How ‘Rock Star’ Became a Business Buzzword
Carina Chocano | The New York Times Magazine
“Despite what his ‘Behind the Music’ episode would invariably reveal, a ‘rock star’—or the Platonic ideal of a rock star—was not just a powder keg of charisma and unresolved childhood issues, but a revolutionary driven by a need to assert the primacy of the self in an increasingly alienating commercial world.”
Who Got the Camera?: N.W.A.’s Embrace of “Reality,” 1988-1992
Eric Harvey | Pitchfork
“‘Fuck tha Police’ wasn’t provocation, but proxy: a stand-in for the millions of stifled screams wrenched from over-patrolled black neighborhoods nationwide. So maybe it was advocacy, but for catharsis, not the violence that Alerich and the FBI feared.”
Dating Will Never Die
Moira Weigel | The New Republic
“If there is one thing I have learned from combing through over a century of material about dating, it is this: People have been proclaiming that dating is about to die ever since it was invented. What intrigues me about these pieces is: Why does anyone still read them?”
The Modern Noir Has Atrophied (And It’s Not All True Detective’s Fault)
Angelica Jade Bastién | Vulture
“Noir’s shifts in part come down to one question: Whose story is being told? The dominant image of noir today is a white, male power fantasy, whether it be in positioning his brutality as badass in Drive, turning depravity into parody in Sin City, or the empty stylistic exercise of Looper.”