If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: Clay, the apathetic protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ first novel, Less Than Zero.
Last week we stereotyped you by your favorite books, and this week it’s time to apply a bumper edition of our gratuitous generalizations to the world of music. Our stereotyping posts have become something of a tradition at Flavorpill, but still, here’s our obligatory disclaimer: this is an entirely tongue-in-cheek exercise, so don’t get all offended — and also, as ever, several of our favorite records are on here, and we’ll totally own up to all the stereotypes that apply to us. Anyway, with that said, here are 50 albums that keep cropping up on end-of-year lists and the sort of people that like them. Read More »
As we mentioned earlier in the week, we’ve had Zola Jesus’s new album Conatus on constant rotation of late, and boy, can we ever recommend it. Although Nika Danilova’s not keen on being labelled goth — “What would be the point of making goth music? It’s already been done,” she told Q magazine in January — she certainly shares some kinship with the likes of Siouxsie & The Banshees and Dead Can Dance, female-fronted or female-centric acts whose music carried a certain ominous air. In this sense, Danilova is the latest in the line of what we might call the dark ladies of rock ‘n’ roll. We’ve selected our 10 favorites after the jump. Who are yours?
When the news broke that Neil Young is writing an all-encompassing memoir, it got us thinking about what other musicians — and specifically which of our favorite current indie rockers — we’d like to see compose tell-all autobiographies. Mysterious band break-ups, high-profile couplings gone awry, reclusive behavior, extensive touring, and cult childhoods exposed would all make for awesome, page-turning reads for those of us who have always been curious about the private goings-on behind the music. So, in hopes of giving our favorite potential memoirists a gentle push, we’ve complied a list of ten artists whose lives who we’d love to learn more about.
You may have noticed that we love indie music here at Flavorpill. And by “indie,” we don’t necessarily just mean music released on independent labels (a term that’s becoming increasingly meaningless these days anyway). These days, “indie” has become similar shorthand to what “alternative” meant in the 1990s: music that exists outside the world of the production-line chart pop that major labels really wish we’d still shell out $25 a CD for. Anyway, definition-based quibbling aside, indie music is a subject that’s dear to our heart — without it, we’d be forever marooned in major label hell, and thus we get upset about the things that we feel are undermining its health. Like the 10 things you’ll read after the jump, for instance.
1. P.J. Harvey has taken home this year’s Mercury Prize for her album Let England Shake, making her the first singer to ever win the award twice. [via ArtsBeat]
2. News that we’re ashamed to admit makes us excited: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis have just closed deals to take on “substantial” roles in The Expendables 2. [via Deadline]
3. The Flaming Lips are recording “Found a Star on the Ground,” a song that’s a whopping six hours long, to benefit the Central Oklahoma Humane Society and the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma, and for $100 a pop, you can have your name included in its epic lyrics. [via Pitchfork]
4. Yesterday Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was fired over the phone, and now “people familiar with the matter” are saying that the company is “open to selling itself to the right bidder” — which many think could be Microsoft. [via Techland]
5. An intruder broke into Celine Dion’s Quebec mansion on Monday afternoon, and then proceeded to make himself a pastry snack and draw a nice, warm bath. [via E!]
Rolling Stone readers polls are the worst. Remember their “Top Ten Live Acts of All Time,” which was so terrible the entire Flavorpill staff came together to post an alternate list? Well, the aging rock magazine has done it again: Last week brought “Readers Poll: The Best Punk Bands of All Time.” And guess what? Not only did Green Day — Green Day! — take the #1 spot, but there wasn’t a single woman on the list. So, in an attempt to correct this latest grievous error, we have compiled a list of 15 essential women punk icons. Let’s be clear: These are hardly the only noteworthy women in punk. They’re simply the ones we think have absolutely earned a spot in any discussion of the best punk bands of all time.
We recently stumbled across an impressive trove of rock ‘n’ roll portraits by Ontario artist Laurie Masters over at Behance Network. Masters is apparently entirely self-taught and creates her portraits of celebrities from photographs – she was originally a musician, and as such it’s perhaps no surprise that her work focuses largely on musicians (PJ Harvey, M.I.A., the Arcade Fire), although her subject matter also encompasses a variety of other artists and actors. Endearingly, she also creates dolls of her subjects, some of which can be seen at her website (apparently Flight of the Conchords were particularly impressed by their stuffed likenesses). We’re not necessarily always fans of the whole painting-directly-from-photos idea, but Masters’ rock ‘n’ roll portraits are an interesting and ongoing project. We’ve collected some of our favorites after the jump.
We’re on a bit of a PJ Harvey kick at Flavorpill at the moment, and recently we’ve been investigating the work of one of her more fascinating collaborators – Irish photographer/filmmaker/polymath Seamus Murphy. Murphy has made a video for each song on Harvey’s new album Let England Shake, but is best known as a photographer – Harvey apparently discovered his work while researching the war in Afghanistan in the course of writing the record. You can certainly see why it affected her so deeply – Murphy’s work is visceral and hugely powerful, focusing largely on human conflict and privation, both military and psychological. His website collects photos from a huge number of battlefields and conflict zones all over the world, from the drug wars of Mexico and the ruins of Mogadishu to the ostensibly civilized surrounds of the Ascot racecourse in England, often working as photo essays that relate a story over the course of multiple images. See some of our favorites after the jump.
We were lucky enough to score tickets to PJ Harvey earlier this week at Terminal 5, and were rewarded with one of the best shows we’ve seen in ages. She played every track off her new album Let England Shake, and it got us thinking about how consistently excellent her career has been, save for a slight dip in the early 2000s. There have been plenty of artists who’ve had one or two good albums in them but found it ever more difficult to maintain that level of quality once the initial rush of ideas is gone. Artists who’ve been able to put out a string of great albums without intervening stinkers are few and far between –- so we’ve rounded up ten of our favorites. We’ve set our bar at four consecutive great albums, which rules out a surprisingly large number of artists -– it’s tough to turn out nothing but goodness over a number of years! Feel free to add your suggestions in our ever-accommodating comments section.
