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Celebrities Praising Celebrities: The Best Tributes From the Annual “Time 100″ List

By Jason Bailey on

Time magazine released its annual “Time 100” this week — a list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The list is, as usual, light on shock; it pretty much features the political figures, artists, athletes, and philanthropists you’d expect. What makes the feature compelling is the deployment of similarly well-known folks to write testimonials about the influential people they admire. Since we love hearing about the actors our favorite actors love, it warms our hearts to read, for example, Jon Hamm’s fan letter to his fellow AMC star Bryan Cranston. “Over the past five seasons,” Hamm writes, “I’ve marveled at Bryan’s ability to turn Breaking Bad’s Walter White from a feckless, terrified father and husband to a ruthless, terrifying father, husband and crime lord. The transformation is mesmerizing. The performance is fearless. Bryan is that good.” These stunt tributes don’t always work (particularly in the political realm — the only thing we want to read less than Sarah Palin’s tribute to Glenn Beck is Ted Nugent’s tribute to Sarah Palin), but when they do, they’re a joy to read. See our favorite celeb-penned tributes from the past five years of “Time 100″ below. … Read More

Music

Great Albums With Embarrassingly Bad Cover Art [NSFW]

By Tom Hawking on

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Mosquito is officially on the shelves, and our first impressions of the record haven’t changed much: we rather like it. The cover art, though… well, that’s an entirely different matter. We’re sure there’s some reasoning behind adorning the sleeve with a lurid pink giant mosquito sinking its proboscis into the ass of a baby (a baby with green lipstick on, we hasten to add), but until we know what it is, the album is going straight to the top of our list of great albums saddled by awful cover art. Here are some of the… Read More

Music

The 10 Albums You Need to Hear in April

By Tom Hawking on

Another month, another packed release schedule — and, as ever, we’ve picked out the ten best albums in the month ahead. On the whole, April is shaping up as a pretty excellent month for new records. Among other things, there’s the return of The Flaming Lips and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, beautiful new music from The Besnard Lakes and Iron & Wine, weird dance-floor-friendly horrorcore from Xander Harris, the continuing renaissance of James Williamson-era Iggy and the Stooges, and at least one album of the year contender. (Spoiler: The… Read More

Music

The Most Controversial Music Videos of All Time

By Alison Nastasi on

An exhibition opening April 3 at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image will celebrate music videos as an art form at the “forefront of creative technology, its role in pushing the boundaries of innovative production, its important role as an experimental sandbox for filmmakers, and its lasting effects on popular culture globally.” This news got us thinking about the boldest images from music videos — those works that helped break the barriers of censorship and became the most controversial of all time. Click through to see ten music videos (many of them NSFW) that pushed the envelope and made… Read More

Music

The Musicians That Make the Best Music Videos

By Tom Hawking on

As we noted last week, we were both intrigued and disconcerted by the arrival of the new Beach House video for “Wishes,” which features the ever-terrifying Ray “Leland Palmer” Wise lip-synching to the song as he directs some sort of weird gymanstic-centric cult meeting in a sports stadium. It’s the latest in a series of pretty awesome videos from Beach House, and it got us thinking about other bands who’ve really embraced the medium as an art form, making consistently great videos over the years. Here are some of our favorites! … Read More

Music

Everything We Know About M.I.A.’s ‘Matangi’

By Alison Herman on

Yesterday, Sri Lankan rapper, visual artist, and general hell-raiser M.I.A. (née Maya Arulpragasam) released her Matangi , an extended cut produced for the Paris Fashion Week runway show of Japanese brand Kenzo. It’s the first officially released new material from M.I.A. since her hit single “Bad Girls” came out over a year ago, although producer Danja dropped its b-side, “Doobie,” this January. Fans are already speculating on what the ‘s sound, which is more reminiscent of Bollywood music than Arulpragasam’s typical genre-bending style, means for M.I.A.’s upcoming fourth album, also titled Matangi. So that you can continue parsing the evidence, we’ve collected everything we know about that record so far, from the release date to the tracklist to song previews. It’s almost as good as having the album itself. Almost. … Read More

Celebrity

10 of the Most Incredibly Unlikely Celebrity Feuds in History

By Alison Herman on

Yesterday saw the latest flare-up in what’s apparently a nearly two-decade war between Roseanne Barr and writer Jamaica Kincaid. As Roseanne tells it, Kincaid resigned in protest when then-editor-in-chief Tina Brown invited Barr to guest-edit an issue of the New Yorker in 1996, which is why Barr now considers Kincaid a “repugnant classist.” We didn’t know the two women had even heard of each other, let alone hated each other, but it turns out plenty of famous people have beef, and not just Kanye and Taylor Swift. Here are some of the most unexpected celebrity conflicts, from authors to actors to everything in between. … Read More

Music

20 Classic Female-Fronted Hip Hop Tracks

By Tom Hawking on

Oh, Rolling Stone. Sometimes you make it so easy. We try not to spend too much of our time nitpicking the amusingly out-of-touch pontifications of Jann Wenner’s empire, but occasionally something comes along that annoys us so much that it’s hard not to react. So it was recently, when the magazine’s editors came back from the mountain with stone tablets purporting to contain “The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time.” In fairness, reading RS for hip hop recommendations is like reading Trucking Monthly for advice on bicycles, but even so, if you’re going to claim to make a definitive list, you don’t relegate Nas’s “NY State of Mind” to #31 (11 places behind 50 Cent’s risible “In Da Club”) — and, more annoyingly, you don’t make the mistake of including only three songs featuring female vocalists. … Read More

Web

What’s On at Flavorpill: The Links That Made the Rounds In Our Office

By Caroline Stanley on

Today at Flavorpill, we watched a video featuring Nathan Fillion in a doctor’s outfit, some puppets, and Neil Patrick Harris’ trouser weasel (don’t worry — it’s not as dirty as it sounds). We were thrilled to hear that Katheryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty nabbed the National Board of Review’s Best Film honor. … Read More

Fashion

M.I.A. Collaborating With Versace

By Judy Berman on

Is Versace the truffle fries of fashion houses? We ask, of course, because it’s time to get used to seeing that brand’s name next to M.I.A.’s. Reporting for Spin on the rapper’s lecture yesterday at MoMA P.S. 1 in Queens, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd reveals that the she confirmed her collaboration with Versace. In fact, M.I.A.’s… Read More