Twenty years after this famous pitch-correction technology beautifully modulated Cher’s voice in her hit song “Believe,” Auto-Tune has proven itself not a fad but a fixture. Where did it come from, and what does it do exactly?
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A History of American Protest Music: Which Side Are You On?
Just as we were in the 1930s and ’60s, America is suffering a moral crisis. We have to decide which side we are on: hate and exclusion, or justice, inclusion, and democracy?
Infatuation
Deena ElGenaidi considers the ways in which adoring Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine from afar in her teens and early 20s provided a safe outlet for expressing desire.
The Power of a Judith Krantz Sex Scene
A ‘90s romance novel offers a glimpse of queer possibility and illuminates the complications of writing about queer love.
In Absentia
A meditation on the nature of grief, at a time when the whole world seems to be grieving.
You’re Just Too Good to Be True
My on-again, off-again love affair with Engelbert Humperdinck.
Vessel of Antiquity
For musical performance artist Leon Redbone, the past was all the material he needed, except his own, which he replaced with a persona. “I don’t have a past,” he said. “The past begins tomorrow.” Strange enough to earn comparisons to Frank Zappa and Tom Waits, Redbone often got shelved in record stores’ rock sections, even […]
This Gen X Mess
A fun, ranging package about Generation X. It includes essays on Evan Dando, The Rules, John Singleton, Grunge music and fashion, CK One, among other 90s touchstones, plus a piece in which Caity Weaver rewinds 25 years to 1994 and spends a week only using what limited technologies existed then.
Performance Art: On Sharing Culture
With physical distancing the order of the day as COVID-19 spreads, cultural locales — sites for communal experiences, like museums and theaters — are emptying out. What are we sharing if we’re not sharing these spaces? And were we really sharing them to begin with?
On Vanishing
Dementia is a kind of erasure, a death before death, where the living discount the infirmed long before they’re gone.
