FEATURES
Raffaella Breaks Down New EP LIVE, RAFF, LOVE (ACT I) Track by Track: Exclusive
In our Track by Track feature, musicians and bands provide insight into each song on their newest project. Our latest edition comes from our August Artist of the Month Raffaella, who tells us the backstories behind her new EP LIVE, RAFF, LOVE (ACT I). Raffaella doesn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve — she wears it like a badge of honor. On her new EP LIVE, RAFF, LOVE (ACT I), our August Artist of the Month pours out her emotions through her sparkling indie-pop. But, as its ironic title might imply, the EP also carries an air of playfulness, with nods to old Lindsay Lohan movies, Joyce Carol Oates novels, and storied New York City bars. Today, the rising indie pop star is giving us a Track by Track breakdown of the EP, out Friday (August 12th). Produced by Raffaella’s real-life part...
5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons
Name Dan Reynolds Best known for I’d like to be best known for being the dad to four really rad kids. I have four wonderful children that I love. I have a nine-year-old girl who has been all around the world with me, right at the beginning of the onslaught of Imagine Dragons, and has been a road warrior in a tour bus. (In the beginning, it was just a van, then the tour bus.) Then I have twin four-year-old girls, and I have a two-year-old little boy who’s about to turn three. I think that’s my number one priority, just to be a good dad. Current city Las Vegas, born and raised third generation, which is pretty rare. Most people are transplants. All my family’s been here for a long time. This city was established by the Mormons and the Mob, and I happen to be on the Mormon s...
Goo Goo Dolls’ Chaos In Bloom
“We had to create our own scene because there wasn’t one in Buffalo at the time that was that welcoming…” Goo Goo Dolls frontman John Rzeznik tells me, of the early days, long before they became a household name. Goo Goo Dolls began as an unpretentious, late-80s punk band who had a hard time fitting in with the hair-metal music scene that was thriving in Buffalo at the time. Their scene was built through raw DIY work ethic: printing posters, calling college radio stations, renting spaces for shows – shows that attracted misfits and outsiders of similar ilk, all searching for a less-judgmental sanctuary. “We played original music…alternative rock, punk rock, whatever you want to call it,” Rzeznik says, from a stop in Salt Lake City, where they will be playing that night. “There weren’t a lo...
‘We Knew We Were Pissed’
San Francisco, 1994 A group of dykes, feminists, queer punks, and onlookers crowded an unassuming martini bar as Lynn Breedlove and a few friends used a chainsaw, blood, and parts of a pig’s body from a Mission District butcher shop to protest sexual assault, police, and art-bro bullshit. “It was gnarly,” Breedlove remembers, noting that there was no warning for the audience. The performance was in direct response to the release of a zine called Answer Me, whose final controversial issue, The Rape Issue,gained popularity with shock-obsessed readers while deeply angering feminists. “We didn’t know what the fuck, but we knew we were pissed.” Little did Breedlove know that this night of performance would birth a queer punk poetry movement that would tour the country, and provide a platform fo...
Cobra Kai Season 5: Everything We Know About the Netflix Show’s Return
Nearly 40 years after Mr. Miyagi famously taught Daniel LaRusso how to paint a fence and wash a car in the original Karate Kid films, the Miyagi-verse has expanded exponentially, beginning with the release of Cobra Kai, a Netflix original series spin-off of the iconic franchise. The series reunites William Zabka and Ralph Macchio in their breakout roles, while introducing a whole new crew of karate kids. Premiering in 2018, Cobra Kai has answered the question: What happens to Daniel after his time with Mr. Miyagi? Since their days with Mr. Miyagi, Daniel LaRusso (Macchio), and his peer, Johnny Lawerence (Zabka) have started their own dojos, mentoring a new gang of fighters. Since its conception, the show has re-sparked love for the original films and become one of Netflix’s most streamed s...
Day Shift Review: Jamie Foxx’s Vampire Hunter Movie Boasts Great Fight Scenes and Formulaic Comedic Beats
The Pitch: Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx) is a San Fernando Valley pool cleaner, but his mundane job is a cover for other, more exciting work. Casing the house next door while skimming a pool, he puts on a ski mask, loads up on weapons, and storms inside. The resident, a frightened old woman, asks “Who are you? What are you doing in my room?” Without answering, Bud blasts away at her with a shotgun. The woman, revealing herself as a vampire and baring her fangs, stands up with a gaping hole in her torso, and begins fighting back. Day Shift is the directorial debut of J.J. Perry, a veteran stuntman who played Scorpion and other masked fighters in 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and choreographed the intense fight scenes in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire. And the scene that opens the vampire hu...
EXCLUSIVE: Director Sadé Clacken Joseph Talks Rap Sh!t and Breaking Barriers
HipHopWired Featured Video Source: press handout / Sadé Clacken Joseph When filmmaker Sadé Clacken Joseph was coming of age in the Bronx as a first-generation American in a Caribbean immigrant household, she never would have guessed that her no-nonsense mother would eventually become her biggest cheerleader. Especially while she makes her way in the world as a creative. And “creative” in her space is more than an overused buzzword in the days of underaged (and too often “overaged”) TikTokers branding themselves as such. So let’s be clear. Joseph is a photographer, cinematographer, editor, director, producer, filmmaker, singer and songwriter. You may have heard her name before now as she was specially chosen by Issa Rae herself to direct the first two episodes of Rae’s new HBO series, Rap S...
Matt Stone and Trey Parker Celebrate 25 Years of South Park with RUSH, Primus, and Ween
A small girl sarcastically sang “JOE BIDEN TOOK OUR JOBS!” into a microphone while South Park co-creator Matt Stone laughed uproariously, Dean and Gene Ween provided backup vocals, Primus’ Les Claypool played bass and Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush sat silently smiling. The plumes of smoke emanating from the 9,545 fans jammed into Red Rocks Amphitheatre were especially thick at this moment on Wednesday night (August 10th). It was the second of two sold-out South Park 25th-anniversary shows, starring Stone and his partner, Trey Parker, as ringleaders of a circus in which Ween performed on stage left, Primus manned stage right and “Blame Canada,” “Uncle Fucka,” “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” and other profane “South Park” classics wafted from the middle. If the satire didn’t always come ...
Football’s Top 5 Most Hostile Atmospheres
There is nothing quite like the feeling of going to a match day; the intensity of the crowd, the pre-game chatter vibrating the eardrums, the crescendo of noise cascading down from row Z as the players enter the pitch. However, there are a handful of stadiums where the atmosphere is so fervid that it becomes intimidating, particularly if you are a travelling fan or player. In this article we will take a comprehensive look at the select few in world football who strike fear into opposition teams, and what it is about their fanbase that makes them so impassioned. 5. La Bombanera – Boca Juniors Home to Argentina’s second-most successful club, La Bombanera is situated in the south east of Buenos Aires, a city widely known for its fiercely passionate fans. Home to some of the country’s greatest...
A Timeline of Ezra Miller’s Legal Troubles
Ezra Miller has been in the news a lot lately, and it hasn’t been about The Flash. The embattled actor has been arrested three times this year alone on charges of disorderly conduct, assault, and felony burglary, and they’ve faced accusations of grooming underage children and running a cult. To quote one person on Twitter, “Every time I see the words ‘Ezra Miller’ I know it’s about to be followed by the strangest combination of crime and location.” Needless to say, it’s a lot to keep track of, which is why we’ve compiled a timeline of Miller’s mounting controversies. June 28th, 2011: Teenage Hijinks Miller’s first brush with the law was hardly as serious as their more recent incidents, but it’s worth noting that their legal troubles didn’t begin in 2022. Back in 2011, while filmi...
10 Post-2000 Indie Albums You Forgot You Kinda Dig
This article originally ran in 2014 and has been updated. For more ’00s nostalgia, check out our Whatever Happened To…? series. In 2001, after years of Korn and Britney tyranny, it suddenly became cool to make guitar music again. If you were in a band, you had your choice of two sounds: garage rock and dance-punk. That may be oversimplifying things a bit, but in the wake of the Strokes, the White Stripes, Interpol, and Franz Ferdinand, an awful lot of groups jumped on one of those bandwagons. A lot of them wore conductor hats, and most were pretty terrible. But some were actually decent, and their CDs — as in compact discs, as in you bought ’em at Best Buy for $9.99 — were the soundtrack to an era everyone seems to have forgotten. It’s time we dig out the following 10 albums and make ‘00s ...
A Decade Later, Swedish House Mafia Has Returned for Its Second Act
In 2012, Swedish House Mafia announced its imminent breakup. In the five years of making music together, the EDM supergroup – consisting of Axwell, Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso – had churned out hits such as “Save the World” and “Don’t You Worry Child” and inspired the sound of the next generation DJs. An accompanying global farewell tour slated for the fall of the same year famously sold out in minutes. The aptly titled One Last Tour wrapped up with a final show in March 2013 at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival, where fans chanted the tour’s mantra “We Came, We Raved, We Loved.” While the DJ juggernauts briefly reunited for performances in 2018 and 2019, Swedish House Mafia has mostly stayed out of the limelight for the past decade. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, however, ...
