Last week, Bruce Springsteen dropped the long-awaited Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a sorta sequel to the box set Tracks that came out in 1998. While the original Tracks was an odd-and-sods collection culled from a bunch of different corners of the Boss’ recording career, Tracks II is actually seven fully-realized albums that Springsteen wrote, recorded, mixed and mastered and then stuck in a drawer for one reason or another.
Read MoreWhen Haim dropped “The Wire,” the killer single that announced their arrival in the mainstream from their debut full-length Days Are Gone, I assumed they would become the next big thing.
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Let me tell you about one of the most humiliating moments of my life.
Read MoreFrank Zappa once said, perhaps apocryphally, that writing about music was akin to dancing about architecture. Like a lot of musicians, he felt that rock criticism was lame and reductionist and parasitic, but in the time before streaming services or file sharing or YouTube, I found great value in the written descriptions of new bands.
Read MoreBrian Wilson passed away. I like the Beach Boys fine but have never been super invested in them (though I definitely like them more than Noel Gallagher does). But I wholly acknowledge Wilson’s contributions to pop music, and I don’t think his talent or his influence can be overstated. His life seemed tough and sad and strange, but it also seemed like he had access to joy.
My Beach Boys interest is basic as hell, and though I’d like to flex about loving some deep cut from Holland, the fact is my favorite Beach Boys song is “God Only Knows.”
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The true cinematic fallout wouldn’t happen for another few years (All the President’s Men is 1976), but the Watergate-based vibes are already on display in the same year that Nixon resigned. Did we, as a culture, ever really recover?
Read MoreIt took me a long time to accept Jagged Little Pill into my life.
Read MoreOasis are returning for a series of huge concerts this summer. I will not be attending, but I have friends who are hardcore fans who have been able to think of little else since the announcement. There’s been a lot of texting back and forth about the potential set list, largely surrounding the question, “Do they play anything that came out in the current century? Do they even play anything past Be Here Now?”
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Maybe this is recency bias working in reverse, or maybe I’m just in a catty mood, but despite the weakness of the opening of this year on Dawson’s Creek and the series of mild disasters that is season five, it is entirely possible this is the worst episode the show ever did.
Read MoreSacha Jenkins passed away over the weekend. He was 54 years old.
Read MoreRemember when characters from movies would appear in music videos? When was the last time that happened? The past was almost always smellier and worse, but if we’re going to be inundated with retrograde unpleasantless from everywhere at all times, then maybe we can have Scarlett Johansson welcoming Dua Lipa into Jurassic Park.
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Thirty years ago, most people weren’t online yet, or at least hadn’t made Internet life a part of their regular life. It was still an intriguing novelty, a mostly silent virtual gathering space for X-Files conspiracy theorists and people earnestly searching for nudity. But Hollywood logged on, and even the movies that weren’t explicitly about the Internet had online-adjacent subtext. Pandora’s modem had been activated.
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After The Blair Witch Project became a surprise theatrical sensation in the summer of 1999, it spawned countless copycats looking to capture its low-fi approach to visceral spook-em-ups. It didn’t necessarily invent the found footage movie, but it definitely galvanized it as its own oft-appropriated subgenre.
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You can rarely judge the quality of a movie year by its Oscar winners, but 2002 is especially misrepresented by the victory laps from well-meaning homework like Chicago and The Hours. You’ll notice neither of those movies show up on the list below, but what does appear runs an incredible gamut of genres and styles and moods. Any movie year can have elite titles at the top of the year-end critics lists, but how many can boast such high-quality junk?
Read MoreI often say I miss record stores, but that’s not entirely true.
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In the year 2000, I both graduated high school and began my freshman year at New York University. One of the most thrilling aspects of moving to Manhattan was the fact that I would now have access to most every movie released to theaters right away. In the past, I had to sometimes wait months for indie flicks to get to Hartford’s one art house theater where it would play for a week. By the end of that year I was living around Washington Square Park and within walking distance of some of the best independent screens around.
Read MoreSka music keeps threatening to come back, but though certain elements of the late ‘90s two-tone revival have wormed their way into contemporary music, there will be no reconsidering the relative legacies of Voodoo Glow Skulls or Reel Big Fish.
That’s fine, by the way.
Read MoreOn my very first day as an editorial assistant at Spin, I didn’t do a whole lot of work. Does anybody do much of anything on their first day? You meet some people, you settle into your space, you get a spiel from IT about your computer, and otherwise you’re just setting up your e-mail signature and waiting for people to ask you to do stuff (which they don’t feel comfortable doing yet because they have known you for all of 22 minutes).
Read MoreTom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ 1991 album Into the Great Wide Open was the first CD I truly appreciated as a complete thought. I had loved other albums before that, but I thought every song on Into the Great Wide Open was a smash. I loved the art work. I obsessed over the liner notes. I started watching VH1 because they played the video for “Learning to Fly” more often than MTV did. Even though I fell under the spell of Nirvana and discovered punk rock and old Iron Maiden records shortly thereafter, Petty continued to be one of my guys.
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I always think of my high school experience as fairly typical, particularly for when I grew up. But if we had a homecoming court, then I have no memory of it whatsoever. We had a vague homecoming weekend with a football game and a dance, but our football team was always terrible and the dance never felt any different than any other dance.
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