Posts
- 11 April 2025
5 January 2025 (before the reunion): I put off getting into them for a while bc of the creepy stuff, but honestly knowing that stuff makes the lyrics more interesting and complex. Maybe Jesse’s apology post wasn’t up to many peoples’ standards but I feel like it’s really clear through many of the songs that he did feel bad about what he did/was doing. Lotta people will say you shouldn’t provide support at all but...
- 26 October 2021
That video games are or can be art has been justified many times over with examples such as Shadow of the Colossus, with its stunning visuals and atmospheric feel, or The Last of Us, with its riveting and emotional post-apocalyptic adventure. For me, though, the most outstanding example is not a 3D, triple-A action-adventure game, but an 8-bit RPG developed by one person with help from his friends—and which managed to become one of the...
- 7 August 2021
When people talk about the history of Cartoon Network programming, there’s two terms you’ll hear quite a bit: the Golden Age and the Revival. The former refers to the era of the Cartoon Cartoons, and runs from about 1996 to 2004. The latter began in 2010 with a rebranding (new logo, new slogan) and the premieres of Adventure Time and Regular Show. It’s not clear yet if that era is over or not, but at...
- 23 November 2020
I found Wheat by very strange means. The podcast Throwing Fits (at the time known by a different name) uses “Teenage Dirtbag” as its theme. The song is by the band Wheatus, and they had that band’s frontman, Brendan B. Brown, on the show. For whatever reason, I remembered that I had heard or seen somewhere of another band that was called simply “Wheat”, and decided to look it up. What I found is a...
- 8 June 2020
Parquet Courts’ Studio Albums, from Worst to Best Parquet Courts are one of my favorite bands of the 2010s, in no small part because they recall the best aspects of literate 90s bands like Pavement without sounding like mere imitators or revivalists. Over time their sound has evolved, but the strength of their songwriting and their general attitude haven’t changed a bit. (I’m not including their EPs, their debut cassette American Specialties, or their collaboration...
- 22 May 2020
I only just gave the 1975 a chance last year, because I’d dismissed them after being unimpressed with their SNL performance a few years prior, but I was roped in by Brief Inquiry. Since then I’d been anticipating the singles they’d been dropping, and wasn’t disappointed—with the run of “People”, “Frail State of Mind”, “Me & You Together Song” coming out sequentially, they couldn’t have made the upcoming album look more promising. The release of...
- 1 May 2020
I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of generations, but since I learned about a year ago that I’m not considered by most to be a millennial (I was born in 2000), I’ve been thinking a lot about how the currently recognized ones are defined. For a while I’ve theorized that there’s a generation in between millennials and “Gen Z”, spanning roughly 1997 to 2001, which I like to call Generation Delta. The idea emerged...
- 10 April 2020
I like the Strokes. If you’ve listened to my show, you may have heard me say that I think Is This It is objectively the best album of the 2000s, and I stand by that. Now of course, when someone says they “like the Strokes,” they mean the first two albums. Plenty of people probably don’t even know they’ve done anything since their second, Room On Fire. The camps are nowhere near as split as...