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Why Do Americans Need Our Electronic Musicians to Look Like Cartoon Characters?

By Tom Hawking on

As plenty of commentators (including Flavorwire) have pointed out, Daft Punk’s sudden rise into the commercial stratosphere coincided with the adoption of their now-iconic robot personas. Their journey from being middle-ranking producers with a flair for the crossover market to globe-conquering fauxbotic superstars started the minute they decided to grab a pair of converted motorcycle helmets and pretend to be androids. Why is it, though, that the US market seems to need its electronic music to be made by people with such strong visual identities? Why do we need our producers to have gimmicks and wear masks? … Read More

Design

The Internet’s Funniest Band T-Shirt Parodies

By Tom Hawking on

A hilarious T-shirt design has been making the rounds on the Internet over the last couple of days — it’s the iconic radio wave landscape from the cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, emblazoned with the words, “What is this? I’ve seen it on Tumblr.” The shirt is the work of one Adam J. Kurtz, a New York City-based designer, and you can pre-order it here. As you wait for your purchase to arrive, here’s a selection of similarly amusing takes on iconic band logos, album cover art, and T-shirt designs. … Read More

Music

Why Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’ Won’t Save Electronic Music

By Tom Hawking on

These are strange times for electronic music. The rise of what the US insists on calling EDM, along with a second wave of superstar DJs, means the genre’s more popular than it’s ever been. A second wave of superstar DJs walk the globe, commanding crazy appearance fees and lengthy GQ profiles. Into all of this comes the return of Daft Punk, the duo that somehow ended up as the biggest electronic act of the 1990s and is thus indirectly responsible for at least partially kick-starting the metamorphosis of electronic music from niche genre to commercial… Read More

Music

The 10 Best Songs We Heard This Week: Savages, Laurel Halo

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, and we are, as ever, rounding up the best songs we’ve heard this week, which to be honest is a rather pleasant distraction from all the other fucked-up stuff going on in the world. This week we swooned (again) at new material from Savages, were intrigued by the return of Laurel Halo, enjoyed the new Daft Punk song (albeit perhaps not quite as much as everyone else), and elsewhere generally got down to new stuff by Com Truise, Gunslinger, Tempers… and Black Sabbath, whose new song actually isn’t that bad at all. Who’d have thought it? Anyway, click through and get listening. … Read More

Music

Fascinating Photos of Famous Musicians in Their Studios

By Tom Hawking on

We’re constantly fascinated with the creative process here at Flavorwire, and one of the most important components of that process is the space in which it takes place. For musicians, at least as far as the recording process goes, this place is the studio, and as such we thought we’d take a look at the studios of some of our favorite musicians. The contrasts on display are intriguing, from the endearingly chaotic to the pristine and very expensive, from analog to digital, from minimalist to decked out in all sorts of crazy-looking… Read More

Art

Idiosyncratic Illustrations of Memorable Musical Collaborations

By Tom Hawking on

We’ve written a bit about unexpectedly awesome musical collaborations here on Flavorwire over the years, and as such, we were rather taken by these illustrations of some such collaborations. They’re by artistic duo Pol and Sakiroo Choi, and we spotted them via Thaeger, whose write-up of the pieces may or may not be interesting reading, depending on how good your German is. Anyway, click through and check out some of our favorites — there’s Run-DMC and Aerosmith, Kanye West and Daft Punk, and various others (but not, sadly, David Bowie and Mick Jagger, although maybe some things are better left un-illustrated. … Read More

News

The Morning's Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. In spite of 4chan’s best efforts, Time Magazine has named Barack Obama — and not North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un — its “Person of the Year”. [via Gawker]

2. Could Daft Punk, The Rolling Stones, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs be headlining Coachella 2013? This email sure seems to suggest so.

3. Here’s an interesting peek at what the New York Public Library’s controversial $300 million renovation of its Fifth Avenue flagship location will actually look like, as envisioned by starchitect Norman Foster. [via NYT] … Read More

Music

15 Hilariously Negative Early Reviews of Classic Albums

By Tom Hawking on

Everybody likes reading a really nasty review every now and then, but sometimes critics get it wrong. Here’s a look at misguided reviews of albums that’d go on to be acclaimed as… Read More

Music

10 Auto-Tune Songs That Don’t Suck

By Tom Hawking on

Cat Power’s new album Sun dropped earlier this week, and the fact that she uses Auto-Tune on the track “3, 6, 9″ has generated almost as much interest as the album itself. For an ostensibly innocuous pitch-correction effect, Auto-Tune has generated a heap of controversy over the last decade, ever since Cher introduced it to the world during the chorus of “Believe.” Much of the opprobrium directed at the use of the software is entirely justified (Hi, Eiffel 65! Hi, Chris Cornell!), but that’s not to say that every Auto-Tuned track is a priori awful — so we’ve set ourselves the challenge of finding 10 tracks that use its sound in creative or interesting ways. And for clarity’s sake, we’re discussing Auto-Tune as an audible pseudo-vocoder effect here, not as a production tweak to correct an errant vocal — otherwise every chart song since the turn of the millennium would be eligible. Anyway, let us know if we’ve missed anything. First person to suggest “Believe” or anything by T-Pain gets a lump of coal for Christmas. … Read More

Music

5 Albums to Stream for Free This Week: The Magnetic Fields, Andrew Bird

By Tom Hawking on

If you’re anything like Flavorpill, Monday mornings never get any easier, especially if Sunday evening came with a bottle of syrah and an extra serving of existential angst. But! Never fear, because there’s always new music to, um, brighten up the morning. This week’s installment of our regular Monday roundup of new records streaming on the internet for free encompasses an extra dose of existential angst from Magnetic Fields, a compilation of nasty minimal wave, new albums from Andrew Bird and Memoryhouse, and the answer to what School of Seven Bells sound like minus a Deheza twin. Click through and get listening. … Read More