F

Flavorwire

Music

Music

An Interactive Map of Vampire Weekend’s Many Geographical References

By Tom Hawking on

“I used to front like Angkor Wat…” Oh yes, it’s a new Vampire Weekend album, all right. Modern Vampires of the City — now streaming at iTunes — is the third album-length example of Ezra Koenig et al’s patented preppy Paul Simon/Peter Gabriel-chic indie rock, and it’s full of the band’s usual lyrical references to the sort of exotic places where they probably played tennis with wooden rackets before sipping Pimm’s on the lawn. There are so many geographical names dropped in the band’s songs, in fact, that it seemed high time to collate them all as pins on a fancy Google map. Click through to discover which continents Koenig’s trust fund and/or tour schedule haven’t sent him to yet (spoiler: South America and Australia). … Read More

Music

10 Albums Made for Incredibly Strange (And Sometimes Hilarious) Reasons

By Tom Hawking on

As you’ve probably heard, there’s a new Lauryn Hill song. It sounds… well, it sounds like it was recorded in a hurry to pay off a tax bill, which is apparently exactly the case (unfortunately, the quickie release didn’t save Hill from a three-month jail sentence). The vocals and lyrics are decent enough, but the beat sounds like it was slapped together in GarageBand with deadlines in mind. Of course, Hill’s not exactly the first artist to have to make a record under duress; here’s a selection of records made for weird reasons over the years, some hilarious, some sadly rather less so. … Read More

Music

Against Music’s Reductive Obsession With Newness: A Defense of Savages

By Tom Hawking on

Cometh the hype, cometh the backlash. Like a lot of the music press, Flavorwire has been enthusing over London four-piece Savages ever since they emerged last year. Out this week, their debut album, Silence Yourself, delivers on the promise of their first singles and killer live show. But with the release of that album, a counter-narrative is emerging, especially in their native UK. It stems largely from the sort of contrarians who haunt Internet comment sections (and celebrity Twitter feeds), but also appears in the occasional (semi-)professional review: Savages are derivative and dull, goes the argument, a rip-off of post-punk/goth luminaries like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joy Division. They’re not doing anything new. … Read More

Music

Musicians Hanging Out in Records Stores

By Alison Nastasi on

What’s the best thing to do when you’re not digging for vinyl? Look at photos of musicians digging for vinyl, of course. Voices of East Anglia featured a few great pictures of stars during the 1960s hanging out at record emporiums, and we wanted to add our own contribution to the collection. Click through to see your favorite musicians in the wild, with… Read More

Music

The 10 Best Songs We Heard This Week: Majical Cloudz, Dirty Beaches

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, which means we are contemplating the weekend ahead and also, as ever, rounding up the best songs we’ve heard this week. This week we continued our burgeoning bromance with Majical Cloudz, reveled in the Suicide-y sounds of the new Dirty Beaches, started crossing fingers that the latest Tricky new dawn won’t prove to… Read More

Film

8 Musician Biopics to Watch Instead of ‘Greetings From Tim Buckley’

By Tyler Coates on

Award-baiting biopics of popular artists are usually saved for the fall in an effort to grab as many Oscar nominations as possible, but today’s release of Greetings From Tim Buckley, which stars Gossip Girl alum Penn Badgley as ‘90s singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley searching for his own musical identity in the shadow of his famous father, is a good indication that the movie isn’t that great. Are we surprised? Musical biopics are a dime a dozen, and very few stand out as outliers in this increasingly popular genre. (Even the two most successful in the past decade — Ray and Walk the Line — featured the usual, stereotypical arcs.) If you’re going to pass on Greetings From Tim Buckley but are itching to learn more about a famous musician through the cinematic art form, here are eight other biopics worth viewing. … Read More

Music

A Song for Every New York Times Hipster Trend Piece

By Tom Hawking on

The ongoing New York Times obsession with “hipsters” continued this week with yet another lifestyle article about Williamsburg, a place that the NYT apparently thinks is still home to the Brooklyn cool set. The piece served as more confirmation that the Times is officially the only publication that still thinks the word “hipster” actually means something and/or is a cultural phenomenon worth analyzing in 2013. At this point, the paper’s ongoing obsession with Williamsburg is the journalistic equivalent of the repressed bro at school who’s secretly fascinated by the weird kids and deals with this by ridiculing them at every possible opportunity. Anyway, The Awl did a pretty spectacular job of highlighting the ongoing absurdity of the whole thing with this roundup of every characteristic that the paper has ever ascribed to hipsters (spoiler: everything, ever) — but what about the music? To help the paper out, here are some songs to soundtrack their most, um, memorable trend pieces. … Read More

Music

A Graveyard of Failed Internet Music Ventures

By Tom Hawking on

Only two weeks after launching, Twitter’s new music application has proven rather less revolutionary or successful than the pre-release hype suggested. Ever since the advent of the MP3 (and possibly before), people have looked at the Internet and gone, “Hey! There must be a way of making money out of using this thing to distribute music!” The problem is that while the distribution bit is easy, the making money aspect has proven a whole lot more difficult. So here’s a look at the decline of other dead or doomed music applications that have graced the Internet over the years; some have proven fleeting fads or ideas that just didn’t resonate with enough people, while others, perversely, have been victims of their own success. … Read More

Music

When Viral Music Ad Campaigns Go Wrong

By Tom Hawking on

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, goes the old Madison Ave truism. But is it actually true? Boards of Canada’s epic album-announcement promotion stunt got them a whole lot of coverage in various publications that don’t normally go in for cerebral electronica, so in that respect it was presumably a success — but let’s be honest, it was also kind of a pain in the ass, especially for fans who’ve been waiting eight years for a new album and don’t appreciate being teased on top of that. Internet marketing is an inexact science, and when artists get it wrong, the results can be at best irritating and at worst counter-productive. Like this lot, for instance.

… Read More

Music

Raw Power: How Iggy Pop Transcends Rock’s Ageist Mythology

By Tom Hawking on

Ever since The Who proclaimed, “Hope I die before I get old,” rock ‘n’ roll has been a young person’s game. Over the years, countless musicians have extolled the virtues of youth and reveled in iconoclastic denunciations of all that’s gone before. This sets music apart from other art forms — literature, visual art, even film — which respect and celebrate the experience and wisdom that come with old age. In the world of rock ‘n’ roll, Saturn never gets a chance to devour his children; by the time the idea presents itself, they’re already making records about how much they hate him. … Read More