Music
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No Pressure: Bieber, Blackness, the Cult of Perfection
Bieber is like a prism that reflects back whatever you want to see.
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Sound & Vision: Celia C. Pérez
Allyson McCabe talks with Celia C. Pérez about her debut middle-grade novel, The First Rule of Punk, her inspirations for writing the book, and her own childhood.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Perfume Genius’s Winky Boots
Music freed me up in a lot of ways, including helping me to develop a sense of style.
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Sound & Vision: Anthony DeCurtis
Allyson McCabe talks with Anthony DeCurtis, author and music journalist, about the art of the interview, his friendship with Lou Reed, and teaching in the digital age.
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Album of the Week: Björk’s Utopia
“i feel in this time of trump it is a necessity to have a plan, a manifesto, an alternative.”
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Album of the Week: Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Rest
“I wasn’t scared about being personal. It’s an open dialogue to myself, to my sister, to my father.”
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Andrew Savage’s Punk Possibilities
I kept listening over and over again, and eventually I realized this album was challenging my idea of what punk is.
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Album of the Week: Peter Oren’s Anthropocene
“Should we all write protest songs? Only if that’s what’s on your mind. I can’t help but write political songs.”
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Swinging Modern Sounds #84: Music for Spaceships
Perhaps space is an inevitable resting place for music of this kind, because time is completely different when conceived of in the vastness of space, and not only because of relativity.
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David Bowie’s Final Finale
Bowie is gone now. The Magic Shop, too. It’s all gone—New York City, too, in a way.
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To Look for America: A Road Trip, a Soundtrack
One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren’t as safe.
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Album of the Week: Julien Baker’s Turn Out the Lights
“Passivity is a tacit endorsement of evil we are too afraid to oppose actively. You can’t just always let go.”