skorn

I wrote about the new The XX and Jens Lekman albums

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:09:15 -0400

I wrote about the new The XX and Jens Lekman albums:

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.

The end.

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 00:38:12 -0400

The end.

What this confluence of cultural moment and employment situation...

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:25:00 -0400

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..."

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 11:34:00 -0400

“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"

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 22:03:32 -0400

My new article for The Atlantic about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Momoiro Clover Z and "Weird Japan":

mbmelodies:

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...

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 11:20:46 -0400

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

Acura invented _____. (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 19 May 2012 18:58:16 -0400

Acura invented _____. (Taken with instagram)

"At this very early point in her young career, Azealia Banks is becoming known more for a flurry of..."

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:27:00 -0400

“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.

oneweekoneband: I was a girl in 1999. I mean, I was a girl in...

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:40:59 -0400

oneweekoneband:

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,”...

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:55:11 -0400

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.

-Maurice Sendak

"Twenty-six years ago it would have been difficult to believe that someone could write seven..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:19:00 -0400

“Twenty-six years ago it would have been difficult to believe that someone could write seven paragraphs about the Beastie Boys without a single mention of race, and it still shouldn’t be entirely ignored. When Licensed to Ill became the best-selling rap album of all time it prompted (well-founded) accusations that skin color had allowed the group to jump the line. The triumph of Paul’s Boutique was partly a triumph of belonging: If Licensed to Ill was the best record ever made by a white rap group, Paul’s Boutique was one of the best records ever made by a rap group, period, and the first to render that qualifier unnecessary. In the wake of MCA’s passing, some folks have remarked that the Beastie Boys made it cool to be white, or some variation on this, an intelligible sentiment that I think is pretty wrong. The Beastie Boys made it cool to aggressively treat being white as a meaningless condition, a crucially different and far better thing. I was 12 years old when Check Your Head came out, and it didn’t teach me that my whiteness was cool—it taught me that great music was infinitely more interesting than the color of anyone’s skin. I learned the exact same thing from A Tribe Called Quest, who, it should be said, loved the Beastie Boys too.”

- Glad to have this piece by Jack Hamilton on MCA.

"There’s a big and very important difference, it seems to me, between “personal” criticism that’s..."

Sat, 05 May 2012 11:12:49 -0400

“There’s a big and very important difference, it seems to me, between “personal” criticism that’s using art as a kind of thematic center around which to write a memoir or personal essay, which is either not-criticism or not-good criticism, and criticism fundamentally about art that is open and honest about the critic’s personal experience. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about yourself, or even that you can’t talk about yourself at length; it’s just that this has to be in some way about your relationship with the piece of art and what that says about art, not what it says about you. Give us something we can use for our own experience of art, not just a well-written Amazon review.”

- (via barthel)

(pasting this onto my wall, into email signatures, etc.)

My belated fanboy letter to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for its 10th birthday

Fri, 04 May 2012 06:09:09 -0400

My belated fanboy letter to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for its 10th birthday:

mbmelodies:

3. Fun fact: in 2004, the author of The Atlantic piece above and I went to the same journalism summer program/camp. On the first day, I saw he was wearing a Radiohead t-shirt and I did something high-school me never did…actually talked to someone I didn’t know! Eventually we flipped through one another’s Case Logic binders…which both included Yankee Hotel Foxtrot…and suddenly we had more to talk about. It also helped that during that summer Wilco got on the cover of SPIN.

He ended up being my college roommate and is one of my closest friends now so…thanks Wilco!

I hate to rain on any of this Patrick because really the vibes are great, but didn’t we actually bond over Ghost is Born? I feel like we did. And Jamba Juice.

(thanks!)

My belated fanboy letter to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for its 10th birthday

Thu, 03 May 2012 14:40:18 -0400

My belated fanboy letter to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot for its 10th birthday

Photo

Wed, 02 May 2012 16:17:36 -0400

I listen to this literally every day at work when I need to tune...

Tue, 01 May 2012 14:08:46 -0400

I listen to this literally every day at work when I need to tune the office out and get into editing mode. Don’t even know if that speaks to its greatness or just that it’s muzak I’ve allowed myself to like. But yeah, a certain kind of bliss.

Rawktumblr: Things I've Learned

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:59:32 -0400

Rawktumblr: Things I've Learned:

rawkblog:

1) Health comes first.

Somewhere between graduating college and my second job, I gained about 10 pounds. Hangovers got worse. I was constantly tired. All of these things are still applicable. But I started eating better and working out occasionally and generally trying not to die of a heart attack at 55. One thing about healthy food: you start eating vegetables every day, you start to like them. Eating cows is basically terrible for cows, the planet, and our bodies, so I make that a special event. I have no interest in being vegetarian but something’s better than nothing, right? Also: totally obvious, but feeling good and well-rested and mentally sharp makes everything else much easier.

2) Habits control our lives.

Crush the bad ones and start up the good ones. Flossing. Push-ups. Saying “I love you.” Stop smoking. Go from there.

3) Life’s not a meritocracy.

Life is more like 50% networking, 25% having people like you, 15% resume, 10% talent. Sorry. But the lesson here is a good one: work hard and make sure people are paying attention.

Cosign literally all 27 of these.

An Abridged List of Actual Names at The Atlantic

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:15:47 -0400

fimoculous:

Garance Franke-Ruta
Conor Friedersdorf
Cotton Codinha
Dino Grandoni
Spencer Kornhaber
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hans Villarica
Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg

All my hopes for the future are placed with these guys.

Zomg. We talk about this a lot. He missed a lot of good ones, though. Right, Elspeth?

Related: this.

"At first, hip-hop was an exercise in musical distillation. It freed words and music from their..."

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:20:00 -0400

“

At first, hip-hop was an exercise in musical distillation. It freed words and music from their melodic obligations, leaving only the barest form of rhythm. But almost immediately after that big bang, musicality slowly seeped back in. Rappers cribbed notes from R&B and dancehall and pop, sporadically re-inserting that genetic material into hip-hop’s DNA. Very few of these fusionists could sing by traditional standards, but they compensated with magnetic deliveries and outsider charm. And over time, standards of good singing warped exponentially, each new iteration stranger than the next. It’s as if rap, after first stripping itself down, has spent the four decades since piecing itself back together from jumbled fragments, like a head-trauma patient reconstructing his memory, or an alien ship piecing together a scrambled transmission.

Future is the latest in this long line of aliens, and he’d probably be quite proud of that distinction. The Atlanta MC raps infrequently on his commercial debut, Pluto, and yet it’s a record that, in cultural terms, can only be defined as a rap album. He leans hard into all those post-Lil Wayne clichés — goofily aligned punch lines, spaced-out drug analogies, dope-boy boasts, designer name-drops — but delivers them in a strained, melismatic warble, drenched in Auto-Tune and constantly cracking. Imagine P-Funk’s Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk re-imagined by Mike Patton, but with unbridled swagger replacing any semblance of pitch or poise. The closest precedent for this approach is probably Wayne’s drowning 2007 mixtape ballad “Prostitute Flange,” but Future pushes past even that level of oddity. It sounds as if he’s purposely affecting a Wayne-esque studio-treated water-gargle before the actual effect is added to his voice. He’s mutating the mutation. And it often sounds magnificent.

”

- Haven’t listened to Future yet, but this makes me want to.

Not sure what the universe is up to by hyping a Dawn and a Daughn at the same time.

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 13:46:00 -0400

Not sure what the universe is up to by hyping a Dawn and a Daughn at the same time.