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Music

The 50 Albums Everyone Needs to Own, 1963-2013

By Tom Hawking on

No one buys albums anymore, goes the music industry truism. And yet, for all that the format’s commercial viability may or may not be on the wane, sitting and listening to a great album from start to finish is one of the greatest pleasures that music can bring. Flavorwire recently got to thinking about how one might build a record collection if you really only did buy one record a year. So here’s the result of our thought exercise: 50 albums you really should own, one a year from 1963 until the present… Read More

Television

10 Amazing, Shocking Unscripted Moments From ’90s MTV

By Tyler Coates on

Though the channel debuted in the early ’80s, MTV really found its groove in the ’90s when it still balanced music coverage with its burgeoning original reality, comedy, and animated programming. Because we can’t resist looking back fondly on the wild and wacky on-air incidents that shaped our adolescence, here are ten mind-blowing moments from MTV’s second decade that make us pine for those halcyon off-the-wall… Read More

Music

The Most Distinctive Singing Voices of the 1990s

By Tom Hawking on

We’re big fans of Suede here at Flavorpill central, and as such we’re delighted to report that their new album Bloodsports is better than we dared to hop for — in fact, it’s the best thing they’ve made since Coming Up, which is pretty impressive considering how utterly dry Brett Anderson’s well of ideas seemed to have run on their last couple of albums. And best of all, Anderson still sounds great; his voice is rich as ever, and listening to the album got us thinking about what a distinctive vocalist he is. His was one of the most recognizable voices of the 1990s, and as such we thought we’d round up some of the others to go with him. … Read More

Music

The Best Advice to Women in Music from Female Musicians

By Alison Nastasi on

Examining the statistics concerning women in professional, creative fields can be a depressing endeavor. A recent study from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University indicated that only 9% of directors of the top 250 grossing Hollywood films in 2012 were women — a number that actually increased 4% since 2011, but still shows the scales are heavily tipped.

The same study applauded the number of women working in the indie film sector, which is a trend that runs parallel with female-fronted bands or solo music acts. Looking at the industry at large, only eight of last year’s top female earners ranked among the world’s 25 highest-paid musicians. The reasons are complicated, and the results can be disheartening, which is why we wanted to collect some of the best advice that female musicians had for their fellow artists — like the tongue-in-cheek list Pretenders frontwoman, Chrissie Hynde, wrote to “chick rockers” that we spotted on Dangerous Minds.

See what wisdom women have offered each other as they navigate a male-dominated industry, share their artistry with the world, and try to stay positive and inspired, after the jump. … Read More

Music

What Pitchfork's Top 10 Songs of 2012 Say About Us

By Tom Hawking on

Seventeen years after Ryan Schreiber first started banging out reviews in his Minneapolis bedroom, Pitchfork’s end-of-year lists are probably the most anticipated in the music industry — both because for all its failings the site remains the Internet’s most popular and thus most influential hive of music criticism, and because it holds its lists until pretty much everyone else has published theirs. Over the last couple of years, we’ve amused ourselves by pondering what the songs in the ’Fork’s Top 10 say about its readership (which, of course, includes us) — and so, with the publication yesterday of this year’s winners, we’re giving the exercise another go-around. … Read More

Music

The Year in Memorable Musical Controversies

By Tom Hawking on

2012 has been a crazy year in many ways, and the music industry hasn’t exactly been immune to its air of pervading insanity. (In fairness, the music industry is rarely immune to any sort of insanity, but still, humor us here.) This year has given us a particularly rich vein of memorable controversies, conflicts, and contretemps, and as part of our ongoing end-of-year wrap-up, we’re looking back at some of the most significant. Some of these are hilarious, some of them depressing, some of them hilariously depressing, and some just plain old bewildering — but from the resurrection of dead rappers through homeless people functioning as wifi hotspots to a record company suing an entire country, all of them have been worth remembering. … Read More

Music

It’s Time to Retire the Grammys’ “Best Alternative Album” Category

By Judy Berman on

The annals of music history are filled with once-specific genre names that are now functionally meaningless. “Indie rock” and “EDM” are some recent examples, but back in the ’90s, it was “alternative” that got so overused as to become meaningless. In fact, these days it’s a term whose non-nostalgic use is largely limited to various music awards shows — including the Grammys, whose 2013 nominations were announced last night. Perhaps more than ever before, this year’s crop of “Best Alternative Album” picks raises the question: What does “alternative” even mean in 2012? … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. “Dull Tool,” a new Fiona Apple song that will be featured on the soundtrack for Judd Apatow’s upcoming comedy This Is 40, has leaked online. Give it a listen here. (On a related note, if you missed the heartbreaking handwritten letter Apple posted yesterday that explains why she’s canceling her upcoming South… Read More

Music

Fiona Apple: Still Not Nearly as Crazy as the Media Wants Her to Be

By Judy Berman on

There’s only one word for the media coverage of Fiona Apple’s drug arrest: ugly. When the news broke last week that cops in Sierra Blanca, Texas had caught the singer with marijuana and hashish, tabloids invited us to “see her crazy mugshot,” and even the least gossipy of music sites followed suit in posting the photo. Never mind that when Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg were arrested for pot possession in the same border town, the press laughed off the story. Of course they smoke weed. Who cares? Despite reports that Apple cooperated with police, her incarceration quickly became a scandal — probably because it fit the train-wreck narrative she’s been saddled with for her entire career. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. In case you missed it last night, here’s the full list of winners from the 64th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards, an evening which was dominated by Modern Family, Homeland, and Louis CK.

2. Fiona Apple shared some kind of garbled thoughts about her recent arrest for hash possession during a show in… Read More