When the Covid-19 vaccine came out earlier this year, Bob, who also goes by the sobriquet Mannish Boy, was on the fence about getting it. He was wary about the speed at which the vaccine came to market, and he’d heard about preliminary data suggesting the AstraZeneca version in Europe …
Read More »Stax Museum Acquires Rare Soul Record Collection
The Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis has acquired a nationally important collection of rare soul records from Chicago music historian and archivist Bob Abrahamian. The collection includes more than 35,000 singles and albums alongside memorabilia and photography, much of it focused on lesser-known Chicago soul musicians. “While …
Read More »How Lil Yachty Got His Second Act
Until the pandemic, Lil Yachty never stopped to think about how quickly he became famous. “It was a full year from walking across the stage in high school to then I’m in this penthouse in midtown Atlanta, I got this G-wagon, put my mother in a house,” Yachty explains. “It’s …
Read More »Taylor Swift Carefully Reimagines Her Past on 'Fearless: Taylor's Version'
“I lived, and I learned,” Taylor Swift sings 85 minutes into the expanded, rerecorded version of her breakthrough 2008 album,Fearless. Less than two years ago, Swift announced she’d be redoing her back catalog to reclaim ownership of her early material after the master recordings of her Big Machine discography were …
Read More »'The Falcon and the Winter Soldier' Premiere Recap: A Broken World
A review of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiere — complete with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I take you out for pinochle… The Kevin Feige era of Marvel TV began earlier this year with WandaVision, a show about television that was clearly made for television …
Read More »The Audacity of 'Dreams': Biden's Inauguration Week and the Triumph of American Musical Weirdness
It really did all come down to that Fleetwood Mac TikTok video, didn’t it? There it was, right in the middle of an inauguration week that was emotionally messy and culturally turbulent on such historic levels: a montage of American idiots, from sea to shining sea, doing their thing to …
Read More »Pornhub Upended the Porn Industry. Now New Changes Could Destroy Sex Workers' Livelihoods
At the start of the pandemic, Alex and Cassie, a same-sex, nonbinary, multiracial couple based in Canada, were laid off from their full-time jobs. Scrambling for income, and unable to leave the house because of Alex’s preexisting conditions, Alex and Cassie, who asked to be identified only by their first …
Read More »Musicians on Musicians: Taylor Swift & Paul McCartney
T aylor Swift arrived early to Paul McCartney’s London office in October, “mask on, brimming with excitement.” “I mostly work from home these days,” she writes about that day, “and today feels like a rare school field trip that you actually want to go on.” Swift showed up without a …
Read More »The Last Word: Matthew McConaughey on the Pitfalls of Success and the Joys of Nude Drumming
Matthew McConaughey‘s new book, Greenlights, is one of the most entertaining celebrity memoirs in years, spiced with stoner philosophizing that (mostly) turns out to be both wise and genuinely inspiring. He is, it turns out, the guy his fans hoped he was, as free-living as he is introspective, hitting the …
Read More »Mariah Carey's Former Engineer Details Secret Alt-Rock Album Recording
Just before releasing her highly anticipated memoir, Mariah Carey dropped a bombshell that shook even her most diehard Lambs: in 1995, the elusive chanteuse recorded and released an alternative rock album under the name Chick. “I was exploring my musical range, but I was also filled with rage,” she wrote …
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