Thursday 2013-04-04, 12:00am
The art of the music video is paid tribute at the Museum Of The Moving Image.
The art of the music video is paid tribute at the Museum Of The Moving Image.
Wrestling, music videos, and class envy, oh my. Plus: It’s time for all of us to fight over the meaning of “hipster.”
Lost tampons, Buzz Bissinger, and the world of endless memoir.
Ah, the satisfying pop of a Snapple cap—the memories it brings back, from the sharpness of the salt bagel it accompanied to the satisfying sweetness of its first sip.
At 14, I wasn’t smart enough to not feel that the simple act of preferring hard rock—the long-haired, dick-swinging kind that most often manifested itself in power-ballad form on top-40 radio—to “softer” music differentiated myself from my peers.
Back in the dialup era, February was notorious among the denizens of a bulletin board I frequented; without fail, it would be the month when so many long-simmering disagreements would boil over and catch fire, causing multi-post back-and-forths, resigning of conferences, snipey private-conference messages, and, sometimes, real-life dissolutions of friendships. The story went that even […]
When I was a cheeky, take-no-prisoners music blogger, one of my favorite tags was “lol words,” which I used to spotlight the silly, stupid, and downright horrifying ways that words would be twisted in service of some band or record or what-have-you. I got a lot of mileage out of it, and am a bit sad that my blogging career ended before social media really took off.
The curious case of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter.
This issue is Maura Magazine’s 10th, and it looks at Big Things: American pop idolatry, country radio in New York City, the idea of the “perfect” song, and movies that fall in on themselves because of way too much self-referentiality.
If American Idol—not to mention its intranetwork rival X Factor, and even to an extent its blind-taste-test copycat The Voice—were truly a singing competition, of course, matters of styling and “marketability” would be taboo subjects, and the contestants would only focus on getting as much vocal rest time and tea as they could before their 90 seconds were up. (No taping of extraneous commercials for Ford for these kids). But of course it isn’t
It might be cliché to say it, but man oh man am I happy February is over.
An interview with Community writer Maggie Bandur.
I’m always loath to read stories that have the phrase “a new study” in their first sentence, but those news items pointing to the Halifax Insurance Digital Home Index this week gave me some pause, if only because I thought that its estimate of the current generation of kids spending 25 percent of their lives in front of some sort of screen was pretty low.
On Heartthrob, the seventh album by the Canadian twins Tegan And Sara, the duo leaps from the indiepop world and makes straight-up crystalline pop music about heartbreak. Maura Johnston, Brad Nelson, and Chris Randle discuss the boldness and effectiveness of this aesthetic move. Brad Nelson: Maybe we should explain at the outset why we want—need—three […]
In keeping with matters Lenten and Valentine’s-related, this issue focuses on both the sugary and the acerbic.
What is Rick Moody’s problem with Taylor Swift?
I, who so often eschewed the phone, am now glad to lean into those long, meandering conversations that it can inspire, those sorts of chats that would not be punctuated by bathroom breaks or impromptu meetings with managers and where a lip-twisting grin and hastily typed “lol” wouldn’t suffice as an expression of amusement.
After a long period of endless album teasers and slow-burn promotional campaigns, the element of surprise has come back to big-tent music in 2013—David Bowie announced an album he’d been working on in secret for two years, My Bloody Valentine released the 21-years-in-the-making followup to Loveless, and Justin Timberlake returned to pop.
Last weekend I realized that my Friendster profile had gone away. The site started in 2002 and accrued millions of users pretty instantly; I joined up pretty early, although it seems like I was first active on the site more recently than 11 years ago. But time turns to taffy on the internet.
I’ve been going to the same Super Bowl party for over a decade now; one year my longtime friend who hosts it incorporated it into his wedding, resulting not only in a grand time but the addition of a (delightful) permanent co-host. This issue is a tribute of sorts to that tradition.