Pop Culture

The 1990s were great because they were an entire decade with absolutely no rules. Everything from the music to the films to the fashion was so objectively arbitrary that in retrospect they seem completely absurd. This was a time when music videos still mattered, unflattering clothing was in style, Ben Stiller was given his own

Taking the mickey out of pop culture and music specifically is nothing new for Laibach. The Slovenian group, sometimes called an “art-pop” outfit, have been at it for 40-plus years. During that time, they’ve had their go at everything from Queen to the Beatles, Jesus Christ Superstar to The Sound of Music, “White Christmas” to

An outsider who, through sheer hard work, rose to the top of his industry and became a magical bringer of joy for thousands of children while giving tirelessly for charity and befriending all in high society…Only for the world to learn that his outlandish public image was a mask hiding someone who leveraged connections and

Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom Kim Nguyen National Film Board of Canada 29 April 2026 | Hot Docs Documentaries sometimes do something simple and useful: they make a well-known historical image feel unfamiliar again. Kim Nguyen’s Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom begins with Eddie Adams’ Execution, Saigon, South Vietnam,

For most indie fans, Broken Social Scene are considered indispensablethanks toYou ForgotItin People(2002) and Broken Social Scene (2005), which is good news for the mostly overlooked producer David Newfield, who helmed both efforts. The Toronto collective did take quite a step up from their debut album, even if their initial outing was among the first

Beauty is best served with rage. Artemisia Gentileschi, Clarice Lispector, and Anne Sexton all apotheosized through the sublimation of rage. Why? Their works refuse to be timid reactions against patriarchal society; they violently threw themselves against oppression. Therefore, it endowed their creations with the risk of self-annihilation. You’re unwilling or unable to look away as

How many Japanese women have directed films? Wikipedia’s page on the topic lists 51. How many can you name? From now on, the world’s film buffs should at least be familiar with Kinuyo Tanaka, because all six of her films have been restored and presented inKinuyo Tanaka Directs, the 48th volume in Criterion’s Eclipse series

Industrial music often gets the rap of sounding cold or distant, but not Chicago’s rising Body Shop. The Florida transplants recently released Sex Body, an EP that challenges that stereotype, with a bracing sound that blends danger and wit and a reputation for confrontational live shows. The music drips with danger and sex, but isn’t

Unfortunately, there are so many deserving LPs that are often underrated by critics and overlooked when compiling “Best of” decade lists. For every album by Beck inducted into the “Best of the 1990s” canon, deserving records by the Lemonheads and Belly are tossed aside. Moreover, for every obvious choice by a well-established artist, more subtly

Jolanda Moletta has been described as a “one-woman electronic choir”, creating wordless compositions or “sonic and visual spells”, as described on her Bandcamp, through extended vocal techniques. On her two previous albums, Night Caves (2025) and Nine Spells (2022), she created gorgeous, cavernous worlds with layers of impeccable singing. On her third release, Oceanine, she

Jazz fans know the vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa from her work with saxophonist Joshua Redman on his 2023 album Where Are We, his first for the legendary Blue Note label, as well as his first to feature a singer. On that album and on the road with Redman, Cavassa found fresh ways to approach standards like

In so many ways, Thundercat’s music has always exploded with color. Often, his fingers blaze across the fretboard of his bass guitar, leaving explosions of notes in their wake. Meanwhile, his albums consist of multiple musical genres exploding against one another like popcorn kernels under a pot lid. Starting with his solo debut, 2011’s The

In the excellent song “An Rá,” from Kneecap’s extraordinary new album Fenian, the Belfast rap trio mock the supposed gifts of British imperialism—a sardonic inventory of what the Crown left behind—and the joke lands like a brick through a window. Three lads from West Belfast telling centuries of colonial history to fuck off, and they

The Delivery Line Nance Ackerman Melki 20 April 2026 | (Hot Docs) Gulbadan, a midwife in Afghanistan, bathes one of her small children. She runs an obstetric clinic and assists pregnant women in remote parts of the country. In this scene from The Delivery Line, though, she is simply at home. She slowly eases a

Where are you tonight, Kyle Craft? Sailing the Mississippi River like Mark Twain? Or performing “Visions of Johanna” to any punter who gives him half a chance at the Bob Dylan Center? You tell me. After releasing three studio albums with Sub Pop, nothing has been publicly heard of him since 2019. It is as

Thirty years ago, the airwaves were dominated by a crystalline hook that seemed to suspend time: “I love you always forever, near and far, closer together.” It was the kind of pop lightning that rarely strikes twice, a song that defined an era of ethereal optimism. For the Welsh-born, Upstate New York-based Donna Lewis, that

Music criticism is often caught up in a forward momentum, where an album’s innovation defines its quality. Revivals and the conditions that cause them are equally interesting. With the numerous developments that have taken place in black metal since the end of the 1990s, from the maligned blackgaze to the embraced disso-black, its history can

Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts The Cecil Taylor Unit Elemental Music 24 April 2026 By 1969, New York-born pianist and composer Cecil Taylor was already a major figure in the free jazz world. His energetic, percussive approach to his instrument, combined with complex improvisational technique, led music writer Val Wilmer to refer to

Since their early beginnings as post-punk novices at the dawn of the 1980s, England’s And Also the Trees have steadily evolved in their trade of goth-inspired rock. The band’s earliest incarnation, comprised of two sets of brothers—singer Simon Huw Jones and guitarist Justin Jones, along with drummer Nick Havas, and bassist Graham Havas—proved possibly the

Music’s Mother Superior of Smut, Peaches, is back with a new album for the first time in more than a decade. Titled No Lube So Rude, the Canadian artist has called her latest album’s title a call for a socio-political smoothing rather than a direct reference to the kind of sticky substance that appears on

Miss Grit is the project of New York-based Korean-American Musician Margaret Sohn. After returning from a particularly gruelling tour for their previous album, Follow the Cyborg, they sought to capture the spontaneous joy of creation. However, post-tour anxieties meant that the music became more personal than they could have ever imagined, with Sohn distancing themselves

Armed conflict has long served as inspiration for contemporary popular music in America. Country singer Johnny Horton detailed life as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War in the 1959 song “Johnny Reb”, for example, and Poco dedicated an entire album to the conflict withBlue and Gray,which was released in 1981 on MCA Records. Both

As Is Josiah and the Bonnevilles Rounder 8 May 2026 In 2008, Josiah Leming appeared on American Idol, after which he landed a contract with Warner Bros., resulting in 2010’s pop-inflected Come on Kid. Leaving Warner, he went his own way, embracing a folk sound and releasing Josiah and the Bonnevilles’ debutEP,Cold Blood, in 2016.

The moment is ripe for vibes these days. In jazz, there may never have been more exciting new players of the vibraphone (or vibraharp). It’s the mallet instrument with the beautiful resonating sound, the chill but blues-rich instrument of Lionel Hampton and Milt Jackson. For generations, it seemed like there would be one or, at

Anyone familiar with the work of Ben “Baby” Copperhead will be pleasantly surprised, a little shocked, maybe, at what they heard on Catch a Cold, his fifth studio recording and his first since 2023’s Wailing Viridescence. The psychedelic folk, tinged with the odd pop sensibility and a voracious appetite for unique arrangements and instrumentation that

Croz Boyce is the newest offshoot of the indie rock institution Animal Collective, featuring Avey Tare (Dave Portner) on guitar and Geologist (Brian Weitz) on electronics, as well as David “Croz” Crosby in spirit. When I think of David Crosby, I think of the hushed reverence of his signature song “Guinnevere”, his ragged intensity on

It’s been 40 years since They Might Be Giants released their debut album. While the duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh have made plenty of changes in their working methods and instrumentation over the decades, their core philosophy seems to have remained unaltered. They combine catchy melodies and big hooks with whatever bizarre musical

Soap operas are the most prominent form of dramatic narrative in which actors age in real time. François Truffaut’s sequence of films starring Jean-PierreLéaudas the filmmaker’s alter ego,Antoine Doinel; Richard Linklater’sBoyhood(2014); and Jia Zhangke’sCaught by the Tides(2024) are films in which actors age onscreen in the same role,shot over a couple of decades. In the

Ethel Barrymore: Shy Empress of the Footlights Kathleen Spaltro University of Kentucky Press January 2026 What do we talk about when we talk about the Barrymores, including Ethel Barrymore, discussed here? Are the Barrymores an American performing arts dynasty that exists outside of time? In a culture quick to condemn “nepo babies” for riding the