FEATURES
The Vinyl Countdown
Blessed (and weird) are the record store saints, who save God-forsaken disks from ending up in landfill graveyards, finding them venerating homes, instead. Unlike most independent record retailers following today’s standard playbook, replacing compact discs and used vinyl in their bins with virgin 12-inch vinyl re-issues and contemporary pressings, a few shopkeepers still operate shrines to holy relics of the 1950s to 1980s–original 45 rpm singles. No new ones are being pressed, so these halo-like plastic wafers inspire religious fervor and even madness Consider Val Shively, who claims to stock over 4 million records in his overstuffed three-story shop, R&B Records. To a western suburb of Philadelphia trek collectors from the Far East and Europe. They come in search of mid-XXth C...
Song of the Week: Doja Cat Manages to Make a Taco Bell Collaboration Genuinely Great with a Hole Cover
Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, Doja Cat elevates what could have been a forgettable Super Bowl team-up and makes it a must-hear cover. Ahead of Super Bowl Sunday, Doja Cat has *checks notes* teamed up with Taco Bell for a cover of “Celebrity Skin” by Hole. No, it’s not an edition of pop culture Mad Libs — it’s somehow a really great cover, and boasts some reworked lyrics in partnership with Courtney Love herself. The thing is, if anyone knows how to Live Más, it’s Doja Cat. Let’s not forget that her first breakthrough into the zeitgeist was “Moo,” a completely ...
Rap Song of the Week: Pusha T Makes His Triumphant Return with “Diet Coke”
Our new music feature Rap Song of the Week runs down the hip-hop tracks you need to hear every Friday. Check out the full playlist here. This week, Pusha T shares “Diet Coke,” the lead single from his upcoming fourth album. In recent interviews, Pusha T has been talking up his fourth studio LP, reportedly titled It’s Not Dry Yet, as “the album of the motherfucking year.” It’s a pretty standard boast for any upper echelon MC, but he’s added fuel to the fire by describing it as “one thousand percent rap superhero shit.” Whatever that actually means, the drug rap king is back with a vengeance after taking roughly two years off to spend time with his son. Despite running in circles with the likes of Pharrell and Kanye West while having been long considered one of the best rappers alive, King P...
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s BigBug Is a Glitchy Robo-Farce: Review
The Pitch: It’s the year 2050, and advances in artificial intelligence have led to a bright, bubbly utopia where robotic servants and maids see to our every whim, from cleaning our homes to, well, cleaning our pipes. But when one brand of security robots, the Yonyx (François Levantal), decides to take over and wrest control of Earth from humanity’s hands, the domestic robots of one suburban home decide to lock their humans inside their well-manicured domicile — for their own safety, of course. As the hours and days pass, the unwitting hostages of domesticity — including divorced couple Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) and Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and their respective new partners Max (Stéphane de Groodt) and Jennifer (Claire Chust), daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard), Max’s bratty son Leo (Hélie ...
The Best Way to Enjoy The Book of Boba Fett Is to Embrace the Mess
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the season finale of The Book of Boba Fett, “Chapter 7: In The Name of Honor.”] The funny thing about The Book of Boba Fett is that a whole lot of people would have been a lot happier if they’d just done something different with the title. While the series started off as a stand-alone tale of the famed bounty hunter’s (Temuera Morrison) transformation into a new kind of crime boss, as seen with Episode 5 the show took an abrupt turn by bringing back famed Space Daddy Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), with the second half of the season serving as a clear sequel to the end of The Mandalorian Season 2. Now that we’ve reached the end of the season, all that’s left to do is try to sort out what, exactly, happened here. Because nothing feels in ba...
Inventing Anna Review: Shonda Rhimes Reminds Us That She’s the Master of Captivating TV
The Pitch: If there is one constant running through the work of Shonda Rhimes, it’s this: Her instincts for what makes a good story are dead on. Not every show with her name on it is an out-of-the-gate hit like Bridgerton or Grey’s Anatomy — rest in peace, The Catch, a great little show about con artists that deserved more of a chance. But it’s impossible to say that a Shondaland series is ever boring. Speaking of con artists, though… Inventing Anna, the new limited series premiering this Friday on Netflix, represents Rhimes’ first Netflix project that bears her name as not just a producer, but a creator. And you can sense why she chose not to hand this project off to someone else, given how many delicate elements are involved in these nine episodes — primarily, the depiction of its two le...
Sparks Kick Off North American Tour at Walt Disney Concert Hall: Recap + Photos
As Edgar Wright’s exhilarating documentary The Sparks Brothers illustrated so well, Ron and Russell Mael, aka Sparks, are “your favorite band’s favorite band” for good reason. The duo have been making delightfully dramatic, experimental yet accessible art rock for over 50 years. Whether they were prancing on Top of The Pops in the ‘70s or blasting from transistor radios on KROQ 106.7 FM in the ‘80s, they never really “fit in” with what was popular at the time. But last night (February 7th) at Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, illuminated by an array of multi-hued stage lights and backed by a solid five-piece band, they were a splendid fit. The Hall is home to the LA Philharmonic, and its grand aesthetic and layout (inside and out), not to mention its unmatched acoustics, make seeing ...
Where to Watch Every 2022 Oscar Nominated Film
While streaming services have slowly but surely been easing their way into awards conversations over the last several years, 2021 was a real watershed year for watching the most celebrated movies of the year from your home. Now, with the 2022 Oscar nominations officially announced, you might be wondering: Where do I actually watch most of this stuff? A goodly chunk of titles in this year’s Oscars conversation came from streamers — Netflix and Apple TV+, for instance, made tremendous inroads with films like The Power of the Dog and CODA — but even those titles that started out in theaters have moved to streaming faster than ever before. (2021 was, after all, a year where most people saw new-release Warner Bros. movies day and date on HBO Max.) But save for a few big movies that are sti...
Chuck Klosterman Returns in the Nick of Time
“[W]hat I have come to realize is that those four or five years represent the only time when things can seem new. When you’re a teenager, you can’t appreciate innovation intellectually and when you reach 30, you can’t enjoy innovation viscerally. And yet there is a very specific window of time when newness can feel truly authentic, and it’s a really amazing moment in your life.”“…I miss when things were new.” – Chuck Klosterman, “Out of Time,” SPIN In 2004, Chuck Klosterman wrote an essay for SPIN titled “Out of Time,” wherein, as the quote above says, he asserted the following: that our individual conceptions of newness are shaped by our experiences during the ages of 20 to 25; consequently, our reception of the world and of culture is forever mediated through this fixed understanding. It...
ATEEZ Are Just Getting Started
“Did you see the new Spider-Man: No Way Home?” asks Yunho, one of the eight members of ATEEZ. “His famous line is, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ We have more and more fans coming in, and we want to carry that responsibility well.” It’s a thoughtful — and fair — observation. Since the last time they were in America, ATEEZ have exploded. Three years ago, the eight-member group (Hongjoong, Seonghwa, Yunho, Mingi, San, Yeosang, Wooyoung, and Jongho) played a venue in Los Angeles that held 1,500 people; on January 30th of this year, they appeared before a sold-out crowd at The Forum (capacity: 18,000). This change is an easy way to visibly quantify the group’s growth, but feels like too basic of a measure of the show ATEEZ puts on. The January 30th concert at The Forum ran over...
We Need to Talk About Spotify
In late January, Neil Young issued an ultimatum to Spotify in response to The Joe Rogan Experience’s willful platforming of vaccine misinformation—resulting in Young’s catalog’s swift takedown from the streaming service. His critique quickly snowballed, with other notable artists removing their own music in protest of Spotify’s profit off Rogan’s message via an exclusive, $100 million-dollar deal—including Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, and india.arie (who significantly noted Rogan’s “language around race”). Music fans en masse showed their support, opting to #DeleteSpotify and contributing to a company market loss reported between $2.1 billion to $4 billion—meaning an estimated $1 billion plummet in net worth for founder and CEO Daniel Ek due to his stake in the ...
Andy Biersack Can’t Believe the Bengals Are in the Super Bowl
Editor’s note: For the past three years, I’ve asked artists to predict the NFL season for their favorite team. Every year, Andy Biersack of Black Veil Brides has been a participant. If we want to roll back the clock even more, the whole “predict the season for your team” idea came from a conversation I had with Andy in 2017. At the time, both of our respective teams were teetering. We were both cautiously optimistic things would turn around. Only one of our teams (his) has gone to the Super Bowl since. Thus, since Andy has been there since day one, I figured we’d open the floor to him about one of the best stories in recent NFL memory: the Cincinnati Bengals. (Courtesy of Andy Biersack) I still feel like it’s a dream. Like I was two weeks old, a little less than two weeks old, the last tim...
