What can the endurance of the messy, campy canon of James Bond theme songs tell us about contemporary popular music?
pop music
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes
Chuck Klosterman on the Success of Taylor Swift, and the Word ‘Calculating’
If you don’t take Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. With the (arguable) exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel—she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, during an era when most […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Grimes and the Changing Face of the Music Industry
In the newest issue of The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh wrote about Grimes, real name Claire Boucher, whose history in underground experimental music led her to making homemade electronic bedroom pop. Last year, Pitchfork named her song “Oblivion” the best song of the decade to date, and as she’s preparing to release her second proper album, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Meet the Woman Who Protects Drake’s Voice
What it means to be a vocal coach.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Reminder: The Bee Gees Were Enormous
The Bee Gees’ dominance of the charts in the disco era was above and beyond Chic, Giorgio Moroder, even Donna Summer. Their sound track to Saturday Night Fever sold thirty million copies. They were responsible for writing and producing eight of 1978’s number ones, something only Lennon and McCartney in 1963/64 could rival—and John and […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
This Is Not Really the Worst Song of All Time
I’m not here to defend “We Built This City,” though I hardly think it’s the worst song of all time. Instead, I’m here to urge every music fan to dig deeper and interrogate his or her own definition of what makes a song terrible. I feel like we pile on “We Built This City” because […]