Weekend Reads (June 29): “Purple Rain,” Aphex Twin, MTV News, Juneteenth
Recommended weekend reading for June 29, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Brandon Ousley reflects on Prince’s Purple Rain for the album’s 40th anniversary.
Every once in a while, there are cultural watersheds that perfectly capture the zeitgeist while cementing an artist’s place in pop history. In the summer of 1984, Prince’s launch into the pop stratosphere fully crystallized with Purple Rain. It was more than a box office-shattering rock drama and mega-selling soundtrack. It was a larger-than-life phenomenon — a transcendent multimedia event that merged Prince’s pop crossover dreams and funk-rock rebellion with musical genius. The seminal moment Minneapolis’ funky daredevil star, multi-instrumentalist, and prodigious upstart carved himself into the Mt. Rushmore of American music.
Purple Rain (the album) was released on June 25, 1984. Purple Rain (the movie) was released on July 27, 1984.
Chris P. Thompson delves into the ambient music of Aphex Twin and why he finds it so interesting and compelling.
Richard was experimenting with microtonality in this era, and SAWII is full of the fruits of that exploration. I hear in this track the most natural sensation of tone possible: the pure tuned harmonic series. The synth is so aligned with the harmonic series that it's hard to tell whether it is actually playing chords, or just one note at a time with intensely locked harmonic timbre: if I listen on headphones, I simultaneously hear a smooth stream tone and feel the motor of individual vibrations. It connects the scale of hearing to the scale of beating. It’s a visceral and wonderful timbre.
Eli Enis explores the unlikely crossover between shoegaze and nu-metal, the “Americanization” of shoegaze, and the role that Spotify playlists and TikTok have played in merging the two genres.
Why are Deftones suddenly more influential on today’s shoegaze breakouts than My Bloody Valentine? Why are there countless TikToks containing the tags “#numetal” and “#shoegaze” — either to promote nu-gaze songs, or to discuss the genre’s relation to one another? Why is there a mega-popular Spotify playlist called “deftones gym playlist to go insane to” that tosses nu-metal bigwigs like Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, and Korn in with young shoegaze progenitors like Glare, Leaving Time, and Wisp? Why did Sick New World festival evolve from an explicit nu-metal nostalgia fest in 2023 to a nu-metal/shoegaze hybrid in 2024 where Slowdive and Drop Nineteens shared a bill with Slipknot and System of a Down?
As a longtime shoegaze fan, I naturally find this stuff interesting, and the thought of Slowdive sharing the bill with Slipknot brings a smile to my face. I am glad to see the genre growing in popularity. That said, it’s tempting to sink into musical snobbery, genre purism, and/or “kids these days” kind of thinking when I read about the decontextualized manner in which people are discovering shoegaze — or any genre, for that matter — via TikTok.
On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a song just because you like how it sounds or makes you feel; you shouldn’t have to acquire a PhD in a band or genre’s history to “properly” enjoy the music. Like what you like, and all that. On the other hand, historical context is not a bad thing. It can deepen one’s appreciation of their favorite bands and lead to even more fascinating musical discoveries and connections.
I guess my hope is that TikTok discoveries will lead at least some newly minted shoegaze fans down a musical rabbit hole similar to the one I experienced in the mid-to-late ’90s. That’s when I discovered shoegaze via mailing lists and webzines, and a whole new musical horizon opened up before me and changed my life forever.
MTV has officially shut down the MTV News website and taken all of its archives offline.
The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.
I should know better by now, but it’s still shocking to me when companies shut down sites in this manner. MTV may have stopped caring about music a long time ago, but that’s still decades of pop culture coverage just down the drain.
And let this be a reminder for any of you who might write for news outlets: always save and archive your work. Don’t trust the execs to do it for you.
Related: Tajja Isen reflects on the changing digital media landscape. “The generation of online publications that were once heralded as the future of media is vanishing at a terrifying rate despite having set the tone in which much of traditional media now speaks.”
Also related: Back in 2020, I wrote a lament for absent websites. “There’s certainly some personal satisfaction in knowing that my humble little blog has outlasted websites that were far bigger in terms of staff, resources, and budget. However, it’s also been a sad, sobering reminder that so many great little, independent sites like Opus have disappeared into the ether over the last 20+ years.”
Back in 2015, hackers released a data dump for Ashley Madison, a site that enabled users to cheat on their spouses. But Annalee Newitz thinks that we’ve all missed the hack’s real lessons.
Generally, the media has focused on the (mainly) men whose names and desires were taken from the company’s subscriber database and shared with the world. But that isn’t a new story. People have been trying to have affairs with strangers for thousands of years. Ashley Madison was never really about that. Avid Life Media, its parent company, wasn’t in the business of sex, it was in the business of bots. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads.
Perplexity is trying to create an AI-powered competitor to Google Search, and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. But in the process, Perplexity is essentially plagiarizing other websites and “shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet.”
Forbes discovered Perplexity was dodging the publication’s paywall in order to provide a summary of an investigation the publication did of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s drone company. Though Forbes has a metered paywall on some of its work, the premium work — like that investigation — is behind a hard paywall. Not only did Perplexity somehow dodge the paywall but it barely cited the original investigation and ganked the original art to use for its report. (For those keeping track at home, the art thing is copyright infringement.)
Back in 1995, a group of librarians and web technologists in Ohio spent the weekend defining a system for organizing and labeling online content — a system that’s still in use to this day.
[I]t soon became clear to all attendees, even those who had showed up thinking that they might be tweaking an existing system, that the metadata standard for the web would have to be something entirely new: simple enough for anyone to label their own documents as they posted them online, but still meaningful and specific enough for other people and machines to find and index them. A brand-new, simple and succinct metadata system would mean that, for the half a million existing items online, and the millions and billions more that everyone knew were coming, there would need to be one agreed-upon way of adding the metadata tags, with the same kinds of information in the tags themselves.
Via The Retro.
I love reading stuff like this about the web’s early days. It reminds me of just how magical the web felt when I discovered it in 1995. I was a college freshman at the time and spent countless hours in my dorm’s computer lab surfing this newly discovered frontier of unfettered information via Mosaic and later, Netscape Navigator.
Sadly, as the article points out, “the historical period of the open web, which arguably began with Mosaic 30 years ago, is already receding, and perhaps has already ended; the story of DC bookmarks the historical moment of when this era was new, and when the web was a source of almost pure optimism.” I remember that sense of “pure optimism” that surrounded the web before corporate interests, social networks, and AI took over — and I sure do miss it.
In a recent newsletter, Jake Meador responds to the ridicule that some right-wing pundits and personalities heap on Juneteenth, which marks the end of slavery in the United States.
[I]f you care about the American project of democratic self-governance under God, celebrating Juneteenth should be easy. It’s not an alternative to July 4, but an extension of it — a reminder both that early 4th of July celebrations lacked something and yet also that some of the injustices that blighted those celebrations have been addressed. Addressed imperfectly, certainly, but still addressed in a real way. And therefore it is also a call to… consider the future and past with equal mind, recognizing both the goodness of the past we still celebrate and recognizing its imperfections and the opportunities we have to honor the past by further realizing its promises. In short, Juneteenth is a deeply American holiday.
The Dispatch’s new faith-focused newsletter starts off with a bang with an essay by Karen Swallow Prior on Christian nationalism’s failure of imagination.
A flourishing Christian faith, along with a flourishing nation, depends on minds free and well-formed enough to recognize truth amid falsehood. The primary question Christian nationalism claims to ask — namely, what does it look like for people of faith (Christian or otherwise) to advocate in the public square for the public policies they believe will do the most public good? — cannot be answered with tropes, types, and cliches. Such are the makings of a flattened imagination that can deal only with ideas, not the real world.
Fortunately, great works of the human imagination that can cultivate imaginations capable of wrestling with the complexities of such questions are there — in abundance — to taste and see.
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