First "The Middle." Now "Background Music." At least she's honest! Looking forward to her next singles, "Music for Supermarkets," "Song For A Clothing Store Commercial," and "Crossover Hit With The Weeknd (Feat. The Weeknd)"
My first friend to get into "cool" music in middle school really liked Boards of Canada. I have a strong memory of listening to this album in the background while we played, like, Marco Polo or something at his grandparents' pool.
Yeah, this is tough. Love Charli XCX and hate social media hive minds. As someone who's not a Swift-level pop star, it's probably easier for a coordinated group of trolls to hijack things.
But the one genuine good to come out of Twitter lately is that it's helped a lot of celebrities realize that most people don't give a shit about NFTs and can see through the scam pretty easily. She seems to be doubling down on NFTs a little with the mention of "things I need to do to fund what will be the greatest tour I've ever done." I can understand the sentiment, but it still kinda sucks whenever an actually promising artist gets sucked into that BS.
Yeah, but they're also artists at vastly different scales, right? Even Ryan Adams is tiny compared to Travis Scott/DaBaby/DMX. People who listen to Pinegrove engage more with the context of the music (because you have to, they're not getting played in supermarkets/TikTok), but the bigger the scale, the less the average listener really knows/cares about the story behind the music. Maybe he's too indie-adjacent to count, but look at how the rapper Kool AD totally dropped off the face of the planet after allegations (according to Wikipedia, he released 29 mixtapes in 2020-2021, lol).
Dr. Luke and Ryan Seacrest are some of the non-rap music figures who basically got too-big-to-fail passes. Or look at the shitstorms going on in emo or contemporary classical music, which all flew totally under the radar until MeToo. There are definitely toxic elements within rap communities, but IMO little if any of this accountability issue is a "rap problem." I mean, the entire AAA video game industry is basically a capitalist 120 Days of Sodom fantasy run by a few middle-aged white guys (slight exaggeration, but man, it's not good).
I'll concede that there are some pretty heinous rap lines, particularly in the past (though I'd argue a lot of rock and pop at the time was saying the same thing, just in different words; is telling a 16-year-old to sing "Hit me baby one more time" really much better than that DMX line?).
But it's weird to complain that rappers get free passes on an article where Tom pretty clearly lays out how Kodak is an awful person. I think he does a great job of covering a newsworthy rapper and providing context without endorsing his behavior. Tom's last paragraph nails what ACTUALLY unites so many of these stories of abuse: not genre or culture, but profit motive.
As a former Big Thief skeptic, IMO, the "in" is either A) listen to "Mythological Beauty" once with the lyrics sheet or B) just absolutely blast "Not." They're like the National in that, yes, there's a certain amount of middlebrow respectability that I usually hate, but they make up for it with good, old-fashioned songwriting skill (and having an underrated sense of humor, maybe not to the extent of the National but definitely more than some peers).
Weirdly enough, I've struggled to get into Spoon. It sounds like something I should like, but the songs just sort of roll over me. Based on the write-up though, excited to give this one a shot and maybe check out some of their back catalogue again.
Albini literally just took a random potshot at Deadheads and said the actual music Juggalos listen to is dogshit. His public enemy #1 has always been the music industry so OF COURSE he'd hate the guy whose podcast is lavishly funded by the biggest corporation in music. If you want to hear him killing sacred cows recently, just look up his opinions on Sonic Youth, lol. IMO, he's the same as always, he just uses different words to express it, and it's a glorious thing.
I definitely lowered my expectations too much for last week's Mitski--it's still phenomenal, and I can't imagine a year where it doesn't make my list. In the context of the album, I think "The Only Heartbreaker" in particular really goes off.
This week, definitely looking forward to checking out this Empath, Vundabar, Shamir, and Blue Eyes, White Puff The Imagine Dragon, Part II, or whatever Big Thief are calling their new one.
I mean, I can take or leave Beabadoobee, but if she pushes the first domino for a mid-aughts Stars revival, I'm all in. Maybe she can even bust out a flugelhorn or two in honor of Beirut's debut.
I see Legal Eagle's point. There was definitely a moment like a decade or so ago when some people were like "if you're gonna say the word, just say THE WORD." Kanye was giving white kids "permission" to say it during the Watch the Throne tour; you had that Django Unchained press tour where Samuel L. Jackson was encouraging a reporter to say it. It was almost considered disrespectful to censor the word if you were quoting someone (as the old Status Ain't Hoods show).
That said, very quickly, the general consensus changed to "actually, this still feels weird, maybe don't say it." (No doubt some people felt that way all along.) It's definitely jarring today to go back to that period.
Would love to see Rogan and Spotify go down, and won't cry if this is what does it lol. But IMO, it's a bit like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion.
Dolly Parton got a career "booster" for helping fund the Moderna vaccine, which I think coalesced in a lot of people realizing that she's actually amazing but has been taken for granted
It is kind of a shame that "old Mitski" (i.e., the singer-songwriter persona that existed circa 2013 to 2017) can't really exist anymore. I get why she's shifted toward a more cerebral pseudo-pop/interpretive-dance thing--it seems like a natural response to the crazy levels of scrutiny she gets (including comments like this one, lol). But as much as I love Be the Cowboy and the new singles, I miss how she used to tie her experimental, baroque side to something that felt more personal. Probably the singer-songwriter persona was also an act to some extent; IMO, it was just a better one, with an interesting tension between her perfectionism and the limits of DIY. Obviously, she's a modern GOAT and doesn't owe us anything. Just trying to figure out why these new songs feel different.
One day, they're going to write about this nipple in history books, and it will be like Guy Fawkes, where nobody really agrees what the moral of the story is, but we all agree that Something Important Happened On That Day.
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