Music

Could Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?

They had me sign my rights away for $1,” Ms. Crane told me. She never did get that dollar.

Meanwhile, in most areas of the United States, women still need permission from a doctor to buy birth control pills, even though they are arguably safer than a lot of other drugs now sold over the counter and there are very few health risks involved. It’s true… See more →

“Dude, you have orange earplugs! I hate orange. I like green!” says the smiling guy at this show with a novel approach to making friends.

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There’s nothing wrong with walled gardens. They’re safe spaces. They take care of your enjoyment and entertainment, so you don’t have to.

But there also a bit boring. I certainly don’t relish the idea of spending my days within the boundaries of someone else’s vision.

There’s a different kind of garden. It takes its name from another short story by Borges.

The Garden of Forking Paths. It is uncontrolled. It is full of possibilities. It’s… See more →

A Gunfight in Guatemala

Crazy story: Sebastian Rotella. Art direction: David Sleight. Animation: Christopher Park.

Police Building Apartments

Lately my favorite part of my commute is passing this building.

Here’s The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read To Her Attacker

Having too much to drink was an amateur mistake that I admit to, but it is not criminal. Everyone in this room has had a night where they have regretted drinking too much, or knows someone… See more →

A Final Visit With Prince: Rolling Stone’s Lost Cover Story

“All of us need to be able to reach out and just fix stuff. There's nothing that's unforgivable.”

The Contributions of Others: A Session with Jeremy Keith

“I’ve found that on the web, it’s best to assume nothing. That might sound like a scary prospect, but it’s actually quite liberating. Giving up on “pixel-perfect” control doesn’t mean giving up on quality. Quite the opposite: it… See more →

Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?

“People are expecting more of body cameras than the technology will deliver,” Professor Stoughton said. “They expect it to be a broad solution for the problem of police-community relations, when in fact it’s just a tool, and like any tool, there’s a limited value to what it can do.”

Inside Operation Trump, the Most Unorthodox Campaign in Political History

Politics require some amount of cynicism and hubris. Trump… See more →

Anonymous BrooklynVegan Comments, Rest in Peace

Glad to see BrooklynVegan taking on its cesspool of a comment section. Rolling my eyes at the inevitable naysayers.

Lupita Nyong’o and Trevor Noah, and Their Meaningful Roles

My mom was like: “Jesus didn’t have his dad, either. You have a stepdad.” People always make it seem like there’s one experience that’s the gold standard to aim for. I didn’t grow up that way.

One of the best things… See more →

The Website Obesity Crisis

Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.

The 2015 ProPublica Year in Visual Storytelling

A nice roundup of ProPublica’s more visually and interactively rich stories from the past year.

Animated homage to The Wire

When I hear Blind Boys of Alabama’s cover of “Way Down in… See more →

It’s been a shitty week, but luckily @lowtheband came to town tonight to wash off the muck.

Violator: Chemical Assault

It wasn’t until my ears perked up for “Ordered to Thrash” (an instrumental) that I realized that Violator’s weak link is the vocals. Otherwise, this is a pretty fun time warp.

Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

I never expected to get so much enjoyment from something that reminds me of Sheryl Crow.

Life Sex & Death: The Silent Majority

I haven’t heard or thought much… See more →

As Mondays go, it turns out that the one where you get to see a free, surprise Stevie Wonder show is a winner.

Color me impressed that @ChamberMonster managed to keep a secret for 2+ months, and tonight we’re seeing Stephin Merritt!

Yuck: Glow and Behold

Well, at least we’ll always have that first album.

Def Leppard: Viva! Hysteria

Joe Elliott can’t hit the high notes quite as forcefully as he used to, but otherwise, Def Leppard sounds pretty fantastic here. It’s impressive to hear an album as quintessentially overproduced as Hysteria pulled off live this faithfully, and 25 years later at that. (Of course, the band has had plenty of recent practice aping its younger self… See more →

After politely listening to one of my diatribes on the untapped potential of music metadata, Jeremy Keith introduced me to the work of Chloe Weil in the fall of 2012, specifically Sound of Summer, which dynamically collates the songs that soundtracked her summers dating back to 2001. I was fascinated by the project, but didn’t get around to actually meeting her until Jeremy introduced us in person a year later at Brooklyn Beta, and we… See more →

US Air Guitar first came to Philadelphia in 2008. It was my first air guitar competition and I approached it with the expectation that it would also be my last – it didn’t occur to me that this was something anyone did more than once. I was disabused of that notion by the many wonderful weirdos I met in the green room before the show, some of whom had been traveling up and down the… See more →

Fuck, you guys. White Lung.

Spent the evening catching up with @mrclean, @magnetbox, and @ems, followed by some rock and/or roll from those Dead Milkmen. Summertime!

After having their records in steady rotation for several months, tonight I heard Whores the right way. Best live band I’ve seen in ages.

Last night’s Nothing show was way more of a punk thing than I expected; it isn’t the dominant vibe I get from the record. Not a bad thing.

The plush, brightly lit green room at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles is clean, colorful, and carpeted, with two large couches, a bathroom with a shower, and an abundance of mirrors. It is probably the most spacious and comfortable backstage area of any we’ve encountered, but it’s still inadequate. Between organizers, performers, friends, and photographers, the room is at more than twice its capacity, topped off with a showgirl’s ransom… See more →

When it comes to aging, there is nothing I am more wary of than nostalgia. There’s a fine line between basking in fond memories and believing your best days are behind you, and getting older presents ever more opportunity to cross it. For many people, and certainly for myself, nostalgia’s gauzy glow is most acute in music. After all, it’s the soundtrack to our lives, and for whatever reason, most of us tend to engage… See more →

Baroness: “Back Where I Belong”

The transition between “Back Where I Belong” and “Sea Lungs” sounds kind of like a dystopian sci-fi re-imagining of Van Halen’s “1984.”

Michael Jackson: Bad (25th Anniversary)

I hope this means we can look forward to a 25th anniversary edition of Weird Al Yankovic’s Even Worse next year.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!

Maybe because Yanqui U.X.O. didn’t really do it for me, I never really pined for… See more →

Swans and Chelsea Wolfe made my two favorite records from last year, and now I’m heading out to see them play a show together.

First time I’ve been frisked at a music venue in NYC. Makes me kinda homesick for Philly.

You know, I bet female musicians just love it when their male fans shout marriage proposals at them onstage.

To intellectually understand what Colin Stetson does, or to see or hear a recording, won’t prepare you for his incredible live performance.

Just got tickets for pretty much the best possible seats to see @lowtheband at @NyseC in March.

Oh, just seeing my favorite band (@lowtheband) with my favorite person (@ChamberMonster). No big deal.

Great room. Great sound. Great set list. Great band. My eighth @lowtheband show in eleven years was the best one yet.

Another excellent @wussymusic show last night. So nice to see great music performed with such honest joy.

During a recent discussion about karaoke, I confessed that one of my favorite songs to sing when it’s available (which is more often than you’d think) is “Too Drunk to Fuck” by the San Francisco Bay Area punk legends Dead Kennedys. Virtually no one is expecting to hear it, and it elicits precisely the sort of slack-jawed amusement and/or horror I like to see in a karaoke audience.

My friend Tyler, who was a Bay… See more →

I recently saw the band Swans live for the second time. They were promoting a stellar new album (The Seer) which essentially encompasses all of the varied and challenging music that bandleader Michael Gira has made under a few different monikers over the last thirty years. In the two years since I saw them last, I had gotten to know their oeuvre better, and coming to this show with a more educated ear paid off.… See more →

With all manner of unnecessary vitriol flying to and fro, social media can be a nasty thing during an election year like this one, but the most unfortunate thing I’ve seen in my social graph lately had little to do with politics. It had to do with punk rock, and a friend’s expressed preference for The Misfits’ post-Danzig era; that is, the seminal horror punk band’s mercenary reformation without its creative mastermind, Glenn Danzig, more… See more →

I recently saw the band Swans live for the second time. They were promoting a stellar new album (The Seer) which essentially encompasses all of the varied and challenging music that bandleader Michael Gira has made under a few different monikers over the last thirty years. In the two years since I saw them last, I had gotten to know their oeuvre better, and coming to this show with a more educated ear paid off.… See more →

For a 6:30 p.m. show with five bands on the bill and no food for sale, you might want to reconsider your “NO RE-ENTRY” policy.

Thrill Jockey anniversary show last night was the most eclectic I’ve seen in ages. I loved Future Islands fans being made to endure Liturgy.

While I’m still probably not going to be a fan, holy crap does that Future Islands singer guy own the stage.

I didn’t mention it in my recent analysis of my first year using Rdio, but one of the many reasons I’m reluctant to make a subscription service my exclusive musical gateway is the ephemerality of online content and services. For that same reason, my writing that has appeared recently in a few other places online has been reposted on this site, and I’ve decided to do the same with the various artist, album, and song… See more →

Dear Frances Bean Cobain,

First of all, it was lovely having lunch with you, even if you did get a bit confrontational at the end there. I’m glad I woke up before I could rebut, because a cooler head has shown me that your assessment of my taste in music, if incomplete, was remarkably astute. Dark themes, deceptively simple songwriting, played loosely but with discipline. You kind of nailed it. And even if you didn’t,… See more →

I have long been skeptical of music subscription services like Spotify and Rdio. What serious music fan would pay a monthly fee to have a remote, fallible gatekeeper between himself and a woefully incomplete music catalog? To forsake my personal collection in favor of that system would be like dumping a lifetime’s worth of home equity to move into a rental apartment in a gated community. That’s what people do when they’re getting ready to… See more →

Last month, I expressed some concerns about remix culture and the questionable value of much of its output. Shortly thereafter, as if in response, the juggernaut of skewed pop music known as Beck revealed that his next album, Song Reader, will be released exclusively as sheet music.

The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart… See more →

Tonight, my glasses spent about twenty seconds on the floor of a crowded and rowdy Bowery Ballroom. Then they were returned to me, unharmed.