I haven’t been able to read a book in three weeks. Watching a two-hour movie is an exercise in extreme willpower: Can I watch three scenes in a row before checking my phone for news? Maybe two and a half? During conversations, I find myself trailing off mid-thought, imagining, in great detail, the circumstances of […]
March has been illuminating. We’re learning what we’re made of and what we can and can’t do without. A pandemic is the rare situation that requires governments and citizens to act in concert in order to ensure each other’s well-being. But we live in a bifurcated nation. One half supposes it can live without the […]
I don’t know if you noticed, but something amazing happened this week. Locked at home in a quarantine that shows no sign of ending any time soon, the nation was primed for a silly bit of celebrity gossip to distract us. And yet, when Taylor Swift and Kanye West reignited their now-decade-old feud, the response […]
The Grammy for Best New Artist is something of a curse. It’s keen on capturing artists in a breakout year but not so good at guessing what happens next. For every good call — like the Beatles winning in 1965, or Mariah Carey in 1991, or Adele in 2009 — there’s another that veers left. […]
Twenty years ago this month, *NSYNC released their history-making second album No Strings Attached. On its cover Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Joey Fatone, Chris Kirkpatrick and Lance Bass appeared as five puppets on strings, but at the time, the group was at the peak of its cultural control. They shifted 2.4 million copies of the […]
It’s easy to forget sometimes, after four decades of hits on the country charts and a dozen roles in TV westerns, that there was once a time when Kenny Rogers, who died Friday at age 81, was seen as an unusual prospect around Nashville. The Texas performer came to country the long way, after years […]
So, Donald Glover did … something this weekend … maybe? At around 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, an hour’s worth of new music appeared on a website called “Donald Glover Presents,” using the same font and titling that accompanied the release of the musician and actor’s Adidas sneaker collaboration last spring. The music streamed on […]
Ariana Grande, proud Bernie ho and consistently socially conscious benefactor, has already risen to the occasion of our national crisis and tweeted at her 70 million followers to stay the fuck home. “It is incredibly dangerous and selfish to take this situation lightly,” she wrote over the weekend, likely aghast at the droves of reckless […]
Musicians across the world whose livelihood depends on the touring industry are reeling from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. In the case of genre-blending British artist Yungblud, known for known for the Halsey and Travis Barker collaboration “11 Minutes” along with contributions to the soundtracks for 13 Reasons Why and Fast & Furious: Hobbs […]
Billie Eilish built a blockbuster in a bedroom, so it makes sense she’d record a Bond song on a tour bus. “We recorded the vocals in a bunk in the dark on the bus in a basement in Texas,” she recalls of the creation of “No Time to Die,” her song for the James Bond […]
SXSW is canceled. Coachella is delayed. Live Nation and AEG tours are suspended. Broadway is going dark. Some TV talk shows continue, eerily absent their lively studio audiences. Major sporting events are off until further notice. The brisk pace of the coronavirus outbreak is causing chaos in every sector of the entertainment industry. Curbing infections […]
To prevent the spread of COVID-19, a.k.a. the coronavirus, the majority of event companies and venues have canceled concerts and shows until further notice. Several cities, including New York City, San Francisco, and Dallas, have banned large gatherings in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus, and if you’ve already bought a ticket […]
If you think the coronavirus pandemic’s only affected massive festivals like SXSW and Coachella and big-scale tours like Billie Eilish’s and Cher’s, think again. As more metropolitan areas take necessary steps in an effort to contain the virus’s spread, thousands of smaller acts are having their entire year — and, in many cases, their only […]
A few nights ago, I joined more than 3,000 audience members from all over the world at the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, about a ship’s captain doomed to drift endlessly, disembarking only briefly every seven years to search for his true love. At the time, the corona-infected cruise ship […]
In a week, the ongoing contract dispute between Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion and 1501 Certified Entertainment, the Texas indie record label that signed her in 2018, has rapidly devolved into one of the most lurid rap-label tiffs in recent memory. On Sunday, Megan told fans that 1501 was attempting to block the release of […]
In a certain world, you could sum up the mid-’90s with Stephen Malkmus, crying while drinking a martini, singing Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh. Malkmus’s group, Pavement, is still one of the great examples of what was thought possible with guitars and irony at the dawn of the internet. Decades later, we caught up with the joke, and […]
It’s the year 2020 and the prodigal Dixie Chicks have finally returned, no thanks to George W. Bush and his ilk. Their new Jack Antonoff-produced single and music video, “Gaslighter,” dropped today, ahead of the May release of Gaslighter, the first new Chicks album in 14 years. Naturally, we have a landslide of feelings about […]
Dave Burd is Über-confident. And not like his satirical rapper alter ego Lil Dicky, whose constant garish flexing and bravado are so blatant it borders on the absurd. No, Burd is simply self-assured to an extreme degree. “These guys would be crazy not to green-light this,” the curly ’froed rapper, who turns 32 later this […]
Bad Bunny is cruising down lanes that not too long ago didn’t quite exist. The Puerto Rican singer/rapper has done American late night, Coachella’s main stage, the Super Bowl halftime show, and collaborations with the likes of Drake, Nicki Minaj, and Cardi B without singing in English. Bunny’s 2018 debut X100Pre is a landmark Latin […]
I’ve been playing Bayonetta a bunch this month. …How to even describe it? You’re a gun-wielding witch who awakens from a several-hundred-year slumber stripped of your memories but not your weaponry. You tear through a sepia-toned landscape causing all kinds of psychedelic gore, I guess to restore the balance between light and darkness, or whatever. […]
Taylor Swift has a new music video out which means all other work I had planned to do today is simply off the table as I bust out my internet magnifying glass and prepare to Harriet the Spy the shit out of this thing. The video for “The Man” runs 4 minutes, 14 seconds long […]
The first time I saw King Krule, performing at an event for the now-defunct College Media Journal Music Marathon in New York hosted by the Fader in 2011, he seemed an excited and preternaturally talented teen guitar wiz on the rise. The then–17-year-old singer-songwriter, just weeks out from his first good marks at indie publications […]
Grimes is the archetypal modern internet citizen. She’s heard all the right records. She’s seen all the right films. She has great taste in video games and anime. She reads a lot and studies language and history. She has lofty ideas about where tech is headed. She got serious about wokeness and poptimism early on, […]
Early Monday morning, Bashar Barakah Jackson, better known as the Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke, was shot and killed in Los Angeles following a home invasion. He was 20 years old. At the time of his death, Jackson had been making music for less than 18 months; nevertheless, he’d become perhaps the most unmissable young rap […]
Five years is an eternity. In the fictional Earth of David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, it was enough time for the entire planet to die. Here on Earth Prime, it has been enough time for everything to go kind of awry, for hurricanes, wildfires, diseases, and […]
As much as I enjoyed the first few episodes of High Fidelity, the new Hulu series based on Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel and the 2000 film that followed, I didn’t fully grasp how necessary it was until the fifth episode. In a scene toward the middle of “Uptown,” Rob, the crate-digging record-shop owner played by […]
Justin Bieber is going through changes. Or … he already went through them? Something is changing and it’s certainly not his love for cringey lyrics. After a break to work on his health, Justin Bieber’s fifth studio album, Changes, details the same three moods he’s always had: sentimental, horny, and spiritual. The Biebs contains multitudes. […]
James Bond is Old Hollywood’s last man standing, the rare film franchise from the ’60s that can still do numbers in the 21st century. People will always show up for a meticulous crime thriller, for a hero who never seems to sweat or worry. A character as adept at cheating death as 007 needs a […]
Backlash, as a very abrupt kind of motion, is governed by the laws of Sir Isaac Newton. Action begets reaction in equal measure. The action on Billie Eilish has been intense this year. She swept all the major categories at the Grammys last week on the strength of her debut When We All Fall Asleep […]
Super Bowl halftime performances can be and often are quite bad. In the early years of the show, you were lucky to get a marching band, a college drill team, a few incongruous movie stars, or some other wholesome business. Carol Channing played twice. The youth educational organization Up with People made four appearances between […]