Posts tagged as Sasha Frere-Jones
The Sound of 2011
"If you look for a trace of our economic woes in the music, you’ll be frustrated. People weren’t supposed to sell records, apparently, but if your name was Adele, your second album, “21,” didn’t leave the upper reaches of the Billboard Top 200 chart in the forty weeks since its American release (usually hanging about in the top ten). What about the music-biz truism that people only come out in big numbers for rappers from the gangsta disapora? Well, apparently you can be Drake and wear sweaters and sing and be as hardcore as Pikachu and go to No. 1. (You risk being called “the human croissant” on the Internet by somebody imitating the voice of Ghostface Killah, but you can handle that.) You can also be a hip-hop diaspora unto yourself, made up of largely foul-mouthed young men, and give away almost all of your music on Tumblr—and watch your leader get signed to the same label as Adele." READ MORE
Where To Also See Awl Pals This Week
What are you doing tonight? I'll tell you what you're doing tonight: You're heading over to McNally Jackson to see Awl pals Matthew Gallaway and Sasha Frere-Jones discuss Matthew's new novel The Metropolis Case and debate the current state of affairs in Tunisia. (Okay, maybe not, but they will for sure be talking about the book.) See you at 7. It's an Awl pals kind of week!
This Year's Superior Architectural Ballets
The 2010 edition of the annual Best Music Writing series is out on November 9th, and they've just released the table of contents. It includes work from Awl pals Maura Johnston, Sasha Frere-Jones, Jon Caramanica and Alex Ross. I don't see how you not get this.
Flicked Off: "The Social Network"
Natasha Vargas-Cooper: I ain't going to lie to you. I went in wanting to hate. I was queasy thinking about what Fincher/Sorkin had to say about the Digital Generation and I was resistant to suffering through Jesse's flat-affect-acting. READ MORE
When Rap Really Died: What He Said
"If you try to locate the moment of a major paradigm shift, in the moment, perhaps by calling your album 'Hip Hop Is Dead,' as Nas did in 2006, you're slipping into weatherman territory. Will it rain tomorrow? Will another great rap album pop up? The life spans of genres and art forms are best perceived from the distance of ten or twenty years, if not more. With that in mind, I still suspect that Nas-along with a thousand bloggers-was not fretting needlessly. If I had to pick a year for hip-hop's demise, though, I would choose 2009, not 2006." Everything I've written about rap this year? This is what I meant to say. And here's a video of Freddie Gibbs, the Gary, Indiana rapper profiled in the last section of this excellent piece.
"Where the Wild Things Are": Where Is the Place Where They Put the Things?
Maurice Sendak said it first: "I thought it was never going to end." If you've ever been through family therapy, you've had the same thought. And this is what director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers have reduced Where The Wild Things Are to-a glum ninety-minute session where emotions are projected onto big fuzzy creatures who look like nested Russian dolls bleached of color, blown up and covered in hairy mildew. The creatures serve therapy, not dreams or fantasy. They embody the vexations of a boy named Max, but none of his desires or imagined ecstasies. And if you've read Where The Wild Things Are, you probably think it depicts the work of a fertile young mind trying to escape grownups and their fat, dopey buzz-killing. Jonze and Eggers, in an audacious sidestep, decided to side with the buzzkillers and render Wild Things as a wintry march of afflictions and psychological donkey work done at the expense of children. If this movie represented the reality of juvenile imagination, I would get my kids hooked on drugs as soon as possible, just to spare them the agony of Having Their Own Thoughts, because that seems like a seriously raw deal. READ MORE
Sonic Youth, 30 Years On
"The band that once specialized in manhandling pawnshop guitars has become an institution." Sasha Frere-Jones reflects on 30 years of Sonic Youth.
