Clik here to view.
Does ‘Spring Breakers’ Have a Moral?
The opening of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, a slow-motion montage of white teenagers dancing and drinking on a Florida beach set to Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” is an invocation...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Justin Timberlake’s ‘The 20/20 Experience’ Was a Contractual Obligation, And...
A fantastic article by Shirley Halperin in the Hollywood Reporter this week makes the case that the wildly successful new album by Justin Timberlake, The 20/20 Experience, was essentially made to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
There Are No Good Conservative Movies Because There Are No Good Liberal...
Ben Howe, editor of the conservative website RedState, penned a piece for Buzzfeed yesterday lamenting the lack of high-quality movies advocating for conservative politics. His critiques center around...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Miley Cyrus’ Reinvention Into a Chill Stoner Is a Fascinating Delight
This week, Miley Cyrus released a new song—well, okay, actually Snoop Lion released a song and Miley Cyrus sung the hook, but no one cares about Snoop releasing a song anymore. It’s called “Ashtrays...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What Do Musicians Have Against Paying Taxes?
It’s tax season here in the US, and while nobody likes to do their taxes (it’s like taking a frustrating test where answering correctly costs you money), there are those among us who at least...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What’s So Bad About Small-Stakes TV Shows Like Bunheads?
If you want to be taken seriously as a TV series in 2013, you need to be big. Your world must be big, your cast must be big, your themes must be big, and more than anything else, your plots need to be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Don’t Let Cuba Ruin Jay-Z and Obama’s Special Relationship
You can tell a lot about America’s commitment to the arts, someone once said, by the fact that our cultural capital and our political capital are not the same city. While places like New York and Los...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is Phoenix’s Coachella Cover of “Ignition (Remix)” an Elegy for Happy Rock...
French soft-rockers Phoenix played Coachella this weekend, and near the end of their set they brought out, to some surprise, the king of R&B himself, R. Kelly. As the band played “1901,” Kells sang...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Do We Care What Brands Do On Twitter After a Tragedy?
In the initial hours after the horrific bombings in Boston on Monday, Twitter was, as has become customary during major news events, a gusher of news, commentary, rumor, emotion, and (occasionally)...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Twitter Is Getting Us Hooked on Breaking News, Whether It’s True or Not
When the events started unfolding in Boston late last night, a lot of people on the West Coast (as well as light sleepers on the East) were glued to the news. “News” here doesn’t really mean CNN, which...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Revolutionary Incomprehensibility of ‘Game of Thrones’
For someone like me who hasn’t read the George Martin fantasy novels on which HBO’s Game of Thrones is based, the first several episodes of each new season would be better entitled “Game of Pausing in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Do TV Shows Hate Journalists So Much?
God help you if you’re a reporter in a TV show or movie these days. In previous fictional depictions, you might not have always been an earnest seeker of truth, but you were at least an honest,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Peculiar Artistry of ‘What Would Ryan Lochte Do?’
We know this to be true: people on reality TV shows are horrible human beings. We know this because we see their lives on TV, and so we know what they’re like, as people. If we saw them on the street,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is Bravo Secretly Marxist?
On Monday, Bravo aired Lauren Greenfield’s 2011 documentary Queen of Versailles. It’s about Florida real estate developer David Siegel and his considerably younger wife Jackie, who in a fit of housing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How PJ Harvey’s Demos Made Me a Writer
On Wednesday, Spin published an oral history of PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, one of the most powerful albums of the ’90s. But it wasn’t the most important PJ Harvey album to me, at least not when I was a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
3 Reasons the Press Isn’t Talking to Homophobes About Jason Collins
CBS’s Face the Nation dedicated its entire last half-hour this Sunday to a discussion of NBA player Jason Collins’ decision to come out as gay, and as is the custom on the Sunday talkies, they did so...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What’s Behind the Phenomenal Success of Ru Paul’s ‘Drag Race’?
RuPaul’s Drag Race, which aired its season finale on Monday, has in its fifth season attracted more gushing, unguarded praise than most reality shows ever dream of. (It has also attracted some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Substance and Style: What’s the Point of Savages’ Politics?
Silence Yourself, the excellent debut album from the UK post-punk band Savages, came out last week, and if you’re the kind of person who argues about music on the internet, you’ve either seen or fired...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How Daft Punk’s Career Mirrors the History of Rap Sampling
Next week, dance music maestros Daft Punk will release their terribly anticipated new album Random Access Memories [Ed. note. The album has appeared to leak early]. A series of videos preceding the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
‘The Office,’‘How I Met Your Mother,’& Why Ending Sitcoms Can Save Them
What happens when a TV show knows how many episodes it has left? Usually, it’s something great. The great curse of television is that a show has no control over how long it’ll last. Maybe it has a...
View Article
