Monday, April 26 2010
Filesharing from Carter to Obama
There is a difference between sharing files and sharing music. In the '70s, victory was hearing your favorite song on the radio. And now it was all here, right in front of me. Just a click away.
Tuesday, April 13 2010
Lady Gaga: Fame Over
Lady Gaga is the return of the repressed mainstream, a Frankenstein of Tumblr fantasies and Twitter dreams. Social media’s decentralization and relativism run amok have brought us to a breaking point.
Monday, April 12 2010
Mental Machine Music: The Musical Mind in the Digital Age
How has the digital age changed our "musical brains"? At the quantitative level, what factors in the digital age lead our brains toward different musical choices? On the qualitative level, how have our listening experiences changed?
Friday, April 9 2010
Sons of Anarchy: Rebels and Bad Subjects with a Cause?
Our present 'social grid' -- the stage Sons of Anarchy plays upon – is one that most on the planet have fallen through; life outside of that grid may offer some hope, some new regime.
Monday, March 15 2010
All You Did Was Save My Life: An interview with Our Lady Peace’s Raine Maida
Our Lady Peace's lead singer opens up about the near break-up of his band, the inspiration behind their latest full-length, and how bright the future looks for the Canadian quartet.
Friday, March 5 2010
Autopsy TV
Autopsy entertainment makes painfully clear that no amount of Twitter and Prozac, Friending and Unfriending, Outplacement and Outsourcing, Bail Outs and Stimulus, Surges and Drones, Mii and Wii, Nunchuck and Netois can save us.
Friday, February 19 2010
Small Towns: Life in a Low Tech Web
To live in a small town is to be connected, and not electronically or digitally. Rather, it means to be connected to people in the flesh, to actual places, to land and buildings, to a common past.
Thursday, February 18 2010
Caregiving a Damn: Travels through Hell with Love
Were lawmakers to seek a better understanding of the work of the caregiver, health care reform would reflect an economic model that placed altruistic motivation above financial consideration.
Tuesday, February 16 2010
When Punk Gains Steam
Steampunk's turn toward the past is more than merely aesthetic. Technology is viewed with a turn-of-the-century sense of wonder that opposes our contemporary tendency to take it for granted. And it is now more pervasive in pop culture than some may realize.
Wednesday, February 10 2010
Rags to Riches: The Fangirl Phenomena
Take a quick look at fangirl history and you will realize that fangirls’ devotion has “made” some of the most significant players in pop culture history. Fangirls are one of the primary drivers in popular media and today they are more empowered than ever before.
Monday, February 8 2010
It’s Me, I’m Alive: A Conversation with Yoko Ono
PopMatters sits down with Yoko Ono to discuss her most recent artistic output along with the big ideas of life, death, and the Beatles.
Friday, February 5 2010
Risk and Equilibrium: The Impact of Greil Marcus
The entirety of Marcus' famous 1970 "What is this shit?" review prefigures the sense of profound, disturbed wonder in the best of Marcus’ criticism.
Monday, January 18 2010
Hamburg: Art, with Its Sleeves Rolled Up
You won't spot a castle or a moat or even an oversized ego in this town, as it's the work that counts in this port city. High-quality substance is valued over prima donna celebrity, as we discover from the premiere of Richard Wagner's Siegfried.
Tuesday, January 5 2010
Boring the World to Death
The green movement is boring. Should environmentalism become less empirical and more emotional?
Friday, December 4 2009
Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture
At best, the cassette revival is merely a vacuous fad of no genuine value; but at worst, it's a confused, regressive cultural misstep more dangerous than most would care to admit.
Friday, November 6 2009
Eclipse Series 17: Nikkatsu Noir
These five films from the golden-era of the legendary Nikkatsu studio shows off the never-ending ways Japanese filmmakers were able to combine the best elements of pulp and epic Japanese storytelling.
Friday, October 30 2009
Agonies of an ‘Antichrist’: Lars von Trier in the Forest of Unreason
Despite the efforts of some to dismiss it as a prank, Antichrist is a serious film and its disturbing extremes speak of broad and deeply felt moral, social, and ultimately, political anxieties.
Monday, October 26 2009
Bored New World: How the Zach Braff Prototype Is Slowly Killing American Music
Natalie Portman popped headphones onto Zach Braff's head and said, "This song will change your life." The resulting sound was not only that of carefully composed dullness, but of a million wealthy white kids investing in dull acoustic music to soundtrack their own romantic melodrama.
Friday, October 23 2009
The Long and Short of Long-Form Journalism
Prevailing wisdom is a funny thing, and the sense that people don’t have the time or patience to work through a complicated work of journalism has taken hold among many of the people and institutions that used to win awards for it.
Exit from Nowheresville: My 10 Years with PopMatters
This is my story of how the new media world impacted my life, as a rural Victorian with a big dream. How it changed, and continues to change, my everyday life. How it made me a writer, gave me the confidence to undertake post graduate study, how it gave me the edge I needed to get the job I now utterly love.
