Every Friday, we take a look at the way various cities from around the world have been depicted in song, choosing five of our favorites about a given location. Having spent the last month across the Atlantic, we’re heading back to USA for a few weeks, and starting on the west coast this time. Specifically, we’re going to San Francisco, a city with a particularly fruitful musical heritage, and a place that’s been immortalized in song more times than you can poke a stick at. As ever, this isn’t meant to be a definitive list of the best songs ever about the city, just a selection of our personal favorites — and suggestions are always welcome.
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You can keep your New Girl and even (sorry, Kat Dennings) your 2 Broke Girls. We’ve been burned by both of the new, deeply flawed network sitcoms about adorably alternative 20-something women, but we have a really good feeling about Girls. The HBO comedy series, which premieres in April, was written and directed by its star, 25-year-old Tiny Furniture phenom Lena Dunham, with Judd Apatow attached as executive producer. The show will follow three young female friends living in New York and seemingly stuck in perpetual intern/assistant hell.
Since we’ve been anxious to know more about the show since HBO picked it up, over a year ago, you can imagine how excited we are to get a first glimpse of it. The teaser below features everything we’ve come to expect from Dunham: smart, self-deprecating humor, professional frustration, and frequent oversharing. Let us know whether you’ll be watching in the comments. Read More »
Tomorrow seems to be the biggest release date in living memory — everyone from Alice Cooper to Neon Indian has records coming out — so there’s much pre-release streaming goodness to be found on the Internet at the moment. This has made our regular Monday task — searching the web for the best records to stream for free — a particularly pleasurable one this week. There’s the new album from Grizzly Bear side-project CANT, which is pretty fantastic listening, along with new records from Girls, Tropics, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Tori Amos. All this awaits you after the jump!
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When Girls’ Christopher Owens first revealed, circa the release of the band’s debut album, Album, that he’d grown up in the Children of God cult, you could almost hear the collective intake of breath from music journalists everywhere (and, we suspect, from the band’s publicists, too). After all, it makes great copy: musician grows up in cult, overcomes weird childhood, makes great album, lives happily ever after. But really, when you read them, the truth is far more complex and less facile — and Owens’ stories of his early years are genuinely disturbing. Plenty of other musicians over the years have arrived at their music via lives that have been unconventional, to say the least. And so, with Girls’ new album due next week and streaming now at Hype Machine, here’s a selection of weird and compelling musician back stories.
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If you’re reading this, then odds are you’re not in route to Matador Records’ epic 21st birthday bash at the Palms in Vegas, where an amazing lineup of bands who have worked with the indie rock label — Sonic Youth, Pavement, Girls, Spoon, Belle & Sebastian, New Pornographers, and Superchunk, among others — will perform for three nights straight. Each evening’s show will be live streaming on Matador’s MySpace page, and will re-air again the following morning. Click through to check out the lineup, and plan your viewing accordingly.
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Music Blog Zeitgeist is the Hype Machine’s punchy visual reference for the most blogged-about bands and artists of 2009.
Based on thousands of daily posts by bloggers writing about their favorite music, the Hype Machine aggregates the myriad songs and remixes floating across the web. At the end of the year, the site revealed the top 50 artists according to how frequently it posted their songs, then paired each act with a visual artist who created original work based on the band name.
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Katie Roiphe caused a stir with her recent New York Times essay “The Naked and the Conflicted,” which argues that a large chunk of today’s heterosexual male authors tend to not only shy away from sex, but also express disgust and even boredom with it. But we’re not here to rehash the ample controversy she incited. Instead, we’ve decided to see whether her thesis applies to young, male artists in another arena: indie rock. We examined some of last year’s buzziest hits to determine whether their creators find sex as passé as their literary counterparts. Will hipster rockers prove the exception by summoning the libido of Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes? Also: Where the ladies at, and are their sexual antics stealing the striptease?
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Just when we thought that we had become jaded New Yorkers and seen all the city had to offer, it threw us a giant bedazzled curve ball in the form of The Miss G Train Pageant. Held at the City Reliquary Museum in Brooklyn, the first-annual beauty pageant pays homage to one of the most temperamental subway lines in New York City. Running through the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, the G train is infamous for its countless delays, sketchy platforms and its ability to attract, ahem, colorful characters.
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Exciting news: Your latest Flavorpill Mixtape has arrived. Your ears are salivating. Your fingers are ready to click ctrl + left click and ‘save as.’ Ten essential downloads from this past week in music after the jump — all free for the taking! Take a listen, and then leave us a comment with what you think. Read More »
The summer of lo-fi music has come to a close — it’s getting cooler out, and we need to refresh our iPods with some new music. So give your fingers a little warm-up stretch and get ready to “Right Click, Save Link As,” because after the jump we present 10 essential downloads from our latest Viva Radio show that we consider required listening at Flavorpill HQ. Enjoy! Read More »
