Phawker

BY JAMES M. DAVIS At the birth of the Internet, David Bowie famously remarked that soon music would be like “running water.” Everywhere, inescapable, available at the touch of a button. Any song from the entire history of recorded music, available at your fingertips, on your smartphone, anywhere you go. This is the world we live in now, and for me personally, it’s difficult to remember a time even when hearing a certain song meant having to go out and buy a CD. Farther back still is the time when hearing obscure music meant finding a dusty old record in a yard sale, or paying some incredible sum of money at an auction. But where PBS’s new documentary three-part series American Epics begins is before even then, when those dusty records were brand new. A time when, for vast parts of America, the only way to listen to music was to hear it performed live. Having musical talent made you an asset to your community. The first episode, which airs tonight at 9 pm, opens with the story of the Carter Family, detailing how Sara Carter could draw a crowd just by beginning to sing from her porch. It’s difficult to imagine a world where entertainment was hard to come by, and also to recognize this world as the beginning of our own.

American Epic tells the story of these people, American folk artists who worked so hard on their craft out in the middle of nowhere, only to be scooped up by the beginnings of the record industry. These people were given bus fare so that, for the first time in their lives, they could leave their towns and go to New York, to the 22nd floor of some skyscraper so that electrical engineers in lab coats could record their music and sell thousands of copies of it. American Epic tries to live entirely in this single moment in history, when the phonograph was just becoming widely used. It’s the moment of discovery, after which what is discovered can never remain the same. Its Schrodinger’s cat writ large. The most heartbreaking example of this is in the final episode, detailing how the Hopi people began to promote their own sacred dances as entertainment for white people. How after hundreds of years of tradition, what had been a central part of the community became a curio, practically overnight.

For anyone interested in the history of American music, American Epic is essential viewing. It removes the sense of old-timey music being the realm of beard scratching intellectuals and reminds us that these people were real, and that at the time their music was marketed and promoted just like popular music today. The way we listen to music now is utterly different, we live in a world of technology and leisure. But we are fundamentally still the same combination of soul and body that we were a hundred years ago, and listening to music from that time, understanding stories from the past, can remind us of that fact.

PART 1 OF PBS’ THREE-PART AMERICAN EPIC DEBUTS TONIGHT @ 9 PM

EDITOR’S NOTE: In advance of The xx’s performance at the Skyline Stage of The Mann on Wednesday May 17th, we present the complete 2012 MAGNET cover story profile written by yours truly. Enjoy.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA It is the tail end of another hot, dog breath day afternoon in early August. Mercifully, we are on our way to some place that is, for one night anyway, cool: Staten Island. There are many locales that you might associate with the sound, the look and the vibe of The xx — London after dark, Tokyo circa Lost In Translation, Manhattan around midnight, capitals of cool each and every one of them — but Staten Island is most assuredly not one of them. There is nothing young or cool or stylish about Staten Island, which even residents refer to it as ‘the forgotten borough.’ And yet here we are, standing on the deck of the Staten Island ferry, motoring across the Hudson for a semi-exclusive audience with London’s black clad indie pop darlings who are playing a hastily announced concert on the island that is Staten. Behind us the Manhattan skyline recedes into the distance, off the starboard bow the sun dipping behind the Statue of Liberty like a solar eclipse, giving Lady Liberty a corona of brilliant white light that sets the twilight reeling.

In advance of the release of Coexist, The xx’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2009’s beloved debut, the band is capping a completely sold out pre-release promotional tour of select West and East coast dates in the U.S. with a performance at the little-known Snug Harbor Cultural Center, a sprawling complex of botanical gardens and majestic Greek revival buildings, situated on Staten Island’s north shore. Erected 1801 as a retirement facility for sailors, Snug Harbor has in more recent years been re-purposed to serve the arts. Tonight it will serve The xx and serve them well.

I am huddled on the deck amidst a de facto posse of employees from the Beggars Group, which, in addition to providing the care and feeding of legendary indie institutions like 4 AD, Matador, and Rough Trade, serves as the stateside outpost of The xx’s British home, XL Recordings. Everyone is, to put it charitably, over 30. Crouched nearby is a tender-aged, barely twenty something couple leaning against the wall and discussing, improbably enough, the exigencies of aging. “Life sucks more the older you get,” says the male to the female who nods knowingly. He looks left and right to make sure this conversation is going unnoticed before adding, “I won’t say it too loud because everyone here will just be like ‘shut up we know’.” We all hear it, but pretend we didn’t, feeling no particular need to provide confirmation. He’ll find out soon enough, the poor bastard. Just like we did. Just like everyone does sooner or later.

I bring this up because the distinguishing characteristic of The xx — beyond the tar black wardrobe and deep debt to the darkly emotive guitar bands from the 80s and the high-shine chart-topping 90s R&B that provided the background noise of their childhood — is how impossibly young they are: barely 20 years old when their hushed nocturnes of their self-titled debut won The Mercury Prize, the British music biz’s equivalent of the Oscar, and sold a whopping 1.5 million copies. It feels a little like we are all on our way to see our little brother’s (and sister’s) band, which, after patting them on the head somewhat condescendingly upon learning of their ambitions for world domination, has somehow grown up to do just that.
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THE ATLANTIC: Levitt famously would not sell his houses to African Americans—not that such a policy was unusual at the time. Between 1946 and 1953, as New York University professor Tom Sugrue notes, 120,000 new homes were built in the Philly metro area. Only 347 were open to African Americans. In 1957 an African-American couple, William and Daisey Myers, bought a house as part of a plan to begin the integration of Levittown. Two thousand residents signed a petition denouncing the purchase: “[W]e feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community . . . [and] to protect our own.” Some went further. Mobs of people gathered, overwhelming local police, and smashing out the windows of the Myers’ ranch house. Protesters clashed with the cops and felled a few officers with rocks. White supporters of the couple were harassed as well, and crosses were burned on the lawns of at least two of their neighborhood allies. The riots against the Myers made headlines across the world. Although another African-American family purchased a house shortly thereafter and was not met with a violent response, Levittown’s integration stopped cold. MORE

THE BALTIMORE SUN: Daisy Myers vividly remembers the rocks through the windows, the taunts and name-calling and cross-burnings and the day-and-night blaring of “Old Black Joe” that greeted her arrival as a member of the first African-American family in Levittown, Pa., 40 years ago. Memories of nights, more than a week of them, in which a mob that was estimated from 200 to 1,000 people gathered along Deepgreen Lane in the Dog Hollow section screaming racial epithets, throwing Molotov cocktails and yelling threats. But she quickly dismisses those memories. She says that she prefers to remember the positives that came out of those violent summer days in August 1957.

“I look back on it as not a bad time in my life. With all of my schooling [two master’s degrees], I would never have learned as much about human nature as I did then, and I wouldn’t have met such fine people like Martin Luther King, Pearl Buck and Jackie Robinson.” All of them, and many others, wrote to Myers and her husband, William E. Myers Jr., during their several-week ordeal in what had been an idyllic suburban, and white, community of 17,311 houses the largest planned community in the world. Today, it is still a mostly white town of about 60,000 residents.

“People brought us food very often. All kinds of fruit and food and flowers. One woman came from another section of Levittown one day and offered to clean up the house for me,” she said, in a telephone interview from York, Pa., where she works for the federal government. Myers also believes her family’s plight spawned a fair-housing law passed by the state about a year afterward. On Aug. 13, they moved in, and the mailman, assuming Daisy Myers was a maid, asked her if she knew the owners. She told him she owned the house.

“He back-tracked and told everybody that he had delivered mail to us and that we were there. That evening, people started gathering outside. They were banging the mail box, throwing rocks through the windows and lighted cigarettes against the house,” she said. […] A cross blazed in the blackness in the Wechsler’s yard. Another cross was burned outside a friendly Quaker’s home. More threats came over the Myerses’ telephone. His fire insurance was canceled. A druggist refused to deliver medicine because his driver was afraid. MORE

NEW YORK TIMES: Levittown had been Hillary country all the way — it gave Mrs. Clinton roughly three out of every four of its votes in the Pennsylvania primary in April. In doing so, it conformed, in some ways, to its history and stereotype. William Levitt built the vast postwar development in the shadow of a giant United States Steel plant, some 17,000 homes sprawling across three Pennsylvania townships and one borough. He would not sell to black families. According to the latest United States census, just 2 percent of Levittown’s current 54,000 residents are African-American; about an equal percent are Hispanic. The community is overwhelmingly Democratic, but filled with older whites who did not attend college — the so-called Reagan Democrats who in recent presidential elections have been the voters most likely to swing between parties. MORE

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Hard to remember now but there was a time when the Jesus & Mary Chain divided the population of planet Earth into two camps: Those who were sure they were the Second Coming and those who thought they were the end of Western Civilization. Such was the response 30 years ago to the band’s debut, Psychocandy. History would, of course, judge it a seminal and deeply influential classic. After a lengthy hiatus, the band is active again, and recently released  the most def Damage And Joy, their first LP since 1998’s Munki. Don’t call it it a comeback, call it a return to form — and yet another reminder that the band once derided as unlistenable noise has become the soundtrack of our lives. In advance of the re-activated Jesus And Mary Chain’s show at Union Transfer on Monday May 15th, we got  frontman Jim Reid on the phone from his home in Devon, England, and he spoke candidly and at length about noise and melody, drugs and religion, and life 30 years after lighting the fuse on a cultural flashpoint that’s still blowing up in our faces like an exploding cigar that just keeps giving.

PHAWKER: First things first, let’s just go over some ancient history. How did the name Jesus and Mary Chain come about?

JIM REID: Well, I mean, it’s the same as any other band, I suppose. We looked for ideas and stuff, like, things that we thought would be cool and not like any other bands names. We actually had a gig before we had a name. We kind of arranged this London show with [Creation Records founder] Alan McGee. It was based on demos that we’d made. But we’d kind of made all these demos under various names, most of which were absolutely shite, to be honest with you. The one I can remember was, I think, The Poppy Seeds. We were The Poppy Seeds for awhile.

PHAWKER: The Poppy Seeds? [laughs]

JIM REID: There were others that I can’t remember. And then it was William that just said, I don’t know where he got it from, but he just said ‘The Jesus and Mary Chain.’ And at first it sounded like, “Naah, no way.” And then you kind of think about it, you think, ‘well, fuck, that sounds like no other band.’ So we went with it.

PHAWKER: Were you guys raised Catholic?

JIM REID: Eh, no. I mean, religion wasn’t a part of our lives. I mean, it’s kind of a fascinating subject. I discovered The Bible when I was like in my late teens and out of curiosity read through it to see what it was all about. But, in the end, came away with the idea that it’s kind of a lot of mumbo-jumbo. For a different set of people and a completely different time it probably stopped people from killing each other before there was any such thing as the law. Stuff like that. So it served a purpose for then, but, you know, I just don’t think it really belongs in the modern era.

PHAWKER: And now that there is a thing called Rule of Law it provides and excuse for people to kill each other.

JIM REID: Yeah, exactly. That’s the irony isn’t it. Now people kill in the name of God.

PHAWKER: When did you guys come up with the idea of combining Phil Spector-style pop melodicism with, you know, White Light/White Heat-style noise?

JIM REID: Well, we were always into both pop music and noise music, so we kind of thought, well, why can’t we combine the two? I mean, we weren’t the first, I would never claim to be. I mean, the Velvet Underground didveverything that we attempted to do, but 20 years earlier. But, you know, that was one of the facets of the Velvets that we absolutely adored, that they could, on the same album, they could have “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and then “[I’m] Waiting for the Man.” You know, you say, ‘well, fuck,  that’s it. That’s the answer.’ Why be tied down to one style? At that time, you know, there was people making noise music, and there’s people making pop music. But nobody was combining the two. And we thought, well, that would be us. That’s what we would do.

PHAWKER: What role, if any, did drug use play in the creative development of the band and its sound and/or songwriting?
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Photo by DYLAN LONG

“We don’t give a shit,” declared James Hetfield, frontman of the heavy metal machine known as Metallica, to the sold-out crowd Lincoln Financial Field last night. Hetfield then elaborated, stating that Metallica doesn’t care what you look like, what you’re wearing, what religion you practice, or your political beliefs. “We’re here to celebrate live music and being alive. This is family.” It was a touching and beautiful moment between Hetfield and the crowd, a moment which of course would be followed by imminent doom and riffs from the bowels of hell.

Kicking off the night with “Hardwired,” the title track from their most recent LP Hardwired… To Self Destruct, I was immediately blown away by how tight these guys both looked and sounded onstage. Yes, it’s Metallica, but I admittedly had my doubts that the members of Metallica in their 50s would be able to match the intensity they possessed when drummer Lars Ulrich was 16. The good news is that I was totally wrong. Hetfield and co. were running back and forth across the gigantic stage, doing laps around the ramps that bled into the crowd and connected back to the stage — jumping, squatting, and most important of all, shredding. Hetfield’s voice sounded like a finely-aged leather jacket, full of toughness and vigor. Not only was the musicianship impressive on all fronts, the production and sound for this show were equally as mental, with fire, pyro and explosions at every turn.

While Metallica has found themselves on the shorter end of the stick of success for what’s felt like forever, they’ve seemed to finally come to a game-changing realization with their latest album and live show: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Some simply brush this mantra off as a revisiting of their earlier days, an attempt to relive what Metallica once was. However, even if that’s exactly what they’re doing, who gives a shit? They kicked ass. The riffs cut into the crowd with precision and force, Lars’ kick drum beat its way to the front of the stage with every thud, and Robert Trujillo ripped some absolutely gnarly bass solos. Unloading more of their new material, Metallica electrified Lincoln Financial Field with pyro-infused performances of “Atlas, Rise!,” “Now That We’re Dead,” and “Moth Into Flame.” Several oldies were woven into the set to balance out the new, such as “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” “One,” “Master Of Puppets,” and a firework-ridden finale featuring nothing other than “Enter Sandman.”

Having grown up on Garage Inc., Ride The Lightning, Master of Puppets, and …And Justice For All, seeing these guys still going strong brought me great joy. Towards the end of the set, Hetfield told the crowd, “I hope you guys are feeling better than when you first got here; I sure am.” At that moment it was clear to me then that metal is in the blood of these four gentlemen, and the fact that they’ve stuck with their craft through thick and thin attests to their love for live music, for rock & roll and for the Metallica family that they have spent their careers creating and appreciating. – DYLAN LONG

Part one of a new Dutch documentary that says what American media is afraid to say.

PREVIOUSLY: The Crowes’ axis turned on the brothers Robinson – frontman Chris Robinson, who actually sounds like he earned the sandpaper timbre in his petulant rasp of a voice, and guitarist Rich Robinson, who makes a commanding grasp of the early ’70s blues-rock vernacular look effortless. On and off since the early 1990’s, The Black Crowes have cut their own path on Rich Robinson’s unique brand of vintage melody and classic-rock swagger. Hits like “She Talks to Angels” and “Jealous Again” off their multi-platinum debut Shake Your Moneymaker helped them find footing among the grunge and heavy metal that was so popular at the time. They followed with The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion which silenced the critics who wrote them off as a cheap Faces rip-off. Though the Crowes would go on to sell more than 30 million albums, the Robinson brothers often toxic relationship resulted in a series of breakups and two abandoned album attempts. While they always remained a force on stage, the music they did manage to release sounded like a band falling apart. In 2015, they broke up for good after a dispute between the Robinson brothers about who “owned” the band. Since then, Rich Robinson has stepped out on his own. […] Robinson took the time to talk to Phawker about the new record as well as the Crowes, the state of the music biz, the importance of vinyl and how he really feels about Rick Rubin. MORE

25TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF THE BLACK CROWES’ ‘SOUTHERN HARMONY & MUSICAL COMPANION’ FEAT. TALLER + GUESTS TONIGHT @ ARDMORE MUSIC HALL

The end is nigh. Share this with everyone you know, before it’s too late!

PREVIOUSLY: Internet users deserve far better, and we thought we were going to get it from a president who promised to “take a backseat to no one in my commitment to Net Neutrality.” Watch now as he and his FCC chairman try to spin tomorrow’s betrayal as another “mission accomplished.” Don’t believe it. This bogus victory has become all too familiar to those watching the Obama administration and its appointees squander opportunities for real change. The reality is that reform is just a rhetorical front for industry compromises that reward the biggest players and K-Street lobbyists while giving the public nothing. It’s not the FCC chairman’s job to seek consensus among the corporations that he was put into office to regulate. His duty is to protect Internet users. More than two million people have taken action on behalf of Net Neutrality. Tomorrow, we’ll all get the carpet yanked from beneath our feet. Net Neutrality is the freedom of speech, freedom of choice issue of the 21st century. It’s the guarantee of a more open and democratic media system that was baked into the Internet at its founding. On Tuesday, Obama’s FCC is going to sell that out. MORE

PREVIOUSLY:  When Is Comcast Buying Time-Warner NOT A Monopoly? Apparently, When David L. Cohen Hosts A Couple Obama Fundraisers At His Mt. Airy Manse

PREVIOUSLY: Sign Petition, Help Netflix Find Its Spine & Stop The Internet From Becoming Another Cable TV Rip-Off

PREVIOUSLY:  Comcast, Where The Internet Goes To Die

PREVIOUSLY: Spielberg In Town To Honor Comcast For Doing Something Nice And Un-Evil For A Change

PREVIOUSLY: WORTH REPEATING: 8 Reasons Why Comcast Sucks

PREVIOUSLY: WEASELS RIPPED MY INTERNET: Cowardly House Dems Cave On Net Neutrality, Cut FCC Off At The Balls

THE VERGE: In a perfect storm of corporate greed and broken government, the internet has gone from vibrant center of the new economy to burgeoning tool of economic control. Where America once had Rockefeller and Carnegie, it now has Comcast’s Brian Roberts, AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, and Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, robber barons for a new age of infrastructure monopoly built on fiber optics and kitty GIFs.

And the power of the new network-industrial complex is immense and unchecked, even by other giants: AT&T blocked Apple’s FaceTime and Google’s Hangouts video chat services for the preposterously silly reason that the apps were “preloaded” on each company’s phones instead of downloaded from an app store. Verizon and AT&T have each blocked the Google Wallet mobile payment system because they’re partners in the competing (and not very good) ISIS service. Comcast customers who stream video on their Xboxes using Microsoft’s services get charged against their data caps, but the Comcast service is tax-free.

We’re really, really fucking this up.

But we can fix it, I swear. We just have to start telling each other the truth. Not the doublespeak bullshit of regulators and lobbyists, but the actual truth. Once we have the truth, we have the power — the power to demand better not only from our government, but from the companies that serve us as well. “This is a political fight,” says Craig Aaron, president of the advocacy group Free Press. “When the internet speaks with a unified voice politicians rip their hair out.”

We can do it. Let’s start.

THE INTERNET IS A UTILITY, JUST LIKE WATER AND ELECTRICITY

Go ahead, say it out loud. The internet is a utility.

There, you’ve just skipped past a quarter century of regulatory corruption and lawsuits that still rage to this day and arrived directly at the obvious conclusion. Internet access isn’t a luxury or a choice if you live and participate in the modern economy, it’s a requirement. […] It’s time to just end these stupid legal word games and say what we all already know: internet access is a utility. A commodity that should get better and faster and cheaper over time. Anyone who says otherwise is lying for money. MORE

WABE: On May 11, 1987, NPR first broadcast a program that has become synonymous with public radio: “Fresh Air.” The interview and commentary show originally ran as a live, three-hour weekday broadcast, hosted by Terry Gross and airing only in Philadelphia. While “Fresh Air” is still produced by Philadelphia member station WHYY, NPR now syndicates it in a daily, one-hour national edition. According to WHYY, 6 million listeners tune in each week on more than 646 NPR stations across the country and in Europe. And in the age of streaming and downloading, “Fresh Air” is NPR’s most downloaded podcast for two years in a row. MORE

NEW YORK TIMES: Gross was born in 1951 in Brooklyn. She grew up in Sheepshead Bay, between Avenues X and Y. It was a new neighborhood, with postwar apartment buildings that went up on the site of an old racetrack. As a little girl, Gross loved realistic fiction (Beverly Cleary, the Betsy-Tacy series) and would retreat to the couch with a book when her family visited relatives. Gross’s father helped run a family business selling materials to hatmakers. Her mother had worked as a secretary but quit after Gross’s older brother was born, and later Gross would seek the life outside the home that wasn’t available to her mother.

As a freshman at SUNY Buffalo, Gross wanted to write. But she was worried she wasn’t good enough to be great, and she struggled to find a subject. At the same time, she was shedding her ‘‘good girl’’ identity. She tried being a hippie — ‘‘I was too inhibited to be very convincing at it. And too Sheepshead Bay, probably’’ — and she tried drugs. One of the first times she dropped LSD, she determinedly brought along paper and pen: ‘‘I’m going to have a subject,’’ she recalls thinking. ‘‘All of my writerly inhibitions are going to open up, and my talent is going to be released!’’ LSD didn’t help her writing, but for Gross it was a beneficially ‘‘immersive experience.’’

In the first months after she graduated in 1972, Gross floundered. She had married, but would soon divorce; she was fired from a job teaching eighth grade after only six weeks (she couldn’t control the class). But then she discovered radio. One afternoon, about a year after she finished school, she was sitting in her house in Buffalo listening to ‘‘Womanpower,’’ a feminist program on WBFO, the university station. One of her roommates was a guest, and she came out as gay on the air. Gross was surprised by the revelation, but more so by the way her roommate had delivered it: sitting before a microphone in a radio studio.

Gross, who had wanted to do ‘‘something in media’’ but hadn’t known how to begin, was intrigued. Through her roommate, she learned there was an opening on ‘‘Womanpower,’’ and Gross started on the show as a volunteer. Just over a year later, she moved to a program called ‘‘This Is Radio.’’ The show’s superpower was a phone line that allowed the staff to call anywhere in New York State toll-free. Gross would scour the Village Voice classifieds for people who might be interesting — jazz musicians offering lessons, a tattoo artist — and call them up and interview them. During college Gross had shed some of her innate reserve, but ‘‘I still was just inhibitively shy,’’ she said. ‘‘With a microphone, I wasn’t shy.’’ In 1975, Gross moved to Philadelphia to take over ‘‘Fresh Air,’’ which was created by a former WBFO colleague (NPR began distributing it as a daily show in 1987). Gross says she was ‘‘always inquisitive,’’ and her curiosity vibrates on the surface of old tape. MORE

BY BILL HANGLEY JR. Yes, Desus and Mero are stoners. But they’re not foggy wookie stoners. They’re rat-a-tat Bronx stoners who’ll snatch a sentence out of your mouth, run with it into the middle of the street, swing it around until it gets dizzy and then give it back to you upside-down and laughing. What results are some of the best interviews on television: The Daily Show as delivered by two smartass kids riding the subway all day when they should be in school. It’s not just that they ask the right questions, as in last week’s interview with Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio [SEE BELOW]:

“You ever roll up at Red Lobster like, forty deep?

“When was the last time you’ve been in a chain restaurant? Like your plane got stranded in Jacksonville?”

“What’s the worst thing you ever ate on the show?”

They know how to shut up when they’re getting the right answers. Again, from the Colicchio interview:

 “I probably would have been diagnosed with ADD. So I couldn’t get through a recipe. I got really frustrated. And when I was about fifteen, I guess, my dad came home with a book by a chef named Jacques Pépin, called La Technique, and it stressed the importance of technique and methods. I still can’t figure out why the hell my father brought that book back. He said he got it from the library at work. My father was a corrections officer in a jail. So I’m not sure how that book ended up in that jail. But he brought it home and it completely changed my life.”

Desus and Mero honed their craft on YouTube and podcasts, and just celebrated their 100th late-night show on the Viceland channel. Their politics are merciless (“Trump goes on Sirius – why? Just another hot take on the Civil War and his boy Andrew Jackson. Another event he found out about yesterday, or like five minutes before the briefing…”), and their taste in video clips shamelessly juvenile (one choice featured an arm wrestler snapping his humerus), but their humor is good-natured and contagious, and their tag-team improvisation invariably disarms their guests and brings out their best.

Some recent favorites include rap duo Run the Jewels  (“are you going to add Bernie Sanders as a third member?”), science guru Neil DeGrasse Tyson (“best-known astrophysicist from the Bronx – at least I got that”), political pundit Angela Rye (“what is it called when you got two different baby mamas pregnant at the same time? What kind of twins is that? Bronx twins. I didn’t say that”) and Blackish star Anthony Anderson: “My momma be asking for fifty grand at a clip! Oh my God! That’s why I had to give her a fucking job! Now it’s a tax writeoff.”

If you’re not watching, watch. Like all great interviewers they’re genuinely interested in their guests and what they have to share, and like all great improvisers they make everyone onstage raise their game:

DESUS: “I’m out here in these streets. What’s the best place to eat in New York that’s not Papaya King?”

TOM COLICCIO: “Best restaurant in New York besides Papaya King? What are you going out for?”

DESUS: “To get slizzered.”

MERO: “And then possibly go home, you know what I’m saying? Get a little cheek action?”

DESUS: “I’m saying…”

COLICCIO: “I got a few that could fit the bill. So you’re talking about a good romantic place?”

DESUS: “I ain’t say all that.”

COLICCIO: “In that case, stick with Papaya King. You’ll be all right.”

NEW YORK MAGAZINE: The saddest thing about the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, which carries the official title Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, is that it’s going to make a lot of people think they’re happy. “Hold on,” you say. “Think they’re happy? If they think they’re happy, then they are happy.” Which is often true, but not always. I think I’m happy eating a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and a large fries. But a few minutes later, when my salt/sugar/fat high has dissipated into self-disgust, I realize that what I’ve paid for is mainly bloat. The ruling aesthetic of the Marvel universe is now bloat. Which isn’t to say that the first Guardians wasn’t fun. By Marvel standards, it was a modest affair, a goofy break from the dark nights of the soul/tortures of the damned experienced by Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, et al. (Never mind the kiddie Macbeths and Oedipuses in the even more grandiose DC universe.) Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord, was a likable screw-up; the wisecracking raccoon had some good comebacks; and there was a jolly, B-movie vibe that brought me back to the days of the old (admittedly terrible) Flash Gordon serial, as well as the first Star Wars movie and Joss Whedon’s much-missed Firefly. The Guardians might have been saving the galaxy but for once what was absent was the weight of the world. This one is heavier, man. It has, Gods help us, a theme, not to mention a god — or demigod, the deistic hierarchy of the Marvel universe being opportunistically elastic. MORE

The last time English shoegazers Slowdive released an album, I was in kindergarten, and Bill Clinton was in the White House weaponizing Wall Street with deregulation when he wasn’t busy paying for Monica Lewinski’s dry cleaning bills. I was learning basic arithmetic, or maybe the “clean up, everybody, everywhere” song, but I think the counterculture adults were mostly either flying the flannel on the grunge bandwagon or throwing down mad adlibs at coffee shop poetry slams. Daria, a cartoon that followed a feminist, critical-thinking teenager through the intellectual wasteland of a wealthy suburban high school, was one of the most popular shows on TV. In the context of this decade, which celebrated difference and sensitivity, the shoegaze movement, led by My Bloody Valentine, made perfect sense. A genre that blended distorted electric guitar swells with obscured, saccharine vocal melodies, shoegaze music gave critics the opportunity to hone their thesaurus skills in the search of synonyms for “shimmering.”

Well, it goes without saying that a lot’s changed in the past twenty years. A nihilistic populist wave has washed over the country. Irony has turned against the satirists and put some of the sharpest minds in shackles. And most notably, technology over-load has overstimulated the population into a horde of want-to-be automatons, waiting for their opportunity to plug their brains into the matrix. So why’s a band that hasn’t released new material since 1995 coming out with an album now? Do they need to make a buck? Are they just bored? Nope, not as I see it. In the context of the millions staring at screens, living in their minds, Slowdive’s new self-titled album does what any good shoegaze does; it brings you down to earth, into your body, where you notice how shallow your breath has become. Seriously, after their long hiatus, with their undulating, swelling, swirly, etc. post-rock sound, Slowdive’s new album feels like a good, deep breath.
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