Nate Haduch

Magdalena Bay, the Los Angeles-based pop duo made up of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, have shared a new single, “Death & Romance.” It’s their first official single since the release of 2021’s Mercurial World, though they’ve kept busy in the years since then with extracurriculars, including a deluxe edition of that album and one of their mini mixes.

Though Benny Blanco has been in the news lately because of his relationship with Selena Gomez, the producer is a prolific hitmaker who has worked on countless top-charting tracks. In an interview with Howard Stern to promote his new cookbook, the 36-year-old musician talked about the origin of “I’m Batman,” a song he, Ed Sheeran, and Lil Dicky wrote for 2017’s The Lego Batman Movie.

Moira Donegan: “OJ Simpson died the comfortable death in old age that Nicole Brown should have had.” He abused, stalked, terrorized, and then killed Nicole Brown & Ronald Goldman. Finally, a truthful obit of OJ.

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A Mastodon client for the Apple II. Yes, you read that right. It supports 2-factor auth!

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The MBTA is preparing to launch its long-delayed, billion-dollar fare collection system – and with it, a crew of “fare engagement officials” who will check whether subway and bus riders have paid their fares and cite those who have not.

January is traditionally a slow time for albums. Singles are another story; the beginning of the year can be a quite lucrative time for pop artists to drop their lead singles. Perhaps it’s the whole new-year-new-era thing. Perhaps it’s because a January single release sets up nicely the spring album release, then the summer album tour. But to illustrate: For over half of 2023, the #1 spot on the Hot 100 was occupied by either Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” or Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night,” both of which were released in January.

Max Martin has now produced the most #1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 as Ariana Grande’s “Yes, And?” debuts at the top of this week’s chart. Martin has produced 24 chart-toppers, beating out George Martin’s 23 (19 of those were with the Beatles).

Ryan Gosling getting an Oscar nom for Barbie while Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were snubbed… well, it looks like the plot of Barbie II is all set then.

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This week, Post Malone touched down in Oceania for the latest leg of his If Y’all Weren’t Here, I’d Be Crying tour. He had a proper show in Auckland, New Zealand on Tuesday, but over the weekend he hit up Danny Doolan’s Irish Pub and hopped on stage to perform with the bar’s house band.
Per TMZ, Posty hung out at the Auckland haunt for almost four hours. His time on stage included covers of Sublime’s “What I Got” and the Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).” (Last week, Kelly Clarkson also covered that Proclaimers song on her show.)
Watch some video of Post Malone below.

A couple months ago, Lana Del Rey was spotted in uniform behind the counter at a Waffle House, which naturally led to a viral moment when video of her seemingly working at the chain circulated around the internet. It happened during an extended stay in Florence, Alabama, where Lana was spotted at different places throughout the city. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she explained how it all came about. She was hanging out with her brother and sister, and had already been to that Waffle House a few times before when that video was taken.

Somerville small-business owners say they’ve been underwhelmed by customer and revenue growth resulting from new MBTA green line stations.

Vox talked to four television writers about how streaming and prestige TV have changed the financial picture for writers over the past 15 years, contributing to the writers strike that's been going on since early May.

Companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, and more have given consumers an unprecedented array of films and TV shows and opened the door to new voices that don't have to adhere to mainstream network formats. On the other hand, streaming has also changed how television gets produced, the role writers play, and how they get paid. We interviewed four television writers and showrunners about how streaming has changed how they work, how their incomes have taken a hit, and why it has become harder than ever to build a career.

Tags: business · movies · TV · video

You can’t top the residents of Cottage Street in Cambridgeport for colorful creativity, even if you drive over the evidence: a mural painted on the roadway.

This is great: The Cut asked 100 people to scream as loud as they could in front of a camera. For some, it was cathartic while others found it uncomfortable. Some folks didn't know how to scream which I don't entirely understand?

This video reminded me a lot of Ten Meter Tower, one of my all-time favorite short documentaries, in which dozens of people are filmed jumping from a 10-meter diving platform for the first time. Both videos deal with inner vs. outer selves and people's comfort with expressing vulnerability. (via colossal)

Tags: video

If you’re into guitar pedals, then you might have seen Fender’s recently released (and first-ever) signature fuzz, which is based on what Kevin Shields uses in My Bloody Valentine. This limited release contained only 700 pedals worldwide, and each came with a signed booklet and a fancy cardboard box. (If you want more specs and pricing, Guitar Bomb has them.) Anyway, turns out there’s also an Easter Egg / Golden Ticket inside 100 of these pedals: a USB thumb drive with an exclusive piece of music from Shields himself.

In recent months, one of the big topics of speculation — both in the music business and everywhere else — has been the rise of artificial intelligence. The increasing sophistication of those AI tracks has been a source of anxiety for many of artists, but Grimes has gone galaxy-brain and apparently embraced the new development, as well as the death of all copyright.

As you no doubt heard via social media, Coachella attendees were less than pleased with Frank Ocean’s Sunday night set after the long-awaited performance started an hour late and was ultimately cut short. Now, TheFestiveOwl and TMZ are reporting that Ocean had suffered a serious ankle injury after being involved in a bike accident on the festival grounds, which apparently forced a change to his production.

Yo La Tengo performed in drag at their show in Nashville on Monday night in protest of the recently passed Tennessee law that restricts drag performances in public. As The Tennessean reports, the band’s Ira Kaplan and James McNew came out dressed in drag during the second half of their set at the Basement East.

*sigh* I get it. I get why people are so enthused about this Jon Stewart video. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a clip from Stewart’s show on Apple+ where he’s debating a Second Amendment purist gun nut who also happens to be a state senator from one of the states that’s trying to take away health care, reproductive rights, and persecute/prosecute LGBTQ+ people for daring to exist in public — basically a real “rights for me but not for thee” dickbag.

Anyway, I guess it’s fun to see Stewart dismantle this guy but arguing with a dimwitted ideologue in this manner is like that old saying: “What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig? You both get all over muddy…and the pig likes it.” Conservatives in America want what they want and don’t care about the arguments against it or facts or consensus or bipartisan anything. They only care about their radical ideology and their constituents who agree with them (and their constituents who don’t can go fuck themselves, I guess). In fact, they welcome arguments because it wastes the time and energy of people who would argue with them and they can’t lose because they don’t care about facts and they increasingly have no shame. See also Can You Really ‘Back The Blue’ If You’re Weak on Guns? from the same show.

Anyway, anyway, anyway…it’s gonna be a fun Monday here I guess.

Tags: guns   Jon Stewart   politics   TV   video

The cover story of the current issue of New York magazine is a collection of tips, rules, and etiquette for how to behave in contemporary society (ok, urban east coast society). It’s a good list for the most part, if unnecessarily provocative in places — gotta sell those magazines and rile up whoever remains on Twitter. I snipped out several of the rules and gently annotated them with my opinionated thoughts below. Just like bloggers used to do in the olden days. Quaint!

6. Never wake up your significant other on purpose, ever.

And don’t turn on the lights when they’re asleep. Jet-lagged and want to talk? Don’t do it. Think someone is coming in to kill you? Work it out yourself.

Huh? I think it’s the “ever” that bugs me here. Don’t get me wrong, I love my sleep and if I don’t get 7-8 solid hours, I’m more or less worthless the next day. But if you actually need me at 3am, by all means, wake me up. (I feel like the person who wrote this doesn’t have children? Getting woken up in the middle of the night is de rigueur w/ kids around, so your partner rousing you in the middle of the night bc they’re, for instance, having a panic attack or are sick & wondering if they need to go to the ER not only isn’t a big deal but is part of the reason you’ve partnered up in the first place.)

27. The proper response to being told something you already know isn’t “I know.” It’s “You’re right.”

I would like to tattoo this on my son’s arm for reference; I hear “I know” from him like 90 times a day when what he really means is, “That’s right” or “Thanks for the reminder”.

30. When casually asked how you are, say “Good!”

It’s neutral and doesn’t force someone to endure a trauma dump or a spiel on how “the world is up in flames.”

I have some trouble with this one. Even when the grocery store cashier is just being polite, I sometimes answer them like my therapist is asking.

33. If you bring up astrology and it isn’t met enthusiastically, change the topic.

Not everyone believes in your made-up star bullshit.

“Made-up star bullshit”: thank you. Religion too. But this probably goes for anything — if your conversational partner isn’t digging it, move along to something else.

47. Listening is not the time for you to silently rehearse what you want to say next.

We can see your eyes glazing over.

I know what they’re trying to get at here — listening, really listening, is important! — but this isn’t great advice for folks who aren’t neurotypical… Some people simply cannot participate in conversations without being extremely in their own heads about how to respond to what is being said, especially when they don’t know their convo partner well.

50. If your burger is becoming a salad, your restaurant-order modifications have gone too far.

You’re allowed to ask for things based on allergies and preferences. But when your dish transforms into another dish, you’re a problem.

Yes, exactly. This is the dunderheaded “the customer is always right” run amok.

59. The correct number of slices of pizza to order for a group of X people is 2X + X/3.

Any fewer is for misers; any more risks catatonia. N.B.: This rule holds for “classic” New York-style pizza.

I’d never heard this rule of thumb before. Let’s see if it checks out. For 3 people, you’d get 7 slices. For 8 people, you’d get 19 slices. Everyone gets two slices, plus one out of three people gets an extra slice. I feel like this might fail sometimes with smaller groups but with larger ones, things will tend to average out more (some ppl will eat more, some less).

78. Don’t talk about a movie when leaving the theater.

You never know who might overhear you raving about the big twist or panning an actor’s overhyped performance. At a certain point, people have to accept that they’re going to hear spoilers for the film, but not three minutes before seeing it.

Yes! I am always very quiet when leaving the theater, aside from non-specific utterances like, “that was great!” It’s easy to wait like 30 seconds for when you make it to your car or out on the street.

83. Go on, take the last bite.

Nobody wants to be the person who swipes that lone, lingering croquette or slurps down the final oyster from a communal seafood tower. Are you selfish? A glutton? All of the above? No. You are sparing everyone — your guests, yourself, your server — from the limbo of leaving one last bite on a shared plate. Letting something sit on the table uneaten while the bussers wonder whether they should clear the dish: That’s not polite. It’s annoying. Eat the food! That’s why it’s there.

Oh man. As a midwesterner who went to sooooo many potlucks and church picnics as a kid, this has been a tough habit to shake — taking the last morsel of something might as well be a felony in some parts of rural Wisconsin. But I’ve learned that if you’re paying attention (which is the key to many points of etiquette), you can tell when it’s alright to take the final bite of something, when to leave it for someone else, and when to urge someone you noticed enjoying a particular dish to grab the last bit of it.

94. It’s okay to email, text, or DM anyone at any hour.

There’s nothing worse than being woken up at 2:30 a.m. with a dumb text or a Slack notification. So why did you do that to yourself? Phones and computers have great tools now to manage your time away, including setting working hours and muting types of notifications. We’re responsible for which flashing lights and noises we let into our lives. Because of that, anyone should feel free to text a friend or message a co-worker at any hour. We can’t successfully move into the future unless we recognize that the onus is on the receiver, not the sender.

No. I get that other people’s notification strategies should not be your problem, but sending work-related emails and messages at all hours may generate a corresponding pressure in recipients to be awake to respond to them and normalizes the sense that you should be on the clock 24/7/365, which is no way at all to live and should be discouraged at every turn.

108. Don’t try to help a stranger parallel park.

People should be allowed the grace to park alone without being perceived. If you are walking down the street and see that a stranger is parallel parking, avert your eyes. “What if they need my help?” you ask. You are allowed to help only if you are directly and explicitly asked to by the driver. Otherwise, keep walking — it’s what’s best for everyone.

Yes! This is related to a current pet peeve of mine here in VT: people who wave at you or flash their lights for you to turn across traffic in front of them, even though you don’t have the right of way. I get why people do this: traffic is “heavy”, they have a clearer view of oncoming traffic than you do, and/or they are trying to be nice. But in reality, it creates a dangerous situation for you: you feel rushed into accepting their offer of help and move into the intersection before you’ve checked if it’s safe. Or someone behind them gets antsy and passes them on the right and suddenly they’re in the intersection when you’re pulling out. It’s just safer and better if everyone just takes their turn when they have the right of way.

111. It’s perfectly fine to walk through someone’s scene.

Whether it’s Marty Scorsese or someone filming an outfit-of-the-day TikTok, they don’t own the sidewalk.

Absolutely. Especially with people on busy streets taking photos with digital cameras, just walk in front of them…they can always take another one.

139. Post like the wind.

On Instagram, where best practices are unspoken but nearly universal, the conventional wisdom is that you should post on your main feed no more than once a day. Infrequent posting is perfectly in line with Instagram’s social mechanisms — it maximizes likes on each post, prioritizes the consumer, and lends itself to a tasteful, optimized feed where only the best-of-the-best pics make the cut. But if you’re going to participate in social media, the only way to have any fun with it is by consciously defying the incentives it dangles in front of you. Post excessively, indulgently, tastelessly. Maybe even take some shots with the in-app camera and post them as-is (it only seems unimaginable because you’re not thinking big enough). The curated photo-dump carousel, polite and unintrusive, is dead; posting 15 individual photos to your main grid in one day is what freedom feels like.

Ha, I like this advice! But I do not do it. Curators gonna curate, so my social media is pretty metered and controlled and all that jazz. Gonna think about letting loose a bit more often.

140. Don’t post RIPs for celebrities.

“Only the most moronic amongst us post photos of famous people seconds after they die,” Keith McNally recently wrote on Instagram. “It’s not a form of respect for the dead, but an attempt to sycophantically associate themselves with the famous. It’s their 15 minutes of fame, the necrophiliac bastards.” We tend to agree: Unless David Crosby was your actual uncle, or cousin, or whatever, refrain.

Huh? No. The public displays by strangers of remembrance, condolence, and, yes, even grief in the wake of a beloved celebrity’s death is one of the best things about social media. What this point should have been instead: If the dead were monstrous, go ahead and speak ill of them after they die. When Dick Cheney finally goes, I want to hear all about how he helped fuck America up for decades to come, please and thank you.

Tags: how to   lists

A move toward using cameras to enforce parking laws, with tickets mailed later, is underway by Somerville’s City Council, starting in Davis Square trouble spots.

Daniel Lopatin, the synth wizard better known to most of us as Oneohtrix Point Never, has a great running partnership with the filmmaking brother Benny and Josh Safdie. Lopatin scored their movies Good Time and Uncut Gems, and his tense and pulsing scores helped turn both of them into modern classics. Right now, Lopatin is working on a new TV series with Benny Safdie, and he’s got some unexpected help.

Last night, Metallica hosted their third annual All Within My Hands Foundation benefit concert at the Microsoft Theater in LA. The night featured several highlights, including the live debut of Metallica’s new single “Lux Æterna,” from their upcoming studio LP, 72 Seasons (arriving on April 14). There were also acoustic covers of Thin Lizzy’s “Borderline” and UFO’s “It’s Killing Me.” Later in the evening, Metallica brought out St. Vincent (who memorably covered “Sad But True” last year) to help play on “Nothing Else Matters,” while San Francisco multi-instrumentalist Avi Vinocur guested on “All Within My Hands.”

It’s here, it’s here! David Erhlich’s annual 25 best films of the year video for 2022 is here. Every year around this time, I get a little down about the movies. There’s nothing to seeeeee… And then I watch Erhlich’s 17-minute love letter to cinema and I want to see ever-ry-thing. The only complaint I have is that Everything Everywhere All at Once is not rated highly enough (a respectable #3 but not #1).

Erhlich has been doing these recaps since 2012 — you can find them all here or almost all of them at kottke.org with my commentary.

Tags: best of   best of 2022   David Ehrlich   lists   movies

Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose has pledged to end his longstanding tradition of tossing microphones into the crowd after he accidentally hit a woman in the face on Tuesday night at the Adelaide Oval. “He took a bow and then he launched the microphone out to the crowd … and then bang, right on the bridge of my nose,” Rebecca Howe told the Adelaide Advertiser after the incident occurred during the band’s last song, “Paradise City.”

In 2022, we couldn’t agree on anything. That statement probably applies more generally, but in this case, we’re talking about the Stereogum staff and the year’s best music. It’s never easy to put together a list of the year’s best music, especially when you’re dealing with a small crew of passionate writer types. Sometimes, though, a few overwhelming favorites emerge immediately. Sometimes, massive and generation-defining albums announce themselves in obvious fashion. That didn’t really happen this year. Instead, this year’s best albums tended to be passion projects — not just for the musicians who made the records but also for the critics who advocated for those records.

In the pantheon of slain Americans who have furthered the civil rights of a marginalized group is Rita Hester, an African American transgender woman.

London’s premier festival for alternative sounds is back in Brockwell Park next year, and they’ve just announced a ridiculously good new wave of acts for the 2023 lineup. Joining the already-announced likes of Gilla Band and OSEES at Wide Awake will be hyperpop genius Caroline Polachek, leftfield techno wizard Daniel Avery, pioneering producer Oneohtrix Point Never and experimental club artist Shygirl. It’s all happening on 27 May 2023 in South London. Tickets are on sale right now.

Wide Awake has been a real highlight of the festival calendar for us since its inception – read our review of 2021 event here, and view an exclusive photo gallery from the 2022 edition here.

Here’s the lineup (so far) in full:

Caroline Polachek / Daniel Avery / Oneohtrix Point Never / OSEES / Shygirl / Ty Segall / Arooj Aftab / Coucou Chloe / Gilla Band / Jockstrap / Joy Orbison / Molchat Doma / Sunset Rollercoaster / VTSS / A Place To Bury Strangers / Blondshell / Butch Cassidy / Enumclaw / Erol Alkan / Glass Beams / Habibi Funk / Lebanon Hanover / Madmadmad / Naima Bock / Optimo (Espacio) / Σtella / The Bug Club / The Underground Youth

Photography by Luke Dyson

Matty Healy, leader of the 1975, achieved pop-heartthrob status many years ago, and he’s often sought to actively subvert that role. Last month, the 1975 released Being Funny In A Foreign Language, a pop album that’s considerably more straightforward than most of their recent offerings. But that doesn’t mean that Matty Healy has moved past weirdo antics. Last night, as the 1975 played New York’s Madison Square Garden, Healy ate what appeared to be an entire raw steak while groping himself.