Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
Bruce Springsteen, “Sundown”
The new Bruce album Western Stars is a startlingly majestic album cover in search of some solid tunes, but it’s hard to deny Springsteen’s minimalist ode to the Laurel Canyon sound. I keep waiting for every song to find a second gear, though the only one that really does anything remotely like chugging is “Sundown,” which cashes a lot of checks on a surprisingly light touch on the old-man-at-the-end imagery. Springsteen might be playing himself by releasing a definitive Dad Rock album the weekend of Father’s Day, but maybe he’s just more business savvy than I give him credit for. And he still has a hell of a damn voice.
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Every Monday, I make myself a playlist of (mostly) new songs. It gets me in the habit of hunting for new music and hopefully gets me embracing fresh trends. This is the Monday Mixtape.
Silversun Pickups, “Neon Wound”
In 2005, I attended my first CMJ Music Marathon in New York. The now-defunct event was part festival, part trade show, and part label showcase for a multitude of music labels. (This was before South By Southwest essentially cornered the market on such a thing, including the CMJ idea that you can get people to come out to shows if you put big artists in small venues.) I was in heaven: I was 23 years old and had a media pass that allowed me into any show I wanted. I’ve never watched so many live bands over such a short period of time. Of the nearly 100 acts I saw over the course of that week, the one that sticks out the most is Silversun Pickups. They were on a bill with a band called the Vacation that was supposed to be the next big thing (they became nothing), and I remember thinking, “These guys will be pretty big!” It’s one of the few times I’ve been correct in such a prediction.
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My wife and I have been obsessing over Moonlighting, the hit dramedy from the ‘80s that launched the career of Bruce Willis. With a redesigned office and some deconstruction of Cybil Shepherd’s hair, Moonlighting would absolutely fit into the modern television landscape and would still be mildly ahead of its time today even though it went off the air in 1989.
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The year just began, but I already know people who are ready to fast-forward to December just so they can experience the ninth Star Wars movie. But between now and then, there are a ton of pop culture tentpoles that will make up the bulk of the conversation in 2019. In the first UP ALL AFTERNOON Top 10 of 2019, let’s take a look at the 10 things I’m most looking forward to in the next 12 months.
10. Big Little Lies Season 2
I remember seeing the billboards for the first season of HBO’s adaptation of the hit novel of the same name and thinking, “I will never care about these rich white ladies.” But I did!
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Dawson’s Creek was sometimes referred to (often in derisive terms) as a “teen soap,” and “Full Moon Rising” is certainly an episode that could be submitted as evidence of its soapiness. It features the continued presence of Tamara Jacobs (I had completely forgotten how long she sticks around in her second visit), as well as a deeply twisted escalation of the open marriage plot between Mitch and Gail and the sexual assault of poor Jen Lindley. It’s all pretty soapy.
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I have lost track of the actual number of times I have made my way through Dawson’s Creek, though I estimate this current run is at least the sixth time I’ve made my way through the series in sequence. There are plenty of my favorite episodes I have revisited as one-offs, including the hour that is coming up next in sequence. (Actually, the next dozen or so episodes make up what is probably my favorite run of television in history.) And while I love Dawson’s Creek as a grand monolithic experience, it remains a serialized television show, and with the number of episodes they produced over the course of six seasons, there are bound to be some duds. We have already discussed several of them, and there are plenty more to come. Some of those fail for character reasons. Some of them simply have narratives I hate. But in the case of “Tamara’s Return,” my esteem for it remains diminished specifically because I can never remember anything about it.
It’s not that “Tamara’s Return” is a terrible episode of television.
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Every Monday, Up All Afternoon delivers the Monday Mixtape. It's six tracks to start your music-consuming week off the right way.
Prince, "Acknowledge Me"
Even more than two years later, the death of Prince still looms. Unlike many of the legends we have lost in the past few years, Prince still seemed to be finding career peaks. He was never going to eclipse his God mode run from Dirty Mind through Sign O The Times (which includes Purple Rain, perhaps the best album in the history of pop music), but he was still bench testing the elasticity of increasingly wicked funk grooves and still maintaining an adventurous and mischievous musical spirit. Up until the very moment of his death, the narrative on Prince was that he was an artist who had only recently emerged from an artistic desert and was working steadily—both in the studio and on the road—to reclaim his rightful place in the pantheon.
Some of that narrative is about to be rewritten.
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Every Monday, Up All Afternoon delivers the Monday Mixtape. It's six tracks to start your music-consuming week off the right way.
Nicki Minaj feat. Ariana Grande, "Bed"
Has there ever been a more thorough case of wasted potential than Nicki Minaj? When she first started popping up on mixtapes almost 10 years ago, she was a verbally adroit rapper with neck-snapping skills—there had not been an MC with her combination of technical mastery and chaotic charisma since Eminem first started dropping tracks in the late '90s. Her 2010 debut Pink Friday was a banger, but even then you could tell that she aspired to more than just being a 21st century Lil Kim. Every album thereafter drifted further away from her core skill set, culminating in naked plays at pop supremacy with RedOne-assisted concoctions like "Starships."
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Every Monday, Up All Afternoon delivers the Monday Mixtape. It's six tracks to start your music-consuming week off the right way.
The Hunna, "Dare"
We played a lot of the Hunna's debut album on Alt Nation, though their follow-up does not seem to be gaining the same sort of traction. That's a shame, because the Hunna have smoothed out their sound and built a sturdy monument to mid-'90s Britpop shot through a very 2018 electronic lens. Most modern bands process their guitars all to hell, but the Hunna leave in just enough crunch to remind you that banging on a six-string is a deeply visceral act (and much more physically engaging than, say, twisting a sampler knob). NOTE: Not a cover of Stan Bush's awesomely cheesy song from the animated Transformers movie.
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Every Monday, Up All Afternoon delivers the Monday Mixtape. It's six tracks to start your music-consuming week off the right way.
Drake, "Survival"
Drake's new album Scorpion would be an old-school double-CD should it ever arrive in that format, and it even divides the two sides of Drake that have often been in conflict (both on record and within his audience). The first half focuses on the type of bar-spitting sorta-battle-rap that defined the early part of Drake's mixtape career, while the second steers more into the druggy R&B croon that launched an entire subgenre and made Drake the biggest male pop star on the planet.
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On the way to Disneyland last weekend, I was listening to the Back in the Day Replay on '90s on 9. I love those old countdown shows because they often resurrect songs that certainly had their moments at the time but have otherwise been forgotten by history. Such was the case on Sunday when Partners in Kryme's "Turtle Power" popped up somewhere in the 20s. That was the theme song to the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, which dominated the box office in the spring of 1990 (it was number one for four straight weeks and was the fifth biggest movie of that year). "Turtle Power" is a very silly song that very intricately describes the characters and action of the movie, a phenomenon that used to be pretty commonplace but is now mostly dead.
But some of those songs, despite their novelty status, are great! And so I decided to dig deep in the archives and unearth the top 10 novelty rap songs attached to movies.
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Serialized storytelling has become so normalized on TV that audiences expect even the most casual shows to have some sort of larger narrative arc that stretches across a season (or multiple seasons). That was not necessarily the case when Dawson’s Creek’s second season surfaced in the fall of 1998, though looking back the WB was way ahead of its time in that regard. One of its biggest hits, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was already diving deep into teasing out long-term stories, and the just-premiered Felicity (which initially aired after Buffy) took a soapier path to extended narratives. Though it didn’t seem like Dawson’s was following that thread at the time, the show definitely dipped its toe in serialization—particularly in its first season, but certainly in a few mini-arcs in season two as well.
That all being said, “Alternative Lifestyles” feels like a standalone episode—the kind of “Monster of the Week” entries that The X-Files would slip in between entries in its larger mythos.
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It’s appropriate that I write this only a few days after my own birthday—an annual event with which I have a deeply complicated relationship—on the occasion of Pacey’s case of “the Molly Ringwalds.” (Joey deduces that he is referencing Sixteen Candles, not Pretty in Pink or The Breakfast Club.)
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Every Monday, I pick a handful of tracks that have been floating through my headspace. Most will be new, some will be old, and all will be great. This is the Up All Afternoon Monday Mixtape.
Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, "You Worry Me"
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We just wrapped up an Oscar season where most all of my favorite movies of the year were relatively solid box office performers, but in 2018, my two favorite movies so far were economic clunkers. The first—Paddington 2—is relatively inexplicable, as it's a super charming kid-centric action comedy that works on all levels. But the second, Alex Garland's Annihilation, does make a lot more sense, as it's a complex cross-section of string theory, body horror and mental illness that doesn't necessarily scream a fun night at the pictures.
But Annihilation is a remarkable movie, and I have been casually calling it the best science fiction film of the 21st century so far. But would it really top that list, and what are the other films in consideration for that title? That's the subject of this week's Up All Afternoon Top 10.
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A legendary trilogy closes up shop this week with the release of 50 Shades Freed, a very silly movie about a boring guy who keeps a sex dungeon and his relationship with a woman with whom he has zero chemistry. When those books became a hit and they were subsequently adapted into movies, much was made about the level of perversion that would end up on screen. But the sex scenes in the 50 Shades movies are mostly hilarious, thanks to an overwrought tone and the aforementioned lack of spark between the two leads.
But the sturm und drang over mild butt play doesn't hold a candle to the unintentionally hilarious sex all-stars below. This week's Up All Afternoon Top 10 is devoted to those very scenes. Don't watch them with your parents.
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It's Super Bowl week, and while I have less than zero interest in the upcoming game between the Patriots and the Eagles, I do love me some Super Bowl-adjacent content. So in honor of this Sunday's event, let's take a look at the best performances by football players in film and television. I disqualified any players who played themselves (except for one very important exception), and I should note at the top that Dan Marino might actually be the worst actor in the history of recorded medium (his stuff in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is truly painful, and he's playing Dan Marino!).
Also, a handful of Up All Afternoon listeners wanted Merlin Olsen on this list, but I've never seen Little House on the Prairie and my only association with him is in the confusingly terrible Joe Don Baker cop movie Mitchell. To the list!
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The second season of Dawson’s Creek opens exactly where the first season finale left off, with Dawson and Joey lip-locked in Dawson’s room. Picking up in media res is a brilliant move by the producers, as the conversation that the two of them would have immediately following that moment would have to be incredibly important. For a lot of shows, the kiss would be the logical climax and end point. But for the inhabitants of Dawson’s Creek, the analysis of the act is just as important as the act itself, and skipping forward would have denied devoted viewers an incredibly vital exchange.
The show punts that conversation just a little bit, as both Dawson and Joey are a little dumbstruck by the bold action they took at the end of the finale. Joey says, “You kissed me,” to which Dawson replies, “I know,” which feels like an homage to Leia and Han in The Empire Strikes Back and is a pretty cool piece of business. But as soon as the afterglow fades just a tiny bit, they both start waffling about what happens next.
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Fifteen years ago this week, Zwan released their debut album Mary Star of the Sea. The band, led by then-former Smashing Pumpkins cohorts Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin and fleshed out by a bunch of indie and post-grunge all-stars (Paz Lenchantin from A Perfect Circle, Dave Pajo from Slint, Matt Sweeney from Chavez), maintained the infectious melodies of the best Pumpkins tunes and pushed the production into a much glammier and prog-inflected direction. It felt like the first step of a promising second act for Corgan, but it ended up being the band's only release because Corgan remains an exceptionally difficult person with whom to work.
Zwan's Mary Star of the Sea remains a great album, and it joins the pantheon of great one-album wonders—artists who made one exceptional album and one album only. Here are the 10 best of those.
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Lethal Weapon has not only become a pretty sizable ratings hit for Fox, but it also has entered into the pantheon of great TV shows that were translated from movies. There are plenty of disasters dotting the landscape, but these 10 examples were exceptionally well-executed, and in some cases rank up with the greatest television shows of all time.
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