I imagine it must be compelling to have a funny, strong BLACK ♀ speaking to the popular culture so many young white women enjoy. To watch that same critic turn...
Born Under the Tobacco Flower, and Raised Under the Lis
Dreams of a separatist Quebec nation are founded on conservative, racist attachments to bloodline that leftist adherents cannot so quickly disavow
Naked Criticism
...in an undressed, matter-of-fact way. But in their unfolding they build an account of the culture industry as a kind of dreamscape, one that elaborates all our fears and fantasies...
Cruel Pessimism
A new book on debt reminds us that we have not left the time of crisis yet
Community Slander
...York Times. Buffington, who founded Yik Yak with his fraternity brother Tyler Droll, sees their app as a corrective to the (micro)celebrity culture of Twitter. On Yik Yak, they claim,...