Jobs (or the lack thereof). Bills. Personal drama. Existential angst. It’s hard out there for 20-something creative types, struggling to make ends meet and still find enough hours in the day to work on our own personal projects. For the most part, here at Flavorpill, we tend to keep a positive attitude about balancing the stresses of our daily existence with the creative pursuits that make life worth living. But every once in a while, we can’t help but get sucked into the vortex of a mini-quarterlife crisis. And we’re pretty sure we’re not alone. Since music is at once the best catharsis and the best inspiration to get out of our own heads, we’ve compiled a list of 15 songs that feel your pain — including a few that might just help you get back to kicking ass.
Here’s a groan-worthy headline for you: “What Comes First: Depression in Teens or Emo Music?” In what may be an unconscious echo of Nick Hornby’s oft-quoted High Fidelity query, “What came first, the music or the misery?”, NPR’s health blog presents a new study that found teens who listen to a lot of music tend to be depressed. Cue hysterical parents, swooping in to confiscate those My Chemical Romance CDs and replace them with — what, Sartre’s Nausea?
Now, it’s totally obvious that depressing songs pre-date emo’s breakthrough to the mainstream by a couple hundred years. But we thought this would be a good excuse to remind hysterical types that just because kids are dying their hair pink and black doesn’t mean the music teenagers like is any darker now than it was before. Listen to 25 of the most depressing non-emo songs we can think of after the jump, and suggest your own additions in the comments.
We will never cease to be amazed by Robyn, even though we have kind of lost track of how many albums she released last year (15? 32?). Now, she’s found the time to work with Savage Skulls and Douster on a wonderful video for the song “Bad Gal” (which was a bonus track on Body Talk Pt. 2). It is weird and great and we love it.
“Bad Gal” got us thinking about all the other immortal bad-girl anthems we’ve rocked out to over the years. There are many. But the ten we’ve listed after the jump are our favorites. Leave your picks for what we left out in the comments. If we get enough great suggestions, we’ll round up ten more songs next week.
Liz Phair has a new album out, and Pitchfork gave it a 2.6 out of 10. That’s bad. Dismal, even. In April, Courtney Love’s resurrected band Hole didn’t do much better with Nobody’s Daughter — their album scored a 2.9. We know the music criticism website is infamous for having high standards, but these grades seem outright punitive.
Perhaps we’re paranoid, but does Pitchfork have something against women over 40? Has a blend of ageism and sexism crept into their reviews, or are they just brave enough to spurn complacent records and give them the grade they deserve? To indulge our suspicions, we compared some of Pitchfork’s album reviews of artists in this demographic with the averages found on the review-aggregate website Metacritic. Check out our findings, along with Pitchfork’s harshest criticism leveled against each member of this random group of mature women, after the jump.
1. Liz Phair posted her first new album in five years on her website over the weekend, and Ann Powers seems to be the only person who doesn’t hate its tongue in cheek offerings. [via Pop & Hiss]
2. Even though it was meant to be awful, M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Last Airbender delivered a respectable $70.5 million box office over the holiday weekend. That said, Twilight: Eclipse raked in $180 million. [via Vulture]
3. Strange but true: Oscar winner Javier Bardem is expected to appear the upcoming season of Glee as a rock star who befriends Artie. [via EW]
4. Thanks to a 4chan prank involving his “My World Tour” Twitter voting contest, Justin Bieber might be heading to North Korea; if audiences are lucky, maybe they’ll get a duet with Kim Jong Il. [via Boing Boing]
5. “Occult jam” made using gin, milk, sugar and Princess Diana‘s hair is currently available for sale at a London surrealist art show. [via Jezebel]
In her new book Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, Marisa Meltzer takes readers on a journey from the moment when Tobi Vail first transfigured the word “girl” to “grrrl” all the way to the current cultural supremacy of all things Miley. As she explains in the preface: “The story of girl power kicks off with riot grrrl, but this isn’t a book just about riot grrrl, or even the nineties. It’s also a book about how everything that happened afterward was just as, if not more, important: how an underground movement trickled up from punk-rock utopias to teen girls’ bedrooms around the world.”
To celebrate its release, we asked Meltzer to provide a list of the most essential female artists from the ’90s — the decade that birthed the girl power revolution. Chime in with your own music heroes in the comments.
Welcome to part two of our round up of the 50 greatest albums by popular female artists. This week’s list spans a half century, from the swinging jazz of the 1950s to the birth of socially-conscious hip hop in the late noughts. To recap our criteria: we limited ourselves to only one album per artist and featured bands had to be fronted solely by a female performer. Mostly importantly, we wanted to feature works that have become a seminal influence on the music industry as a whole.
So without further ado, selections 11 through 20 (in no particular order) – and don’t forget to check back next Friday for Part 3. Read More »
It all started off last week. I was in a deli near my apartment, when I looked over and saw Elton John’s face peering up from the ice cream section of the freezer. No, I wasn’t hallucinating. He’s got his own Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor — Goodbye Yellow Brickle Road — complete with a photoshopped-thin head shot. But he’s not the only musician who has “sold out” — and I’m using that term in the most literal way possible. After the jump, a list of some of the most egregious instances of an artist using their celebrity to hawk something ridiculous that we could come up with here at Flavorpill HQ. (And no Pitchfork, Liz Phair contributing a song to some crappy Banana Republic compilation doesn’t count.) Do us a favor and keep the list growing in the comments. Read More »
Someone get Warhol on the phone. Lissy Trullie is like Edie Sedgwick + the throaty pipes of Lou Reed/Liz Phair + the charisma of Courtney Love + the looks of Agyness Deyn + the hipster bouncing DJ skills of Sam Ronson. In today’s anti-individual celeb culture, where the spotlight is more about crotch shots than talent, it can be difficult to take a pretty young face seriously. Especially when she’s the belle of the fashion set. And so Flavorwire chatted with our favorite rocker since _____ (we can’t remember when; she’s that damn good) to find out if it all adds up or this emerging musician is really too good to be true.
— their album scored a 2.9. We know the music criticism website is infamous for having high standards, but these grades seem outright punitive.
, Marisa Meltzer takes readers on a journey from the moment when Tobi Vail first transfigured the word “girl” to “grrrl” all the way to the current cultural supremacy of all things Miley. As she explains in the preface: “The story of girl power kicks off with riot grrrl, but this isn’t a book just about riot grrrl, or even the nineties. It’s also a book about how everything that happened afterward was just as, if not more, important: how an underground movement trickled up from punk-rock utopias to teen girls’ bedrooms around the world.”
