Daughn Gibson
This guy is basically a perfect storm of all my major interests — synth bleed, Appalachia, hot guys with sculpted beards.
Is it weird to say he’s kind of like Puddy AND Chris Isaak? Because a) PERFECT, and b) true, right?
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One Direction
—What Makes You Beautiful
Someone posted a pretty funny parody of a Pitchfork review of Up All Night by British boy band One Direction. I was listed as the author. Never heard this band but decided to check them out. I like this song, “What Makes You Beautiful”, more than I expected. Some interesting textures and I like how it toys with pop song structure. Who says big-time chart pop can’t also be innovative?
My friend/former officemate is something of a boy band connoisseur and he’s been teasing me for months about pulling some strings to get Pitchfork on the One Direction train. Looks like things sorted themselves out! MATT, YOUR CAREFULLY-MUSSED DREAMS CAME TRUE.
Judy Berman: Please submit to my fun/painful zine/book project, and also reblog.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
It’s Complicated: Feminists Write About the Misogynist Art We Love
ed. Judy Berman and Niina Pollari
“Listening to the Sex Pistols, trying to figure out if ‘Bodies’ was really an antiabortion song, I discovered that it was something even worse. It was an outburst of loathing…
My pitch for this just got accepted, and I’m more excited about writing this than probbbbably anything else I’ve written over the past few months!
Tom Waits was making “kinetic type” videos while you were still in design short-pants.
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Reigning Sound
—The Bells
This is one of my favorite Reigning Sound songs for a lot of reasons, but chiefly for the line “I wait to hear your footsteps and yours alone/ Please guide me home.” It’s love in the context of my favorite aural phenomenon — our ability to distinguish the wide array of non-verbal sounds made by the people most important to us from the sounds other people make.
When I was a young buck, I spent a lot of time in after school care because my mom worked nights. The place where I went had a basement level room (no Oliver Twist) and the stairwell leading down to the room was big and cavernous and echo-y. I could always tell when my mom was coming down the stairs because I could distinguish the sound of her keys in her hand from the way other parents’ keys sounded. It got to the point where I would start packing up my stuff the minute I heard her keys start jangling — long before she actually walked in the door, to the puzzlement of all the daycare instructors. They may have thought they had a clairvoyant kid on their hands, but in reality I would just grow up to alternately praise and condemn sounds on the internet. Sorry, after-school care instructors of yore! But also, you’re welcome!
I can tell when my boyfriend is home because he slams the front gate in a way that sounds completely different from our neighbors. He walks up the stairs in a different way than they do. It’s a weird way to be bonded to someone, but one that’s also pretty telling. It’s to anyone’s great advantage to be hypersensitive to these kinds of sonic cues: They’re a beacon we follow to those we love, a warning to flee from things we can’t trust.
Evolution thinks it’s important for us to be extremely discriminating and discerning about sound! Music criticism: a life-saving profession.
Between this photo and this song, it’s Team Memory Tapes 2K11 for this moi.
I always thought that if you kept working hard enough and you were good enough at something, that it didn’t matter how much time went by. Eventually something would happen. But other people tell me you have to have the natural talent. But don’t you just get the talent by working on it for a long time? How could you not?
A Comprehensive List of Every Rick Ross Lyric That’s Not A Complete Lie
1) “I’m thinkin’ money/ Every moment thinkin’ money/ I bust a nut, then I’m back to thinkin’ money.”
2) “We ate all day.”
