I love you more: MoPOP Pop Conference 2018

At the best MoPOP Pop Conference of the last eleven years of intermittent attendance, I learned about the centrality of Geto Boy Bushwick Bill’s shortness to his rapping, that Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet stare at each other across the wastes of history in the hopes of building castles out of all the things we

Worst Songs Ever: Poison’s ‘Unskinny Bop

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to

Singles 4/27

From Korean group Twice to Janelle Monae, the artists below could hide neither their ebullience nor a determination to explain themselves, garishly, intensely, or sketchily, as the case requires. Click on links for full reviews. Twice – What Is Love? (8) Blue October – I Hope You’re Happy (7) Janelle Monáe ft. Grimes – Pynk

My favorite debut albums

I realize country is woefully underrepresented, in part thanks to the singles-plus-filler that dominate the genre. 1. Pretenders – Pretenders 2. Guns ‘N Roses – Appetite for Destruction 3. Change – The Glow of Love 4. Saint Etienne – Foxbase Alpha 5. The Beatles – Please Please Me 6. The Notorious B.I.G. – Ready to

‘Zama’ takes cool approach to obsession

Whether John Boorman, Terrence Malick, or Werner Herzog is behind the camera, films about European contact with indigenous peoples tend to abjure a hard narrative line in favor of a imagistic collage that often gets “hallucinatory” slapped on it like a sell-by sticker. It’s as if the concatenation of history, myth, and the director’s personal

I don’t wanna have to pay for this: The best adult contemporary #1s of the 2000 and 2010s

Notice I smushed two decades together as the reigns at #1 get longer. From Faith Hill and Savage Garden and anthems by Lee Ann Womack and Martina McBride to Adele and Justin Timberlake. It was the era of Daniel Powter and James Blunt‘s skin-crawlingly sincere retrenches of ’70s soft rock. An awful lot of Christmas

Bill Cosby’s sickest joke

Wesley Morris ponders the verdict in the Bill Cosby case: This is the heavy thing about this verdict. The sorting of the ironies has been left to us. Mr. Cosby made blackness palatable to a country historically conditioned to think the worst of black people. And to pull that off, he had to find a

A show of self: Ashley Monroe, Cardi B, John Prine

Ashley Monroe – Sparrow For listeners who love strings, Dave Cobb can arrange them. Whether lending a baby-I’m-burnin’ urgency to “Hard on a Heart” or buttressing the I-love-my-baby ardor of “She Wakes Me Up (Rescue Me),” they’re apposite and pleasurable in themselves. This goes double for Ashley Monroe’s velvet-covered croon, earthbound by design despite a

I’m pouring Chandon: The best #1 R&B singles of the 2000s

The chart, renamed to the Top R&B/Hip-Hop songs in 2008, saw bewildering gyrations: Elliott-Timbaland productions, crunk&B, 50 Cent, Stargate (now make a Billy Joel rhyme out of’em). And a guy named Lil Wayne poked his head into the mix, looked around, and bided his time. 1. Destiny’s Child – Say My Name 2. Missy “Misdemeanor”

‘Opuntia’ studies the attraction of land and the pull of myth

An explorer with an unusual run of bad luck, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was in April 1528 among the first Spaniards to land in Florida, near to what is now Tampa Bay. Tocobagas regaled him with stories about cities of gold. Splitting his party, he set sail again, hugging the Florida coastline. A hurricane

The best of the #1 R&B hits of the ’70s

Ah, the seventies. As white liberals turned on the Great Society, black America responded, in part by reminding these white liberals that the Great Society hadn’t been nearly enough. These songs show deluxe and delightful fantasy lives, allow cries from disillusioned souls, celebrate a salvation in agape and eros or an eros that feels an

Worst Songs Ever: Stone Temple Pilots’s ‘Plush’

Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to