both of which are great.
while i’m shamelessly plugging the day job: definitely read David Cooper Moore on Farrah Abraham and Jack Hamilton on Bob Dylan.
I wrote about the new The XX and Jens Lekman albums
What this confluence of cultural moment and employment situation means for me is that “Rolling in the Deep” is constantly stuck in my head. Anyone else?
“A quick taxonomy: “reverb” and “echo” are often used interchangeably, but really echo is when sound repeats—”Hello!… hello!.. hello!”—and it almost always happens outside. Reverb is an indoors phenomenon that occurs when there’s not enough distance for delays, and it results in a continuous ring until fading.”
— Learned a lot of factlets I probably shoulda already known while editing this piece on the history of reverb.
My new article for The Atlantic about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Momoiro Clover Z and "Weird Japan"
1. I swear I’ll take a break from writing about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu now.
2. Here’s a topic near to my heart - “weird Japan,” which is often so ridiculous. Kyary and, to some extent, Momoiro seem to be exploiting this, though.
![theatlantic:
Fiona Apple Is Not Insane
Apple’s power as a songwriter actually comes from self-awareness: her aliveness to the way people perceive her, her ability to analyze what’s actually going on inside her, and her talent for communicating both of those realities. It’s fitting that the 23-word album title refers to the parts that make up an engine and the fibers that make up a rope. Both are sturdy, mechanical, complex but knowable objects—pieces of systems in which actions have reactions, wear and tear take their toll, and what’s broken can be patched up but never made new. Her previous albums (see the title of Extraordinary Machine), were also built around this metaphor for the mind, but The Idler Wheel… renders it more fully, making a mesmerizing argument for the dignity of anyone who’s been brushed off as ridiculous or crazy or overly emotional.
Read more. [Image: AP]
my attempt at reviewing The Idler Wheel](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5vefcUsID1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Apple’s power as a songwriter actually comes from self-awareness: her aliveness to the way people perceive her, her ability to analyze what’s actually going on inside her, and her talent for communicating both of those realities. It’s fitting that the 23-word album title refers to the parts that make up an engine and the fibers that make up a rope. Both are sturdy, mechanical, complex but knowable objects—pieces of systems in which actions have reactions, wear and tear take their toll, and what’s broken can be patched up but never made new. Her previous albums (see the title of Extraordinary Machine), were also built around this metaphor for the mind, but The Idler Wheel… renders it more fully, making a mesmerizing argument for the dignity of anyone who’s been brushed off as ridiculous or crazy or overly emotional.
Read more. [Image: AP]
my attempt at reviewing The Idler Wheel
“At this very early point in her young career, Azealia Banks is becoming known more for a flurry of self-imposed drama (starting random beefs, announcing and then shelving releases) than the songs she’s released.”
— Do we think this is true at all? Are her songs thus far not actually totally phenomenal? I don’t know/can’t remember offhand what beef she’s really started. Kreayshawn? Who hasn’t? Her songs, though. I do remember them.
I was a girl in 1999. I mean, I was a girl in 1993 (when blink-182 recorded their first demo), and I was a girl when “Dammit” was on heavy late-night cable rotation in 1997. But by the time “What’s My Age Again?” was getting radio air I was a girl, a body, sexually situated and old enough to start thinking of myself as A Girl. And then, by the time “All the Small Things” was ubiquitous, I was A Girl negotiating girlhood in the notoriously hypermediated year 2000. And by the time Take Off Your Pants and Jacket was released in 2001, I was, of all things, a self-styled Punk Rock Girl. Maybe I don’t need to say it, but I will say it anyway: in the late 90’s and early aughts, blink-182 and the particular pop culture climate that created them had everything to do with my adolescence, my identity, and how I understood what it meant to be a girl. And, maybe more importantly—
I hated blink-182.
A lot.
(Oh hey, my name is Rikki but everyone calls me RGR and I have a women’s studies minor and a blog and a lot of feelings.)
We cannot examine how much we like this band or why we like this band without addressing the time we’ve spent hating this band. Most of us hated them, right? If you were a preteen punk, or a kid that got picked on, or even just some high-school sophomore who maybe overidentified with Stephen Malkmus, there’s a pretty solid likelihood that you’ve dropped the “poser” bomb once or twice in conversation. (Or at a least, like, you called Tom Delonge a douchebag.) It wasn’t cool for hip kids to like blink-182, and it wasn’t cool for uncool kids to like blink-182. I hated blink-182 in my adolescence and then, after that, I spent nearly a decade forgetting that they ever existed.
This hatred, and the halls in which it festered, to me, is as much a text as anything—a reading of blink-182 is a reading of our own situated identities and our relationships to media (and, duh, high school) in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. There is no blink-182 without these things.
Oh oh oh this is so promising. I don’t know how to weigh age/geography/gender divide here but I can say that circa ‘99/2000, in Southern California middle school and early high school, it was perfectly fine and cool and normal for my dorky dumb self and friends to like this band. A lot.
In interviews you’ve spoken disparagingly about what you call “Kiddiebookland,” the kingdom of saccharine, squeaky-clean books that depict children as innocent and guileless. Why do the authors and publishers of these books misjudge children and childhood?Well, when a kid writes to me—as a kid did write to me—and says: “I hate your book. I hope you die soon. Cordially.” Well, the combination of “I hope you die soon” and “cordially” is wonderful. It shows how bewildering the whole thing was to her—and to me.
She was allowing herself to hate. “I hate your book.” But she’d learned in school that you’re supposed to end your letter with the words “cordially” or “best wishes.” And so they combine both without thinking there’s something goofy in such a thing. But that’s their charm, and that’s what we lose by growing up—lose, lose, lose. And if we’re lucky, it happens again when we’re old. And I’d like to believe that it is happening to me. Things that were so wonderful to me come back now. And I’m so grateful—because I wouldn’t know how to start otherwise. But it’s happening.
