The Strokes

A Song for Every New York Times Hipster Trend Piece

By Tom Hawking on May 2, 2013 3:00pm

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

Music

Great Albums With Embarrassingly Bad Cover Art [NSFW]

By Tom Hawking on Apr 17, 2013 4:00pm

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

New York Buzz Bands of 2001: Where Are They Now?

By Tom Hawking on Apr 4, 2013 3:00pm

It’s all gone a bit 2001 this month, with the return of The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. As we were listening to Mosquito yesterday, we got to wondering about some of the less heralded bands from the garage and post-punk revivals that brought a whole heap of hype to NYC around the turn of the millennium. Some of the bands from that scene are still around and doing well, of course — Interpol spring to mind immediately — but the others… Well, we’ve put on our deerstalkers and done some digging. … Read More

Music

The Hipster Is Long Dead; Should The Strokes Die, Too?

By Tom Hawking on Mar 25, 2013 4:00pm

Remember the late 1990s and early 2000s? Nu-metal, the dregs of post-grunge, the dregs of gangsta rap, the tail end of Britpop. Britney Spears. Artful Dodger. The New Radicals. Cher’s ubiquitous “Believe.” Craig fucking David. It was a dark time for everyone. The history of that era has already been written and rewritten, and the accepted narrative goes something like this: everything largely sucked, and then The Strokes released Is This It and saved rock ‘n’ roll. The New Rock Revolution™ was dead almost as soon as it started, but it left in its wake a renewed interest in guitars and rock music generally, and for that we get to pay eternal thanks to Julian Casablancas and his band of drainpipe-jeaned saviors. … Read More

Design

Iconic Album Covers Recreated With Socks

By Emily Temple on Aug 19, 2012 2:00pm

Now this is an entertaining way to spend laundry day. Neatorama pointed us towards The Sock Covers, a very clever Tumblr devoted to recreating famous and iconic album covers with, you guessed it, socks. Sure, it’s not high art, but it’s goofy and cute and irreverent in all the right ways — if a sock-version of Warhol’s iconic banana on The Velvet Underground & Nico doesn’t make you at least crack a smile, well, we just don’t know what to tell you. In addition, we have to say that we’re rather impressed by the anonymous author’s collection of socks. Click through to check out a few of our favorites from the project, and then head on over to The Sock Covers to see some more for yourself. … Read More

Music

10 of the Most Unnecessary Side Projects in Music History

By Tom Hawking on Aug 7, 2012 1:00pm

Things about which we are tired of hearing include: Wavves. As such, we greeted the news that Nathan Williams has a bitchin’ new side project with his bro with stony indifference — frankly, the last thing anyone needs to hear at this point is Wavves and his brother making a hip-hop record under the adolescent-tastic name Sweet Valley. (You’ll never guess, but he’s done an interview with VICE about it, in which he answers the hard-hitting question “Are you bored with rock ‘n’ roll?” with a deeply heartfelt “Yeah, I suppose so. At times.”) Still, it’s not the most gratuitously unnecessary side project in music history… Not compared to the ones after the jump. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on Oct 13, 2011 10:06am

1. Does Seth MacFalane wish that Family Guy would get canceled? In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter he says: “Part of me thinks that Family Guy should have already ended. I think seven seasons is about the right lifespan for a TV series. I talk to the fans and in a… Read More

Music

10 Indie Rock Memoirs We’d Like To See

By Nicole Rallis on Sep 22, 2011 4:00pm

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. … Read More

Web

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

By Caroline Stanley on Aug 29, 2011 5:00pm

Today at Flavorpill, we were surprised to discover how Time Warner actually profits from Anonymous’ attacks thanks to the group’s fondness for wearing Guy Fawkes masks. We watched the Foo Fighters take an NSFW shower together. We wondered why Justin Bieber decided on someone as innocuous as Taylor Swift … Read More

Web

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

By Judy Berman on Jul 26, 2011 5:04pm

Today at Flavorpill, we adored Michel Gondry’s video for Björk’s “Crystalline.” We agreed that On the Road and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are among the favorite books of the secretly jerky. We were not impressed (or surprised) by the trailer for Russian Dolls, the Brighton Beach-set Russian version of… Read More