Styles: The Lemon Cookie Revolution
Others: Glass Candy, Hunx and His Punx, Light Asylum
SSION get called many things — art-punkers, glam-rockers, faggots — all of which are at once accurate descriptors and wholly inadequate. They’re what the Haus of Gaga wishes it could produce, but hey — that’s the difference between “real” and “manufactured” weirdness, right? Well, maybe.
More about: SSION
Links: SSION
Hip-Hop’s Odd Future
Welcome to “The What.” The ongoing goal of this column is to think through the ways in which hip-hop “functions” in our present milieu: as a genre, discourse, and touchstone for examinations of our life + times, from taste and representation to race and class. In this way, “The What” seeks to document the aesthetics and teleology of hip-hop as it presently reveals itself. Such dialogues may be about how hip-hop got here and where it is going, but it also might tell us how we got here and where we are going.
Styles: action, comic book, superhero, science fiction
Others: X-Men: First Class, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Inglourious Basterds
Although not at all obvious from his name, Captain America is propaganda. Superman, in spite of his immigrant status, may have stood for the American way and even personally apprehended both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in a 1940 mini-comic entitled “What If Superman Ended the War?” but Steve Rogers, alias Captain America, was born and bred by creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for the sole purpose of fighting Nazis for his country (to be fair to comics history, both the Man of Steel and Cap entered the war before the United States did).
Styles: drama, American football
Others: Cold Weather, Friday Night Lights
It’s a little league cliché that winning isn’t everything, son, it’s all about how you play the game. But nobody takes that advice in sports dramas, where high-stakes motivations are so ubiquitous that “plot” is mostly interchangeable with “path to victory.” A loved one’s life or the family honor depends on it. Rocky needs to prove he’s not a bum.
Styles: pop, R&B, VH1 Diva-type shit
Others: Diana, Whitney, Mariah
If you’ve been patiently anticipating the release of Beyoncé’s newest album, 4, then you’ve no doubt come across a fair amount of grousing, grumbling, and complaints. When she wasn’t busy re-appropriating Major Lazer, she was ripping off Italian choreographers at the Billboard Music Awards and charting lower than Destiny’s Child alumna Kelly Rowland.
More about: Beyoncé
Styles: jazzy grooves, lounge crooner, philly soul, rock ‘n’ roll
Others: Barry Adamson, Serge Gainsbourg, Gary Wilson
Dave Graney’s schtick weighs a ton. Or so he’d have us believe, and there’s nothing here to make us doubt it. Graney (along with his schtick, and longtime partner and collaborator Clare Moore) occupies an interesting place in territory that he shares with the circle of Australians and other misfits that coalesced around an expatriate Nick Cave, taking in musicians from Rowland S. Howard and Einstürzende Neubauten to The Go-Betweens, The Scientists, Laughing Clowns, and Crime and the City Solution.
More about: Dave Graney
Links: Dave Graney - Liberation
Styles: rap, pop, emo
Others: “I Need a Doctor”
It’s an hour or so after nightfall in Detroit, Michigan, and local god Marshall “Eminem” Mathers is speeding around town in a Mercedes with his old friend, enemy, and decidedly less wealthy rapper, Royce da 5’9”. Royce is leaning out of the passenger side window, stunting at girls like the titular scrub in that old TLC hit, trying to convince them he’s got money even though he’s gotta cruise in his buddy’s whip. Between drive-by come-ons, he leans back into the plush leather seat, fantasizing lazily about murdering cops.
More about: Bad Meets Evil (Eminem and Royce da 5'9")
Links: Bad Meets Evil (Eminem and Royce da 5'9") - Shady/Interscope
Styles: drama
Others: Badlands; Days of Heaven; The Thin Red Line
With his latest work, director Terrence Malick has gotten as close as he probably ever will to just blatantly laying out in no uncertain terms his fundamental and abidingly humanistic teleological argument about the nature of the cosmos and humankind’s place in it. Which is to say, it’s still going to be regarded as obtuse by many and downright boring by many others. The narrative of The Tree of Life is by no means groundbreaking, nor is it supposed to be.
Styles: chamber pop, electronica, indie pop
Others: Morrissey, Owen Pallett, Wild Beasts
It is by now a truism that the work of a happy, newly partnered musician, emerging from a period of angst and personal darkness, will take a nosedive. And I’m not here to do the typical reviewer’s trick of opening with a standard expectation only to demonstrate how it’s been confounded.
More about: Patrick Wolf
Links: Patrick Wolf - Mercury
Styles: drone
Others: Ellen Fullman, Phill Niblock, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros
Born between wars, Eliane Radigue’s musical journey began in the Paris studios of musique concrète OGs Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry during the 1950s and 60s, experimenting with magnetic tapes, honing her craft in sound construction. But it wasn’t until the 1970s when Eliane moved to New York City — because as she said, “There were no synthesizers in Paris”— that many of her recorded works and beloved pieces were formulated.
More about: Eliane Radigue
Links: Important
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