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A Song for Every New York Times Hipster Trend Piece

By Tom Hawking on

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

Coachella 2013: The Good, The Bad, The Bros

By Leah Taylor on

Our intrepid, heat-resistant reporters spanned both weekends of this year’s Coachella to bring you a look at the (no exaggeration) epic music festival from the comfort of your own laptop. While the bros and the… let’s say “overmedicated” crowds can sometimes be deterrents to enjoying the weekend, ultimately, you’re there for the music. And there is something for everyone. Here are our highlights, with special thanks to Doug Levy, Liat Kriegel, and Dan Busta. … Read More

Music

A Second-by-Second Guide to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Mosquito”

By Tom Hawking on

As you may or may not have read in our newswire yesterday, the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album Mosquito was streaming at VICE’s Noisey site this afternoon. As we did with Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience, we listened along and noted down our thoughts as the album unfolded. (Happily, this record wasn’t the interminable experience the JT album was.) Read our verdict after the jump. … Read More

Music

The 10 Best New Songs We Heard This Week: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Phoenix

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday afternoon, which means that a band just finished playing in our office, and also that it’s time to recap all the best new songs we heard during the past week. In the past few days, we got more than a little obsessed with the new Majical Cloudz song — and as well as that, there’s another most excellent Phoenix remix, Iron and Wine getting all 19th century on us, surprisingly good new stuff from Primal Scream and Tricky, unsurprisingly good new stuff from Azar Swan and Kelpe, and plenty more. Get streaming and/or downloading, peoples! … Read More

News

The Morning's Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. In spite of 4chan’s best efforts, Time Magazine has named Barack Obama — and not North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un — its “Person of the Year”. [via Gawker]

2. Could Daft Punk, The Rolling Stones, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs be headlining Coachella 2013? This email sure seems to suggest so.

3. Here’s an interesting peek at what the New York Public Library’s controversial $300 million renovation of its Fifth Avenue flagship location will actually look like, as envisioned by starchitect Norman Foster. [via NYT] … Read More

Design

Iconic Album Covers Recreated With Socks

By Emily Temple on

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

The Bands Who Inspired Your Favorite Bands

By Tom Hawking on

We ran a rather lighthearted feature earlier this week about endearingly silly hair metal bands, one of which was the enduringly awesome Hanoi Rocks. At the time, we noted that despite inspiring many of the bands who’d rule the Sunset Strip in the 1980s, Hanoi Rocks had already broken up by the time hair metal went global. This got us thinking about how often this pattern has been repeated over the years — it’s not always the bands who are the first to play a new sound who enjoy that sound’s success. And in a happy coincidence, there’s a new album by one such band — Seattle proto-grunge pioneers Melvins — out this week, so it seems a fine time to explore the idea further. … Read More

Music

Hear Macy Gray's Barn-Burning Cover of Radiohead's "Creep"

By Judy Berman on

If you haven’t checked in with neo-soul singer Macy Gray since her inescapable 1999 hit “I Try,” we suggest you catch up, because she’s made four more thoroughly enjoyable studio albums since then. And today marks the release of her sixth full-length, a compilation of covers bearing the entirely appropriate, if a bit unimaginative, title Covered. The tracklist includes versions of songs by everyone from Sublime (“Smoke 2 Joints,” obviously) to Kanye West to Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Metallica. As entirely random as this may seem, we’re enjoying her impassioned take on Radiohead’s “Creep,” which you can hear after the jump. If you’re still on board after that, head over to Stereogum to for Gray’s covers of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” and Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up.” … Read More

Music

10 Egregious Omissions from VH1′s ’100 Greatest Women in Music’

By Judy Berman on

We recently took VH1 to task for including some fairly undeserving — and a few just plain awful — acts on their countdown of the “100 Greatest Women in Music.” So, who do we think would have been more deserving? We’re so glad you asked! Although it’s lacking in many categories, female rockers were especially slighted. We’ve attempted to point out some of the most egregious snubs, keeping two rules in mind: 1. VH1 has limited itself to the past 20 years, so it’s only fair to follow suit. 2. It’s not realistic to expect a mainstream TV network to acknowledge the existence of performers as obscure as, say, Carla Bozulich — so, while we certainly think she’s great, she’s not on this list. See who we would have included after the jump. … Read More

Music

Listen to David Lynch’s “Pinky’s Dream” with Vocals by Karen O

By Judy Berman on

There is never a bad time for a collaboration between David Lynch and Karen O, but the weekend before Halloween is very possibly the best moment for one. With the November 8th release of his solo album right around the corner, “Pinky’s Dream,” a cut that features lead vocals by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman,… Read More