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Suicide Music
A teenage girl is found dead in her bedroom. The culprit? Emo, a death-obsessed youth subculture. But while some teens claim emo romanticizes mental illness, others call it therapy.
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Reading Between the Yard Lines
Sex and product placement in Big Sean’s “I Don’t Fuck With You” music video.
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Glory Days
When maintenance came to clean Jadwin Gymnasium on the morning of November 2, 1978, they found litter on the gym floor, broken glass, and gouges in the basketball court a quarter inch deep.
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Digging Dubstep Sellouts
At this point, hating Skrillex is so common that it’s no longer really possible to gain any cultural cred by expressing one’s disapproval for the musician. If anything, engaging in vocal hatred just establishes you as yet another member of three distinct groups. You might be part of the group of Skrillex disparagers made up…
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“Marry Me” St. Vincent
When Pitchfork asked Annie Clark, better known by her stage name St. Vincent, how she celebrated winning a Grammy for her self-titled album St. Vincent, she responded, “I just took a shower. [Laughs.] I’m having a coffee with cocoa.”
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Sex, Drugs, and American Dreams
The best song released last year, ILoveMakonnen’s “Club Goin’ Up on a Tuesday,” blooms in purgatory.
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Soul Music
Hundreds of people are crammed into a tiny room and the room is pulsating—not in a figurative, metaphorical sense, but literally. Bodies bounce against each other, arms and legs thrash out angularly, and heads bang in unison.
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Respecting Ms. Banks
Of the many things the singer Banks (the stage name of Jillian Banks) does well—and I think there are many—the thing she does best is cultivate her own vibe.
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Reborn in the USA
Campaigning for re-election in 1984, Ronald Reagan riled up a crowd in New Jersey by blasting Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song which sounds like a latter-day national anthem but which actually takes a critical stance on the Vietnam War and the state of American society left in its wake.
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The Radio Star Lives
It is after six o-clock pm, and the aisles of Shaw’s are bustling with last-minute dinner shoppers. Dodging throngs of gym-clothed soccer moms, I make for the produce section, unsure whether I’ll find “fresh ginger root” in a supermarket stocked with bulk cases of Lays’ chips and soda. I have been here for over an…
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Jackson Browne
I first got into Jackson Browne in that awkward phase of adolescence where nothing seems to really make sense and you’re caught between the comforts of youth and promise of adulthood.