Archive

Pop Culture

The 2013 TwH Year in Review Megathread

By
December 31, 2013
Pop Culture, Sports
1 Comment

drake_and_ford.jpg.size.xxlarge.promo

2013 brought many strange occurrences and changes. From the triumphant, like Jason Collins’ admission of homosexuality, to the tragic, like the Boston Marathon bombings, to the downright necessary, like Pope Francis and the charge toward universal acceptance. Toronto got some run, with Drake and Mayor Rob Ford (pictured above) giving the Ontarian capital a few things to consider aside from the Maple Leafs’ collapse and a distinct lack of Chris Bosh in recent years. It also brought a website, born of a hellish New York morning and a few text and Facebook messages, which, we hope, you have enjoyed thus far. Now, several of us discuss 2013 in its many forms. How could 2014 ever follow this performance?

Read More

Hubris for the Holidays

By
December 30, 2013
Pop Culture
Leave a comment

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

If you had to choose a theme for this holiday blockbuster season, you could make a strong argument that it is delusion. I spent my vacation time away from work in the company of some of the most arrogant, excessive and stubborn characters I have ever seen on a silver screen. Some were relatively grounded; others were space cadets. American Hustle, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues and The Wolf of Wall Street all displayed varying degrees of lunacy and screwiness in movies where the central characters were all tied together by the size of their kaiju-like egos.

Holiday movies tend to be a bit warmer with a focus on a hero or redeeming character. You can probably get this fuzzy feeling from films like Saving Mr. Banks, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. But it seems to me that the three most buzz-worthy offerings would rather you go running to your raucous family gathering for escape rather than go to the movies to avoid more awkward meals with your second cousin.

Read More

The Pied Piper of Perversion Returns

By
December 10, 2013
Music, Pop Culture, R&B
Leave a comment

R&B has been at an interesting crossroads in 2013, with many new acts incorporating gender-bending vocals, subject matter about an artist’s sexual orientation and experimentation in weird, dark soundscapes. It may seem like a rather odd time for R. Kelly to jump back in the swing of things and record another album to give to the masses. But evidence suggests that this is probably the most opportune. From sharing the stage at Coachella with Phoenix to releasing a flock of doves during the Pitchfork Music Festival, Kelly has been received by crowds with all the enthusiasm of people who act like they’ve been sexually repressed for decades. This has translated into the surprise success that Kelly’s collaboration with Lady Gaga on “Do What U Want” has seen in recent months. The world wants the directness of R. Kelly again, and R. Kelly is what they get with Black Panties, perversion and all.

Read More

The TwH Reaction Thread: ATLiens Return

By
November 25, 2013
Hip-Hop, Music, Pop Culture
2 Comments

outkastWith news breaking this week that OutKast will embark on a tour starting at Coachella in 2014 for the first time in a decade, the music community, hip-hop in particular, is already trembling with excitement. These bastions of southern rap have done enough separately to keep things interesting since the 2003 release of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (or the 2006 release of Idlewild, depending on who you ask), but even if they hadn’t it would still be a monumental reunion by any standards. We at Tuesdays With Horry are just as excited as everyone else, so a few of us discussed what this means from a personal or macro standpoint.

Read More

Let It Bleed

By
November 13, 2013
Music, Pop Culture
1 Comment

Blood Orange

In 2011, producer and multi-instrumentalist Devonté Hynes released Coastal Grooves under the moniker of Blood Orange. The album was hit-or-miss, with more tracks that were outlines rather than fully-fleshed out ideas. It was an unrestrained attempt at injecting post-punk moodiness into late-70s stylized R&B. With clunky melodies and equally awkward song structure to match, Coastal Grooves seemed like Hynes picked his new project out of a basket without any full realization of its potential. After a year of working with artists like Sky Ferriera and Solange, as well as releasing cuts like “Dinner” and “Bad Girls,” the blanks in Blood Orange’s sound were starting to be filled in with denser production and immense improvement in song craft.

On Cupid Deluxe, the project’s sophomore effort, Hynes has taken his market fresh idea and squeezed as much crimson juice as he could out of it.

Read More

Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal

By
October 28, 2013
Music, Pop Culture
Leave a comment
lou-reed

Courtesy of Verbicide Magazine

To call Lou Reed a pioneer is to do a disservice to him as well as elevate other so-called “pioneers” to an undeserved status. To call him influential, the same. So few people in the history of music actually, really changed the way people listened to and created music. As the principal songwriter of the Velvet Underground, Reed did just that. He did it again as a solo artist, repeatedly re-inventing himself and ostracizing his own fan base, which made them love him all the more. He became an urban spokesman, the Bizarro Dylan whose sordid tales of debauchery, sexual ambiguity and repentance gave a window into the twisted, all-too-real world of Warhol’s New York City in the 1960s and 70s.

Read More

Brotherly Love

By
October 17, 2013
America, Folk, Music, Pop Culture
2 Comments

MatD

In the interest of full disclosure, here is a somewhat abridged account of my relationship with the Avett Brothers as a musical entity: one night in the autumn of 2008, when I was probably seventeen years old and a junior in high school, I was riding in the backseat of my friend Carrie’s blue Jeep with two of my other good friends, Justin and Morgan, around the streets and highways of South Carolina. Cycling through the tracks on a mixed CD and/or the shuffle function on her iPod (I can’t remember for certain, but I know there was a huge collection of CDs in that automobile), she landed on something that was new and exciting to me but which had become, to my admittedly much cooler friends, something of a way of life. This was the first time I heard the opening strums of “Die Die Die,” the first song on the 2007 album Emotionalism, and it tore up every Hendrix-laden notion of my personal preferences at the time. Bruce Springsteen once said of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” that it “sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind.” In the context of my own teenage taste, the same explosion happened in that Jeep.

Read More

KANYE ON JIMMY KIMMEL: BREAKING DOWN THE EPIC INTERVIEW

By
October 12, 2013
Hip-Hop, Music, Pop Culture, Television
1 Comment

kanye on kimmel

It’s easy to see Kanye West as a caricature of himself. He’s arrogant, abrasive, married to not only a Kardashian but the Kardashian… basically, he makes it pretty simple. But people who only see Kanye on this level are missing out. It’s hard to take someone who’s always calling himself a genius seriously, but if you listen… Kanye actually is a genius. He’s musically brilliant and maybe a bit of a ridiculous person, but he’s also fucking smart too. Case in point: his interview on Jimmy Kimmel. If you missed out on the epic twitter battle, here’s the rundown: Kimmel spoofed an interview Kanye did in the UK, using a couple of kids and a couple of milkshakes to recreate it. For whatever reason, Kanye really did not take kindly to this, and went on a hilarious and insane twitter rant insulting Kimmel. A few weeks later, Kimmel had Kanye on the show so they could prove they’d kissed and made up. What resulted was basically a giant therapy session and it was fucking brilliant:

Read More

#LOCHTENATION FOREVER: Top 10 Moments From E!’s ‘What Would Ryan Lochte Do?’

By
September 28, 2013
Pop Culture, Television
Leave a comment

ryan2

Last week, E! cruelly ripped out America’s collective heart by cancelling the brilliant gem of a TV show What Would Ryan Lochte Do? No longer will we get to watch our favorite lovable, swimming goof (not, not you Michael Phelps) search for his one true love by bringing a bunch of girls to the same sushi restaurant for approximately twenty-two minutes a week. Our Sundays will be a little bit darker from now on, but 2016 isn’t that far away. In the meantime, here’s the top ten moments from WWRLD for you to revisit until then (feel free to share with your Lochterage):

Read More

Is Cleveland Even Trying Anymore?

By
September 26, 2013
America, NFL, Pop Culture, Sports
1 Comment

cleveland-20browns-20suck-jpg

“To tell the truth, I’m not excited to go to Cleveland, but we have to. If I ever saw myself saying I’m excited going to Cleveland, I’d punch myself in the face, because I’m lying.” – Ichiro Suzuki

We have gotten to a point as a nation at which I feel inclined to pose the question undoubtedly on the minds of everyone paying attention to the progression of this nation as it rollicks forward toward an uncertain fate: with the utmost respect and least offense possible to its residents, is the city of Cleveland even trying anymore? I’m not even focusing on sports, although in the wake of last week’s Trent Richardson trade by the city’s supposed professional football team, it is certainly a focal point.

Read More