In the age of social media fads develop before we’ve even had the chance to deliberate, as they're tweeted and retweeted ad infinitum. Culture is reduced to meme format, giving way to some pretty detestable content. The following list rounds up recent music trends that will hopefully be dead by New Year's Day. Dance Challenges Remember the Harlem Shake? One of the earlier "dance challenges" of the...
Is it a bad idea to cover an Ariana Grande song? Probably yes, right? Ariana Grande is the moment's dominant pop star, and she's got a lot of great songs, songs that you might find yourself singing tunelessly at red lights or whatever. But she's also got a feather-light, effortlessly showy voice, the kind of voice that few people alive can hope to replicate. If you try to sing one of her songs, you're...
Former Runaways bassist Jackie Fuchs (fka Jackie Fox) is making her second appearance as a contestant on tonight's episode of Jeopardy!. Last Friday, Fuchs won $14,200 on the show. That episode included two questions about music: “In this song by the B-52’s, ‘we were at the beach, everybody had matching towels’” (“What is ‘Rock Lobster?’”) and “Solana Imani Rowe performs under this...
We at Stereogum have already announced our picks for 2018's best albums and songs (plus a bunch of other opinions about The Year That Was). Today, we hear from our readers. The votes are in, the ballots are counted, and the results of the 2018 Gummy Awards are here. As ever, you all continue to have exquisite taste. Thanks to those who voted and to everyone who day-in, day-out makes this one of the...
If "half a billion views on YouTube" is any criteria to go by, there's really only one candidate for a modern Christmas standard, and by "modern" I mean "recorded after Bing Crosby's lifetime." With all apologies to Run-D.M.C., Low, Cristina, and the in-house musicians of Studio One, we're going to have to go with Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You," co-written and co-produced with Walter...
Matt Damon hosted last night's episode of Saturday Night Live and played a ride-or-die Weezer fan in one of the sketches. It starts with him playing their cover of "Africa" by Toto at a Christmas party. Leslie Jones calls Damon a fake fan for liking Weezer's new stuff: "I'm just confused because real Weezer fans know that they haven't had a good album since Pinkerton in 1996." Damon fires back, "'Pork...
For the past six years, men have dominated the Grammys to a depressing degree. Earlier this year, a study found that from 2012 to 2017 out of the 899 people nominated, only 9.3% were women — not even double digits! The surge of enlightenment and optimism ushered in with #MeToo and Time's Up unfortunately did not foreshadow major change for the most recent ceremony. The lip-service paid to both movements...
One of the best moments I witnessed at this year’s Damaged City, the DIY punk festival in our nation’s capital, came when Wildhoney, a Baltimore shoegaze band, covered Sixpence None The Richer’s “Kiss Me.” There was no irony in that cover. There was only warm, nostalgic affection. And I didn’t see any irony in the way the crowd received the cover, either. People seemed surprised, and people...
Phoebe Bridgers won a lot of people over quickly. Amidst releasing her debut Stranger In The Alps last year, she immediately made her presence known: A gifted singer-songwriter often diving into confessional, melancholic depths while maintaining a sometimes-dry, sometimes-quirky sense of humor online and elsewhere. She was gifted, and she was interesting. We wound up…
Right now, it certainly seems as if Open Mike Eagle can’t be stopped. Since he got started in earnest at the beginning of this decade, he’s never really taken a break from releasing projects in various forms. His run of albums and EPs since 2014, in particular, has shown the arc of an artist getting…
“It certainly has been … a surprising year,” Lindsey Buckingham joked from the stage at Manhattan’s Town Hall last week. Fleetwood Mac’s erstwhile singer and guitarist is playing shows in support of Solo Anthology, a career-spanning collection that’s somehow his first-ever hits package 37 years into a successful solo career. The just-released 6xLP version of…
Snail Mail was already having a quick ascension. Last year, when Lindsey Jordan was just 18, she garnered a ton of buzz and acclaim for her reissued 2016 EP Habit, eventually earning her a deal with Matador for her full-length debut. She seemed like one of the indie world’s bright new stars, and we named…
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…
