Have never felt a more profound generation gap than in listening to people in their very early 20s describe 2016 as a pinnacle of good vibes, utopian energy, and positivity - like, 2016?????? THAT year??
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Matthew Perpetua
@perpetua
Writer of Fluxblog for 20+ years - sharing things I know and love with those of my kind linktr.ee/fluxblog
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I love signs like this at small businesses that imply some complicated behind the scenes drama or power struggle and appeal to a core clientele who may be genuinely hype that Mark's back
I have close to zero respect for the charts as an accurate measure of popularity and success given all the ways things can be gamed, but I do think "actually this isn't legit because fans PAID FOR THE SINGLE" to be a bizarro world argument
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This cover of Spin from 2003 is so funny to me in so many ways
There is a huge difference between arenas and stadiums - an arena show is typically around 17K people and a stadium show is typically around 60-80K people, so when you're carelessly conflating the things, it's basically like insisting my two bedroom apartment is a two story house
These were the shows at Madison Square Garden in 1987 - if you could see two (2) of them, which would you choose?
I'm begging people to get a new angle on this guy - maybe get into why hyper-stylized live action is so viscerally upsetting to you? maybe try to engage with how he essentially works as a cartoonist but in live action film?
It is kinda hilarious that a rock move as old and banal as theatrically smashing a guitar can inspire this sort of scoldy pearl-clutching from very young people in the year 2021
I should never underestimate this guy
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the 4 Billy Joel song categories
"You Think You're Better Than Me??"
"Look At This Asshole/These Assholes"
"Things Used To Be Better"
"Here's Some Advice, Moron"
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I think my main feeling from response to this is basically that I'm glad some people were having a great time and also I believe young people will find a way to have a good time regardless of the greater context almost always and that is beautiful
A 32-year-old James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem in Vice late 2002
I just heard an argument that we don't have a "song of the summer" this year because BTS is too popular and their songs sell too many copies and "Butter" has been #1 for over two months and this somehow means no one listens to that song and it's not part of anyone's life
Garbage reviewing late 90s hits in Spin January 1999 and being pretty correct about things
The only feelings allowed in popular music now:
• I am (or want to be) rich
• I am stoned
• I am chill but sad
• I am horny but sad
• I hate my ex
• performatively woke
• I am anxious too and it's ok
• if I don't make you horny you should die
• I am a cowboy
"We Didn't Start the Fire" is the ultimate Boomer song - history didn't exist before them and nothing is their fault
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my confusion was not so much that people were having a great time, people are always having a great time tbh, but the assertion that 2016 had anything like POSITIVE VIBES... that's the part I really don't get esp when the great music people cite from 2016 is pretty dark vibes
I yearn for impossible data, like "what were the songs most frequently burned to CD-R in 1998-2004" and "what random album tracks were so widely put on mixtapes circa early to mid 90s that they would be considered viral today"
Let's play the concert budget game, but you're booking a show you get to see after the quarantine ends - with a budget of $100, who is on your bill?
RIP Vaughan Oliver, one of the greatest album cover designers ever
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pop chart people will do ANYTHING to deny that people paying to show up to see a performer is a meaningful measure of real popularity - it's how they've been supporting the "actually no one likes rock music anymore" fallacy for a long time
What does it mean that two of the most iconic villains of 2010s pop culture exemplify the rarely explored archetype of the DARK NEPHEW?
A 61-year-old Jack Nicholson going absolutely hog wild at the club Chaos in Miami, Rolling Stone August 1998
Vibing out on the tweets of people taking pictures of people in Prospect Park and other public places and scolding them for not "social distancing" but it's like, OK asshole why are YOU there?
I think Midnights is a pretty decent record but if you told me that they made it three or four years ago and then shelved it until now I would 100% believe it
see the problem here is seeing this as a failure in streaming tv and not what it really was - a successful scam to make Frank Quitely, one of the best comics artists of all time, wealthy
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Netflix spent $200 Mil on this show then immediately cancelled it 1 month after release
Will be introducing "did you know that Todd Field, the writer/director of Tár, is also the co-creator of Big League Chew, the gum that's like chewing tobacco" into every conversation I have through the end of the year at least
The main baddie in the Hawkeye show looks like he's dressed up as Paul F Tompkins for Halloween
What are your favorite opening lines in songs? Ideally, something that just immediately sets up an interesting idea/scenario/feeling, but you do you.
People never really got to choose which David Bowie they got the honor of being photographed with
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what Bridgers should have done at the end of playing her song on live tv is stop everything cold and announce she would be donating her guitar to charity and rattle off all the socials and hashtags
New playlist BLACK BEATLES: R&B COVERS 1963-1972, a selection of major Black artists of the period interpreting the music of the Fab Four
Spotify: open.spotify.com/playlist/171uK
Apple: music.apple.com/us/playlist/bl
here's a preview of the first half...
The Cure selling t-shirts at Madison Square Garden for $25... Robert Smith is really making it happen, a saint
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waving hello to the BTS fans - we talk about the BTS/McDonald's thing a good amount in the new episode of my show! it's fun
Here's some young girls playing the White Stripes' "Fell In Love With A Girl" on the street in Park Slope
0:29
interesting to use an image of yourself looking bored, ambivalent, or full-on dissociating to advertise your solo tour
I wrote about being laid off from my role as Director of Quizzes at BuzzFeed after working there for six and a half years. fluxblog.org/2019/01/how-la
It's pretty interesting to live in a moment where nearly all the platforms and technology that have driven the culture of the past 15-20 years is collapsing or declining, but it's unclear what's going to replace it or how long we will live in this phase
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yeah but a LOT of this particular argument is that "well, BTS isn't on radio enough" and it's like... we KNOW why this is, it's very much a racist thing and radio is also massively corrupt and is a laughable metric to begin with, but yet this song thrives
New playlist THIS WAS INDIE SLEAZE 2002-2008, a tighter and far more historically accurate version of someone else's idea
Spotify: open.spotify.com/playlist/5W7FB
Apple: music.apple.com/us/playlist/th
Two cultural things from this past week that would've been a much bigger deal some years ago:
• Thom Yorke/Jonny Greenwood ending a new song with two minutes of grunge guitar catharsis
• Jennifer Lawrence in a movie where she beats up a gang of teenagers while entirely nude
When yr 4th album is undeniably great but too many normies are into you to get that BNM
Few things I've encountered in old magazines have hit me in that Proust madeleine way quite like this Mac iBook ad from Rolling Stone September 1999
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my other major takeaway from this is that apparently the people behind Pokemon Go need to get a new game out ASAP to give a lot of people a desperately needed boost of joy
"Baby Gronk got rizzed up by Livvy and now he's the new Drip King" would sound AMAZING sung by Bob Dylan, he'd make a meal out of every syllable of that, I hear it so clearly in my mind
Cigarettes After Sex are a slowcore/dream pop band on an indie label and they have crazy high streaming numbers - it feels like a lot of people don't notice they're this big? their top song is no one's idea of commercial but it's closing in on a billion streams on Spotify
I love that Disney, a company famously obsessed with protecting its IP, is like "oh no, nothing we can do about this"
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There's Not Much Marvel Can Do About Cops Using Punisher's Logo
buff.ly/2MEA3ox
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honestly would love to see a working class version of Succession about the power struggle to run a south Brooklyn gas station
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it's just... I don't know how you can one hand be like "this is a massively popular act, almost no one has this level of fan engagement" and on the other hand be like "but no one listens to this music, right?"
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and folks I know you all love Bowie and he's gone now but this is the Glass Spider tour and maybe you should wish to see someone at their peak?
out of all the artist couples that exist I am most curious how Joanna Newsom and Andy Samberg have directly influenced each other's work, like specific examples
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I feel like it says so many good things about Harry Styles fans that the response to all this is kind vibe "Harry is just that good, he can give us what we want before we know it" messages and not a swarm of people screaming at me that I'm an idiot for not having known
My main ipod is 160GB & it's full of music NOT on streaming. This argument is for people who don't care about music. nymag.com/selectall/2017
Was kinda shocked by how many people in my area left The Cure show last night before the 2nd encore - like, did they not know that's the hit parade? I can't fathom going to a Cure show and skipping this part, but my row and the one behind me were nearly cleared out before Lullaby
If yr gonna publish a Jack Antonoff hit piece in July 2023 and never mention "A&W," the best and most artistically ambitious thing he's ever worked on, then you simply don't have credibility as a critic - yr conveniently leaving something huge out to make a point from 3 years ago
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very few people calling attention to "throwing trash at rock stars" and no one at all questioning why Justin Timberlake is apparently their example of a rock star
I just want Keanu Reeves to play Adam Driver's dad in a movie, or at least his older brother. I've never seen a John Wick movie but if Adam Driver was John Wick's psycho brother, I'd buy a ticket.
Maybe more rock bands would be successful today if they did songs more like 1D's monumental loving tributes to the awesomeness of girls
This is what Daft Punk looked like in 1997 before the horrible accident that left them mostly bionic for the rest of their lives... de si beaux garçons
Liam Gallagher has been wrong about a lot of things but I think he was right that "sunshine" should be pronounced "sun-sheeee-ine"
A little reminder of how American publications treated Radiohead prior to OK Computer - here's Chuck Eddy's review of The Bends in Spin May 1995 which is wrong-headed and incredibly lazy
I've been thinking about this Heathcliff comic for hours now and I just can't figure it out gocomics.com/heathcliff/201
How can we convince guys like Harry Styles and Timothée Chalamet to level up and start carrying lambs
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I do realize that making the cartoonist connection depends on having a knowledge of the history of more than one medium, but if that's so hard maybe Writing About The Arts is not your lane
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I get where Tom is coming from but tbh when I see how people write about K-Pop now it looks exactly like the cringe way people wrote about rap in the 80s magazines I have
It increasingly seems like everyone involved in Don't Worry Darling is making decisions based entirely on how cool it would be to hear talk about them on a future You Must Remember This
A fun thing I learned from Dan Charnas' J Dilla book is that the clap in the original Linn drum machine that Prince used extensively in the 80s was a recording of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers clapping backstage as a favor to Linn who was struggling with getting a good clap sound
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this song really needs to be a huge crossover hit
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I think very few American songwriters have embodied the character of the place they're from as accurately and unromantically as Billy Joel embodies the character of Long Island
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I think a lot of what people hate is that his style is very The New Yorker but without getting the cartoonist aspect the connection to that elite vibe is poorly articulated, just throwing darts wildly at a vague target like this essay
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It's been 7 hours and 15 days since U took your love away
Ryan Seacrest has at this point replaced Regis Philbin, Casey Kasem, Dick Clark, and Pat Sajak - every remaining old 20th century holdover TV/radio personality must now reasonably assume that they, too, will eventually be replaced by this guy
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one thing to note here is that Luther Vandross did 4 sold out MSG shows in 87, second only to the Dead! Luthermania in NYC
Keke Palmer is such a natural host, she has the sort of charisma/energy that makes really stiff host copy sound actually fun and genuine
Beck getting the album of the year Grammy nearly 20 years after Odelay and Midnite Vultures is like when Scorsese got his Oscar for Departed
this Fantastic Four reboot sucks
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Our astronauts have completed training and are a go for launch. #NSFirstHumanFlight
Mos Def loves Steely Dan, ice cream, black musk oil, and the word "paradigm"
I'm making a directory of independent music media in 2020 - please suggest blogs, podcasts, magazines, zines, Instagrams, YouTube channels, playlist makers, anything that is coming from a critical/journalistic/curatorial POV (but not fandom/standom, that's different)
I really like how The Bear doubles down on using Wilco, R.E.M., and Counting Crows on their soundtrack over and over - it's an odd move to repeat like that but it makes the show more specific and distinctive
I've seen The White Stripes at least six times, I've seen Jack White with a few different ace ultra pro drummers, and while the latter was great, they just never went as hard as he went with Meg, made everything more feral
What is a music-related shirt that you once owned but no longer have but wish you could have back? this is one for me
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it is hard for me to understand because I grew up with the past constantly present and always presented as superior to the present
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I feel like every day we get a new reminder that the NYT is not in fact on the side of good and it's kinda weird that so many of us ever assumed they were
New playlist called WELCOME TO THE '90s covering the short-lived sleek post-house pop aesthetic of 1989-1992 - – not quite '80s in style but not the eventual sound of the '90s either. Here's a preview of the track listing... open.spotify.com/playlist/0ARRD
I just want Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty to write and record their contemporary equivalent to Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers' "Islands in the Stream"
Congrats to Jai Paul, who is super high up on the Coachella bill despite releasing almost no finished music in the past 12 years - I assume a real record must be coming? otherwise he's basically booked this high on the strength of two songs from the very early 10s
Isn't it crazy how Murmur is one of the most astonishingly unique and lovely records ever made and R.E.M. made at least a handful of records that are even BETTER, and yet so many of you people constantly underrate or outright denigrate them? So crazy.
Look it's the two guys who statistically wrote 85% of all of the best indie rock songs
