Swinging Modern Sounds #104: Paradise
For me, performance is a conversation with the sacred and timeless, the sublime.
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Posts Tagged: pop music
A Fantastic Communion: Renaissance Normcore by Adèle Barclay
Salt—the speaker’s only remains, after she dives into the ocean and sets herself free of the past.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #226: Benjamin Nugent
“I’m interested in beautiful events that are wrong.”
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Poetry as Archeology: Talking with Roy G. Guzmán
Roy G. Guzmán discusses their debut collection, CATRACHOS.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #94: I Think I Might
This is a deep dive, therefore, into the site of brilliant, uncompromising contemporary work.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #93: Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy
I see both subjectivity and objectivity as constructions.
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Circling Backwards, Snaking Sideways: Talking with Sharlene Teo
Sharlene Teo discusses her debut novel, PONTI.
...moreAlbum of the Week: I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life by tUnE-yArDs
“…I am—as so many musicians do—taking those influences and turning them into music that’s under my name.”
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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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Swinging Modern Sounds #82: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark: A Symposium
…yet she did what she did, and in the process made the most successful album of her career.
...moreAlbum of the Week: Something to Tell You by HAIM
Four years after releasing their impressive debut album Days Are Gone, HAIM are back with their long-awaited sophomore project, Something to Tell You, out now via Polydor. The three Angeleno sisters Este, Danielle, and Alana have kept their distinctive, classic rock sound—inherited from the cover band they fronted in the early days together with their parents—smoothed out by […]
...moreAlbum of the Week: Bravado by Kirin J. Callinan
“With every decision I made, I picked the least-tasteful option,” Australian singer-songwriter Kirin J. Callinan told the FADER in discussing how his newest album, Bravado (Terrible Records) came to be. A wacky yet riveting journey into the clichés of contemporary pop but with a distinguished sonic quality and production, the album features guest appearances from DeMarco, […]
...moreAlbum of the Week: Allison Crutchfield’s Tourist in This Town
Allison Crutchfield has been making music her whole life: with her twin sister Katie first, then in bands like P.S. Eliot, Bad Banana, and Swearin’, founded with her former partner. Now, Crutchfield has just released her first solo album, Tourist in This Town, via Merge Records. In her own words, “[i]t’s a record about change—change of scenery, of partner, […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: 69 Love Songs
Everywhere people are shoving things into the ground—time capsules not to be opened until the year 2100, the more optimistic postmarked for 3000—letters to the future in the language of the now.
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Southern Girl: Beyoncé, Badu, and Southern Black Womanhood
None of the imagery of Lemonade is foreign to those of us who grew up in the South or who have Southern roots.
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Whole Lotta (Middle-Aged) Love
The first time I saw Adam on television, on American Idol, past and present collided, as if psychedelic clothes, gnawed by moths, are suddenly rewoven, resurrected.
...moreIt Takes A Village
…to make a Selena Gomez album. According to an article that appeared in New York Magazine‘s October 5th issue, no less than thirty-eight people worked on the star’s latest album, Revival, including Gomez herself—a pretty impressive number of contributors for a solo album. The article charts out a who’s who of Revival track-by-track in what becomes […]
...moreRevenge Writing
After about two years of writing essays, I learned about something I will hereby in these pages name the Passive-Aggressive Writer’s Conundrum: People, particularly non-writers, are an optimistic, delusional bunch. If you mention people in an unflattering way without naming them, they will never recognize themselves in your story— even if you name actual details […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Shameless
I’ve always been somewhat prone to obsession, but my years of intense Britney fandom were the first time that I felt that strongly about an individual person.
...moreSong of the Day: “Never Over You”
Critics have described indie singer-songwriter Natalie Prass variously as “stunning,” “sublime,” “charmingly delicate,” and also, bizarrely, as a Disney princess. The Nashville-based former Berklee College of Music student offers up a heady melange of influences on her acclaimed new eponymous album. Natalie Prass is undeniably a pop record, but on “Never Over You,” she flirts with […]
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I Enjoy That Confusion: Paul Rome and Roarke Menzies’s Philadelphia and Other Stories
Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Interviews Tracy K. Smith
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Tracy K. Smith about her collection Life on Mars/
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