Pop Culture

Much has been written about the Beatles’ August 1965 visit with Elvis Presley in Los Angeles. What has not been extensively explored is the meeting between the Beatles and Detroit’s hit makers, the Supremes, only nine days before the Beatles met Elvis. Even though half of the group’s members have been dead for decades and

Florence Adooni – A.O.E.I.U. (An Ordinary Exercise in Unity) (Philophon) A.O.E.I.U. (An Ordinary Exercise In Unity) by Florence Adooni At the end of the title track of her debut albumA.O.E.I.U., an ecstatic Florence Adooni rhapsodizes about music. It is many things, she says: the art of time, a metaphor for life, capable of generating cosmic

Tom Wilson was a young, black Harvard graduate who founded a tiny jazz label that issued the visionary debut recordings of Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Donald Byrd, and crucial early works by John Coltrane. He would ultimately move to the Big Apple, join Columbia Records, and produce the milestone early classics of Bob Dylan (“Like

One characteristic of a compelling work of art is its enduring, cross-generational relevance. Call it the “evergreen effect”: regardless of the epoch, strong art maintains a grasp on the core components within each zeitgeist. In John Carpenter’s action-packed sci-fi satire, They Live (1988), these components include consumerism, authoritarianism, and conformity, which are bolstered by a

On 6 July 2017, Kesha released “Praying”, and almost everyone who heard it wept. Having established herself as the trashy party-rock pop diva of the 2010s (quite literally: her first single “TikTok” topped the US Billboard charts the first week of January 2010), Kesha‘s extremely public statements and lawsuits regarding her alleged treatment by producer

OK, the heatwaves are on, and some heavy, otherworldly music is always a good way to try and escape them! For this month, there is a black metal depth worth exploring. From Stygian Ruin’s atmospheric waves, Anfauglir’s epic symphonies, to Vauruvã’s and Hexvessel’s folk obsessions and Necromantic Worship’s romantic traditionalism. On the death metal edge,

Even if all is full of love, as Björk decreed on her 1997 song, it can still be notoriously hard to pin down. In her clear-eyed and sophisticated second book, Love In Exile, the British journalist Shon Faye mines from her own life and the past to interrogate why we’re denied, or we deny, love.

Comprising four highly regarded and innately skilled jazz and improvisational musicians, Tropos are a unique and experimental supergroup. Comprised of Ledah Finck on violin, Yuma Uesaka on clarinet and bass clarinet, Phillip Golub on piano, and Aaron Edgcomb on drums and percussion, this foursome has accomplished a great deal in other iterations. However, as Tropos,

When a young influencer launched an OnlyFans account that indulged in pornification just hours after turning 18, she broke the platform’s revenue record, earning $1 million in a single day. The story about this account sparked brief outrage, then quickly became old news, another data point in a culture that seems numb to provocation. It’s

It’s a sunny afternoon in Sonoma County on Saturday, 7 June, and kind vibes abound at the SOMO Village Event Center on the outskirts of Rohnert Park, 40 miles north of San Francisco. The solar-powered venue is hosting Sonoma Wild, a single-day music festival and community gathering featuring Rising Appalachia as headliners. Led by sisters

Bonnie Blue: James Cotton’s Life in the Blues Bestor Cram Freestyle Digital Media 14 February 2025 A crucial component of examining any given genre is understanding its musical vocabulary: how artists utilize motifs, themes, or instruments to convey the message of a given piece, and how that fits in with a greater community of like-minded

It feels reductive to dismiss Blonde Redhead as simply a shoegaze band. Over their 30-year existence, they’ve worked in Sonic Youth-indebted noise rock, psychedelic pop, French chanson, and dream pop, as well as dreamy, cinematic shoegaze. While shoegaze is often excellent for conveying a sense of romantic detachment or a psychedelic “continual derangement of the

Has there ever been a band that has successfully straddled between the mundane and the exotic with such British panache as Pulp? In the 1990s, they had a songbook of coming-of-age stories with memorable, ribald scenes: the narrator of “Babies” hiding inside a wardrobe to eavesdrop on a friend’s sister having sex. However, these were

Alien Strapping Young Lad Hevy Devy | Century Media 22 March 2005 Devin Townsend and David Cronenberg delve deeply into the complex and often unsettling relationship between body, identity, and transformation. Through their respective arts—Townsend’s dense, aggressive music and Cronenberg’s visceral, psychological cinema—they explore the fraught boundaries of human experience. The phrase “Long live the

Punk music generally prioritizes authenticity over technical proficiency and polished execution. The genre was created by young people disillusioned with the self-congratulatory flower power of the 1960s and bored with the rock excess of the early 1970s. A key element of punk is an openness to raw performance that inherently includes what fans might call

Music for 17 Musicians Jameszoo / Asko|Schönberg Brainfeeder 30 May 2025 In 2019, Dutch composer, producer, and musician Jameszoo (born Mitchel van Dinther) delved deeper into the music of his bright, weird electronic debut album, Fool, by collaborating with Jules Buckley and Metropole Orkest to create an organic and electronic reinvention. That result, Melkweg, was

Looking like the Strokes in their Is This It-era heyday, the young Chicago trio Lifeguard are ready-made for critical adoration and indie record shop “best-of” lists. Every so often, a band like this emerges: one that isn’t really experimental or new at all, but manages to flaunt their impeccable influences in a way that is

Sunwise, the new album by Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul, begins with a drone. It features almost six minutes of that drone, a risky and utterly transfixing move that clears the way for Chaimbeul to march forth and pipe with wild abandon. What emerges is astounding work, Chaimbeul’s approach to the bagpipes as deeply rooted

Matmos have built their decades-long career by making electronic records using constraints and conceptual frameworks. They’ve recorded an album with only sounds made by objects in their apartment. They’ve recorded a record of the sounds of operating room procedures. They’ve recorded an LP by elaborately editing the music of late Polish composer Bogusław Schaeffer. They’ve

Author John Patrick Higgins can’t catch a break. Unless you count the shattered bone that left him hospitalised for months in 2002. That had a lasting effect on the author of Teeth and, like Jeffrey Bernard before him, he is unwell. However, that doesn’t mean he can rest on his near-death bed. First, he had

One of the most radical acts of therapy in the 1990s didn’t happen on a therapist’s couch, but in a cartoon, broadcast on Saturday mornings between commercials for L.A. Gear light-up sneakers and the technicolor sugar-blast of Cap’n Crunch cereal for kids. The show was Life with Louie, and its creator, the late comedian Louie

What started as a result of the COVID lockdowns in 2020 has resulted in one of the more refreshing and welcome examples of ambient music in recent memory. Stretched out across the continental United States, Fuubutsushi was formed by Patrick Shiroishi (Los Angeles), Chris Jusell (Raleigh, North Carolina), Matthew Sage (Colorado’s Front Range), and Chaz

The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy James McMurtry New West 20 June 2025 The brilliant singer-songwriter James McMurtry opens his latest ten-track opus,The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy,with a hard-rocking cover of somebody else’s song: Jon Dee Graham‘s “Laredo (Small Dark Something)”. It’s a classy move. The two Austin musicians are regulars at

After breaking through with their sophomore LP Cartwheel, New York’s Hotline TNT return with Raspberry Moon. Hotline TNT has become part of the shoegaze renaissance that has swept indie rock over the past few years. While Raspberry Moon doubles down on that particular sense of nostalgia, the record transitions to a brighter palette of colors,

Film festivals are quintessentially the fixtures and fittings of a film critic’s life. Whether it’s Berlin, Sundance, Cannes, or the Fantasia Film Festival, among many others, they are what command our attention and govern our sense of time. Then there’s the impact of the human footprint that is slowly eroding the environment’s seasons. If changing

Chris DeVille, Managing Editor at Stereogum, presents his labor of love, Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion.Throughout Such Great Heights, DeVille illustrates how indie musicrose to prominence over the last quarter-century. The term “explosion” perfectly captures the impact, as the sheer number of indie fans and musicians remains impossible

Innocence is a topic often discussed by pop stars. Through the Disney pipeline, child-friendly personalities age with their fan bases and shed perceived naivete. In 2017’s reputation, Taylor Swift proclaimed, “Don’t blame me”, and, in 2025, Miley Cyrus‘ high-fashion endeavors feel like a cover-up for the messiness of the Bangerz era. On the other hand,

When Malcolm Cowley assembled the pieces to include in The Portable Faulkner in 1946 for Viking Press, he felt the burden of introducing to his readers a writer whose reputation with the public was questionable. Although William Faulkner had published 13 novels, at that time, only one was in print. So Cowley was cautious. In

What are the chances you’ve heard of Marie-Paule Belle? From approximately zero in much of the world, they increase if you’re a Francophone, a Francophile, French, Parisian, and/or a devotee of modern chanson. As her Wikipedia page notes, “Marie-Paule Belleest unechanteuseetpianistefrançaise, née le25 janvier 1946àPont-Sainte-Maxence(Oise). Elle est connue pour la chansonLa Parisienne, qu’elle a créée