Julian Casablancas is back. Well, maybe Julian Casablancas never went away, but he’s certainly all over the Internet this week. For once, though, it’s not because he’s in a Lonely Island Video, or releasing covers of SNL Christmas songs. He’s got a whole new band, The Voidz, and they’ve got a whole new, actually pretty good record, Tyranny! It’s streaming for free on Soundcloud (via Rolling Stone ).
Zach Baron has a painfully brief but surprisingly meaty profile of Casablancas over at GQ, in which he paints a pretty convincing portrait of Casablancas as a shaken, unwilling former idol who maybe has a lot to say but is bad at saying it. There are some fun quotes about Casablancas not wanting to give fun quotes.
On his moving to a city in upstate New York:
“Do you mind if you just call it ‘upstate,’ just cuz…”
After saying he left the city because he is annoyed at the people he sees while walking around New York City:
“I wouldn’t say that the reason is I walk around and hate everyone who lives there. That’s just rude.”
And then, inexplicably, he takes aim at everybody’s favorite meal:
“I don’t know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon.”
These quote-worthy non-quotes are due probably to Casablancas being super-duper sensitive about discussing his personal life, which is a point that is sharpened by the Q&A run over at Stereogum. In it, Casablancas waxes poetic on everything but himself — America and money and capitalism — which are all things you wouldn’t expect from someone who made his fortune singing “New York City Cops.”
Wait — is Julian Casablancas an Alt-Bro? According to the piece over at The Awl, not entirely. Alt-bros aren’t known for wearing basketball jerseys under leather jackets, really. But this does sound like him: “He’s neither elitist nor classist, but he doesn’t trust people who don’t ‘fundamentally feel ideas.'” I don’t know, guys. Read it for yourselves. But Julian Casablancas might be an alt-bro.
Let’s move away from Julian but stay in the 2000s, yeah? Julia Volkova, half of Russian fake-lesbian band t.A.T.u, said she wouldn’t be happy with a gay son because that would mean he wasn’t masculine enough, but a lesbian daughter would be fine because young women are more “aesthetically pleasing.” She also said, if the translation is to be trusted, that a man has “no right to be a fag.” I wonder what Hodor has to say about that? (Probably just, “Hodor.”) You’d think Volkova would be different, being a product of Vladimir Putin’s Russia…
And, staying in that same, skinny-jeaned decade, but moving to less depressing pastures, let’s go have a look at how the cast of The O.C. has aged, using BuzzFeed’s nifty little photo overlay sliding mechanism. Yeah, Adam Brody is still a fox.