I was thrilled to return to the terrific left-wing podcast Delete Your Account for another wide-ranging chat about pop culture in a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode! I joined co-hosts Roqayah Chamseddine and Kumars Salehi to talk about Janelle Monae, Westworld, Kanye West, Game of Thrones, Beyoncé & Jay Z, Solo & Star Wars, Roseanne, Drake vs. Pusha T, and much more. Go and subscribe and listen!

26. ‘Wet Hot American Summer’ (2001)

Meet the only film on this (or any other) list in which a deranged Vietnam veteran played by Law & Order: SVU’s Christopher Meloni learns valuable life lessons from a talking can of vegetables that can suck its own dick. (“And I do it a lot.”) With a gaggle of alums from the influential sketch comedy group the State both in front of and behind the camera – and a cast of soon-to-be superstars including Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks and Paul Rudd – this send-up of raunchy Reagan-era teen comedies has an anything-for-a-laugh approach that actually gets laughs every time. This one-time cult curiosity has since spawned two Netflix spinoff series … as well as a legendary DVD audio commentary track that just adds extra fart sounds.

I contributed a pair of write-ups to Rolling Stone’s list of the best comedies of the century so far, featuring the usual murderers’ row of writers. Enjoy!

I was so happy to speak to Bryan Quinby of the terrific left-wing podcast Street Fight in one of their many, many patreon-only bonus shows! Bryan and I are so sympatico that it’s crazy. We discuss criticism, TV, metal, wrestling, how cool Marilyn Manson and Korn were, you name it, for two hours. Absolutely worth the subscription!

9. Yaz, “Only You” (Season 3, Episode 4) / Pink Floyd, unspecified (Season 3, Episode 6)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPpHLK4SHt8

The Ballad(s) of Jim and Kimmy. Along with Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac, and Roxy Music (don’t touch that dial, music fans!), Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet’s synth-soul duo Yaz — that’s Yazoo to us Yanks — were one of The Americans’ go-to artists. They were never employed better than when poor infatuated teenager Kimmy Breland played the group’s gorgeous love song “Only You” to “Jim,” the hipster weed-dealer alter ego Philip employs to gain access to her CIA father’s house. Sweet but never saccharine, it suits the dancing-in-the-moonlight ambience of the scene perfectly.

“Jim” returns the favor a few episodes later, with a truly brilliant non-music cue: Placing headphones on the ears of a very stoned Kimmy, he plays her an unnamed song by Pink Floyd, the mind-expanding beauty of which we’re left to imagine through watching the blissed-out expressions on the face of actor Julia Garner, then 21 and already a formidable talent. The heart of Kimmy and Jim’s relationship was a dark one, and it only got darker when she returned for the final season. But in these two scenes, Kimmy’s need to be acknowledged and understood, Philip’s desire to do right by a teenage girl while failing his own, and the power of music to transport and delight shine through anyway.

Combining three beats I love—The Americans, pop music, and the use of music by TV dramas—I wrote about the best music cues in the show’s history for Vulture.

Today new interviews came out with both Julian Casablancas (ex The Strokes) and Jack White (ex The White Stripes) in which they said a variety of dopey things. Because of this, half of my twitter timeline took victory laps about how they never liked the Strokes and the White Stripes, that the Strokes and the White Stripes were never good, and so on. It’s a low-grade version of how people fall all over themselves to announce that they always hated the work of the latest man to be exposed as a sexual predator, and it’s just as goofy here as it is there.

I understand the compulsion to seize any available opportunity to advertise your distaste for a passionately disliked artist. Couple that with the catharsis of dunking on people who’ve revealed themselves as fools or creeps under any circumstances and it’s like you’re playing socio-critical tee-ball. But in every case, this unspoken logic behind these comments is that only fools and creeps can make shitty art, and you had the perspicacity to see through the act from the start. It’s a totem wielded against the nerve-wracking uncertainty involved in investing your time and energy and emotions in art, a field in which being a smart person, being a good person, and being a good artist often have little to do with one another.

I’ve disliked a lot of art made by people who turned out to be pretty awful; Louis CK is the most obvious example here. But I also love, and continue to love, a lot of art made by such people as well, though I don’t love the people themselves. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed to learn that other artists I love are awful people in the future. And god knows that any number of artists I both love and hate are doofuses. (One of the “I never liked them anyway!” comments I saw about the Strokes and the White Stripes unfavorably compared them to Britney Spears; I like a lot of her music too, but is the implication here supposed to be that she’s never done or said anything unfortunate or asinine?) I’m hard pressed to think of a single case in which my feelings about their work and the truth about them as people had a connection I sussed out years in advance, and therefore now deserve to crow about publicly. Critics, of all people, should know better.

Best: “Streets of Philadelphia” (‘Philadelphia,’ 1993)

Like “Shaft” shaking up the saccharine sounds of the 1970s, Bruce Springsteen’s sad, sparse contribution to the soundtrack of Jonathan Demme’s AIDS-crisis drama Philadelphia is a bracing break from the Best Song norm of its era. The lyrics are one the Boss’s most haunting portrayals of loneliness and abandonment (“I was bruised and battered, I couldn’t tell what I felt / I was unrecognizable to myself”); he recorded the song alone in his home studio with a synthesizer and a drum machine, and you can hear the isolation in every note. (The only down side to the song’s victory: Neil Young’s even more devastating contribution to Demme’s movie, titled “Philadelphia,” had to lose.)

Worst: “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” (‘The Lion King,’ 1994)

It didn’t have to be this way. When Disney’s big animated comeback The Little Mermaid upended the Eighties’ string of Top 40 Best Song winners in 1989, it did so not with a ballad (although “Part of Your World” is one of the studio’s best) but with the calypso jam “Under the Sea.” Beginning with 1991’s Oscar for “Beauty and the Beast,” though, the category became a cartoon-ballad free-for-all, with live-action winners mostly following suit. The result is one of the dreariest, schmaltziest runs in the award’s history, and they don’t come much goopier than Elton John and Tim Rice’s love song for lions. Pro tip: “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” is twice as long but about 40 times as awesome.

I had a grand old time writing about the best and worst Best Song Oscar winners of all time for Rolling Stone. These kinds of pieces are a blast to write, since you get to cover so much territory and study how values change over time.

It’s 2018 and Fischerspooner have returned after a nine-year absence as an in-studio supergroup. Sure, why not? The group began as the performance-art project of frontman Casey Spooner and co-writer/producer Warren Fischer before finding surprising success as electroclash’s signature act. That genre’s celebration of artifice, coupled with the suspicion that it was all an art-school lark, created a mountain of critical skepticism that Fischerspooner have had a hard time surmounting ever since. Yet of their three previous albums, two displayed tremendous proficiency in the booth: #1, from 2002, remains a sexy, sleazy snapshot of its time and place, while 2005’s Odyssey convincingly refashioned their sound into muscular electro-rock. They really only blew it with the rickety dance pop of 2009’s Entertainment, and as another great prefab star once sang, two out of three ain’t bad.

For their comeback, Spooner and Fischer have joined forces with (among others) Chairlift vocalist Caroline Polachek, Beyoncé and Run the Jewels collaborator Boots, Saddle Creek Records’ in-house sound wizard Andy LeMaster, pop superstardom’s go-to engineer and mixer Stuart White, and freaking Michael Stipe. Speaking of comebacks, Stipe’s writing and production on the record constitute his first major musical outing since the dissolution of R.E.M.following 2011’s Collapse Into Now. As if in homage to the formation of this alt/indie/R&B Justice League, Spooner sculpted himself into a superhero’s physique, though with his long hair and soup-strainer mustache he looks less Marvel Studios and more like a human mash-up of the Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott characters from Road House. But the transformation has more to do with Spooner’s mid-life embrace of his own sexuality, which he addresses throughout the record with more candor and unapologetic lust than ever before. In fact, Stipe turns out to have been Spooner’s first boyfriend, way back in 1988, providing Sir with a juicy backstory to match all its attention-getting musical collaborations and stylistic shifts.

Where does all this behind-the-scenes stuff get us? You can find out in my review of Fischerspooner’s new album Sir for Pitchfork. I’ve loved Fischerspooner since (before?) their first album came out, so writing a number-graded review of their new work was a difficult task for me. I’m still not sure how I feel about doing that.

It’s no slight against Impossible Star, the first album by electronica innovator Jack Dangers’ Meat Beat Manifesto in nearly a decade, to begin this review by outsourcing it to another critic: my six-year-old daughter. “My favorite part is that it doesn’t just sound like one thing,” she said after listening to the album on a lengthy car ride. “Some songs are creepy, some songs are funky. I like that.” Who could disagree? The delights of a good Meat Beat record—a magpie approach to collecting sounds, combined with a tasteful precision in arranging and deploying them—are apparent even to a child’s ears, and Impossible Star is a very good Meat Beat record indeed.

I reviewed Meat Beat Manifesto’s fine new album for Pitchfork. Such a delight to return to MBM’s sound after all these years, and such a pleasure to get to talk about them for p4k. (I was also pleased to be a part of my daughter’s critical debut.)

A holiday gift for you from Boiled Leather! Sean proudly presents a surprise collection of music from the Boiled Leather Audio Hour and the Boiled Leather Audio Moment — full-length versions of our opening and closing themes by composer Kevin MacLeod, plus 17 superb songs from across the musical spectrum that Sean threw on the podcasts just because he felt like it. Enjoy, and we’ll see you this time next year for Vol. 2!

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

LISTEN ON SOUNDCLOUD

2. The Young Pope: “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO

“Sexy and I Know It” is Paolo Sorrentino’s ambitious, emotional, confrontational series about an autocratic American-born pope in miniature. Granted, using LMFAO to represent your drama about faith, loneliness, power, corruption, and lies is a bit counterintuitive compared to, say, summing up Twin Peaks with a song from the Twin Peaks score. That’s the joke, in part: It’s very stupid, and therefore very funny, to watch the Holy Father dress up for his first address to the College of the Cardinals while Redfoo drawls about wearing a Speedo at the beach so he can work on his ass tan. Girl, look at that body … of Christ?!

But like so much of The Young Pope, there’s a much deeper and more serious meaning beneath the craziness and camp. To wit, the brand of tyrannical, uncompromising religion the pontiff formerly known as Lenny Belardo (Jude Law) embraces depends on craziness and camp. Look at the obscene decadence of his subsequent entrance to the Sistine Chapel, borne on a litter like an emperor of old. Listen to his megalomaniacal speech, demanding that the Church remake itself in his bizarre and imperious image. Watch how he demands his followers demonstrate their obedience by literally kissing his feet. It’s a contrast to the self-aware silliness of “Sexy and I Know It,” yes, but it’s a contrast achieved by taking that song’s boasts as deadly serious claims to superiority. He’s got passion in his pants and he ain’t afraid to show it. Spiritually speaking, anyway.

I wrote about the 10 best music cues on TV this year for Vulture. As is always the case with lists of this nature when I write them, it is objectively right and I shall brook no dissent.

Moment 12 | Velvet Goldmine

a new Halloween mix for 2017

plus a revised edition of the original Black Friday mix from 2014

Download links:

2014 / 2017

Tracklisting in the lyrics medatada

Let it surprise you

“An end to foreign invasions. An end to borders. The total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex. Healthcare, housing, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right. The expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again.” Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s demands are firm, but, you know, fucking fair.

These demands come attached to a press release for the band’s new album, Luciferian Towers—a title that recalls the fiery horror that befell London’s Grenfell Tower and the gruesome class inequity that disaster exposed just weeks before the album was announced. Song titles include “Anthem for No State” and “Bosses Hang.” Fire courses through the “context” provided by the band in a press release: “We recorded it all in a burning motorboat.” “The wind is whistling through all 3,000 of its burning window-holes!” “The forest is burning and soon they’ll hunt us like wolves.” By the sound of it, post-rock’s most overtly political and unapologetically powerful band seems ready to toss the ravenous zombie corpse of neoliberalism on the pyre for good and all.

Seen in that infernal light, the sound of Luciferian Towers is the last thing you’d expect. The pulverizing, prophet-of-doom riffs that characterized Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! and Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, the band’s previous two albums, are gone. So are the six-to-ten-minute stretches of drone—the anxious calm before those records’ storms. Ominous field recordings—a one-time Godspeed sonic standby, already pared down to a minimum on Allelujah! and eliminated entirely on Asunder—are again nowhere to be found. The album barely even hits minor-key territory until six tracks in, before resolving the melody into a more uplifting mode within a couple of minutes. If you’re looking for Lucifer, search elsewhere.

I reviewed Luciferian Towers, the new album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, for Pitchfork.

You don’t have to pay attention to Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△. In fact, I’d go so far as to make that an order: Do notpay attention to Anthology Resource. This album of ambient music and soundscapes from the astonishing third season of “Twin Peaks,” by the show’s music and sound supervisor Dean Hurley, will frustrate focused attempts at listening. Passages feel overlong and repetitive, despite 11 of the collection’s 18 compositions clocking in at two minutes or less. Moments of beauty and terror burst out of the murk, only to dissipate with aggravating speed. Hurley’s airy electronic tones conjure up a sense of space so distinct you can practically see it, as titles like “Weighted Room / Choral Swarm,” “Tube Wind Dream,” “Interior Home by the Sea,” and “Forest / Interior” make clear. Yet the effect of sitting and listening intently to song after song is like looking through a window at these strange new worlds, only for someone to abruptly close the blinds on you over and over.

Here’s the thing, though: So what?

I reviewed the first of this season’s Twin Peaks soundtrack/score albums, Dean Hurley’s Anthology Resource Vol. 1 △△, for Pitchfork. It’s a roundabout way for me to talk about Transcendental Meditation, too.

At this point, this willingness to let songs do the heavy lifting is an endemic problem for television. Westworld, Legion, Stranger Things, you name it: They can all take advantage of labels and artists who no longer have record sales to fall back on and must capitalize on any and all other available revenue streams by licensing pretty much any song they choose. I just want them to choose wisely.

I closed my review of Ozark’s fourth episode for Decider by ranting and raving about its lamely unimaginative use of the Rolling Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” from Casino, but the rest of the episode was surprisingly good.

The EP’s final track is both the strongest and strangest. “The Background World” appears to be a slinky electronic groove that might conclude a big-budget Hollywood thriller, serving the same function as Moby’s “Extreme Ways” in the Bourne movies, or Reznor and Ross’ cover of Bryan Ferry’s “Is Your Love Strong Enough?” with their frequent collaborator (and Reznor’s wife) Mariqueen Maandig in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Yet the lyrics are bluntly bereft of sequel-ready optimism: “There is no moving past/There is no better place/There is no future point in time/We will not get away.” Reznor’s detractors tend to mock this sort of sentiment, but in the year of our Lord 2017, who’s laughing now?

The song’s formal moments are even more intimidating. It repeats the same awkwardly edited instrumental snippet—a brief empty hiccup separating each iteration—over fifty times. Seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds of the song’s eleven minute, forty-four-second runtime are eaten up as the segment plays out over and over, each new version a degraded facsimile of the last, until only static remains of the original riff and rhythm. Like an image run through a Xerox machine until it’s no longer recognizable, this makes Reznor’s Hesitation Marks–era worry that he’s just “a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a” legitimate entity real and audible. Its audaciousness would make David Lynch himself proud. As Reznor promises additional work to come in the near future, it gives his listeners reason to hope, no matter how hopeless he himself becomes.

I reviewed the new Nine Inch Nails record for Pitchfork. Proud to be covering this band for this site in this way.

A good chorus can put a whole lot of questions to bed—about a song, about a band, about a reason to get up in the morning, you name it. Fleetwood Mac, whose catalog is so festooned with world-bestriding hits that they can do a best-of reunion tour and leave “Sara” and “Hold Me” off the setlist, know this better than just about any other band. Their colossal pop collaborations kept them together through years of intense interpersonal turmoil and full decades of cordial détente. Like, in the grand scheme of things, is it really that big a deal if you left your bass-player husband for the light guy if the result is “You Make Loving Fun”?

Which brings us to the curious case of Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, a Fleetwood Mac album in all but name—and the conspicuous absence of the third member of the band’s songwriting trinity. Ending what seemed like a permanent departure from the band, keyboardist and vocalist McVie returned to the fold in 2014 for a massive tour. After it wrapped, she and guitarist/vocalist/production whiz Buckingham headed back to the studio together for the first time in well over a decade, with drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie joining them. As for Stevie Nicks, well: “What we do is go on the road, do a ton of shows and make lots of money. We have a lot of fun. Making a record isn’t all that much fun.”

Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie feels like a retort to Nicks’ statement. For McVie, the return to the band has been creatively invigorating as well as financially lucrative (Nicks herself gets that, facetiously describing McVie’s only other alternative to heading back to the studio: “‘Now I’m just gonna go back to London and sit in my castle for two years?’ She wanted to keep working”); Buckingham’s a born striver who kills time between tours by adding guitar texture to Nine Inch Nails records. Going on the road and making money is “what we do”? The pair’s collaboration feels like a “speak for yourself” in album form. To paraphrase a Rumours classic, they’ll make recording fun!

I reviewed the new album by bonafide pop-rock geniuses Lindsey Buckingham & Christine McVie for Pitchfork. It’s definitely fun, just not fundamental.

I wonder if that longevity has something to do with another key element of the book — that The Beatles were “a pop group” and “a rock band,” and you talk about them as both.

Sheffield: The fact that they play in both of those leagues is one of the really weird things about them. There’s something utopian about the way they float over that distinction. Their original concept of “rock and roll,” which is what they called it when they were just starting out — it’s amazing how expansive it was. They were really into playing blues, R&B, country, American rockabilly, corny cheesy show tunes, upscale New York professional-songcraft stuff like Goffin and King, girl-group stuff.

It was controversial, even at the time when they were playing in Liverpool. Paul has this funny story in his book about how the other Liverpool bands thought The Beatles were good at playing blues covers, and that it was lame that they wanted to play pop stuff. Mick Jagger was saying, “We were blues purists. We like pop stuff, but we would never do it onstage.” But [Motörhead singer and bassist] Lemmy talked about seeing The Beatles at the Cavern Club, and he was like, “That’s the most ferocious live band I’ve ever seen.” The idea of a 16-year-old Lemmy going to the Cavern for the lunchtime show, and all these office girls who are there with their hair in rollers, dancing around their handbags.

It’s funny that the definitions of rock and pop became more exclusive and narrow-minded since then. The Beatles were beyond that from the beginning. Their conception of rock and roll was so wide-ranging and so imaginative that there was something revolutionary about it. They would try playing anything new: Motown, Carl Perkins, The Music Man, all on the same record or in the same set. They were very self-consciously provocative about that. Even [girl groups like] the Marvelettes or the Shirelles or the Chiffons. [The Beatles] liked singing in that girl-group style of vocals together. Like, no, The Rolling Stones did not do that.

It’s my great pleasure to make my MTV News debut by interviewing Rob Sheffield about his tremendous new book Dreaming the Beatles, the best thing about the band I’ve ever read. It sidesteps the canonicity argument completely and talks about how the Beatles’ presence in pop culture didn’t just end with their amazing eight-year run, but continued to grow and change and get even bigger among different groups of kids and musicians every decade since. Absolutely stellar work, and I’m so glad I got to pick Rob’s brain about it.