Happy 71stIf, Starman.

You probably have an expensive Texas Instruments graphing calculator packed away somewhere. I do. In fact, I still have two. For years, TI graphing calculators have been on the school supply list of almost every student that even sets foot in an upper-level math class. They are the only calculators allowed on major standardized tests, including the SAT, ACT, AP, and IB exams.

When I was in school, everybody had one. And if you haven’t poked your head into a high school for a while, that’s still the case—and they haven’t gotten any cheaper. My first graphing calculator, a TI-83 Plus, which was the standard at the time, cost my parents $100 over 15 years ago. Guess what? They’re still just as expensive, even though your watch has more computing power. They can cost upwards of $200, depending on the model.

But recently, several school districts around the country dealt a worthy blow to the stranglehold Texas Instruments has long held on students and their families’ wallets. The calculator app Desmos, which you can install on your iOS or Android device for free, was cleared for use on some standardized testing in 14 U.S. states. It’s also available in your browser. TI still remains top dog on 60 other “high-stakes” exams, according to Texas Instruments president of education technology Peter Balyta, but its days appear numbered.

This is a welcome change for just about everyone, outside TI HQ. If this trend continues, no longer will Texas Instruments have a calculator monopoly, and no longer will less-fortunate families be forced to shell out major moola for a plastic brick that spends most of its time taking up space in students’ backpacks. Math will hopefully be more accessible to all. It’s truly for the better. And yet….

I am a tinge sad. Partly because I’m getting older and losing touch with the youth of today, but also partly because I loved my calculators and future students won’t get the same experience I did. During my math journey from algebra to high-level college calculus and beyond, my graphing calculators became extensions of my brain. But that’s not where my love for the machines came from. No, it was the games that sealed my bond with my TIs.


You see, in high school, my friends and I ran an underground ring of calculator game sharing. The process was simple. With a special cable you could install games you found within the darkest depths of the internet onto your device. Then, with the same cable, you could transfer the game data over to a different calculator. And for the graduating class of 2002, I was the originator of this black market, having started taking Algebra II at the high school in 7th grade, giving me a 2 year head start with the TI-world.

The TI-83s and beyond were capable of running all kinds of games that I played during class, on the bus, or even at home—despite the fact I had a perfectly functional GameBoy, and two different console systems (SEGA and SuperNintendo) and their game libraries at home. Oh, the hours I spent playing Snake, finessing my skill and climbing to the top of my circles ladder where I reigned from freshman year until midway though college, when my stats were horrifyingly wiped in a terrible factory reset event. How I longed to beat Phoenix, a bullet-hell shooter that I still can’t believe was written in TI-Basic. From text-based adventures to a near-perfectly-recreated version of Bubble Bobble, my TI was my favorite gaming device. Anybody could play them in class and the teachers would be none the wiser. Now, I know kids can play games on their phones easily enough, but smartphones have been the bane of teachers’ existence since they entered public schools, and having those out in the open during class raises a lot more suspicions (cheating is a big one) than an innocent calculator. My math teachers had no idea that the only numbers I was concerned with when they were reviewing the lesson for the slower kids was my high score.

Some games, like ancient stories retold by orators through the years, were merely passed down from generation to generation. Nobody knew where most of the games originated, but everybody had them. Every week it seemed like there was a new game to acquire, and kids with the hottest collections of TI games—like me—had people lining up in the hallway. Like a shady back alley deal, kids would approach me at lunch and ask if I had anything new. “Yeah, I’ve got the hookup,” I’d say, “But what have you got for me?” I’d like to think that somewhere in the country a kid is playing a game I once passed down from my very own TI-83+.

So I’ll look forward to the bright future of more affordable math tools with a smile, but I won’t look back with hatred. No, today I’m pouring one out for my TIs. Your reign will soon be over, my friends, but I’ll never forget you.

Yesterday morning on twitter one user shared a photo of what appeared to be Biggie and Kurt Cobain together, staring down an unknown photographer with expressions apropos for their respective genres. The tweet asked Krist Novoselic to confirm whether or not the photo was legit.

@KristNovoselic sir, can you please confirm, is this a real picture??? ? pic.twitter.com/TP8Cn5z2VC

— chicken serious (@andrew_omega) May 12, 2017

The former Nirvana bassist’s reply arrived tonight, and it’s a doozy:

It’s real, but has been cropped. The person holding the pack of smokes is Tupac. https://t.co/K4dDEnQCgJ

— Krist Novoselić (@KristNovoselic) May 14, 2017

Gift-wrapped set-up aside, a troll is still a troll and Krist’s entire reply was malarky. Well, except for the part about it being cropped.

The photo depicting two great icons from the 90’s Rap and Grunge scenes mugging for the camera is actually a quick and dirty photoshop job. And that is Pat Smear’s hand, not Tupac’s, holding the cigarette pack as you can see in the original, unedited picture.

No known photographs exist of Biggie with Kurt Cobain on a tour bus or anywhere else. I know, internet, it makes me sad, too.

Mary J. Blige, Bjork, Foo Fighters, John Legend, Common, Bon Iver, Sleater-Kinney, St. Vincent, Chvrches, Feist, Laurie Anderson, Estelle, Elliott Smith and members of The National are among a stacked group of artists donating mostly unreleased music for Seven Inches For Planned Parenthood, a new box set of 7″ singles to benefit the reproductive health care organization.

The idea for the Seven Inches originated with The National’s Matt Berninger and the band’s manager Brandon Reid in the immediate aftermath of the fraught U.S. presidential elections.

“The day after the election was very hazy,” Reid told Billboard. “We were throwing ideas back and forth and started to think about immediate things [Trump] was going to attack and it was frightfully clear Planned Parenthood was on the top of that list. Many of us in music business are transient, don’t have health insurance and rely on Planned Parenthood so we got the idea off the ground.”

The duo reached out to their network of creatives and industry contacts including two pivotal new Brandons: Stosuy, director of the lauded Creative Independent Kickstarter series (+ ex-Pitchfork editorial director) who helped curate the set; and Minow who organizes and produces events for Planned Parenthood. For those keeping score, that’s a total of 3 Brandon’s, and 1 Matt. 

Berenger specifically nixed the initiative’s aesthetic being “too indie rock,” in favor of something similar to his Creative Independent project which features a wide-ranging palate of musicians, artists, writers, poets and comedians often discussing the essence of inspiration. Here, each artist would have equal sway in the project.

“The first person I asked was Bjork,” Stosuy recalled. “Once she said yes it gave us a little more legitimacy with other people. Then we could be like, ‘So we have Bjork, Sarah Silverman and Zach Galifianakis,‘ those were the first three we had. And from there people realized we were serious in trying to do something and it became easier to curate.”

When the National played a Women’s Protest/Inauguration Day show at the legendary 9:30 Club with 16 reproductive rights groups, Reid added a number of new key contacts from other artists on the bill as well as the . He also reached out to Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, whom he had worked with on an episode of Portlandia, and a friend whose mother-in-law was author Margaret Atwood. “Every day I would get an email or call from someone like Elliot Smith’s estate,” Reid recalls. “The support right out of the gate was amazing.”

Many artists, like Chvrches and Sleater-Kinney contributed new songs for the project while others like Björk, and Bon Iver provided rare versions of previously released songs or previously released rarities that most fans haven’t heard.  Meanwhile the comedy on Seven Inches is almost exclusively archival culled from the Largo’s live sets recorded at Largo that few if any have heard and the visual art was created specifically for the project. 

When asked, Stosuy likens the project to “making a giant mixtape” and his favorite aspect was the pairings. He cited a spoken word piece from women’s health provider Dr. Willie Parker that goes into a Sharon Van Etten track, and a Margaret Atwood poem about Blackberrys that is the b-side to a Bjork song and goes into music by composer Nico Muhly. That particular seven inch also has cover art by James Merry, who designs Bjork’s masks, entitled “Undifferentiated Gonads.” “That one feels very complete,” he said. Both Brandon’s say the creative army of contributors are open to live shows and other future cause-collabs. They also hint at still-unannounced A-List participants in the 7 Inches project, which

When Reid looks back at what was accomplished in such a brief interval he’s incredulous. “Holy shit, we started a record a company in five months.”

Complete List of Performers:
Aparna Nancherla, Björk, Bon Iver, Bryce Dessner, Chvrches (with film clip directed by Kristen Stewart), Common, Dr. Willie Parker, Dream Hampton, Elliott Smith, Estelle, Feist, Foo Fighters, Heather McGhee, Helado Negro, Janeane Garofalo, Jenny Slate, John Legend, Jon Brion, Laurie Anderson, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Cho, Mary J. Blige, Mary Lattimore, Matt Berninger, Meg Baird, Mitski, Nico Muhly, Pete Holmes, Sarah Silverman, Sharon Van Etten, Sleater-Kinney, St. Vincent, Tig Notaro and Zach Galifianakis.

Visual Contributors:
Angela Pilgrim, Azar Kazimir, Domonique Echeverria, Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Jacqui Oakley, James Merry, Mark Fox, Megan Tatem, Molly Schiot, Penelope Gazin, Rashid Johnson, Shepard Fairey, William Villalongo

More information on the project is available on Facebook + Instagram.

As I write this 19 years later, nearly 3 years since telling Jarvis Cocker during our Coachella interview that I’d been saving myself for him when I was 14 (he blushed, it was awkward, I reveled in giddy delight), I’m struck at just how much the tracks piano kills me, so thoroughly shredding me apart. “Its what men in stained raincoats pay for…” It certainly is. Still.

You know how sometimes you’re on stage performing a benefit concert you organized in order to give back to an org that you depended on and is under attack for stupid political reasons, when all of a sudden one of your personal heroes stops by to duet a few with you? Well, so does Bethany Cosentino. Best Coast’s Planned Parenthood benefit concert at Los Angeles’ El Rey Theatre was going great last night when an iconic guest star popped in.

Liz Phair showed up during the band’s set to offer her assistance on 3 songs:  a pair from her own catalog, “Never Said” and “F**k and Run,” as well as Best Coast’s “When I’m With You.” The perennially bad-girl Phair told the crowd, “Thanks for putting your money where your mouth is and your bodies where it counts,” before ceding the stage back to Best Coast and frontwoman Bethany Cosentino. “Can I just say that having been able to do that in my life is so cool. You’re the coolest,” she said to Phair.

The “Don’t Sit Down” concert, which benefited the women’s health nonprofit under constant attack the last few years by right wing radicals and 45 who favors “punishing” mothers who acquire abortions, also featured performances by Veruca Salt, Side Eyes, The Regrettes, Lovely Bad Things and MUNA. In addition to ticket sales, the event included a silent auction and special, limited-edition merch sales to supplement the dollars donated, with all proceeds benefiting Planned Parenthood.

Cosentino, who helped organize the event, told the Los Angeles Times she’d taken advantage of Planned Parenthood’s services when she was too scared to talk about women’s health issues with her mother and too young to purchase insurance on her own. She has been eager to raise money for the organization, as well as educate women on the benefits of its services, which reach 5 million women, men and youths per year. Phair, whose Exile in Guyville, rocked patriarchal boats with its 1990’s release perfectly complemented Best Coast’s Cosentino.

“I wouldn’t be the artist I am without musicians like Liz,” Cosentino told the Times, “especially those female musicians when I was a teenager that made me go, ‘Whoa, girls with guitars.’ I only paid attention to boy pop-punk when I was super young, then I got older and realized girls can do it, too.”

Q: How does one make Your Girl in Music swoon?

A: Buy me the book + bring booze for bonus points.

Oops, I just wrote the best feminist soft core opening plot ever.

By ending the story at Knebworth, Whitecross’ film tacitly acknowledges the moment when Britpop’s champagne supernova started to fizzle into flat corner-store Prosecco. Soon after, the British charts would be taken over by another, decidedly different group draped in Union Jacks and saucy attitudes, the Spice Girls. On the other side of the spectrum, electronic music was plotting its mainstream incursion. But if 1996 is commonly perceived to be the beginning of the end for British rock music’s pop-cultural dominance, then 1997 offered one last jolt of life, like that horror-movie villain who refuses to stay dead.

Britpop was a reactionary movement by design: a celebratory reclamation of once-proud UK musical traditions—’60s pop and psychedelia, ’70s glam and punk, ’80s indie—in the face of American grunge’s pervasive misanthropy and aggro instincts. But the rock music coming out of the UK in 1997 felt undeniably of the moment, embracing contemporary influences—electronica, post-rock, minimalist classical, lo-fi—while snapping out of Britpop’s hedonistic bubble to grapple with the tensions of encroaching technological overload and globalism. It was a year when established bands underwent career-saving reinventions and upstart acts dropped game-changing debuts.

Alas, this didn’t exactly usher in a new golden age of forward-thinking mainstream British alternative. By the end of the millennium, the charts were clogged with the sensitive serenades of Travis and Coldplay, and shortly thereafter, the British music press effectively turned into the Strokes’ PR department to trumpet a regressive garage-rock renaissance. But listening to Brit-rock’s class of ’97 now, you don’t so much feel like you’re revisiting a bygone moment as living in the tense, chaotic future it anticipated.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the record that got the ball rolling: Blur’s self-titled fifth album. Let’s have a look back at 10 albums that made 1997 one of the greatest years in British rock ever—right up there with ’68, ’72, and ’79.

Blur, Blur (February 10, 1997)

Blur was intended as an act of retreat. After their overly arch 1995 album The Great Escape got steamrolled by Oasis’ universally adored What’s the Story Morning Glory in the much-ballyhooed Battle of Britpop, Blur wasn’t so much interested in plotting a retaliatory strike as playing a new game altogether. It speaks volumes about the aesthetic restrictions of Britpop that the mere revelation of Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon’s fondness for Pavement became a minor cause célèbre in the British music press. While Blur didn’t exactly live up to the “Britpop heroes go full American slack-rock” hype, the album stripped the songs down to their skeletons. They lay bare the raw materials Blur (and Albarn solo) would dramatically reshape on future records, from discordant punk fuzz to murky dub grooves to frayed-nerve serenades. Ironically, in trying to initiate a retreat, Blur only slingshot themselves to their greatest Stateside success to date: American and British football may be totally different games, but sports fans on both sides of the Atlantic can certainly appreciate the rallying power of a good “woo hoo!”

The Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole (April 7, 1997)

Along with the Prodigy’s Fat of the Land and Daft Punk’s Homework, the Chemical Brothers’ second album generated a thousand “Electronica Is the New Rock” headlines in 1997. But the album’s success had a lot to do with the way it rewired Old Rock, providing an easy gateway from Britpop to big beat: “Setting Sun” jacked up the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” groove with drum ‘n’ bass clatter and rave sirens (not to mention a guest vocal from England’s most famous Fabs fan, Noel Gallagher himself), while the nostalgia-fueled symbiosis between the late ’60s and the late ’90s reached its summit on the sitar-tweaked blowout “The Private Psychedelic Reel.”

Radiohead, OK Computer (May 21, 1997)

Radiohead’s third album arrived nearly 30 years to the day after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and it would define 1997’s prevailing pre-millennial tension just as the Beatles’ classic did the Summer of Love. As news telecasts were starting to devote more and more airtime to discussion of the Y2K bug and the oncoming techpocalypse, Radiohead were consumed with an even more frightening—and ultimately correct—21st-century prophecy: that the computers would function all too well.

Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (June 16, 1997)

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl to the Verve’s Richard Ashcroft, boy makes 70-minute free-jazz psych-rock epic with the London Community Gospel Choir, Balanescu Quartet, Dr. John, and the ghost of Elvis, complete with enough drug metaphors to make the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers seem subtle. Lest you think Jason Pierce doesn’t come by his “sky”/“high” rhymes honestly, Spiritualized’s tour itinerary supporting their third album includes the near-top of the World Trade Center and the revolving restaurant at Toronto’s CN Tower.

Primal Scream, Vanishing Point (July 7, 1997)

With 1991’s rave ‘n’ roll masterpiece Screamadelica, Primal Scream seemed like they were the future of rock; by the half-baked boogie woogie of 1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up, they were barely the Black Crowes. The dark, dubby rocktronica of Vanishing Point didn’t just herald the Scream’s comeback—it ended up being the most crucial record of their career. Primal Scream’s fifth album reasserted the band’s avant-rock bona fides at a time when they were threatening to fade into irrelevancy, and laying the scorched-earth groundwork for 2000’s electro-punk blitzkrieg XTRMNTR.

The Beta Band, Champion Versions (July 25, 1997)

A folk group in dub dressing, the Beta Band initially seemed like an antidote to the more modernist music beaming out of the Isles in 1997. But the Scottish group’s debut EP answered electronica’s rise with their own unique and equally disorienting brand of acoutisca, whether transforming a simple campfire serenade into a confetti-strewn circus parade (“Dry the Rain”) or blowing up a low-key funk clang into a thundering percussive onslaught (“B+A”). A year later, Champion Versions and its two successors would be compiled into the epochal Three EPs; before long, the Beta Band would become Noel Gallagher’s new favorite group and the subliminal retail tactic of choice for discerning record-store employees.

Oasis, Be Here Now (August 21, 1997)

Just kidding!

Super Furry Animals, Radiator (August 25, 1997)

After hearing their adrenalized 1996 Creation Records debut, Fuzzy Logic, you could be forgiven for thinking the Super Furry Animals were just Wales’ answer to Supergrass. They seemed like another band of Britpop chancers making weekend-ready soundtracks to being young, free, and fucked up (with the odd cameo from a unicorn). But the spectacular Radiator offered the first real glimpse of the future-shocked classic rock that would become their stock and trade, using their familiar Kinks/Bowie base as a foundation for techno-schooled freakery and ominous observations on everything from surveillance culture (“She’s Got Spies”) to xenophobia (“Mountain People”).

Cornershop, When I Was Born for the 7th Time (September 8, 1997)

Where Cornershop’s previous records initiated a sound clash between Eastern and Western aesthetics, on their third album, Tjinder Singh and co. traversed a shortwave-radio dial’s worth of pan-cultural sounds—funk, soul, indie-rock, Indian psych, even country—with the casual ease of a crate-digger’s record-bin flip. (And for a moment, they pulled off the feat of making a bygone Bollywood star the most famous actor in England.) But embedded within the feel-good grooves are stark reminders of the realities playing out beyond the discotheque doors—“Funky Days Are Back Again” isn’t an invitation to dance, but a call to protest. Perhaps it’s not so surprising, then, that Tim Kaine is a big Cornershop fan.

The Verve, Urban Hymns (September 29, 1997)

To a certain purist, Urban Hymns isn’t really a Verve album, as it all but vanquished the group’s formative space-rock mysticism in favor of the crowd-pleasing populism that Richard Ashcroft would drive into the ground on his solo albums. For a moment, though, Urban Hymns represented the post-Britpop ideal in that it proved a band could be as big as Oasis but with sonic ambitions beyond Beatles pastiche, exemplified even in the string-swirled samples and hip-hop-schooled beat powering “Bittersweet Symphony.”

Mogwai, Young Team (October 27, 1997)

For those in the throes of Britpop fatigue, Mogwai’s debut album could not have been better timed. In lieu of crowd-baiting choruses and three-minute singles, Young Team offered noise-rock eruptions and 16-minute avant-psych epics. Where most upstart bands of the day harbored desires to fill stadiums, the Scottish quartet made the sort of seismic songs that actually could topple them. And if coke-fueled excess didn’t kill off Britpop for good, then “Like Herod” surely finished the job.

One day after the inauguration ceremonies of failed-businessman-turned-reality-TV-star-turned-president-of-the-united-for-now-states, with either abysmal or record busting attendance, depending on whether you’re using using real or alternative facts, Women’s March turned into something of an international phenomenon this year, transcending its feminist platform to become an extended protest of Drumpf’s divisive, incendiary rhetoric.

The UK songstress has been openly critical of the new US Commander-In-Thief throughout his campaign. Earlier this year Allen included the original song on He’s Got The Whole World, In His Tiny Hands, her own anti-Drumpf playlist available to download or stream via Spotify and Apple Music.

Knowledge of these characters isn’t strictly necessary to enjoy “Feel Good Inc.,” but Gorillaz remain one of the few working bands with a genuine mythology around them. It helps that Albarn and Hewlett strongly committed to the bit from the beginning: Del the Funky Homosapien’s verse on “Clint Eastwood” wasn’t just a guest appearance; it was the manifestation of a ghost (also named Del) who lived inside of Russ’ body. (All of his friends were murdered and their ghosts took up residence in his corporeal form, or so the story goes.) Russel also does interviews, and Noodle is literally a brand ambassador for Jaguar Racing. They even wrote an autobiography, Gorillaz: Rise of the Ogre, in “collaboration” with frequent collaborator Cass Browne (a real human, to be sure); the book largely takes the form of an oral history… from cartoons. So while Gorillaz aren’t “real,” they definitely exist.

The mutability of Gorillaz as something totally subject to the whims of Albarn and Hewlett is reflective of the various incarnations and characters of the masked rapper DOOM, whose MF DOOM, Metal Fingers, King Geedorah, and Viktor Vaughn personae frequently interact on records (and who, coincidentally, appears on Gorillaz’s 2005 LP Demon Days). With all of this in mind, it might be more useful to think of Gorillaz as less of a band than an alternate reality game.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, an alternate reality game (ARG) is essentially a form of interactive storytelling, using elements from theater, geocaching, cryptography, and, most frequently, the internet (often via message boards). Players find “rabbit holes” seamlessly integrated into everyday life, and pursue to them to find a series of challenges and an unfolding narrative. Early ARGs were largely tied to the release of massive pop culture products—the movie A.I., the video game Halo 2, and so on—but took on a life of their own, often being enjoyed separately from the thing they were supposed to be promoting.

One of the hallmarks of ARGs is a willingness to blend media. The life cycle of a Gorillaz record, which is simultaneously the product, an audio narrative, a new set of online tools for “interacting” with the band (through a fresh website, social media accounts, etc.), a jumping-off point for visual storytelling—all tied to an ongoing story about a bunch of fictional characters—is essentially an ARG by itself. Though ARGs have become far more sophisticated (and ubiquitous) in the past few years, their heyday is decidedly evocative of the Demon Days era. Even if the Gorillaz designs get sleeker, the band will still look (and probably feel) like a product of the early Bush years, from its anime-inspired appearance to the sloppily rendered images in some of the early videos that look like they’re from a Half Life game.

In particular, the band’s web presence has long been a way of fleshing out the story beyond albums. Kong Studios, the Gorillaz website described in Rise of the Ogre as possessing an “unprecedented level of interactivity,” depicted the studios where Noodle, Murdoc, 2D, and Russel lived and worked, full of hidden Easter eggs about the characters, and secret rooms. Most of the original Kong Studios site is maintained in archive form—if you want to poke around, you just need to download Adobe Shockwave.

The lead-up to the band’s next album, expected sometime this year, has maintained that interactive spirit, though in less aggressively webpage-based form. A series of Instagram stories have caught up fans on the whereabouts of each band member since “the attack on Plastic Beach,” the story told throughout Gorillaz’s 2010 album. Apparently 2D spent a few months weaving bracelets, Russel was kept as an oddity by North Korea, Noodle tracked down and killed a shapeshifting demon, and Murdoc was literally imprisoned by EMI underneath Abbey Road until he agreed to write a new Gorillaz album. Besides the Instagram stories, each of the characters has also “created” Spotify playlists for specific occasions (delightfully, Murdoc’s is titled “Dirty Santa Party.”)

 

#TheBookofNoodle

A post shared by Gorillaz (@gorillaz) on Oct 3, 2016 at 8:24am PDT

The hybridity of the ongoing Gorillaz ARG-like project perhaps seems odd, until you realize that it’s essentially how pop functions these days. Not that the line between PR and reality was ever particularly thick, but it’s become even harder to tell the difference between the two—or, rather, it matters less, especially for anyone less famous than a major pop star. (Even Dirty Projectors’ upcoming album—not a major pop project by any means—has been so heavily telegraphed as being “about a breakup” that it might as well spring from a nerdy 12-year-old’s notebook.) It was a more nascent internet when Gorillaz began their world-building, but the digital tools they used to mock pop celebrity eventually made it easier for everyone to get in on the game.

Big pop albums have often fit within some kind of narrative, but now it’s harder than ever (or maybe more pointless) to separate the two. And when every album becomes a story in addition to a piece of music, the artifice of major pop stars feels less and less like a bug and more like a feature. At this point, how much difference is there, really, between the explicit storytelling at play in a Gorillaz album rollout and the rest of the music industry?

The difference is that for Gorillaz, the “alternate” reality is genuinely alternate (and not in the “alternative facts” sense of the word). Exposing this gap was part of the original idea behind Gorillaz as a project. Much of that “autobiography” Rise of the Ogre bemoans what the “band” characterizes as MTV-fueled celebrity culture. The preface of the book lays out the band’s accomplishments in what is functionally a press release, as Murdoc interjects—first sardonically, then enthusiastically, until it becomes clear that the cartoon bassist has paid the writer (Cass Browne) to flatter his band so he (Murdoc) can masturbate.

By now, the frustration with celebrity and industry narratives expressed by Rise of the Ogre feels almost quaint. Now, it’s a fun guessing game to see why Taylor Swift is staging a relationship with Tom Hiddleston, or who Lemonade is actually about, and who the fuck ‘Becky with the good hair’ is. If the existence of Gorillaz was ever a statement about the music industry, it’s been fully absorbed now. Still, if anything, the increasing willingness to turn narratives into something more dizzying and complicated—to blankly, unconvincingly assert everything is real while openly winking at consumers who are obviously in on the bit—makes it feel like the rest of the world has caught up to what Albarn originally described as “dark pop.”

“Hallelujah Money,” the first song off their upcoming album, is surprisingly sincere, coming from a band made up of animated characters controlled by skeptical humans. But that veneer has always allowed the band to be a bit more direct, like they are here in railing against Trump. There’s the naked emotional resonance of something like “On Melancholy Hill,” but the band’s disarming earnestness is political, too. Demon Days is, among other things, an album about the Iraq War, while Plastic Beach’s environmental message is so blunt, it’s literally impossible to miss.

So it’s besides the point to call the bright colors and silly voices of the Gorillaz a “distraction.” In fact, the world of the band—ours, but not quite ours—paints society in allegorical terms while avoiding the corny pitfalls that have trapped so many of their collaborators. The end of the “Hallelujah Money” video features the pained cries of Spongebob Squarepants, which is as definitive an aughts-cartoon reference as you can make. 2D appears primarily as a shadow puppet, with obvious sticks moving to manipulate his mouth.

Though it’s been a few years since Albarn and Hewlett made a concerted effort to pretend Gorillaz were real, this is the closest they’ve come to a diegetic acknowledgment of the whole setup. It makes perfect sense. Once you dig underneath all that artifice, it’s actually quite real.

Anyone hearing this for the first time today would never guess it was written 30 years ago instead of for the Breitbart administration.

Let me set the scene — Madrid, 1987. David Bowie and Peter Frampton embark upon their very own epic hero’s quest, desperately seeking beer. Press play to learn what harrowing perils and spectacular triumphs await our two heroes.

Upbeat and heavy on double-entendres hidden in plain sight, PUSA was always a go-to for those music fans who just wanna shake their hair out and dance it off, an Rx that we could really use as we deal with an incoming minority-elected president who campaigned on fear-mongering and hate and whose victory has already made many innocent americans victims of violence and emboldened hate groups to openly terrorize communities across the nation.

Even if Trump is a phenomenal leader (its possible since no one knows his real position or intent on any issue), the Presidents breakup is still a huge loss that leaves a plethora of unanswered questions in its wake. For example: In ‘Peaches’ was the line “Peaches come in a can” referring to a pocket vagina? How many euphemisms did I miss? Were they all anatomy based? These are mysteries fated to remain unsolved, and we just have to accept that, regretfully. The best comment on the breakup announcement was posted by Robert Horrell whose dismay is easy to understand as he’d just finished a Lump/Trump parody, the lyrics for which he shared. Betcha ‘Trump’ gets stuck in your head after just one read.

WELL GEE 2016, JUST WHEN I THOUGHT YOU COULDN’T GET ANY WORSE… YOU GO AND TAKE LEONARD COHEN TOO?? DIDJA WANNA KILL KURT COBAIN AND JOHN LENNON AGAIN WHILE YOU’RE AT IT?  UGH, I HATE YOU, YOU’RE THE ABSOLUTE WORST YEAR IN ALL OF HUMAN EXISTENCE!!!! YOU, 2016, HAVE NO COUTH. NONE.

Yes dear readers, 10 months to the day following Bowie’s death on 1/10, on 11/10 we learn that Leonard left us, too.  You may recall my wondering at Leonard outliving Bowie, but feeling comforted that I still had one living musician of the two most impactful artists on my life.  Between this and the Election two days ago, I just don’t know that surviving cancer, again, this year was really all that great an outcome.  Excuse me, I have to go listen to “Tower of Song” a billion jillion times while I ugly cry into laundry I should do already but just can’t find the energy to.

*sigh… I honestly hate everything about this year.  

The party kicks off later this evening with Lolla’s Channel One (so BBC, right?!) boadcasting sets from Yeasayer, Daughter, Flosstradamus, and J. Cole.  The rest of the weekend serves up three channels of Pure ‘Palooza goodness daily between 2 – 10 PM (Chicago Time).  Friday boasts sets from Future, Major Lazer, A$AP Ferg, Miike Snow, GRiZ, and Martin Garrix.  On the menu for Saturday are performances from the likes of Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Disclosure, Big Gigantic, and Hardwell.  Sunday features LCD Soundsystem, Bloc Party, Silversun Pickups, Flume, and Adventure Club. We’ve got the entire streaming schedule below:

       THURSDAY, JULY 28

          Channel One
     6:10-7:10P – Yeasayer
     7:15-8:15P – Daughter
   8:30-9:45P – Flosstradamus
     9:45-10 PM – J. Cole

FRIDAY, JULY 29

SATURDAY, JULY 30

SUNDAY, JULY 31

David Bowie added four more posthumous award nominations to his tally today, this time for the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards.

Bowie was recognized in four professional categories for two music videos. His video “Blackstar” was nominated for Best Art Direction, and “Lazarus” secured nods for Best Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Editing. If there is any justice in the world, certainly it demands the Man Who Fell To Earth take home all of the MoonMen offered him.

Both songs are featured on Bowie’s 25th studio album, Blackstar, which was released on his birthday, January 8. Two days after it dropped, the music superstar passed away at age 69 following an 18-month battle with cancer. The artist’s longtime producer and friend Tony Visconti later revealed in a Facebook post that Bowie planned the final album as his swan song and “parting gift” to the world.

The “Lazarus” video dropped on January 7 and some rather astute fans interpreted the ominous video as a nod and a hint to Bowie’s long rumored health issues and part of his artistic vision around his passing. The video features Bowie strapped to a hospital bed, writhing around, with bandages wrapped around his head and buttons attached where his eyes would be. At the end of the dark, eerie video, he walks into a dark wardrobe.

Another short film, the haunting and puzzling ★, released in November 2015, also prominently featured the visual of Bowie’s bandaged eyes in his role as a blind prophet stuck in a cell with several others.

The VMA nominations are the latest in a long string of posthumous awards Bowie’s been nominated for. Undoubtedly, they will not be the last. If YGiM had her say, she feels that she can objectively state that her Starman would win every music award that exists henceforth, forever. The music icon competed for Top Rock Album at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards for ★, losing to Twenty One Pilots Blurryface. ★ is also eligible to be considered for the Grammy Awards in 2017, since the qualifying period began in October 2015.

Check out the full list of nominees below, and vote for your favorites at vma.mtv.com. Tune in to MTV on Sunday, August 28, at 9 p.m. ET to watch the wins at NYC’s Madison Square Garden.

Frances Bean Cobain, the sole offspring of Nirvana frontman /Voice of a Generation-X Kurt Cobain and Hole frontwoman Courtney Love, announced today on her twitter and instagram channels she is making prints of her original artwork publicly available for purchase at online retailer depop.

In a classic case of “apple fell close to the paternal tree,” like her father before her, the latest additions to her body of work show an obvious fascination with darker themes of body horror and embryonic … something. The surreal, unsettling pieces are available between $200 to $400, and are almost sure to sell out before I’m even finished posting this article.

Frances Bean, 23, held her first art exhibition, ‘Scumfuck‘, back in 2010 at the La Luz de Jesus Gallery in East Hollywood under the psuedonym Fidler Tim. In October 2012 she announced her first solo exhibit set for February 2013 at LA’s Dark Dark Science Gallery.

A touring exhibition of Kurt Cobain’s art is also currently in the works. Courtney and Frances are collaborating on the project with Jeff Jampol, who told The New York Times in June that “[Kurt]’s got some amazing canvases that a lot of the world has never seen or even heard of.” 

Suicide released five studio albums between 1977 and 2002, as well as several recordings of their famously raucous live shows. Vega was also prolific on his own, releasing three solo records and more than a dozen others with various collaborators. Suicide is the band that will always sound like the future, even now, decades after their arrival, perusal and departure from the scene … whether or not you personally could dance to their music is irrelevant. The NYC punk scene, and therefore the worldwide punk scene is not the same without them.

Born Boruch Alan Bermowitz in Brooklyn in 1938, Vega worked as an artist in the 1960s, creating paintings and light sculptures. He was inspired to start a band, he said in interviews, after seeing Iggy Pop and the Stooges perform. Although he suffered a stroke in 2012, he continued to live in New York City until his death. Godspeed, Alan Vega, may you rock in peace: a pioneer and visionary who pushed the boundaries first and let others enjoy the spoils later. The likes of such artists will not be seen again.

The Vega family statement is reprinted here:

With profound sadness and a stillness that only news like this can bring, we regret to inform you that the great artist and creative force, Alan Vega has passed away.
Alan passed peacefully in his sleep last night, July 16. He was 78 years of age.
Alan was not only relentlessly creative, writing music and painting until the end, he was also startlingly unique. Along with Martin Rev, in the early 1970s, they formed the two person avant band known as Suicide. Almost immediately, their incredible and unclassifiable music went against every possible grain. Their confrontational live performances, light-years before Punk Rock, are the stuff of legend. Their first, self-titled album is one of the single most challenging and noteworthy achievements in American music.
Alan Vega was the quintessential artist on every imaginable level. His entire life was devoted to outputting what his vision commanded of him.
One of the greatest aspects of Alan Vega was his unflinching adherence to the demands of his art. He only did what he wanted. Simply put, he lived to create. After decades of constant output, the world seemed to catch up with Alan and he was acknowledged as the groundbreaking creative individual he had been from the very start.
Alan’s life is a lesson of what it is to actually live for art. The work, the incredible amount of time required, the courage to keep seeing it and the strength to bring it forth — this was Alan Vega.
Alan is survived by his amazing family, wife Liz and son Dante. His incredible body of work, spanning five decades, will be with us forever.

EXCLUSIVE – First look at David Bowie’s private art collection – heading for Sotheby’s auction. #BowieCollector pic.twitter.com/ASSaX6Mcyn

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) July 14, 2016

Preview World Tour:
London: 20 July–9 August
Los Angeles: 20–21 September
New York: 26–29 September
Hong Kong: 12–15 October

The Exhibition: Bowie/Collector
Sotheby’s London 1–10 November

All exhibitions are free and open to all.

The Auctions
Part I: Modern and Contemporary Art, Evening Auction, 10 November
Part II: Modern and Contemporary Art, Day Auction, 11 November
Part III: Post-Modernist Design: Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group, 11 November

This article will be updated as new information becomes available.

So yeah, smart guys who make me laugh and set my synapses firing? STAHHHP – no, don’t!

 

Jarvis Cocker pops up to point out that Britain is in Europe – where can we go. We can’t leave. #JarvisCocker #ilovehim #seriouslyilovehim #marchforeurope #notoarticle50 #nobrexit???? #notinmyname #britainisineurope #fromagenotfarage h #housesofparliament #houseoffools #borislied

A photo posted by @emmelinemay on Jul 2, 2016 at 5:44am PDT

If you remember PBR tasting god-awful in college, it may be because you were shotgunning it to a god-awful soundtrack. Or, OK, PBR is just god-awful. Bad example. If you remember PBR tasting delicious in college, it may be because you have the most exceptional record collection known to man. You see, according to science, it turns out our taste may not be all in our mouths after all. In fact, it may be mostly in our ears.

Wait, don’t go! Let me explain.

According to a new study that will appear in this September’s edition of Food Quality and Preference, music affects the way people experience the taste and strength of beer. Vrije Universiteit Brussel researcher Dr. Felipe Carvalho, who conducted the experiment, had participants try what was, unknowingly, the same beer twice, each time with a different “sound stimulus.” 

Eater reported that participants drank a range of pale ales and dark beers with alcohol by volume ranging from 4.5% to 8%, all while researchers played three different kinds of music — one of which was a “Disney-style track” which caused participants to rate their beer as tasting sweeter.

“While listening to the pleasant sweet soundtrack, the participant transfers his or her experience and feelings about the music to the beer that they happen to be tasting,” researchers wrote, according to Eater.

So crank up the “Disney-style tracks” — or, you know, anything that doesn’t suck — and enjoy a cheap, cold one. 

Earlier this week, the Senate failed to pass four separate gun control measures, prompting House Democrats to stage a (still-ongoing as of this posting) sit-in, pushing for a vote on a controversial gun control measure. Today, some 200 artists — icons like Joan Jett and Sting, pop stars like Lady Gaga and Kesha, hip-hop statesmen like Vic Mensa and Questlove, even the unlikely trio of ex-Beatles Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the woman blamed for the bands dissolution Yoko Ono — along with industry execs and Billboard magazine (whose editors organized the effort) published an open letter in a very special issue of Billboard seeking a sane and safe end to gun violence.

An open letter to Congress:

Stop Gun Violence Now

As leading artists and executives in the music industry, we are adding our voices to the chorus of Americans demanding change.Music always has been celebrated communally, on dancefloors and at concert halls. But this life-affirming ritual, like so many other daily experiences—going to school or church or work—now is threatened, because of gun violence in this country.The one thing that connects the recent tragedies in Orlando is that it is far too easy for dangerous people to get their hands on guns.We call on Congress to do more to prevent the gun violence that kills more than 90 Americans every day and injures hundreds more, including:

• Require a background check for every gun sale
• Block suspected terrorists from buying guns

Billboard and the undersigned implore you—the people who are elected to represent us—to close the deadly loopholes that put the lives of so many music fans, and all of us, at risk.

Sincerely,

Adam Lambert Alan Gilbert, NY Philharmonic Andrew Bird Barbra Streisand Bo Koster, My Morning Jacket Brad Delson, Linkin Park Britney Spears Cameron Strang, Chairman/ CEO, Warner Bros. Records Charlie Puth Christina Aguilera Courtney Love Daniel Ek, Co-Founder/CEO, Spotify Dina LaPolt, Founder, LaPolt Law Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam Emily Robison, Dixie Chicks Glenn Kotche, Wilco Irving Azoff, Chairman/CEO, Azoff Madison Square Entertainment James H. Gosnell, President and CEO, APA Jean-Michel Jarre Jeffrey Harleston Joan Jet John Esposito, PresIdent/CEO, Warner Music Nashville Jorge Hernandez, Los Tigres del Norte Justin Tranter Kelly Rowland L.A. Reid Lin-Manuel Miranda Marc Geiger, Partner/Head of Music, William Morris Endeavor Martin Bandier Matt Cameron, Pearl Jam Michael Rapino, President/CEO, Live Nation Mickey Hart, Dead & Company Mike Dungan Natalie Maines, Dixie Chicks Nicky Jam Patrick Hallahan, My Morning Jacket Peter Tork Questlove Rob Bourdon, Linkin Park Rosanne Cash Ryan Lewis Scooter Braun, Founder, SB Projects Shakira Steve Bartels Sting Terence Blanchard Tom Blankenship, My Morning Jacket Tori Amos Wayne Coyne

Adam Leber, Partner, Maverick Alanis Morissette Andy Samberg Beck Bob Weir, Dead & Company Bradford Cobb, Partner, Direct Management Group Butch Walker Carl Broemel, My Morning Jacket Charlie Walk Christina Perri Craig Kallman, Chairman/CEO, Atlantic Records Group Daniel Glass, Founder/President, Glassnote Entertainment Group/Insieme Music Publishing Diplo Elle King Eric Hutchinson Gregory Porter Jack Antonoff Jason Kupperman, Agent, Paradigm Talent Agency Jeff Ament, Pearl Jam Jennifer Lopez Jody Gerson John Janick Josh Groban K.D. Lang Kesha Lady Gaga Sir Lucian Grainge Mark Pinkus, President, Rhino Entertainment Martin Erlichman, Manager, Barbra Streisand Meghan Trainor Michael Stipe Mikael Jorgensen, Wilco Mike McCready, Pearl Jam Nate Reuss Pasquale Rotella CEO/Founder, Insomniac Events Paul McCartney Phil McIntyre, CEO/Founder, Philymack Ricky Martin Rob Light, Partner/Managing Director/Head of Music, Creative Artists Agency Rufus Wainwright Sam Gores, Chairman/CEO, Paradigm Talent Agency Sia Steve Jensen, Partner, Direct Management Group Stone Gossard, Pearl Jam Thom Yorke Tom Corson Trent Reznor Yoko Ono

Adam Levin, X Ambassadors Alex Pall, The Chainsmokers Angel Coleman Bill Kreutzmann, Dead & Company Bonnie Raitt Brandon Creed, Manager/The Creed Company Calvin Harris Carole King Cher Chromeo Cyndi Lauper Danny Bennett Doug Morris Ellen DeGeneres Faisel Durrani Halsey Jackson Browne Jason Mraz Jeff Chimenti, Dead & Company Jeremy Zimmer, CEO/Co-Founder, United Talent Agency Joe Hahn, Linkin Park John Mellencamp Julia Michaels Kaskade Kevin Liles, Co-Founder, 300 Entertainment Lecrae Lyor Cohen, CEO/Founder, 300 Entertainment Mark Ronson Martin Kirkup, Partner, Direct Management Group Melissa Etheridge Michele Anthony Mike Caren, CEO, Artist Partners Group; Creative Officer, Warner Music Group Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park Nels Cline, Wilco Pat Monahan Pete Wentz Prince Royce Ringo Starr Rob Thomas Russell Simmons, Hip Hop Mogul & Activist Sam Harris, X Ambassadors Scott Borchetta, President/CEO, Big Machine Label Group Stephen Cooper, CEO, Warner Music Group Steve Levine, Partner/Co-Head of Worldwide Concerts, ICM Partners Stu Bergen, CEO, International and Global Commercial Services, Warner Music Group Tim Westergren, CEO, Pandora Tom Windish, President, The Windish Agency Troye Sivan

Akiva Schaeffer Alicia Keys Avery Lipman Billy Joel Boyd Muir Brendon Urie, Panic at the Disco Cam Casey Harris, X Ambassadors Chester Bennington, Linkin Park Conan O’Brien Dan McCarroll, President, Warner Bros. Records Demi Lovato Drew Taggart, The Chainsmokers Elvis Costello Fher Olvera, Maná Iggy Pop James Corden Jay Marciano, COO, AEG; Chairman & CEO, AEG Live Jeff Tweedy, Wilco Jim James, My Morning Jacket Joe Jonas John Stirratt, Wilco Julie Greenwald, Chairman/COO, Atlantic Records Group Katy Perry Kid Cudi Lee Daniels, Director; CEO, Lee Daniels Entertainment Macklemore Martie Maguire, Dixie Chicks Matisyahu Michael Buble Michelle Jubelirer Mike D Monte Lipman Nick Jonas Pat Sansone, Wilco Peter Edge Pusha T Rivers Cuomo Roger Gold, Co-Founder, 300 Entertainment Ryan Leslie, Producer Sara Bareilles Selena Gomez Steve Barnett Stevie Nicks Talib Kweli Todd Moscowitz, Co-Founder, 300 Entertainment Tony Bennett Vic Mensa Zayn Malik

Six months after the death of David Bowie, normal reality is collapsing at an ever-increasing rate.

Scientists have concluded that Bowie was in some way integral to the function of what we call normality in ways which they have not yet properly begun to understand, but postulate a hitherto unknown particle called the ‘Bowon’ which helped the universe keep its shit together.

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have added the Bowon to the list of particles they are looking for after recognising that things ‘really started to get all kinds of freaky’ after January 10th of this year.

“It started with small things,” said Professor of Applied Bowie Physics Simon Williams.

“Leicester winning the league, for example.

“But as time goes on, what we humans perceive as ‘normal’ is being revealed as a shared group illusion which is collapsing at an ever-increasing rate.

“Donald Trump leading in the polls. Hillary Clinton getting the nomination. Boris Johnson becoming Foreign Secretary. Jeremy Corbyn being allowed to remain where he is. That sort of thing.

“Stuff that simply would not happen in a sane world.”

Preliminary experimentation in subtracting the Bowon from other fundamental particles indicates that they just lose something of their Strangeness and Charm, and scientists theorise that this is what’s happening to everything, really.

Staff at CERN have taken to playing Space Oddity down the LHC really loudly to try and pull things back together, and will report on their findings.

This story is still developing.

That’s how long The Queen Is Dead allows its listeners to venture through a world of sleazy record label execs, unrequited love, regicide, suicide, organized religion, women’s bodies, dead poets, and pretty much every other theme imaginable. In ten songs on one album lasting 37 minutes, The Smiths definitively summed up the personal, political and socioeconomic challenges of life in Maggie Thatcher’s 1980s United Kingdom.

Three decades later, the album proves that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The songs have lost not one note of relatability, the music industry is as corrupt and shallow as ever (ask Kesha), and Morrissey seems no keener on his Queen Ellie than when the album was first released.

The Queen Is Dead, the album that epitomizes Morrissey’s well, Morrissey-est lyrics, celebrates the 30th anniversary of it’s release on June 16th. Give it a spin and relive 37 minutes of heartbreaking lament, witty turns of phrase, and slyly sassy insults. The pleasure, the privilege, is yours.

Pool marks a notable achievement in it’s stunning display of naked vulnerability, made all the more notable considering their 2007 In Rainbows introduced and made them relevant to a new millennial generation. Despite its shorter length, In Rainbows was the quintessential collection of all the Radiohead sounds we loved, from spectral piano ballad to in-the-pocket prophecy and back again. Discarding Kid A/Amnesiac’s ambient meanderings any rash of lucid moments were tampered down by Rainbows swift pace.

The band then doubled down with 2011’s most unloved The King of Limbs. It met with a lukewarm reception and never seemed to find an audience, despite containing some of Radiohead’s tightest playing yet. It grew on me slowly over a handful of years as a kind of spiritual jazz record, winning me over with its unwavering focus on its own repetitious mantras. A Moon Shaped Pool takes the entirety of their lessons thus far and dives deeper, proving a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Opener “Burn The Witch”, one of the several songs on this record that has surfaced in fragments at shows for years, makes this clear with its quantized string swells that simultaneously evoke the brit-pop grandeur of Oasis and The Verve while taking the sonic trope someplace more far-out than any of them. Though Radiohead have embraced orchestral arrangements since O.K. Computer, Jonny Greenwood’s vast compositional experience between albums has shown those arrangements getting more complex, as he’s scored P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice and The Master (among other projects). By opening with a ritual, Radiohead usher their signature explorations of demagoguery and paranoia to the fore. It’s a sudden moment of urgency and immediacy they use with intention, creating a push and pull between energy and passivity that the rest of Pool applies to its flow.

You hear this immediately with “Daydreaming”, as dreamy loops invite you back to a Kid A future while a repeating piano run carries you through. In this receptive state yet still struggles to arrive at a place of clarity—”Beyond the point of no return, and it’s too late, the damage is done,” Thom says, later repeating “half of my life” backwards. At 47-years-old Thom had, in fact, been with Rachel Owen for half of his life as the relationship dissolved. It’s hard not to hear him baring it all with this insight, and coming from a band that sometimes makes its themes difficult to unpack, such moments of transparency are breathtaking. Jonny Greenwood’s buddy P.T. Anderson directed the stunning clip for “Daydreaming”, too, which depicts Yorke in movement, desperately searching for light.

We turn a gorgeous psych-folk ditty corner with “Desert Island Disk,” parting clouds to let a few rays of light filter in. Then comes “Full Stop”, the darkest and most propulsive track on Pool. A sinister synth bass line reminiscent of “All I Need” or “The Gloaming” lingers low in the mix, and Yorke finds his recent despair is starting to bring him wisdom, albeit a dark-and-growing-darker wisdom. “This is a foul-tasting medicine, to be trapped in your full stop, truth will mess you up,” he intones. Much like the taste of shamanistic brew, his journeys bring epiphanies that are eye-opening but not necessarily comforting. There are further directional signs of his trajectory on “Glass Eyes.” He’s still in a mood, but at least he’s moving, finally able to see the “glassy-eyed light of day.”

“Identikit” sounds like self-therapy, as the catchiest tune on Pool explores the power of will to change one’s own reality. The “broken hearts make it rain” lyric might sound like a comment on the tears of a break-up, but viewed in the larger trajectory as an example of how our individual mental state affects the environments around us, the lyric takes on a much more significant resonance to Yorke’s resolve. An identikit is another word for those composite caricatures that police sketch artists whip up to identify criminals, go figure.

He sees the moon smiling, here, too, over dulcet piano runs that sound like harp chords in that stock-sound evocation of heaven, clouds parting and all. In that moment, where anyone healing from the end of a relationship feels like someone recovering from an addiction, he ends the song by affirming, “one day at a time.” The title of a children’s rhyme is evoked to comment on trajectory with “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief.” A fire is built to keep the animals away, and nature can be a threat. Duly noted.

All that resolve climaxes on “True Love Waits”, the stunning closer track that has been a live Radiohead favorite for years. Reborn from its first arrangement as a solo guitar number, Thom’s sparse piano fingers form pools around his every syllable. “And true love waits in haunted attics, and true love lives on lollipops and crisps,” he croons. “Just don’t leave.” Played as the penultimate encore during the Amnesiac tour (and captured in its acoustic glory on the live record I Might Be Wrong,) “True Love Waits” always had the power of a final lesson. On Pool, though, it’s the perfect cap to the journey we’ve been invited along on. “We tried to record it countless times, but it never worked,” producer Nigel Godrich told Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke in 2012. “To Thom’s credit, he needs to feel a song has validation, that it has a reason to exist as a recording. We could do ‘True Love Waits’ and make it sound like John Mayer. Nobody wants to do that.”

That’s the beauty and immaculate realization of A Moon Shaped Pool right there—for all Radiohead’s vast back-catalog of live songs never released, for all of its identifiable sonic shifts, the boys have created a work here that sounds crafted and composed but not meticulous. “True Love Waits” does feel like a validation, as does the whole album, that Radiohead remain dedicated witnesses to strange new sonic universes. It may have taken years, but this time, they’ve gifted us with a window into their own.

Yes, I’m afraid it’s true. Moments after my loot crate arrived with the much-anticipated ‘Bowie as Labyrinth’s Jareth’ tee in a suspiciously purple palette, KCRW announced that Prince had been found dead at his Paisley Park compound in St. Paul. He was just 57 years old. I guess this is what it sounds like when Doves cry. This stupid, awful year has claimed yet another of Your Girl In Music’s childhood icons. I met Prince when I worked at the agency, and am so glad I got to see him in some of our cities more intimate venues while he was still with us. Prince. F*cking Prince.  2016, I am so done with you.

Let’s start here: calling Gang of Four’s magnificent Entertainment a punk record is like calling the Soft Machine a British Invasion band.

Rolling Stone has just published a list of the 40 Greatest Punk Albums of All Time. So of course the list was riddled with records that had only the most tenuous connection, if any, to punk; also, its many bizarre and embarrassing omissions underscored the painfully obvious fact that the writers wouldn’t know the difference between punk and blues if they had a Ramone and Robert Johnson on hand to advise.

It appears these authors believe “punk” a catchall term for anything that their cool sophomore year at Uni roommate had in his or her record collection. Sure, said roommate appeared to know what they were talking about, and could talk a long time, but they were also the same person who spent a whole weekend trying to convince you to like Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airman (that was a weekend you will never get back, my friend), and when they were stoned they would stand in front of the mirror trying to make the face from the cover of In The Court of the Crimson King.

Just because a song had a distorted guitar, wasn’t a ballad, didn’t have a saxophone, wasn’t immediately identifiable as heavy metal, and was played on your college radio station doesn’t mean it was punk. Let me put it another way: the authors of the Rolling Stone list have spent a significant portion of the last 40 years living in the mucosal folds of Glenn Frey’s transverse colon. You, dear reader, have not; therefore you probably know what punk rock sounds like when you hear it. It doesn’t sound like “Torn Curtain” by Television or “Candidate” by Joy Division, does it?

The bands enumerated in the Rolling Stone list comprise no fewer than 13 different and distinct genres,^[i] only a few of which could be accurately placed under the “Punk Rock” umbrella. As a student and adherent of these musical stages, I can tell you that they were, indeed, all distinct movements; lines may have blurred to a small degree, but this blurring was significantly less then you might presume. If you’re a listener, a musician, or a journo who pays attention, you pretty much know that it’s a rather grand stretch to call Sonic Youth or Devo punk bands, even if Sonic Youth figures prominently in The Year Punk Broke. Please don’t base any understanding of punk on that doc BTW – its focus year is a full decade and a half after punk actually broke, which should give you an idea as to the veracity of its claims.

Now, let’s address the very first line of the piece: “Punk rock started in 1976 on New York’s Bowery…” I am sure the Sex Pistols, who performed for the first time in London in November 1975, would be very surprised to hear that. By the way, The Sex Pistols were created as a marketing gimmick in order to sell Sex Jeans. Except Sex Jeans actually got a bunch of punk kids who weren’t listening and were gonna do their own thing anyways, so jokes on them.

Anointing the Bowery circa ’76 as the birthplace of punk is inaccurate and misleading. Yes, the magnificent rumblings of art and revolution in the mid-’70s Bowery Necropolis are fundamental to Punk’s origin story, but putting such a specific pin on the date/location is, well, more ignorant than an Ignorant Lives Matter protest led by Ignorant Jock McIgnorant, winner of the 1988 Mr. Ignorant Universe contest. Suffice to say: bands like the Pistols, the Damned, the Stranglers, and the Saints (to name just four) were up and running before they played in NYC.

It’s pretty easy to understand why Rolling Stone failed so hard here: Lack of Subject Matter Expertise. Eight authors are credited on Rolling Stone’s “40 Greatest Punk Albums of All Time;” of which just ONE (Dave Fricke, American music journo treasure) has ever written about punk rock. Fact: most of the contributors have never written about anything even tangentially related to punk. There’s a reason I don’t cover fashionable DJ’s, rape-metal, or tween-pop boy-bands: these are genres where my knowledge is limited, so I am smart enough to steer clear of them.

If you check the credits of the RS list writers, you’ll say to yourself, “Of course this list is a suppurating, pulsing, swollen and spongy word-orifice of almost unbelievably transparent errors and sad yet comical ignorance; the people who put it together knew nothing about their subject.”

I also note that this same team of writers turn out these sorts of lists fairly frequently. Here’s a suggestion: Next time you are conjured by Satan to write one of these things, why not bring in an outsider who might actually know the terrain? Get a consultant like, oh, Jack Rabid or Matt Pinfield or even Jim DeRogatis so you could actually get this thing right, for once.

If the primary concern with the Rolling Stone list is the over-broad, misleading application of the “punk” label, the secondary problem is that the authors appear to know very little about the true salad days and gilded age of punk rock (that is, the flowering of young, loud and snotty bands in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Europe between 1976 and 1979).

Conspicuously missing from Rolling Stone’s list: Damned Damned Damned or Machine Gun Etiquette by the Damned; Inflammable Material or Nobody’s Heroes by Stiff Little Fingers; the Undertones’ self-titled debut; any (or all) of the first three Stranglers albums; Endangered Species by the U.K. Subs; Crossing the Red Sea by the Adverts; Greatest Hits Vol. I by the Cockney Rejects;^[ii] I’m Stranded or Eternally Yours by Brisbane’s Saints; and Generation X’s eponymous debut album. These are not obscure albums; each charted significantly in the U.K. and received considerable press both at the time of their release and in the decades since. The fact that not one may be found among Rolling Stone’s collection is damning evidence that something is very much amiss over at Corporate Rock Magazine HQ.

A line in the lists preamble is meant to address what was left off: “…a lot of great punk acts didn’t make the cut. The Circle Jerks, Adolescents, Fear, the Big Boys, the Dickies, the Dicks and even the mighty Damned just didn’t have that one perfect LP statement that could inspire consensus among our editors.”

O.K. That statement makes perfect sense if the person assessing the music is Marlee Fucking Matlin.

I understand that living inside the rapidly decaying ass pipe of a recently deceased Eagle may be bad for your hearing, but the Damned’s Machine Gun Etiquette and The Black Album are both exactly the kind of “perfect LP statement(s)” that RS would appear to be looking for; not only are both these albums two of the best “punk” records, but they’re also two of the best albums of the whole friggin’ era. Sorry to be accusatory, but clearly these morons weren’t actually familiar in any meaningful way with Machine Gun Etiquette or The Black Album.^[iii] Listen to ‘em, if you don’t believe me—just two or three cuts into either, you’ll see why these are major effing records.

Likewise, as I have long espoused, I would personally say that Eternally Yours by the Saints is the second best punk album ever made (after the first Ramones album, of course), and very few people with even a cursory familiarity with that record could possibly leave it off of a list like this.

I also can’t stress enough how wobbly the list’s application of the word “punk” is, but here are two especially wonky examples: All Mod Cons (which comes in at No. 24) is probably my favorite record by the Jam, but it is a fairly radical departure from their earlier “punk” records. Any fan of the Jam (along with those who have studied punk) would never call All Mod Cons a punk record; it is, in fact, their step away from punk. And if the inclusion of All Mod Cons is indicative of Rolling Stone’s willingness to loosen their criteria to include more progressive works by punk acts, why the hell isn’t the Clash’s London Calling, one of the greatest albums ever made, on the list?

(Oh. I remember why. The list was compiled by people living in Glenn Frey’s dead ass, that’s why.)

Likewise, the Slits’ Cut is definitively a post-punk record by a former punk band (the Slits did not record a full-length studio album until after they had moved away from their earlier punk ideation). Perhaps Cut was included because of what the pioneering Slits stood for in 1977 (when they were performing “true” punk music); but the band who recorded Cut were deeply influenced by reggae, Can and PiL, and I don’t know anyone who would mistake Cut for a punk record.

Musically, Cut is about as punk as The Third Ear Band, and I don’t see any of their records on the list.^[iv] Which is all to say that the silly and misleading list includes non-punk records by punk bands and non-punk records by non-punk bands. I guess I should just be grateful that Oingo Boingo isn’t mentioned anywhere.

But back to the primary problem of the list: Rolling Stone’s expansion of punk’s umbrella to include records that aren’t punk records. I have literally never, not once, heard anyone refer to Joy Division or Mission of Burma as a punk act, and anyone who thinks that Unknown Pleasures is a punk record knows so little about music that not only should they not be writing about punk rock, they shouldn’t be writing about music, and probably not even about noise or sound, like at all.

I am Your Girl In Music and I endorse this message.

[i] For the record, these are the genres: non-punk punk-era music (i.e., music made around the time of punk’s first flourishing and containing musical and stylistic elements that challenged contemporary pop and rock habits and indulgences, but wasn’t phat-downstroke barre chord punk); proto punk (stuff that was released prior to 1976, like the Stooges and the Dolls, and was retroactively labeled punk rock); D.C./L.A./NYC hardcore (you know what that is); artcore (the same, but with pretensions to art and/or expertise); noise rock (bands like Sonic Youth, who did serious guitar de-construction heavily influenced by Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, but set to a rock beat); post punk (Gang of Four, Joy Division, Slits); new wave prog (Devo); mod (The Jam); punk revival (Green Day, Blink-182); grunge; punk-era art rock (Pere Ubu); Riot Grrrl; and, of course…punk.

[ii] The Cockney Rejects Greatest Hits Vol. I is not a greatest hits album, by the way.

[iii] It’s worth noting that as brilliant and essential as those two albums are, the Damned’s masterpiece is 1983’s Strawberries, which blends psych, soul, surf and punk in a stunning way. Because I, unlike Rolling Stone, do not believe in an amorphous, flexible definition of punk, I cannot claim that this wildly diverse pop-art masterwork is actually a punk album.

[iv] True story: About 10 years ago, John Lydon showed up at my besties door unannounced and handed me an album by the Third Ear Band. He gave me the firm instruction, “You have to listen to this.” Since Lydon’s stepdaughter, the late, great Ariane “Ari Up” Foster, was the vocalist for the Slits, this allusion to the Third Ear Band may not be entirely off base.

This lineup though. Best I’ve seen for Summer 2016 yet. Obviously, I have to go, cause I forgot to ask Haim who their favorite Corey heart-throb was from the 1980’s, the last time I interviewed them, and you, dear friends, deserve to have this matter put to bed once and for all, finally. I think I can get the betrothed to join me and I’ll call it his birthday present and we will have 4 days of music and, well, moxie in the Windy City. I see some tasty deep dish in our future.

If you didn’t snap up your 4 day GA passes already, you should snag single-day tickets NAO because this is gonna sell out FAST and you don’t want to be the only person you know without the t-shirt – that’s decidedly so UN-fetch.

listen: we wanted to answer when you called, we really did. we got your emails and txts. and we did hear you knocking on our door all those times, but it just wasn’t as simple as us clicking reply in gmail or coming down the stairs to get the door or pick up the phone. you see, we were washing our hair. no, really!!! but like, with an at home keratin leave in treatment. it was a whole thing, ok?

so no, we couldn’t answer the door or the phone or reply to texts because of the shampooing, but we were sending you telepathic messages SO HARD, all the time. we told you about so many new artists and great lit discoveries and some hilarious bad date stories (these dates were so bad we actually told them we couldn’t see them because we were washing our hair, ha!) and every time Voldemort tried to show back up and when we realized we were actually over Voldemort and fit for a real relationship once again.

there was a veritable avalanche of telepathic updates and info Your Girl in Music was sending you these last 44 months – did you not get any of them? well, that is certainly distressing. we are going to do better though, we swear.

Bowie, always first in line to push the boundaries with artistic experimentation and technological innovation, saw the potential of InstaMiniSeries to produce and disseminate new interpretations of his final album, ★. The album was released just two days before his death on January 10 following a private 18 month battle. Bowie provided InstaMiniSeries advance access to the album, its art and images while granting the team total autonomy in interpreting the material without any condition.

The series was filmed in late fall and completed in December, making it possible that the Thin Duke saw the finished product. According to BowieNet, the series “takes its audience on a journey of evocative images inspired by the moods suggested in the album’s music, lyrics and artwork.” Your girl in music remembers when she read Bowie contemplating the potential for this kind of music delivery back in 1999, and is as excited now as she was then for the experience.

InstaMiniSeries founder and EP Nikki Borges saw the project as a natural fit for the artist and social sharing medium: “David Bowie has always been about reinvention over repetition. Remarkably honest and passionate in his work, his innovations have influenced our own work as we transform a social media platform into a creative outlet. We are grateful to have the opportunity to participate with the chameleonic rock icon and honored to be entrusted with interpreting his art.”

“Unbound” was directed by Nikki Borges and written by Carolynn Cecilia. It stars Tavi Gevinson as the protagonist. Check out a trailer for “Unbound: A ★ InstaMiniSeries” below and catch the premiere in two days at InstaMiniSeries.

 

“UNBOUND: A ★ InstaMiniSeries” In the Fall of 2015, David Bowie gave us unique pre-release access to the music from ★ (pronounced ‘Blackstar’), his 28th studio album, allowing us to create our own visual interpretations of his songs, with no limits or preconditions on his part. Completed in December 2015, UNBOUND: A★InstaMiniSeries takes the audience on a journey of evocative images inspired by the moods suggested in the album’s music, lyrics and artwork. Each episode of the series is sure to capture the imaginations of all who experience it and will undoubtedly lead to endless speculation and discussion of meaning, metaphor and intention. We are honored to have had this opportunity and hope you’ll join our 16 episode series, premiering February 25th. New episode every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Executive Producer: @InstaMiniSeries Director: @nikkiborges Music: @davidbowie Writer: @carolynncecilia Co-Producer: @lawrenceperyer Director of Photography: @joshuasterlingbragg Line Producer: @delaVega Associate Producers: @amandadelanuez @itscecfernandez Production Designer: @LezGolden Costume Designer: @Bodilicious Hair / Make Up Artist: @missy_mua Miss Clarkson’s Make Up Artist: Angie Elizalde VFX Production House: @heym1ster Dance Choreographer: @ofbonesdance, @hollyebynum Stunt Coordinator: @stuntmanpete Wire Rigger: @stuntworks Stunt Woman: @hellskitten29 Behind The Scenes: @a_madd Production Assistant: @clemencyforclem Special Thanks: @instalucas Protagonist: @tavitulle Lounge singer: Patricia Clarkson The Dancer: @rysak Woman at the Train: @Jayknowlest Young Boy: Jonah Herman Man in the alley: @Qdb_omg Woman in the red dress: @nikkiborges Drummer: Owen Riley-Duffy Older woman: Ching Valdes Anan Piano Player: @katiemorrmidd Dancer #2: @maks_wel18 Dancer #3: @katiemattar Dancer #4: @fulloutfarrish Dancer #5: @_ious Dancer #6: @felixs_journey Arm of man: @delaVega Woman in the audience: @amandadelanuez

A video posted by InstaMiniSeries (@instaminiseries) on Feb 22, 2016 at 2:50am PST

music + moxie is returning soon

ps: … don’t call it a comeback, we never left

He wanted to  prove his failure to play my +1 was poor luck and not an act of malice. A few months later, he won our 2nd Valentine’s Day by revealing he was taking us to their bay area tour kick-off show in March, with a drive home down PCH over the weekend. It was this little college venue, where the bar is basically a lemonade stand but only serving grown-up juice. We wound up upstairs and I made us crawl across a sorta-rafter type thing to stake out some real estate with a view…
It was an epic night. As always, OK Go were the masters of audience engagement. They just get it and they do it right. It helps that they have a defined artistic vision and purpose. It’s alot easier to make your mark when you know what that mark is. Here’s OK Go, making it again, all over my heart with this latest video, no thanks to Gravity, thank you very much.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: OK Go To: Ses
Date: Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 6:38 AM
Subject: Our New Video Out Now – Upside Down & Inside Out ???

HEY!

Upside Down & Inside Out – The Video

We’ve been hiding away making stuff. And we made the best thing ever: our new video for “Upside Down & Inside Out.” To watch it now, just click on the image below.

If you want to know more about how it was made, we’ve answered some questions here.

Love,
OK Go

If you believe everything you read outside music+moxie, the music industry was “saved” not once but three times in 2015 — first by Taylor Swift, then by Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, and once more by Adele. Crisis averted, and we can all rest easy knowing that Record Label execs can put away those golden parachutes, sit back, and enjoy a fine cigar, lit by a crisp Benjamin, cause the Industry’s Scrooge McDuck money-pile is only getting bigger, right?

That was a great laugh but seriously, now my sides hurt, and the music industry is still a giant trainwreck.

It’s not Taylor’s fault — the situation is simply too dire for one artist to fix alone. In just over a decade, the revenues created by selling music in the U.S. were cut in half. The narrative is all too familiar by now: Thanks to artificial scarcity and a centralized, one-dimensional production chain, sales of absurdly expensive, purposefully fragile, and frequently unlistenable compact discs reached their peak. Then after the internet came along to disrupt the economy/democratize production/introduce “goatse” to your mom, those revenues burst in a sudden implosion, as bubbles inevitably do.

And yet, even by the standards of your average technology driven Shangri-La-to-the-Sahara-overnight, scorched-earth industry decline, the precipice atop which the music business once perched was staggeringly high — and its fall astoundingly steep. So dramatic was this disruption that I imagine many in the industry gazing upon what Uber did to the taxi economy with something like envy. Because while a cab company owner can at least retire early, safe in the knowledge that the world simply moved on from charmingly corrupt old-world Medallion systems and yellow-checkered color schemes, “music” — as long as you leave the word “industry” off the end of it — hasn’t imploded at all. In a narrative that’s just as important as the music industry’s downfall, music itself has never been bigger.

From production to consumption to availability, music has exploded thanks to a series of innovations like Napster, iTunes, BitTorrent, and Spotify. And though the industry’s financial outlook is still fuzzy, one thing is certain: No matter who ultimately “wins” the digital music wars — contenders include Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and Pandora — streaming music as the world’s dominant listening method is poised to last far longer than the various ruling periods of MP3s, CDs, and probably even vinyl records. That of course means an end to the sustained viability of physical music products — but the industry and its patrons have known that for a while. The more significant and unique feature offered by streaming platforms versus services like iTunes or BitTorrent — particularly for that small sliver of youth consumers straddling the blurred line between Gen-X era and Millennial and for whom one’s iPod library was, from 2003 to 2006 nothing short of a digital representation of their very soul — music in 2015 need no longer take up virtual space either.

Back when “the cloud” was purely a meteorological phenomenon, megabytes of storage — on hard drives, computers, smartphones, mp3 players — were a pricey but unquestionably fundamental accessory at least as crucial to serious music enthusiasts as a decent set of headphones. Upon unwrapping a shiny new 128 GB U2 iPod, the potential and possibilities for one’s music library felt limited only by a listener’s hunger and imagination. But it was never long before we had to start erasing last year’s chill-wave to make room for this year’s witch-gaze or goddess-metal or whatever other fresh micro-genre crept into our collective consciousness. For the most passionately obsessed collectors, these digital storage constraints still imposed a tiny layer of scarcity to our music consumption habits, thus preserving an intrinsic measure of value to the music we owned, which artists and fans had for decades taken for granted.

Streaming changed all that. With tens of millions of albums floating up in the digital ethers operated by Spotify and Apple, just waiting to be plucked with a few taps of our smartphones or keyboards, this idea of scarcity is as dead and outdated as the telegram. In many ways, this overwhelming overabundance of sound is the best thing that’s ever happened to music. Even cranky punks like Steve Albini agree with that notion. Access to great music is no longer a luxury reserved for those fortunate enough to have disposable cash and time. Income inequality in America is still a very real problem, but there’s at least one intellectual privilege that today is effectively available to anyone with an Internet connection: consuming good music. And unlike Silicon Valley’s disruption of the film, television, and publishing industries, which still generate significant income through Netflix subscriptions and Amazon ebook sales, some of the biggest and earliest music streaming services (ahem, MOG, now Beats Music, who first talked me into doing something real with this blog 5 years ago) never bothered to make even the most obsessed enthusiasts pay for music, making it the only space that’s lived up to the internet’s promise of democratizing everything under it’s cloud-filled sky.

But despite the joys of having free, unlimited access to the better part of recorded music history on any internet connected device — the same surfeit of sound is available on Spotify’s mobile offering for just $9.99 a month — it’s worth considering what fans have lost as scarcity continues to disappear from the calculus of music consumption.

For instance, if you were among the few hundred people in 1967 or 1996 who bought an original pressing of The Velvet Underground & Nico or If You’re Feeling Sinister around the time they were released, it probably meant you were either extraordinarily in-the-know, extraordinarily lucky, or both. But today, particularly for listeners whose tastes tend to align with the hipster-crit consensus, music collection and appreciation can be boiled down to a simple and cold mathematical proof: Step One, check out reviews of new albums/tracks online; Step Two, cross-reference against Spotify; Step Three, repeat until your roommate/partner/parent forces you to go outside. It might come as a shock to our parents, or the square-iest squares in your social circle, but the fact that you know “all the cool bands” isn’t rocket science or Walter White-caliber meth-making. It’s like cooking ramen in the bathroom or scrambling eggs via microwave your first year of college.

This equation usually only fails when the artist-variable is among a handful of acts like Taylor Swift and Drag City’s stable of talent who have forsaken Spotify because it has helped perpetuate — and arguably exacerbate — the decades-old tradition of “screwing over musicians.” But otherwise it’s an effective shortcut to achieving the minimum viable credibility needed to talk shop amongst the true believers of any subculture. Half an afternoon and an unlimited data plan are all you need to become a convincing “indie rock kid” or “hip-hop enthusiast” or “metalhead.” In the world wrought by Spotify and its streaming peers, to say you’ve heard or heard of or are a fan of any given artist or artistic movement is no longer remotely notable or interesting, let alone impressive. Even if you saw the band live, so what? Any band with even a modicum of buzz is invited to play on the increasingly homogenized and exhaustive festival circuit. Over the past five years rarely, if ever, does a musical artifact, obscure or otherwise, require any measure of actual effort to uncover.

In short, the thrill of the hunt is gone.

Now, let’s not get confused about the reasons why the forgotten art of the hunt matters and why it’s worth eulogizing. It’s probably a good thing that even fewer people than ever before are impressed when someone boasts of being at “the first Can show in Cologne” or “the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City” or any of the other hipster/bohemian Mad Libs included in LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge.” To suggest otherwise is one of the more expediant ways to prove oneself obnoxiously privileged in 2015.

So the hunt matters because it increased the value — perceived or otherwise — of a piece of art. Many of you will disagree with that, but hear me out:

A common refrain of the new music industry is that people who don’t pay for music are incapable of assigning value to it. With respect to that viewpoint, it’s not quite right. Yes, people should pay for music in some shape or form; and yes, artists deserve to be compensated for their work. But cash is only one metric for measuring and reverse-engineering value. Time, effort, physical space, and the allocation of digital resources are all currencies a listener may bring to the process of discovering or collecting music. All five — cash included — may be expended in varying amounts depending on the mechanism at work when consuming music. iTunes dispensed with “physical space” and arguably “time” as value indicators, but kept the rest. BitTorrent and Napster removed cash from the equation. But Spotify’s immensely popular streaming platform, where music is freely accessed and suspended in a digital cloud that, as far as listeners are concerned, is virtually infinite in size, exists in a state where these all of these value indicators have arguably been stripped.

For the youngest generation of listeners — the streaming generation — the only value exchanged between consumer and producer is attention. To be clear, producers and platforms that undervalue attention as a piece of currency — particularly among younger users — do so at their own peril. But a value system based solely on attention creates the lowest stakes imaginable for producer-to-consumer creative transactions, and moreover pits musicians and music platforms against not only one another but against every other item of digital content, from Instagram photos to Facebook statuses to Candy Crush.

And so in an effort to identify pockets of scarcity in a music industry dominated by a near-complete lack thereof, here are 10 of the best unofficial, self-released, or otherwise off-the-grid albums of 2015. None of them are terribly hard to find or “scarce,” per se. But as old media gatekeepers attempt to wrangle this digital explosion of music so that it once again resembles the bland, one-directional product chain of old, it’s worth celebrating artists who take control of their own distribution, independent of huge labels or streaming platforms. And all of these albums — either coincidentally or as a direct consequence of their distribution method — required greater effort to find and/or keep than it takes to hit “play” on Spotify.

NOTE: In the interest of celebrating the increasingly rare notion of scarcity in 2015’s music-consumption, any appearance on Spotify disqualified an album from inclusion on this list. That said, albums like Joanna Newsom’s Divers, despite total Spotify abstention (and despite being preposterously awesome) don’t really belong here either because of its traditional release and the overwhelming levels of publicity it garnered. (One could say the same of Taylor Swift’s 1989, which made headlines after she withheld it from Spotify because she witheld it from Spotify).

01. Cindy Lee – Act Of Tenderness

Here’s a band that is so knowingly out-of-sync with today’s social media and digital distribution machine that its website is hosted on Geocities, that web 1.0 relic I had forgotten even existed, and never imagined was still a thing.

The Band Maybe Soon-To-Be Formerly Known as Viet Cong wasn’t the only act to rise up from the ashes of Calgary’s fuzzed-out art rock crew Women. While Matthew Flegel and Matthew Wallace were wooing festival crowds and collecting outraged tweets over their historically insensitive band name, Flegel’s brother Patrick launched Cindy Lee. And whatever the reasons behind Women’s choice to split up, judging by Cindy Lee’s dark, anxious Act Of Tenderness, “artistic differences” doesn’t likely rank high on that list.

Indeed, the 12 no-wave-influenced tracks here — which like the cult band This Heat strike a precarious balance between violent, immersive firestorms of noise and irresistibly catchy melodies — would not sound out of place on a collection of Viet Cong outtakes. Though to be honest, the staggeringly great songwriting and thrilling vintage-sounding production here make Viet Cong’s fine, critically acclaimed debut sound more like the B-sides collection, not the other way around. Tracks like “What I Need” sound as if someone shoved a ’60s girl group like the Shirelles through a meat grinder and served up the gristle and bone chunks that should have been thrown out. Others like “Last Train Come And Gone” graft the digestible structures and song lengths of pop music onto a musical canvas borrowed from post-rock. Elsewhere on “Operation,” Cindy Lee falls to the temptation of creating something almost like a radio hit by offering up a low-rent DIY take on the Knife’s immaculate spazz-outs.

Act Of Tenderness is the sound of someone who would and could create pop music, if only that genre’s vocabulary were capable of saying something honest and engaging about today’s weird, ugly world. If Flegel had been born 50 years earlier, he would be writing hit song after hit song for vocal groups like the Crystals. In 2015, he makes this.

Despite the fact that everyone involved showcases A-game talent, Cindy Lee only pressed a few hundred copies of Act Of Tenderness. And in a move that befits such an intimate affair, the digital version of the album can be found by accessing a special Dropbox folder.

Download it here.

02. Laddio Bolocko – Live And Unreleased 1997-2000

This now-defunct pioneering quartet of New York ’90s noise rock offers up a valuable lesson: Always leave the recorder on and save everything. These 13 improvisational studio tracks, which along with six live cuts make up the 2015 rarities collection Live And Unreleased 1997-2000, are better than most bands’ final drafts. For newcomers to the band — considering their success was largely limited to cult status, that means almost everyone — this three-LP set, along with a DVD of live, documentary, and abstract footage that is masterfully shot and edited by Aran Tharp, offers an ear-shattering, high-decibel primer on why the band was so important.

The band’s impact was not unlike that of the Velvet Underground; smaller in scale, yes, but similarly proportioned. By that I mean, there weren’t a ton of people who heard Laddio Bolocko during the group’s dark quiet roaming reign of the city’s rock and roll fringes — but everyone who did hear them started a band. Hell, if you wandered wasted into a rock ‘n’ roll club only to hear a band that sounded like Can and Sonic Youth got into a knife fight and lit each other on fire and then lit you on fire, wouldn’t you?

Luckily, fans who missed Laddio play while they existed need not rely on their imagination alone, thanks to the DVD included in the box set. The disc is far more vital than some perfunctory extra tacked on to appeal solely to super-enthusiasts. Filmmaker Tharp accepts and embraces the challenge of capturing Laddio Bolocko’s brutally mesmerizing live performances by patching together thousands of frenzied cuts in order to replicate the disarming and disorienting sensory experience of witnessing a great punk rock show. The effect is far more visceral than what would be achieved by setting up a few cameras and letting the band work its magic. And while I wasn’t fortunate to have seen Laddio Bolocko perform in the flesh, I’ve seen a great many killer shows in my lifetime, and this footage captures that ineffable feeling convincingly:

On that note, it’s not only the scale on which the band’s influence operated that makes it different from the Velvet Underground’s. Because while many of Laddio’s concert-goers went out and started their own bands, not many of them sounded much like their inspiration. But that’s only a testament to how unique and inimitable Laddio Bolocko was during their brief lifespan.

Buy it here.

03. Lil B & Chance The Rapper – Free Based Freestyles Mixtape

“We are making an entire piece of content from scratch,” says Chance as he kicks off “What’s Next,” the second track off of this impossibly likable mixtape made up entirely of freestyle raps. “Which is where the best things in life come from,” he continues. “The best things in life come from nothing and become something different.”

That’s an elegant summation of why rap mixtapes are some of the most impressive and enjoyable hip-hop releases on the planet, despite their “unofficial” status. While the format has evolved to the point where rappers like Drake, Future, and Chance himself take the production and promotion of these “tapes” as seriously as any other release, their real magic stems from that sense of raw, boundless creativity which, for the world’s best rappers, rushes forth like a tidal wave of words and ideas from their brain to their mouths to their SoundCloud dashboard, where it’s mainlined into the listener’s cerebral cortex. And this creativity is arguably best hatched in the context of a mixtape, where it’s untouched and uncorrupted by studio advance money and the demands and expectations that come with it.

A rapper at the top of his or her mixtape game is a thing to behold — history’s most impressive display of sustained prowess in that context might be Lil Wayne’s run in the years prior to Tha Carter III, from which the classic Dedication and Drought series were birthed. And while this entry from Lil B and Chance doesn’t reach the heights of Dedication 2 or Da Drought 3, it possesses that same uncut, unfiltered mad-scientist creativity that helped expand Wayne’s fanbase beyond the mainstream into the headphones of every rap head and indie kid with a brain in-between their earbuds.

Meanwhile, the freestyle restriction gives listeners a peek at the rappers’ stream-of-consciousness technique and process — imperfections and all. This lends a sense of intimacy to the proceedings, which is most evident on the first track, “What’s Next,” when Chicago’s Noname Gypsy drops by to stumble through a thoroughly charming verse that falls apart after her mind goes blank. She may not be the “best rapper alive” but it’s moments like hers which make Free Based Freestyles such a joy. Like the inverse of Jay and Kanye’s distantly affluent Watch The Throne, Free Based brings listeners in close, making them feel as if they are smoking joints in a basement, watching two friends rap battle at 3 AM. The fact that Lil B and Chance The Rapper just happen to be much better freestylers than anyone you know doesn’t make the record any less intimate.

Listen here.

04. Advance Base – Nephew In The Wild

To any Sun Kil Moon fans who were turned off by Mark Kozelek’s immature flame wars with lesser indie rockers, first I’d say, “Get over it.” Your favorite Beatle has probably done far worse. But second, I’d say, if you need that Midwestern sad-sack singer-songwriter itch scratched and Kozelek’s no longer your man, check out Chicago’s Owen Ashworth and his Advance Base project. Kozelek himself must have recognized Ashworth as a kindred spirit, having invited him to play Rhodes piano on 2014’s knockout Benji; Ashworth even wrote the music to the album’s sixth track, “Jim Wise.” On Nephew In The Wild, his 10th release as Advance Base since 2011, Ashworth presents 10 frozen working-class anthems, splitting the difference between Kozelek and Sufjan Stevens’ Michigan. Unlike Stevens, however, Ashworth is less interested in the details of their squalor and more concerned with the diversions his characters — pretty much all of whom are waitresses — use to escape their shitty lives, whether that means summoning Satan on the appropriately named “Summon Satan” or getting high and listening to Thin Lizzy on “Trisha Please Come Home.”

Listen here.

05. Molly Nilsson – Zenith

Zenith is basically the “upbeat Beach House album” I wish Beach House had actually made this year. Okay, that’s not true; I loved Thank Your Lucky Stars. Rather, Zenith is what an “upbeat Beach House album” actually sounds like, as Molly Nilsson lays her laconic Swedish vocals over a musical backdrop more indebted to the resurgence of Italo Disco embodied by acts like the Chromatics than to indie rockers like Yo La Tengo. As for the lyrics, well, “1995” is the best song ever written about how an operating system — Windows 95, to be exact — is a metaphor or life and love and everything else.

Download it here.

06. White Gzus – Stackin N Mackin, Vol. 3

I’m glad to see that getting pulled over with $15,000 worth of heroin on New Year’s Day 2015 hasn’t slowed down Gerik Raglin, one half of the Chicago duo White Gzus. On the contrary, this year brought us Volumes 2 and 3 of the excellent mixtape series Stackin N Mackin. (Another advantage of the mixtape format? Release dates are never sidetracked by court dates.)

Here, Raglin and his collaborator Marek Fortineaux rap over everything from old soul songs to Beetlejuice. (Check out the so-silly-it-shouldn’t-work-but-the-fact-that-it-does-makes-it-that-much-better “SDR.” In the same vein is the way “Peeeeyyyenthouse” is enunciated over and over again on that title track.) Meanwhile, the melodic and maximalist approach to the production and the verbal dexterity of Raglin and Fortineaux might be considered a throwback when compared to the grimmer Drill delivery of some of the duo’s contemporaries in Chicago and elsewhere, like Chief Keef. At the same time, by bringing in collaborators like producer du jour Metro Boomin, White Gzus bridge the past and present more memorably than just about any other hip-hop act this year.

Listen here.

07. Wished Bone – Pseudio Recordings

Athens, Ohio’s Wished Bone is like Joanna Newsom with twice the Appalachian street cred. Their super lo-fi debut, Psuedio Recordings, is as weird as it sounds, but there’s an undeniable sweetness and smartness to tracks like “Witty Boys Make Graves,” which balance knowing cleverness and openhearted sincerity.

Listen here.

08. Toro Y Moi – Samantha

Few artists have evolved as quickly and covered as much musical ground as Chaz Bundick — better known as Toro Y Moi. Starting out as one of the pioneers of the dubiously named yet surprisingly resilient chillwave movement, Bundick later incorporated the influence of house and experimental hip-hop. Meanwhile, 2015’s What For? was his most dramatic deviation yet from those chilltronica roots; its lead single, “Empty Nesters,” for instance, sounds like a straight-up Big Star song.

This impressive eclecticism has made Bundick tough to pin down. But if Samantha, the free 20-track mixtape he released over the summer, is any indication, his heart lies with the Flying Lotus- and Dilla-influenced hip-hop of Anything In Return. And in truth, Samantha is an improvement off that record, in large part because of the addition here of some phenomenal guest collaborators like Kool AD, Nosaj Thing, and Washed Out. At times, Samantha feels a bit too indebted to its influences — and frankly, I was expecting more from a track called “Stoned At The MOMA.” But elsewhere, “Room For 1zone” is a thoroughly unique mash-up of sinister trap melodies, ambient grooves, and distorted soul vocals that would serve as an optimal formula for the “Bundick sound” going forward — not that he’d ever settle on one. Meanwhile, the Washed Out collaboration “Want” reminds us that Bundick has been fucking with weird-ass R&B forever, and deserves some credit for anticipating the success of acts like FKA Twigs.

The big takeaway here is that the album’s finest moments are the ones where Bundick gets an assist from one of his semi-famous friends. I don’t mean that as a show of disrespect; the same thing could be said of Brian Eno. And indeed, adopting an “indie rock Eno” position is where I could see Bundick having his biggest impact going forward: as a gifted technician and student of innovation who makes everyone in the room better.

Listen here.

09. Kevin Gates – Murder For Hire

Years from now, Murder For Hire might be remembered as Kevin Gates’ last street mixtape before he blew up … or it could be forgotten on the pile of Southern rap also-rans. Gates, who has been working hard and recording tracks for a decade now, has been in the conversation for much of that time after the Louisiana rapper attracted the attention of Lil Wayne’s people. Now, 2016 is his do-or-die moment as Gates — on the eve of his 30th birthday — readies Islah, his official debut and his first record likely to benefit from a big marketing push by Atlantic Records.

If Islah is a hit, Murder For Hire would be a fine victory lap, offering up tracks like “Mexico” and “Khaza,” which filter the modern mainstream incarnation of trap through Gates’ unique voice and persona, which is at turns fiercely aggressive and sharply funny.

“I suffer from depression, so I record everyday,” Gates told Mass Appeal. “I try to record everyday, and the reason I’m not really in a happy mood right now is because I haven’t recorded since last night.”

In other words, regardless of how 2016 shakes out for Gates, he’s not going anywhere.

Listen here.

10. Heidecker & Wood – Good As Is

You didn’t ask for them, but here they are: 56 “unwanted songs” that celebrate everything great and terrible about ’70s radio rock. Good As Is isn’t as flat-out hilarious as, say, Heidecker’s “pee-freak” project, the Yellow River Boys. But songs like “Angry With You” exist where humor and sincerity overlap; a place that, 40 years ago, was routinely explored by popular artists like Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman. Blame Ween, blame Weird Al Yankovic, but at some point in the ’90s, it stopped being cool for musicians to be funny. If you were funny, you were “joke rock” — which meant you were worthy of dismissal.

This might be changing, however — witness the success this year of albums by Colleen Green, Courtney Barnett, and Jim O’Rourke, three artists who by any reasonable measure are pretty funny. And while Good As Is doesn’t reach the heights of those albums, it too is fighting the good fight. Oh, and because you didn’t really think a label in 2015 would pay to release and promote a 56-track soft rock album, the duo chose to release Good As Is as a $1 BitTorrent download. That’s less than 2 cents per song! What are you waiting for?

Here’s the sitch: He’d been hanging out with this girl to the point where they were seeing each other all the time and being flirty and talking every day, alone, etc. He really liked her so he told her so, and that he was interested in dating. She came back with the old “I’m not looking for a boyfriend” line. Before he could finish, I interrupted him “She’s not into you, but doesn’t want you to take it personally.” He was good with that but asked why girls can’t just directly say that. Why they obfuscate.

At this point, the other guys started complaining about this: “she wants you to move her sofa sometime;” “she’s keeping you on the back-burner;” “girls only know how to play games.” I had to interject, obviously.

“Oh, no, we can’t just turn you down directly, that’s not safe. We learn, from around the time we are 12, that if you tell a boy, ‘thank you, but no,’ there’s a really good chance they will call you names like ‘whore.’ And not just once and then walk away and get over it, we’re talking full blown grudge-fest with violent overtones, whether or not they materialize as actual violence. They might get in your face with their buddies. If we dare to injure the wrong guys ego, we might get hit or raped or worse. And the thing is, most guys seem normal and friendly, they might even be our friends until that switch. So we have no way of knowing who we can be honest with, and who we need to cushion the blow for.”

They looked at me, saying nothing so I went on.

“I remember the first time I ever said to a dude and his friends who had been “flirty” and “friendly” from a distance, ‘Sorry, we don’t want to hang out, but thanks for the invite.’ I was at the river for a three day weekend with my friend Nicole. We were in junior high. ‘What? You’re too good to party with us? Tricks!’ the group of older guys with beers shouted at my 14 year old friend and I. I, hoping humor would provide us an escape, laughed ‘But I thought tricks were for kids?’ as we kept walking. ‘Dirty sluts! Come hang out, what are you afraid of?’ They came back, with more colorful, foul descriptions than I am gonna recount.

I was young and so principled and didn’t know any better (you know me) so I re-engaged. ‘Look, I don’t think you know what that word means. By virtue of our refusal of your kind offer to “chill”, we are not sluts. But we do now know “chill” means “sex”. Point of fact, I can’t be any of the things you are calling me, because I DECLINED. And a ‘trick’ is the man in the prostitute-john equation, not the woman…. Also, if we didn’t want to hang out when you were being ‘nice’ to us, do you really think that hurling profanity and epithets is gonna change our minds and make us see what we are missing out on – like oh, well the forceful way he calls me a slut just makes me weak in the knees??’ I had just gotten going, was on a roll with no intention of stopping and didn’t notice the absolute danger I was in as he and his posse closed in around me, but the much more street-savvy Nicole did. She grabbed my hand and pulled me the hell out of there. We didn’t stop running for a while. Anything could have happened. Nothing did.

Variations of this scenario have happened countless times since. Even walking in the mall with friends looking at the earings we’d just bought at Claires, guys, some we knew, some we didn’t, might approach and turn scary if you turned them down. It took me several times to learn I should not address misapplication of the word ‘bitch’ to myself or my friends, ever. Much safer to just say ‘yep, sorry’ and keep moving. As recently as last week, a girlfriend and I were accosted walking to a comedy show from a restaurant. ‘What’s wrong, you don’t like compliments?! TALK TO US!’

And the scary thing is, this is just par for the course. This is just what happens. Anywhere. Everywhere. And so we learn this is normal – that it’s our problem, and maybe our fault. So obfuscating becomes innate and ingrained, a survival skill we do without thinking about it or realizing what we’re doing. Not just trauma victims, by the way, all women learn this without ever being aware of it. And we learn even the boys we go to church or school or later, work with or who we grew up with may become verbally and/or physically violent when we turn them down in a clear, unambiguous way. Sometimes our ‘nice-guy/good-guy’ friends decide they are tired of ‘always finishing last’ and start stalking us and we have to get restraining orders. So we take street combat classes (at least that was my solution) and we nudge and hint and push at our answer when it’s “no” but we don’t say it too concretely, because bad things happen if there isn’t a possibility-laden qualifier after that ‘no’. It’s not fair to you or the other 80% – 90% of the male population that would just be cool and move on, but one or two out of ten is high risk when its your life on the line and it’s way better to stay alive.”

His face at the end was …definitely something. He still wishes women would just be direct with him. But I think they all understand the struggle a little bit better now.

Save

———- Forwarded message ———-
Date: Sat, Nov 14, 2015 at 1:26 PM

I think we may have reached the point of no return
/TMM

On Nov 14, 2015 12:22 PM, Jeremy wrote:

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 8:18 PM, Luke wrote:
We can’t F4rd to keep these puns going much longer…

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Joe wrote:

Knowing the difference is Key

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 6:45 PM, Casey wrote:
Would hate to Insert myself into this but it really must End. I’m going Home.

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 6:34 PM, Alex wrote:
I feel like people can’t ctrl their puns anymore, need to switch to an alt thread and del this one.

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 4:38 AM, Gary wrote:

Looks like he goes there to Escape.

On 12 November 2015 at 05:18, Mark wrote:

this puncake has too many layers.

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Daniel wrote:
I wonder if he called mission control before telling the guy at the bar to shift over so he could start up a tab.

 

On Nov 11, 2015 7:13 PM, Marc wrote:

Kekeke

 

On Nov 11, 2015, at 6:38 PM, Ses wrote:

I know, you can’t. But there’s no need to.

Instead, please simply behold the magic that is David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” covered in the style of XKCD’s Up Goer Five – that is, using only the “10 hundred” most common words in the English Language – and know that even if the creators were to try, they could not make me squeal any happier than I did upon finding this. Those of you who’ve been with me from the start of m+m will know exactly why.

“This is the best tradition I ever stole.” I wish I could take credit for the creation and naming of this holiday – but it was my favorite mermaid, Daphodelia, that first mentioned the tradition to me when we were girl detectives back in 2013.

Even then, Pi Day was old news – for anyone outside the States, here we notate the date in a ‘month-day-year’ format, so today, the 14th day of March is 3.14, or, the first three digits of that enigmatic mathematical celebrity that is π or the artist formerly known as Pi. The holiday’s go-to celebrations were always a bit cliche: make/eat pies? YAWN. Every super-evil-mega-corporation hosts those year after year. Could you think of a less-inspired observance? No, no, no, the ‘magical mathematical mystery of life number’ holiday  deserved something special, something uniquely its own.

So when Daphodelia first mentioned her houses tradition of marathoning Pride and Prejudice while eating ALL THE PIE* (*term applied loosely so pizza counts, cheesecake counts, quiche counts), I knew I had to appropriate that, if I couldn’t secure my own invite to that year’s festivities. When I was told the party was a “roomies only” event, I started planting seeds with Char-Char (I may be a cunning super villain, but I am a benevolent cunning super villain).

In fact, in the 4 years we’ve binged on Jane Austin and all things pie together, this post is probably her first hint that our annual manner of observance is not our own original creation. You see, CharChar and I are Austinphiles. I’ve loved Jane Austin since my first reading, at age 9, of Emma‘s opening line “nothing to distress or vex her.” What a turn of phrase, I was smitten with words for life. And Char-Char is an even bigger fan than I am. I’m pretty sure she has memorized every sentence of every book, not exaggerating. We both get lost in the sassy retorts of our female protagonists who operated both within and around a system that treated women as property, as Jane herself did.

Point of fact: This, being 3.14.15 is in fact a sort of ultimate Pi day, as the last two digits of the year advance Pi corectly. So I am wishing each of you today are all reveling in the proto-feminist storytelling of Jane Austin, indulging in whatever sweet or savory pie-esque treats beckon, and will find nothing to distress or vex you until we all find our own Mr Darcy’s and Miss Bennett’s. Accept no substitutions.