Made for China
...years ago, bicycles and buses dominated Beijing, but now the city streets are an impasse of cars. For a culture so obsessed with America, it gives them a thrill to...
Gender Fuck
...people use porn as sex education, but because porn is also a reflection of our culture's sexual politics. Unfortunately, working in the adult industry still carries a heavy stigma and...
The Hasheesh Eater
...distance is infinite, I am immortal. It shall be tried. I commenced the descent, wearily, wearily down through my league-long, year-long journey. To record my impressions in that journey would...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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....
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...
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...
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...
♫ 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...
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...