Entries associated with the tag "Media":

Is Straight Outta Compton really turning 20 years old next year?

LA Weekly is celebrating a little early, and has posted a cover story on N.W.A that they originally ran in May 1989. It's a portrait of a more innocent time, when wearing Raiders caps felt really badass, Ice Cube was rapping about Olde English instead of making movies about driving an SUV, and Eazy-E was throwing punches at doormen instead of being dead. It's also one of the only contemporary accounts of the group that approached their gangsta posturing with a healthy skepticism and an understanding of how show business works rather than simply swallowing their schtick and turning "OMG BLACK GUYS WITH GUNS" into feature-length copy.

The new issue of Spin showed up at my house today, and after giving it a cursory flip through I'd say it looks like the magazine has a serious boner—that's a journalism term—for the City of Chi right now. The Spin Mix lists Miss Alex White & the Red Orchestra's sugar-thrash treat "Squeaky Clean" and the bumping remix of Matt & Kim's "Yea Yeah" that Flosstradamus (described here as "DJ gremlins") did a little while back. A few pages later there's a picture of Kid Sister alongside a description that makes her come off as some sort of club gangsta rather than a fun-time lady who raps about getting her nails done. Then Office shows up with a full-page profile that's oddly focused on their drinking abilities. It's a full-on Chicago party up in there.

Just as I was thinking how weird it is that I've probably seen half of this month's Spin together in the same room, I got an e-mail alerting me that the Mannequin Men—local purveyors of "tight-pants swagger"—are today's band of the day at Spin.com. You can and should download the track "Boys" from their upcoming Fresh Rot here. (Full disclosure: I wrote the bio for Fresh Rot's press materials and those guys are my bros.)

I smell a "Chicago is the New Seattle Austin Portland Montreal New York" trend piece in our near future.

The bad news just came down the wire that Chicago-based politics and music journal Punk Planet is no more. The magazine's been on shaky ground ever since it ran into distributor-related financial problems in late 2005, but in an open letter on the Punk Planet Web site, editor/publisher Dan Sinker acknowledges that drop offs in ad revenue and subscribers finally did it in:

"[W]e could blame the Internet. It makes editorial content—and bands—easy to find, for free. (We're sure our fellow indie labels, those still standing, can attest to the difficulties created in the last few years.) We can blame educational and media systems that value magazines focused on consumerism over engaged dissent. And we can blame the popular but mistaken belief that punk died several years ago.

But it is also true that great things end, and the best things end far too quickly."

I'll admit that I haven't picked up an issue of PP in a while, but it was by far one of the biggest influences on my formative hardcore years, and the magazine's righteous fury in the lead-up to the 2000 presidential election still stands in my mind as a prime example of how passionate, effective, and emotionally moving political writing can be. 

Sinker says that punkplanet.com's forums and blogs will keep on keeping on as "a social networking site for independently minded folk," but I sort of prefer the image in my head of PP in magazine heaven, being pissed off among the angels.

Kevin Federline was by far the most popular costume at Halloween parties this weekend. Think about what that means: in 2006 Kevin Federline is actually more popular than Dracula. As a year-round fan of Dracula, I am disinclined to do anything to promote K-Fed, but then he went and dropped this surprisingly long combination autobiography-philosophical treatise in the New York Post, and I can't help myself. If you don't have the time to read it all, here are some of the choice quotes.

On finding his muse: "I started dancing a little bit when I was a teenager, when I was like 13. I quit when I was about 14. A lot of people, they were just like, 'Well.'"

On dancing for the opener on a Britney tour: "That was her tour -- opening up for my wife, in the future, that I had no idea about."

On the Britney and Kevin: Chaotic reality series: "[T]hat might have been a mistake. But then again, it might not have. I got a little piece of that."

On the media: "I honestly think the media is a give-and-take. It's not that I can say, 'Completely f - - k you.' I could just only say, 'Halfway f - - k you.'"

On his new album's message: "There's no real, like, message."

Long after we forget about Federline, I hope that everyone remembers that you can meet someone who you will be married to in the future and not even know it at the time, and I hope that the phrase "halfway fuck you" becomes an established swear form. Now, let's please get to the forgetting about Kevin Federline part.