Destroy All Monsters
...The original Godzilla plays out the struggle between two of post-war Japan's major political tendencies: a revolutionary critique of modernity against a victimized anti-historical Japanese nationalism You always hear...
What Was the Child?
Childhood as we currently understand it emerged with 20th century capitalism, but as the distinction between labor and leisure is breaking down, so too is the concept of childhood
Minor Feelings
...the self and another person, who held out the promise of recognition without ever fulfilling it. The only thing that approximated fulfillment in these songs was the music itself. At...
Armed Words
...An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh on the role of culture in Syria’s struggle Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a Syrian writer, intellectual and former political prisoner. In 1980, while...
The Souls of Drone Folk
...a child; Kyle gives us bros before hoes: to protect his brothers, he must kill this woman, and does. Chris Kyle liked to tell stories that suited his worldview more...
Come Down With Fire
...interview with Amanda Redington, Dio explained his "mystical" lyrics as a palliative for "the awfulness in the world," which he pointedly characterizes in terms of rape culture: "Every time you...
Can She Dig It
...strange feeling,” said Rebecca Birmingham, one of few female collectors featured on the blog Dust and Grooves: Vinyl Music Culture. Though women have collected vinyl since the inception of the...
Dead Can Dance
...Freud (1990) and Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003). Like these books, The Work of the Dead investigates the troubled line between nature and culture, and the manifold...
Capital Flows
...Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, artists like the Beastie Boys “convinced music industry executives that rap music, for all of its ‘blackness’ in attitude, style, speech, music,...
Taming the Inexplicable
...Ellsworth Kelly,Seine, 1951 The Witness’s potentially subversive message is lost inside a culture of relentless techno-utopianism and its creator’s own hubris THE recent release of Thekla Inc.'s 3-D...
The Poverty of Entrepreneurship: The Silicon Valley Theory of History
How Silicon Valley coopts history for its own autocratic ends.
Black Magic,
White Soul
...white America loves black culture at a distance, loves hip-hop but is afraid of black men, plays black music in cars that have never carried black passengers. The film’s dual...
TNI Vol. 9 Editorial Note: On Music, Utopia, and Failure
...Death of a Ladies Man, is about music and failure, about utopias posited and dissipated. But its point is not to argue that music makes nothing happen or that it...
Mass Authentic
...lives. We want to believe—indeed, I argue we need to believe—that there are spaces in our lives driven by genuine affect and emotions, something outside of mere consumer culture, something...
A Taste of Cesium
...2015 in an English-language book produced by Tokyo Agricultural University, Agricultural and Forestry Reconstruction After the Great East Japan Earthquake: Tsunami, Radioactive, and Reputational Damages . The research recorded in...
Melancholic Damage
...Wiz Kalifah have songs based on this premise), Rihanna does neither. Her musical performance is just “meh.” The album’s lead single, “Diamonds,” in both its music and its video, evokes...