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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

Hilariously Awful T-Shirts for Your Favorite Bands

By Judy Berman on

We’ve all been there. You go to see a band you love, the show exceeds your already astronomical expectations, and when it’s all over, you feel the need to take home a memento of the evening. But then you get to merch table and the T-shirts are inexplicably awful. Thankfully, as the excellent Low Times has proven, terrible band T-shirts can be a whole lot funnier than they are disappointing. The site asked its audience to use CustomInk to create the worst designs they could think of, and the results — which feature tributes to the likes of Animal Collective, Bon Iver, and even Kelly Clarkson — are hilarious. Click through for a few of our favorites, and visit Low Times to see all 31 of the finalists (including a design submitted by one Steve Albini). … Read More

Music

Watch Arcade Fire Perform a New Song

By Emily Temple on

There aren’t that many bands whose new, unreleased and even unrecorded tracks we search out and swoon over, but Arcade Fire is one such band. On Friday, the band released this video, a live recording of a new song, “Crucified Again,” as performed in New York City on Thursday. Though band debuted the track in March at a show in Haiti, this is the first time it’s ever been recorded. And it’s pretty great, at least to our ears. Have a listen after the jump and let us know what you think in the comments. … Read More

Music

10 MP3s You Need to Download for Free This Week: Liars, Marissa Nadler

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, which means another installment of our regular roundup of downloadable MP3 goodness from around the web. This week we get all excited about the arrival of a new Liars track via Adult Swim’s Singles Program — and there’s also an unreleased Marissa Nadler song, a free track from Dan Deacon’s new album, the return of Jean Grae and Efterklang, How to Dress Well going for full-fledged pop R&B thrills, and plenty more. Since all this action costs precisely nothing, what are you waiting for? All the download links await after the jump. … Read More

Design

Duane Dalton’s Elegantly Redesigned ‘Album Anatomy’

By Judy Berman on

You might be tempted to lump in Duane Dalton’s Album Anatomy series with the many “minimalist” renderings of pop-culture icons and artifacts that have flooded the Internet. But the Dublin-based designer is actually doing something a bit more interesting than many of his peers, pushing all the information about the record to the top and bottom of the image and using the center space to illustrate his own experience of it. Dalton writes that the project is “an exploration in the art of reduction. It breaks down album imagery into its purist [sic] form by discarding any unnecessary information. This is achieved using a strict grid that displays the relevant album details, which leaves a central void to convey a response to the album. This void is filled by my personal response to an album. It can be influenced by a key track, the cover art or the overall flavour of the album.” Click through to view some of our favorite Album Anatomy redesigns, and visit Dalton’s website to see many more. … Read More

Music

Hear Macy Gray's Barn-Burning Cover of Radiohead's "Creep"

By Judy Berman on

If you haven’t checked in with neo-soul singer Macy Gray since her inescapable 1999 hit “I Try,” we suggest you catch up, because she’s made four more thoroughly enjoyable studio albums since then. And today marks the release of her sixth full-length, a compilation of covers bearing the entirely appropriate, if a bit unimaginative, title Covered. The tracklist includes versions of songs by everyone from Sublime (“Smoke 2 Joints,” obviously) to Kanye West to Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Metallica. As entirely random as this may seem, we’re enjoying her impassioned take on Radiohead’s “Creep,” which you can hear after the jump. If you’re still on board after that, head over to Stereogum to for Gray’s covers of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” and Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up.” … Read More

Books

Literary Mixtape: Scarlett O'Hara

By Emily Temple on

If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: the always divisive literary diva Scarlett O’Hara. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. Scarlett Johansson has been cast as Janet Leigh in Fox Searchlight’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. Anthony Hopkins was already on board to play the famed director, and Helen Mirren, his wife Alma Hitchcock. [via Slashfilm]

2. The new trailer for Pauly D’s Jersey Shore spin-off, The Pauly D Project,… Read More

Music

A Selection of Awesome Interactive Music Videos

By Jennifer Lewis on

Once upon a time, there was a magical place called MTV where all the music videos would play and be merry. Indeed, those days are long gone, but the Internet isn’t such a bad replacement, eh? Where else could we view eerie footage of our childhood homes set to the tune of an Arcade Fire jam? Or submit a tweet to be featured in a Robyn video? These days, some of the most enjoyable music videos are interactive — the ones that take you on a delightful ride through a personalized audio-visual experience. Click through for a selection of interactive music videos by Cold War Kids, Broken Bells, Tanlines, and more, and hit the comments to let us know what you made OK Go spell with their bodies. … Read More