My Favorite Longform & Culture Articles of 2017
Full disclosure I totally stole/was inspired to do this from a writer I follow who did the exact same thing in 2015.
Year end lists are always a great time to catch up on stuff you missed. This list is not in any sort of order as I was pretty bad at bookmarking articles I read and tried my best to scrounge everything up from memory. It’s also a very narrow view of what I enjoyed and leans heavily more so on music related articles. Hopefully there is something here worth your time.
R. Kelly Is Holding Women Against Their Will In A “Cult,” Parents Told Police
By Jim DeRogatis
What reads like a news headline is one of the most chilling in depth investigative reads of the year. Given Kelly’s past it shouldn’t come off as too much of a surprise but the fact this guy still has a career is mind boggling.
“R. Kelly is the sweetest person you will ever want to meet,” McGee said. “But Robert is the devil.”
MTV News: The Good, the Bad, and the Contradictions of an Ill-Fated Experiment
By Jordan Sargent
A couple of years ago MTV redid their website putting an emphasis on longform music journalism in hopes of staying relevant. They hired on Jessica Hopper, renowned music critic, as the new editorial director of music to create fresh and “really smart criticism of the culture through a music lens.” Unfortunately for Hopper and her team, MTV valued their relationships with big name artists like Chance the Rapper than uncensored editorial criticism.
The dissolution of this micro-era of MTV News in just over a year and a half leaves us with several questions: Can a behemoth media company like MTV succeed in reinventing itself from within simply by creating a “prestige journalism” arm? Further, what kind of journalism does a company like Viacom — which is largely reliant on friendly artist relationships for its financial success — support and allow? And what even was the intended outcome? Fierman and Hopper both came to MTV News from publications — Grantland and Pitchfork’s longform print magazine, respectively — that had not been economically viable from the perspectives of various suits. Why would Viacom want to attempt it again?
MTV News, Chance the Rapper, and a Defense of Negative Criticism
By Amanda Petrusich
Somewhat of a followup to the piece Spin did above, it’s more of a response to MTV’s decision to cut their newly assembled editorial staff because of what was deemed as a bad review of one of their most favorable artists. Chance’s team even threaten to sever ties with MTV completely if the article was not removed. Petrusich points out why this is problematic and the need for negative criticism.
Fairly or not, I often catch myself suspecting that work that’s been unilaterally praised is either boring (what kind of art is so innocent and uncomplicated as to bestir only gracious titters of approval, like a child’s finger painting?) or provocative in such a way that critics are paralyzed, terrified to dissect it for fear of being seen as unsophisticated or boorish. Mostly, though, I think of what a weird and tedious trajectory it would be for an artist never to have someone consider her work seriously enough to question its motives and its successes.
Decoding the Cleveland Prestige Machine
By Sam Allard
Over the summer I lived in Cleveland and interned at the city’s alt-weekly, Cleveland Scene. I highly enjoyed my time there and think about it often, especially coming from a much smaller city with a population that is all too proud to live there. Cleveland is going through a bit of renaissance right now with multiple publications praising how cool the city is. And if there’s one thing people who live in a city that flies under the radar want known is how great their city is. But how many lists can a city make without becoming redundant and who are these lists really for?
But “accolades” is an interesting term for Cleveland’s appearance on many of these lists (Best Midwest Destination for Group Travelers, Best City to Go Car-Free, Underrated Cities for Art Lovers, Must-Visit Cities for Beer Connoisseurs, etc.), most of which are the result of readers’ polls, freelancers’ whims, or the public relations efforts of Destination Cleveland itself. It’s not that these lists are illegitimate — they are part and parcel of a “high-metabolism” media landscape that preys on consumers, not readers, and caters to their short attention spans — it’s that they tend to be overvalued, speciously “researched” and sometimes misinterpreted.
Vince Staples Is the Least Corny Man in America
By Mychal Denzel Smith
Vince Staples is one of the few rappers that can rival King Kendrick. His second full length album, Big Fish Theory, is a fresh take on hip-hop beats incorporating more electronica production and enlisting some surprise producers, like PC Music affiliate Sophie into the mix. Vince is known for his wit and no bullshit answers and it really shines through in this interview. If he wasn’t a rapper he’d probably be a scholar.
I could tell you what Vince Staples is eating for lunch, but we both agree that celebrity-profile trope is corny. There’s a lot in this world that Staples thinks is corny, but when we meet in downtown Manhattan on a June afternoon, he seems to be particularly peeved about the music industry. I can’t blame him. He’s only in New York City for the day, between a red-eye from Los Angeles, and another flight to London. And he’s spending his time answering a journalist’s questions, a thing he’s done hundreds of times in the past few years, and then doing a photo shoot. There are lot of things that have to be done in order to sell music that don’t involve music, and Staples isn’t particularly enthused.
Tiny Mix Tape’s Review of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘DAMN.’
By Jackson Scott
Kendrick continues his reign over the music and critical world with his latest release Damn. Tiny Mix Tapes may not be a household name like Pitchfork in the music criticism sphere, as they tend to focus on more abstract and avant-garde releases. Scott does a great job of providing a biblical context to the record and is an interesting take on the album, focusing on the fears that drive and motivate us, as well as Kendrick.
Damn is a derivative of damnare, a rather mundane Latin word meaning loss or harm. John Ayto, author of The Dictionary of Word Origins, reveals that it didn’t become exclusively a theological term or an expletive until its original meaning was lost around 16c; its Biblical use is therefore contested, as its original connotation of mild condemnation does not fit what has eventually become synonymous with exemption from divine mercy. Its use on DAMN.encapsulates all of these historical permutations, as loss, harm, and exclusion (from both divine and mundane spaces) are all prominent themes. There’s a recurring motif, delivered at one point through a voicemail from Kendrick’s cousin Carl, of people of color being cursed by GOD for being inequitable and following other gods. Damn, as a verb here, is something that GOD does. It’s a top-down kind of smiting, but this kind of exchange is also present here between mortals. On opener “BLOOD.,” there’s a sample of FOX News reporters misquoting and deriding his song “Alright” after his 2015 BET Awards performance. “Oh please, ugh, I don’t like it,” one anchor says of its supposed anti-police message. It’s another, fleshier example of punching down, of condemning (or reinforcing condemnation of) a disenfranchised people.
How the Cleveland Clinic grows healthier while its neighbors stay sick
By Dan Diamond
I used to drive by the Cleveland Clinic all summer long. It’s almost impossible to avoid especially when living on the east side in Cleveland Heights. The campus is beautiful and obviously very well kept up while the neighborhood surrounding it is left in urban decay. From the perspective of my girlfriend, who is a nurse at the Clinic, it’s a hospital for the elite and wealthy. This article shines some light on the problems and criticisms the Clinic faces from its surrounding community.
There’s an uneasy relationship between the Clinic — the second-biggest employer in Ohio and one of the greatest hospitals in the world — and the community around it. Yes, the hospital is the pride of Cleveland, and its leaders readily tout reports that the Clinic delivers billions of dollars in value to the state. It’s even “attracting companies that will come and grow up around us,” said Toby Cosgrove, the longtime CEO, pointing to IBM’s decision to lease a building on the edge of campus. “That will be great [for] jobs and economic infusion in this area.”
But it’s also a tax-exempt organization that, like many hospitals, fought to preserve its not-for-profit status in the years leading up to the Affordable Care Act. As a result, it doesn’t have to pay tens of millions of dollars in taxes, but it is supposed to fulfill a loosely defined commitment to reinvest in its community.
That community is poor, unhealthy and — in the words of one national neighborhood-ranking website — “barely livable.”
Do We Really Need an Indie Revival in 2017?
By Emma Garland
The answer is no or at least in my mind. Every year some big indie juggernauts get back together to release another record that may or not be good. This year it’s the Shins (which this review cuts straight to the point of how I feel about them), Broken Social Scene, Grizzly Bear, and the Dirty Projectors among others. It’s not that these are bad bands but rock has been in a very stale place this decade. I still enjoy my fair share of sad white boy indie rock but it’s great we have more diverse voices in music that discuss more important issues than some longing melancholy theme. If anything I find the female indie rockers like Mitski, Jay Som, Japanese Breakfast, and Angel Olsen to be making more interesting music not only sonically but lyrically as well.
This is a good take on the current state that is indie is in and how it compares in our current cultural climate.
Indie — in the most generalized sense of the word that exists outside of Camden — no longer has the cultural clout it used to. In the politically tense times of today, people want the visceral rage of Beyoncé stomping through water to “Freedom” in front of flamethrowers while Kendrick Lamar spits about racial discrimination, not Death Cab For Cutie gently whispering about Donald Trump’s finances over acoustic plucking.
What We Can Learn About Saving the Planet from Watching the Birds
By Eric Sandy
Sandy sets up what it’s like to approach birdwatching from a novice’s perspective while giving background information on how the hobby started. Attending the Biggest Week in Magee Marsh in Northwest Ohio, Sandy learns from the biggest names in birding. Along the way he notices that time has slowed down for him in a way that he hasn’t felt in a long time, which gives his time to reflect on the current state of the planet. Sandy cuts from his firsthand experience of learning the art of birding with his thoughts on how humans have messed up the global climate seamlessly.
Things were getting very weird in America as I planned this trip, and I realize now that I was looking for something smaller, something more innate to place my faith in. It wasn’t long before the Biggest Week that the U.S. Senate installed sundry climate skeptics and fracking expansionists into prime Cabinet spots. I didn’t want to dwell on it, but there was something unavoidable in all the dire warnings of public lands sell-offs, natural gas pipeline construction and national monument downsizing. Like a lot of people, I was having trouble deciding what I could do to improve our lot. America was less organized than ever, clearly, and certainly in danger. Without thinking much about it, birds just seemed to make more sense.
BETWEEN TWO COASTS: UNDERGROUND CLUB MUSIC IS THRIVING IN AMERICA’S HEARTLAND
By Whitney Wei
Yet another product of my summer in Cleveland. While the 216 is still very much a rock n roll town, I mean after all the Rock Hall of Fame is in the city, there is a small underground electronic scene in the works. Every month In Training, “a queer-run monthly event aiming to create an autonomous space for queer existence and solidarity via electronic music,” takes over the punk dive bar, Now That’s Class, to give Cleveland a taste of what underground club music is like. They also host Disco Paradiso and Heaven Is In You all with the same D.I.Y. vibe. It’s great to know there is a larger network out there that I was unaware of making waves in the Midwest. Now if only we could get something started in the Bible Belt…
Disparate cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee and Ohio may receive less shine, but the crews and labels behind their respective homegrown subcultures are intent on making an impact. They choose to write their own rules. Pay attention.
Why am I Still Listening to British Radio in the U.S.?
By Nicola Davies
The only time I ever remember listening to the radio regularly was when my mom would take me to and from school. It was mainly banter from the DJs and people calling in to discuss the day’s topic. When I got my first iPod I had no use for the radio and it wasn’t until later that I would get more into online radio like NTS, based in London. I guess it just goes hand in hand with DJ/producer culture. As my taste in music leans heavily more towards electronic I love that NTS, BBC, and Mixcloud for allowing me easy access to their broadcasted mixes. That’s not to say the U.S. doesn’t have cool things going on like the Lot in Brooklyn or Sirius XMU (especially when Gorilla vs Bear is on) but it still feels pointless to listen to major commercial U.S. radio stations. I guess it comes back to what you want out of a DJ, are you looking for a tastemaker or a wedding DJ?
A key difference in DJ practice, and therefore listening experience, can be categorized as curation versus programming. Non-commercial radio DJs have the freedom to play music they are passionate about and often have discovered themselves whereas commercial radio DJs are at the behest of their music director, playing the same tracks show after show.
How post-horror movies are taking over cinema
By Steve Rose
No wonder some film-makers are starting to question what happens when you switch the flashlight off. What happens when you stray beyond those cast-iron conventions and wander off into the darkness? You might find something even scarier. You might find something that’s not scary at all. What could be emerging here is a new sub-genre. Let’s call it “post-horror”.
Inside the black market where people pay thousands of dollars for Instagram verification
By Kerry Flynn
Pretty crazy there is a market for this and people are willing to pay that much to become verified on Instagram. There’s a lot of benefits to getting one.
This is a guy who knows a guy, a middleman in the black market for Instagram verification, where anyone from a seasoned publicist to a 22-year-old digital marketer will offer to verify an account — for a price. The fee is anywhere from a bottle of wine to $15,000
King Krule: The Wizard of Ooz
By Jazz Monroe
What happened to Pitchfork doing long profiles on artists? They still do consistent interviews and rising articles, but I miss their big “Cover Stories” with fluid animations that really brought the web story to life, like the one they did on Panda Bear and Daft Punk were incredible, it helped bring you into their world and forget you’re reading something on the Internet for a brief moment. Even the two stories that didn’t focus on a musician (Streaming and Irv Teibel, a field recordist) were very well done.
Anyways it’s always good to see an in depth profile on one of my favorite musicians. King Krule’s, aka Archy Marshall, music is pretty versatile. While I wasn’t that big into his debut LP, I absolutely loved his 2011 s/t EP and 2015 debut album, A New Place 2 Drown, under his own name. The new record effortlessly blends together elements of jazz, electronic, hip-hop and record in a way that only Archy can produce.
“It’s all about the gunk,” Marshall says, staring me in the eye.
“It’s all about the shit you do subconsciously,” Marshall goes on, “like the snot, the earwax, your spit, your jizz, your piss, your shit.” He pauses, forgetting something. “Your beard, your nails — all of that shit. You don’t ever think, Wow, I’m actually pushing all this stuff constantly — my brain’s creating all this gunk, this forcefield.” His eyes swing back to his pint. “And I guess that kind of saved the whole thing.”
The Problem with Muzak: Spotify’s bid to remodel an industry
By Liz Pelly
One of the major changes I made in 2017 was to backup all of my mp3s to an external hard drive and purge them from my laptop. For years I had amassed a large music archive and always put mp3s on my iPod and later my iPhone to bring my music on the go. The reason for the change was because both my laptop and iPhone 5s were running out of space. So why not just save storage and convert to the cloud? Plus as a Spotify subscriber I can download any song I want on the platform to conserve data. Something I have taken advantage of and created a special playlist of downloaded songs now that I have an iPhone 7 Plus that holds 128 GBs instead of a very limited 32 GBs.
For all of its convenience Spotify is something volatile. Pelly points out that Spotfiy playlists have created a new type of listener. “One who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll.” Pandora used to be known as the streaming service for people who don’t know what they want to listen to and just put on a mindless station.
In addition to Spotify’s commitment to breaking down and marketing music to all things chill, corporations can now make playlists and include artists on those lists without consent or paying them.
We have a while to go to figure out the problem streaming services have introduced for artists. I’d like to think I was helping by racking up more plays for artists I love by switching over to Spotify as my primary music platform. I still buy physical records and go to shows but who knows if that’s enough anymore.
“To understand the danger Spotify poses to the music industry — and to music itself — you first have to dig beneath the ‘user experience’ and examine its algorithmic schemes. Spotify’s front page ‘Browse’ screen presents a classic illusion of choice, a stream of genre and mood playlists, charts, new releases, and now podcasts and video. It all appears limitless, a function of the platform’s infinite supply, but in reality it is tightly controlled by Spotify’s staff and dictated by the interests of major labels, brands, and other cash-rich businesses who have gamed the system.”
Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius
By Lindsay Zoladz
There is right now a spirited conversation about women and canonization happening in the music world, and there is right now a new biography of Joni Mitchell on the shelves. If you pay more than passing attention to these topics, you will know that neither of these occurrences is particularly rare, but they are as good reasons as any to take stock of Mitchell’s singular, ever-changing legacy, in the always-fickle light of right now.
Why is Joni Mitchell the token female musician that even the most macho rock guys are comfortable calling “great”? (Jimmy Page has gone on record saying that her music makes him weep; Jimi Hendrix, in his journals, called Mitchell “a fantastic girl with heaven words.”) Is the very idea of a canon — or “greatness,” or even “genius” — inherently male, and if so, should women chuck all those words and ideas out the window and look for new ways to talk about and value the art they make?
Should Women Make Their Own Pop Music Canon?
By Wesley Morris
This past semester I took a feminist theory class and for my final paper I wrote about deconstructing musical canons and trying to make them more inclusive. This article and the one above it I used as sources to help argue my point. Canons can be a great reference point but the problem is they have all been created by middle age white men who have decided on what is good and what is not. I never came up with a solution in my paper as I feel like it’s not in my place to dictate how more diverse canons should be created but instead tried to diagnose a problem.
Maybe you’ve read all of this and are thinking that albums don’t have the same cultural worth that they used to. Maybe you’re thinking lists are dumb. So are awards. They’re the patriarchy playing God with taste. Sales matter, and women sell music — why not cheer that? But canons do amount to something. In art, they’ve been made to function almost as law. They are, in part, what corroborates greatness. They’re what help keep Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones — and more recently, acts like Nirvana, Radiohead and Kanye West — next to godliness, not unreasonably. These rankings are something to resist, challenge, question, roll your eyes at and investigate, not in order to bust up the strongholds, necessarily, but to amend them, not to dislodge Dylan from this particular Mt. Olympus but to insist that other more female gods exist.
