Summer officially arrives this week, bringing with it afternoons in the park and rooftop parties and beaches. The thing is, though, every summer needs a soundtrack, and while every year there seems to be a rush to anoint a certain tune The Song of the Summer™, Flavorwire decided to go one better and choose a quintessential summer album for every one of the past 50 years, as something of a sequel to last month’s list of the 50 albums you need to own, 1963-2013. Click through and get… Read More
Prince
Pictures of Prince Doing Normal Stuff
Happy birthday, Prince! Yesterday, the artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince celebrated his 55th glorious year on this planet (just imagine how many times that cherry moon has spun around him). While he’s one of the beautiful ones — untouchable, seemingly extraterrestrial — the purple paisley god is, at times, just like the rest of us (only more fabulous, and with a penchant for wearing frilly shirts). To celebrate his time with us, we’ve curated a gallery of Prince doing everyday activities — bike-riding, sports-watching, Batman-loving — with his trademark purple-hued flair.… Read More
The 50 Albums Everyone Needs to Own, 1963-2013
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
A Selection of the Flat-Out Dirtiest Songs in the History of Music
The good folk at Dangerous Minds are great at unearthing amazing YouTube rarities, and they outdid themselves last week with a 1971 performance by Ike and Tina Turner, which goes down in history as one of the most subtly filthy live performances we’ve ever seen — it’s basically one long allusion to oral sex, with Tina spending most of her time doing very, very suggestive things to the microphone, and while Ike’s ophidian glare still gives us the creeps, he does make some glorious slurping noises into his own mic. The crowd clearly knows exactly what’s going on, sniggering throughout, and the whole thing’s a testament to just how filthy music could be, even in an era that was still comparatively conservative. Anyway, the spectacle got us thinking about our favorite dirty songs, the best of which we have shared after the jump. Don’t play these while your boss is around. Obviously. … Read More
The Fascinating Untold Stories Behind Some of Our Favorite Songs
Sure, everyone knows that Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” is about about his son falling from a window, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” may or may not be about Warren Beatty, and “In the Air Tonight” is not about watching someone drown. But there are plenty of other less well-documented backstories behind popular songs — like the one that surfaced over the weekend about The Beatles’ “Get Back” starting its life as a dubious satire called “No Pakistanis.” Wisely, the band rewrote the lyrics before releasing the song, but it remains a pretty fascinating piece of history, and our cue to discuss the less-documented stories lurking behind some of the songs in our iTunes collection. … Read More
Music’s Greatest Gender-Defying Fashion Statements
Earlier this week we did some serious thinking about the role of gender in Shaking the Habitual, the fantastic new album by The Knife. Today, we thought we’d revisit the same topic in a rather more lighthearted way: by looking at some of music’s most memorable gender-defying fashion statements over the years. Androgyny and ambiguity have long been part of popular music, after all, and they’ve been responsible for some of its most iconic imagery. From The Knife to Grace Jones and a certain remarkable German countertenor, here are some of the best… Read More
Great Bands That Made (Relatively) Forgettable Debut Records
In an interesting cosmic coincidence, this week marks notable anniversaries for two of the more significant debut albums in the world of rock ‘n’ roll: 25 years ago yesterday, the Pixies released Surfer Rosa, while 50 years ago today, the Beatles released Please Please Me. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is the contrast between the quality of the records — Surfer Rosa was a fully realized artistic vision, while Please Please Me only hinted at what the Beatles would go on to achieve. Still, the Fab Four are in pretty good company as far as bands who overcame relatively unimpressive debut albums go. As these ten records prove, there’s hope for everyone! … Read More
10 Stars From Your Childhood Who Got (Too Much) Religion
“Nobody finds God on prom night,” Dennis Miller once joked — an insightful gag about the tendency of celebrities and other public figures to turn religious once their lives and careers are in a freefall, rendered doubly poignant by Miller’s subsequent turn from an equal-opportunity offender to a right-wing water carrier when the gigs dried up during the Bush years, but I digress. Point is, we’re big on ‘80s and ‘90s nostalgia around here, but as we look into the current whereabouts of celebs we remember from those years, we’re often surprised to find how many went and found God when the phone stopped ringing (or just before, which may or may not be a coincidence). After the jump, a brief selection of folks we remember from before they hit the Bible. … Read More
‘Panto’N'Roll’: Rock’s Most Colorful Songs Illustrated With Pantone Swatches
“You know you enthrall me and yet you don’t call me / It’s making me blue, Pantone 292,” sing The Magnetic Fields on “Reno Dakota.” Of course, the relationship between music and Pantone’s increasingly fetishized pigments isn’t usually that literal. But Paris-based creative studio Chic & Artistic has united the two worlds once again, in a series called Panto’N'Roll, which uses Pantone swatches to represent classic songs like “Purple Rain” and “Yellow Submarine.” Click through to see the designs, which we discovered via It’s Nice That, and visit Chic & Artistic‘s website to learn more about their work. … Read More
Controversial Cultural Icons Interviewing Each Other
The gamine-coiffed creator of Girls, Lena Dunham, is currently on the cover of Interview magazine. Creative comrade Miranda July conducted the chat with the Tiny Furniture director. Both artists have carved their own path in the industry and made careers out of being keen observers, illuminating the unspoken intricacies of the everyday. Each has also faced their share of controversy — arousing criticisms over sex, nepotism, racial insensitivity, and body image, to name a few. We wanted to explore what happens when two cultural icons sit down to interview each other — and we’ve shared the Dunham/July talk past the break. Do these pioneering, celebrity culture makers ask the tough questions? Can they relate to one another, or do they lock horns? Check out the interviews between several controversial cultural icons that we tracked down, and find out. … Read More
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