Lyricist Aaron Weiss of post-punk Christian band mewithoutyou used the F-word in a song and it got banned from radio and the album got pulled from record stores. Meanwhile, his fans ponder his parodying of cultural mores.
The first book from Switched on Pop hosts Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan leans into the podcast's academic tendencies, as it makes the case for music fans to take all music a bit more seriously.
Camille Billops moved beyond predictable and well-tread ground to open up space for new narratives in her films—about Black families, Black women, and Black middle-class life—that pulled on her distinctive and unapologetic worldview.
The last month of the 2010s was defined by an explosion of black metal grimness, modern and retro sprinkled with death metal brutality, caustic hardcore and some historic re-releases.
On John Badham's Dracula. Because the director of Saturday Night Fever is the first person you would think of to direct Dracula, right?
In 2019, the music world saw amazing reissues spanning rock legends to foundational electronic artists, soul and jazz to pop of all stripes.
The best new musical artists of 2019 are all pushing boundaries as popular music becomes less genre focused. New artists are forging new identities, rather than occupying the convenient marketing categories of the past.
Why, despite all the knowledge we've gained and the technology we've harnessed, do we cling to our mythologies?
In a brave new world dominated by platforms such as Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb, and marked by anxiety in the Age of the Anthropocene, McKenzie Wark's Capital Is Dead eschews digital utopianism for a sense of urgency that recognizes things have gotten serious.
The Story of Temple Drake grapples with the unbidden, unsettling force of emergent sexuality.
Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, one of the most technically gifted rock musician of his - or any - generation - passed away from brain cancer on 7 January, leaving behind an incredible legacy.
Critics and audiences have made much fun of Tom Hooper's Cats. The laugh is on them.
Punk's idea(l)s may have been fostered in Art schools, but its musical foundations were cultivated in garages.
After suffering through the pressures and losses of years past and laboring on their album in practical anonymity, the Wrens have hit the ground running.
The Ealing name has been revived in the new century, but film buffs will always regard its incandescent era as that period when it held up a scrappy and schizoid mirror to postwar England's depressions and aspirations.
Prince's 1999 is not so much one of the greatest albums of all time as a curation from an amorphous mass of music that might be one of the greatest achievements in pop.
Joni Mitchell's foray into jazz was not an impulsive change. Rather, jazz has been the constant, undulating beneath industry demands and topical concerns that called for the acoustic guitar or the Appalachian dulcimer.
We think you're going to find much to enjoy and learn from, here. Engage with these books and they will change you. That's why you're here, isn't it?
Some of the best works of fiction here do not offer us a pretty view out of an open window; they drag us to the broken shards of glass scattered outside that window and force us to reflect upon each jagged piece.
Social historian Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, is a graceful and compelling elegy to both Roman Polanski's landmark film, and the end times of old Hollywood.
Todd Phillips has planted a tantalizing trail of clues throughout Joker to upend viewers' most basic assumptions, presenting a film whose contradictory structure can cause as much mayhem as its titular character.
From forward-looking electronic and experimental to new approaches in the ever-evolving R&B scene, from hip-hop and punk to rock and pop, 2019 bestowed an embarrassment of musical riches upon us.
The early Ida Lupino films hold a particular nuance for female characters and the textures of their everyday lives, which has rarely been exhibited in classical Hollywood filmmaking.
Rising R&B songwriter Parisalexa talks about pitching a song on NBC's Songland, how she writes music, and what it takes to get to the top.
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