The 100: Deftones, AROUND THE FUR
When I first started buying music, it was on cassette tapes.
Read MoreSong of the Day: Suede, "Animal Nitrate"
Despite my longtime devotion to ‘90s Britpop, I was late to Suede.
Read MoreSong of the Day: They Might Be Giants, "Till My Head Falls Off"
I don’t think they were ever my favorite band (none of their albums are in my top 100 list), but there was definitely a period of my life when I was a very intense apologist for They Might Be Giants.
Read MoreThe Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: None of the Above
I will give the third episode of the Eve Era credit: It’s got a nice cold open. Any time this show kicks off in a place that isn’t Dawson’s bedroom (as it did last week and the week before), it just feels wrong and incongruous. So I was relieved when I pressed play and faded into the familiar confines of the Leery house.
Read MoreSong of the Day: Age of Apocalypse, "Mortal Coil"
Even though the way we find, consume, and think about music has been repeatedly upended, it’s mildly comforting that there are still some constants. Chart breakthroughs are still meaningful. Physical sales still count for something. Little trend pockets can still cross over and influence the mainstream. Lots of stuff about the current music world is a drag, like Kate Nash literally showing her ass so she can pay for a tour. But even I, a deeply depressed cynic, find silver linings on a lot of these clouds.
Read MoreThe 100: Nightmares on Wax, SMOKERS DELIGHT
My relationship to electronic music has always been mercurial. My first real experiences with it likely came during the ‘90s Euro-pop boom on mainstream radio—the big tent voice-based house and techno jams like Real McCoy’s “Another Night,” Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night” and La Bouche’s “Be My Lover,” alongside the rise of Ace of Base. I didn’t like most of that stuff at the time, though I have a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in some of that stuff (I’ll always ride for Gina G’s “Ooh Aah…Just a Little Bit”)
Read MoreTrailer Park: The Pelican Brief
The Movie
The Pelican Brief, released December 17 1993
The Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Homecoming
Last week’s season premiere was uneven and strange, but it’s possible Dawson’s Creek just had a case of the yips thanks to its new showrunner and some complicated emotional cliffhangers. Maybe the ship would stop capsizing in the second episode now that the cobwebs were shaken off a bit?
No, we are still sinking.
Read MoreTrailer Park: The Firm
Movie
The Firm, released June 30 1993
Song of the Day: Lucy Dacus, "Ankles"
Lucy Dacus is in a weird position at the moment.
Read MoreThe 100: David Bowie, LOW
I’m not sure when I heard David Bowie for the first time. I imagine I heard “Space Oddity,” which was one of those songs that was always in the air, floating through radio airspace and embedding itself in the carpet even if you weren’t going out of your way to find it. I also have a clear memory of seeing Tin Machine perform on an old episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Macaulay Culkin. (Like the rest of the universe, I was unimpressed.) I was aware of Bowie and what a towering figure he was, and I had seen him on screen in Labyrinth and The Last Temptation of Christ, but if I’m being perfectly honest the first time I really engaged with David Bowie was when he was interviewed next to Trent Reznor on MTV.
Read MoreThe Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Like a Virgin
I’m not entirely sure when everyone became hyper-aware of the term “showrunner,” but it was well after Dawson’s Creek shuffled off the airwaves. In the late ‘90s, TV was not yet considered an auteur’s medium. People knew that shows had groups of writers all working to one goal, but the idea of a singular voice dictating the direction of a whole series wasn’t an accepted concept.
Read MoreTrailer Park: Disclosure
Movie
Disclosure, released December 9 1994
The Filmography: The Series Finale
For more than five years, my old Entertainment Weekly pal Derek J. Lawrence and I hosted a weekly podcast called The Filmography.
Read MoreSong of the Day: Playboi Carti, "Pop Out"
I have a hard time with Playboi Carti. He seems like he’d be a really rough hang, and the predominant narrative about his output in the past 18 months has been how strangely difficult it has been to hear new music by him. But a big part of me admires just how intensely he has managed to stick to his guns and how much he has bent the mainstream to his deeply chaotic approach.
Read MoreThe Dawson's Creek Episode Guide: Parental Discretion Advised
I missed me too.
Read MoreVideo Store Adventures: 'Bulletproof'
In the summer of 1997, I met a girl. I knew about her long before I met her, as she was the younger sister of a fellow summer theater camp participant who became obsessed with matchmaking the two of us. I had some mild experience with women before that summer, though the concept of "dating" was mostly foreign to me, and my girlfriends in the past had primarily been ladies who didn't hate talking to me on the phone and would let me kiss them. It was an inauspicious career that more or less stayed consistent for the rest of my social life.
But Clara* was different.
Read MoreTrailer Park: Hackers
Movie
Hackers, released September 15 1995
Song of the Day: The 1975, "If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know)"
Chuck Klosterman once half-jokingly wrote about how Radiohead’s Kid A might have predicted 9/11. I don’t think Thom Yorke had any sort of inside info about the comings and goings of international terrorists, but I do acknowledge it’s kind of wild that album feels like what life was in the immediate aftermath of that attack, even though Kid A arrived nearly a full year before the event. Kid A wasn’t a response to 9/11, but it felt like one, and retroactively feels like the soundtrack to life in New York in the aftermath. (The same could also be said of PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea, which also came out in the fall of 2000, is all about urban isolation, and features vocals from Yorke.)
In a similar vein, I sometimes think Matty Healy of the 1975 anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read MoreThe 100: Ramones, TOO TOUGH TO DIE
I’m always making lists, and last year I put together a compendium of my 100 favorite albums of all time. The only hard and fast criterion followed was that at some point in my life I had to have considered each record on the list to be my absolute favorite at that time. My long list was way longer than 100 but I managed to whittle it down to a representative rundown. It’s a living document (I’ve swapped out a handful of titles since the initial drafting), but the bulk of the entries feel pretty permanent. I didn’t bother to rank them (for sorting purposes, it was easier to leave the list in alphabetical order) so I tossed the whole list into a random generator and will endeavor to break down each individual entry in this space.
Let’s begin with the Ramones, whose first four full-length releases (1976’s Ramones, 1977’s Leave Home and Rocket to Russia and 1978’s Road to Ruin) are all bulletproof compendiums of raw punk energy and deceptively sweet songcraft. So why do I gravitate toward a far more uneven release from the Ramones’ tumultuous 1980s?
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