Picture the scene: it’s a chilly night during the Australian winter of 1997. Your correspondent, aged 19, is huddled in a sleeping bag on a Melbourne doorstep with a couple of friends, a pack of playing cards and a crate of beer for company. The doorstep belongs to Ticketek, the Australian precursor to Ticketmaster, and we are queuing dutifully to buy tickets for Radiohead, whose OK Computer tour was announced that morning and is due to visit town for two dates in early 1998. We hang out all night playing poker for 50-cent coins and drinking beer that never gets any warmer because the night is so damn cold. When the Ticketek dude turns up at 8:45am, he seems slightly taken aback that four bedraggled teenagers have spent the night camping out, but he dutifully sells us tickets for both shows. We head home cold and hungover and happy. … Read More
Radiohead
Flavorwire Roundup: The First CDs We Ever Bought
Despite how easy it is to go online and quickly download an entire album in just a few seconds (which we are paying for, of course), there’s nothing particularly special in purchasing music from the ether. Gone are the days of driving to the mall to browse through the racks of CDs at Camelot Music and Sam Goody; no longer can we fill out multiple Columbia House order forms for seemingly free albums. CDs were the last physical music objects, and our first purchases say a lot about us as much and the time in which we grew up. (For the record, I like to tell everyone my first CD was the Reality Bites soundtrack, but it was, regrettably, the revival Broadway cast recording of Grease! featuring Brooke Shields as Rizzo.) I asked a few friends from across the Internet to share their first CD purchases. Click through after the jump, and share your stories in the comments! … 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 Song for Every New York Times Hipster Trend Piece
The ongoing New York Times obsession with “hipsters” continued this week with yet another lifestyle article about Williamsburg, a place that the NYT apparently thinks is still home to the Brooklyn cool set. The piece served as more confirmation that the Times is officially the only publication that still thinks the word “hipster” actually means something and/or is a cultural phenomenon worth analyzing in 2013. At this point, the paper’s ongoing obsession with Williamsburg is the journalistic equivalent of the repressed bro at school who’s secretly fascinated by the weird kids and deals with this by ridiculing them at every possible opportunity. Anyway, The Awl did a pretty spectacular job of highlighting the ongoing absurdity of the whole thing with this roundup of every characteristic that the paper has ever ascribed to hipsters (spoiler: everything, ever) — but what about the music? To help the paper out, here are some songs to soundtrack their most, um, memorable trend pieces. … Read More
A Selection of 4:20 Songs to Soundtrack 4/20
Last week, we amused ourselves with a thought experiment that was doing the rounds on Tumblr — marking 4/11 by picking out the best songs in our iTunes library that were precisely four minutes and 11 seconds long. It turned out that there were heaps, and the idea got us thinking: when better to do something similar than 4/20? So we thought we’d limit ourselves to making our annual stoner mixtape for today out of songs that are precisely four minutes and 20 seconds long. (Disclaimer: these songs are all 4:20 on our iTunes — your mileage may vary, and all that, but let’s not split hairs, eh?) … 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
The Pop Culture Love Tester: Radiohead + The Mountain Goats
If you ever took a junior-high date to the arcade (or an older one to certain retro-minded drinking establishments), then you’ve probably experienced the Love Tester — a contraption that allows you and your beloved to test your attraction by simply gripping a handle and seeing how much heat you can generate. But why trust hand-clamminess as a measure of your compatibility when Flavorwire is here to forecast the future of your relationship using a far more reliable gauge: your cultural preferences? Send us your and your partner’s favorite band, song, movie, book, or TV show, and we’ll (anonymously) read the tea leaves to see whether you were meant to be. First up: a lady (E.) who loves The Mountain Goats and a gent (P.) who worships Radiohead. … 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
The Musicians That Make the Best Music Videos
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
Fascinating Photos of Famous Musicians in Their Studios
We’re constantly fascinated with the creative process here at Flavorwire, and one of the most important components of that process is the space in which it takes place. For musicians, at least as far as the recording process goes, this place is the studio, and as such we thought we’d take a look at the studios of some of our favorite musicians. The contrasts on display are intriguing, from the endearingly chaotic to the pristine and very expensive, from analog to digital, from minimalist to decked out in all sorts of crazy-looking… Read More
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