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Ezra Koenig was the guest at GQ LIVE at Neuehouse Hollywood yesterday, where he surprised the audience with a Vampire Weekend performance. They covered Bob Dylan’s “Jokerman.” Over the past few weeks, Koenig has been sharing Instagram Stories of the whimsical '90s font Jokerman in the wild, and resharing submissions from his followers. He even spoke to the font’s creator Andrew Smith on his...
The Pogues' Shane MacGowan has responded to calls to censor "Fairytale Of New York," The Irish Times reports. In the song, Kirsty MacColl sings the lines, "You scumbag, you maggot/ You cheap lousy faggot/ Happy Christmas, your arse/ I pray God it's our last," and earlier this week, 2FM DJ Eoghan McDermott took to Twitter to express his discomfort with the lyrics, writing, "I asked the two gay members...
The legends, for the most part, stayed quiet in 2018. Your Radioheads, your Beyoncés, and your Kendrick Lamars were not entirely silent; Thom Yorke, Johnny Greenwood, and Kendrick Lamar all had movie-music things going, while Beyoncé and JAY-Z wrapped up their internal-affairs trilogy with a shrug of an LP that felt more like an excuse for a tour than anything. Kanye West released an album and a...
Rap music existed in a dark fog in 2018. Mac Miller, XXXTentacion, Fredo Santana, and Jimmy Wopo all died. Tekashi 6ix9ine might be the biggest new star in the genre, but he’s also a self-destructive sexual predator whose gang affiliations reportedly came very close to killing him, and who might spend a very long time in prison. Kanye West lost his mind. Many of the year’s most popular songs were...
First, some housekeeping. In place of what would have been November’s Black Market column, you are now (in early December) getting our TOP 10 METAL ALBUMS OF THE YEAR (*terrifying thunderclap*) MINUS A MONTH AND A BIT (*sadder, softer thunderclap*). At the end of this month, as a sort of "special edition" of December's Black Market column, we’ll cover the “best of the rest” in some configuration...
Listmas is upon us! Seemingly every pop culture freak in the world is unveiling their year-end best-of list -- the Stereogum staff included -- and now it's once again time for you, the collective Stereogum readership, to voice your opinions in our annual readers' poll. We call it the Gummy Awards, and you can vote in it starting now. As usual, we're asking you to choose the one album and one song that...
The Grammys announced their full 2019 nominations this morning. Kendrick Lamar leads the field with eight nominations, followed by Drake with seven. (Notably, Drake didn't submit his music for consideration last year.) Major snubs include Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift, both of whom were locked out of the major categories. However, women on the whole are much more represented in those categories this...
Pete Shelley, co-founder of the great and influential English punk band Buzzcocks, has died, the BBC reports. According to Buzzcocks' management, Shelley died of a suspected heart attack Thursday at his home in Estonia. He was 63. Shelley was born Peter Campbell McNeish in Leigh, Lancashire, in the greater Manchester area. He founded Buzzcocks with Howard Devoto, a fellow student at Bolton Institute...
When someone says they want to show you a piece of Old New York, there are certain locations you might imagine. Maybe a far-flung corner of Brooklyn or Queens, less touched by waves of gentrification. Perhaps one street hidden away in the long-lost stretches of the Lower East Side, still openly marked by all the…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
Before she had no luck at all, Aimee Mann had beginner’s luck. She hit it big at the age of 24 with one of the first songs she ever wrote, “Voices Carry,” a top-10 hit for her band ‘Til Tuesday. Despite its superficial new-wave signifiers, “Voices Carry” wasn’t merely a vacuous byproduct of the Me…
The most influential emo bands are almost invariably mourned using the lexicon of incompletion and imperfection – they break up on the precipice of something bigger, are misunderstood or scorned by contemporary critics, leave a cruelly small recording legacy cited by more commercially successful peers as a primary influence. And since Algernon Cadwallader is a…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
“The Best Years Of My Life,” a standout from the Pistol Annies’ third album, Interstate Gospel, may have the best opening line of any song this year. After a short guitar intro that sounds like someone is X’ing out another day on the calendar, Ashley Monroe sings, “I picked a good day for a recreational…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
Linnea Siggelkow. L.S. Ellis. It’s as simple as that. And the Hamilton, Ontario musician’s songwriting is just as intuitive, a raw yet graceful breed of indie rock with a dream-pop splendor and a brooding slowcore soul.
For people of a certain age, Gary Busey is best known as a rapscallion of disputable ’00s television, popping up in programs such as Entourage, I’m With Busey, Dancing With The Stars, Celebrity Apprentice, and Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew to offer up loopy yet undeniably heartfelt exhortations to follow your dreams to anyone who…
Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.…
It’s late Wednesday evening in London and Danny Elfman is admittedly jet-lagged. “We’re right in the middle of scoring Dumbo,” says the iconic composer of the upcoming live-action adaptation of the classic story starring Danny DeVito and directed by his frequent collaborator Tim Burton. “All I can say right now about it is that the…
The first thing you’ll notice about Miya Folick is that voice. She’s just one of these people: There’s a natural gift there, and she has cultivated it, and she knows how to deploy it. Her vocals have an overwhelming power when she truly lets loose, the sound of a storm brewing within then erupting from…
Let’s just make something clear: While motorized scooters have infiltrated just about every major city in America to entertain drunks, endanger pedestrians, and undermine mass public transportation, watching kids throw Birds and Limes off a building or lighting them on fire is not funny. Nor is seeing a dog take a shit on these Uber-funded…
When Trent Reznor says he is excited about something he doesn’t actually sound excited at all. He speaks in a measured mutter, choosing his words carefully whenever he’s asked a question that could potentially lead to a headline-grabbing response. The press cycle for his most recent Nine Inch Nails release, Bad Witch, generated some notable…
Lorely Rodriguez writes about love in massive and minuscule ways. She measures it in the stars, she memorializes moments shared on a city stoop. Whether you’re speaking to her in person or listening to her lyrics, Rodriguez is considerate and direct. Both are attributes that she uses to write songs that feel universal and familiar…
