…the way that people have written and talked about the searing physical images of her recent performances—her sinewy muscles and berserk movements and haphazardly-scrunchied hair—suggest that she’s providing [an unexpected jolt of humanness in the ever-churning, willfully plastic cultural machine], that she's a savior for those who need one (and, to be sure, not all of us do) from these airbrush’d, cyborg’d, sea-punk’d times. Because the wild physicality of these performances reminds us of our own muscle and bone.

Our consciousness and memory are moving into the ether, so the need for our senses is diminished. And the interface for this transformation turned out to be text.

We can decline. We can change our patterns. Identity is far deeper than any of these labels and habits. We are not what we do, or even how we do it or why. We are what we feel. Identity is in the surge when you recognize unverifiable truth, or the pang when something snaps that you can't see, or the way you know that you love something you'd never even contemplated. We are not the sum of our fears or our atrophies or our helplessnesses, we are the product of our hopes and our surprise and our inexplicable instincts. We are broken as a test; we are repaired as a challenge. We contain divinity and infinity and infamy. We are beautiful under these terrible layers and clothes, in motion where we sit, warm in these climes, improvised in panic. We can walk away from the stories they're trying to sell us, and write our own. If they hang on us, we can throw them off. If they pursue us, we can run.

A great, short profile directed by Spike Jonze

This piecemeal patchwork of tracks hangs together amazingly well as a front-to-back album.

A dozen years after its release, Fevers & Mirrors, Bright Eyes' defining LP, is reissued by Saddle Creek, along with 2002's There Is No Beginning to the Story EP.

The ability to use “white” to mean “middle-class” to such an overwhelming extent that you actually start to misidentify people—all so that race itself, not class or background or culture or manner, can still remain the difference, the Other. There’s an odd habit here.

His homemade philosophy is such that he can just wander around trying to be honest and respectful of others, and how they react to that effort is entirely their problem, not his. This is why no pockets of ickiness in the audience reaction feel particularly sad.

Connecting the dots between Fatboy Slim and Skrillex.

Readability has no right collecting money in my name without my consent. Now, realistically, I have given Readability consent by signing up — but what about other publishers that have not only not signed up, but have actively chosen to not sign up? Is it still OK for Readability to be collecting money in their name? I think not. But how do you solve this problem? I don’t know, but it is a very real problem.

Nicki employs street hardness as a signifier of how great she is at rapping, not as an attempt to actually convince anybody that she's "hood" or any of that authenticity nonsense. She's successfully occupying the trap, ground zero for hardness, and calling its inhabitants "bitches," all to prove that she is the consummate rhyming bad-ass.

There is a tendency among music critics to create sub-stories with records and impose narratives. We might identify with a hardcore punk group this year because we are a restless generation, or with a work of hyperactive pop because the internet has made us incapable of concentrating, and so on. But sometimes we take a record for what it is: a resistant piece of art, existing as a singular entity. In a world that is newly full of "content" at every turn, it can be refreshing to find an uncompromising record that exists so honestly on its own.

People born during a dip in the birth rate grow up consuming a lot of culture that's aimed at someone older than them. People born during a boom do not do cultural apprenticeship, because everything is quickly aimed at them; they watch the things that appeal to their age group bloom and succeed, whether anyone else is interested in it or not. This is why some Americans have spent decades clutching their heads as the Baby Boom generation makes big chunks of our world revolve around itself: Large cohorts have a large gravitational pull.

I’ve spent the morning listening to Skrillex’s three EPs, and they’re fun, but they’re not really any indication of what this guy does. Maybe he’ll make a great record some day, and his tracks certainly bring the hooks, and sometimes they sound the way people wish that last Justice album sounded. But at this point, listening to Skrillex at home is almost like listening to Gwar at home. The live experience is the thing.

That’s the realm that Mercer is working in now, and when he has the confidence on Morrow to follow through on his glossy pop ambitions, his music manages to be as likeable as it always has been. It’s when Mercer tries to update the old Shins playbook with big-budget production that Morrow sounds awkward and dangerously sleepy.

On Bill Callahan and Grimes. Letting the hero die might mean opening yourself to new experiences. Finding more to identify with. Noticing the commonalities that point to the one, along with the differences point to the many, and identifying with songs from the inside and outside at the same time.

On Katy Perry covering ‘N***** in Paris’. The dumb, tee-hee transgression of saying the edited-for-television version sort of obscures what’s interesting and daring about this performance, which is that under the guise of tribute/ironic cover tune (it feels about half-and-half) it’s a girl refusing to let this song’s imaginary world of swinging-dick privilege be off-limits to her. But that’s all that’s happening here; she puts the word on like a piece of borrowed jewelry and parades in front of the mirror.

Tao Lin and his band of followers at Muumuu House are some of the most vehemently disliked—and discussed—writers on the internet. Critics call them hip. Haters call them frauds. But their fiction may be just what our digital lives deserve.

He Marries the Stuffed Owl Exhibit At the Indiana Welcome Center and The Feeling of Needing a Pen

‘Del Rey doesn’t have the emotional and psychological depth to support all the satin and spotlights. Her invocations of Sinatra and Lolita are entirely appropriate to the sumptuous backing tracks, but, when it comes to lyrics, she and her collaborators get lost in a tangle of keywords.’

On one hand, it’s great that she’s this new hot blog thing, because she is a woman who creates her own beats in a space that historically is not that friendly to non-males. On the other hand, her elevation been a case study in the values people consign to the music they love — in this case, thin representations of ideas, that people have praised her for her “naive” and “elf-like” qualities, as though by filtering her voice into wispiness to the point that she’s almost a specter (as she does), she becomes more admirable, a negation of herself.

‘It's tempting to view Reign of Terror as somehow ironic, pairing Krauss' saccharine cheerleader delivery with raging guitars and martial dance beats, but it doesn't feel that purposeful. Such a juxtaposition seems to arise naturally out of what they like and what they want to express: cheesy pop triumphalism dialed to "mosh" and drenched in tar-black bloodlust. It lacks cynicism, and goes for nothing deeper than the sacred ideal of teen gimme-gimme: the glorious joy of the big, loud, timeless Fuck You.’

‘”What To Expect” is, then, finally, a self-fulfilling prophesy, because what to expect as an expectant mother today is to be bombarded with information about how you are doing it wrong—whether it is carrying a baby in your womb, pushing it out, or raising it.’

‘If the songs were dull or disposable, they’d still be important, but they might matter less. But they’re both good, “Birthday Cake” very much so. The quality matters because they’re likely to lodge themselves in the public consciousness and seep onto radio playlists: this mess won’t just melt into the air.’

‘Like so many spotlit debuts, Visions displays a young singer developing a relationship with her own voice and the seemingly infinite possibilities for shaping and representing it. The mirror stage for emergent artists who spend a lot of time online and work alone with inexpensive tools often can (and does) lead to merely replicating the surface qualities of the stuff that streams their way. Boucher's talent lies in the balance of exploiting her gifts and leveraging what's come before her, but judiciously.’

Profile of the rising rapper.

‘Pity the poor rock fan? Well, no: Rock fans have launched enough snobby, pernicious bits of language at other genres that they could afford to do some penance resurrecting their own.’

‘Sleigh Bells' music has always been about overwhelming your senses, making things so loud and so blurred that you don't know where one thing stops and another ends, how fast the day is passing. Slow things run at double-time, fast things run at half-time; the world runs backwards, slows down, speeds up.’

‘The vast majority of this record is given over to rhapsodizing over some hunky, dangerous fella, and none of the alterations — sonic, biographical, cosmetic — allegedly made to the real-life Lana/Lizzy could distort the truth as thoroughly as her unrelenting Ooh He's a Bad, Bad, Sexy Man routine. It's instructive to picture what this guy would actually look like IRL, some clown with a real emotional haircut, Crocs hanging off his feet, Urban Outfitters leather jacket hung over his IKEA futon, remnants of that Taco Bell burrito with the Fritos in it congregating at the corners of his mouth as he binges on Skyrim, blasts "Pumped Up Kicks" on infinite repeat, and gargles dozens of shots of, like, Goldschläger.’

‘When it comes to IVF, in-vitro fertilization, nothing is normal. Your world is upside-down. Your doctor compliments your wife on her monkeys. Then, when every dollar and exertion has gone toward a single hour of hope, it begins to snow.’