Weekend Reads (February 15): Kendrick Lamar, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Collecting Vinyl, Trump’s Tariffs
Recommended weekend reading material for February 15, 2025.
If you enjoy reading Opus and want to support my blogging, then check out my annual special. Subscribe to Opus during the month of February and save 50% on your first 12 months as a subscriber. That’s just a mere $2.50/month or $25/year.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
I’m not sure where Kendrick Lamar ranks in the annals of Super Bowl halftime performances. That said, it was far from the worst performance of all time, as some people — who’ve obviously forgotten about The Weeknd and The Black Eyed Peas — have claimed. Still, it was decidedly not your typical halftime show; it was more dense and layered, and less concerned with mere entertainment spectacle.
I’ve compiled a collection of reviews and reactions to K.Dot’s performance, be it the song selections, the political statements, or Lamar’s beef with Drake.
Related: Wired’s Angela Watercutter recounts the “wild true story” behind Lamar’s halftime show. Via Daring Fireball, who shares some thoughts re. Apple sponsoring the halftime shows.
The 2025 nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have been announced, and as usual, it’s a pretty eclectic bunch.
Among the 14 up for induction are returning nominees Oasis, the White Stripes, Mariah Carey, Soundgarden, and Joy Division and New Order, as well as first-timers including Outkast and Phish. The inductees will be announced in late April, before a ceremony in the fall.
Cyndi Lauper, Bad Company, Billy Idol, the Black Crowes, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, and Maná complete the list of nominees.
I am, of course, pulling for Joy Division and New Order, who have been nominated jointly.
Related: Stephen Thomas Erlewine weighs in on this year’s nominees. “It’s finally happened: the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has nominated more Gen-Xers than Boomers.”
The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder turned 40 this week, and when it was released, it changed Angus Batey’s life forever.
The things that gave The Smiths the capacity to change lives were the same set of factors that ensure their records remain arresting and remarkable all these years later. Morrissey’s lyrics spoke about real lives with an honesty and a clarity that rock and pop often shied away from: here was someone writing about heartbreak and isolation not as mythic subjects that somehow glorified the sufferer, but as the all-too-real consequences of the everyday. You didn’t get the sense, as one sometimes does from songwriters, that they were trying to make it sound like they were doing all this to provide escapist or aspirational entertainment — the characters Morrissey wrote about were you, or the folks around you, or the people you thought you might one day be. They looked like a band, they had that indefinable star quality, and there was the strangeness of Marr’s music and the ambiguity around Morrissey’s in-song personas that meant you were never thinking they were just the same as you — but they were a lot nearer to being people you might know than the rest of the pop world of the mid-1980s.
Natalie Weiner offers up a beginner’s guide to starting your very own vinyl collection.
I’m as much a sucker for the ease of streaming as anyone — was a very early adopter to Spotify (boo) and have spent hours creating playlists and exploring musical history through it (and all its peers, obviously). But there’s something really special about owning physical media rather than relying on digital jukeboxes. Records are so beautiful and tactile, with so much to relish not just in their analog audio but in their art and liner notes — in all the information that has yet to be fully digitized.
At least for me, learning about vinyl was a long road of trial and error. Trying to understand how turntables work, what exactly a receiver is, what damage makes a record unplayable as opposed to charmingly fuzzy. This guide is basically a long message to my past self, some things I wish I’d known before I bought my first record.
For a beginner’s guide, this is pretty thorough, with tips for buying a record player, storing your vinyl, and much more.
Last week, a Stradivarius violin sold for $11.3 million at auction, which isn’t even the record. (The record is $15.9 million, back in 2011.) But what makes Stradivarius violins so special and valuable, exactly?
[Antonio] Stradivari was a fastidious craftsman who undertook smart experiments with geometry and wood thickness, perfecting flatter arching on the front and back to create violins with much more power than any before. Indeed, Stradivari’s instruments made it possible for the music to reach every corner of large concert halls and thereby helped usher in the symphonic age of Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Stradivari “anticipat[ed] the growing role of the violin as a solo instrument and brought violin-making to new heights,” says Cocron, who marvels at “how attuned [Stradivari] was to musical trends.”
Originally envisioned as an online dating service, YouTube has become increasingly popular as a place to watch movies. The Paste Magazine staff have compiled a list of the 50 best movies currently available on YouTube. Their list runs the gamut from silent classics and zombie horror to cyberpunk anime and blaxploitation spoofs.
Related: YouTube was founded 20 years ago this week, and it’s difficult to imagine the current media landscape without it. Wikipedia has an extensive history of the company. (Fun fact: YouTube’s first office was above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant.)
Here’s the very first video ever uploaded to YouTube, back in April of 2005. It was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.
If you’re looking for a new anime series to watch, Rafael Motamayor makes the case for the sci-fi series Planetes. (For what it’s worth, Planetes has been on my “to watch list” for awhile now.)
At first, Planetes starts out as a workplace drama about the interpersonal relationships of the Space Debris Section’s workers. However, it quickly becomes a show about the isolation of space, late-stage capitalism, the challenges of working for massive corporations that don’t care about you, and the ways that corporations and governments could exploit space travel for profit (much like they ruined our home planet’s environment for their own benefit). The result is simply one of the best sci-fi stories ever.
The animated film Ne Zha 2 has dominated the Chinese box office this month, and it recently started a limited theatrical run here in the States.
Ne Zha 2 has earned almost almost $1.3 billion in the two weeks since it was released in mainland China, according to the Chinese ticketing platform Maoyan. In addition to being the most successful film in Chinese box office history, it is the first non-Hollywood film to earn more than $1 billion and the first film in the world to earn more than $1 billion in a single market.
[…]
Chinese moviegoers have showered the new film with praise, taking pride in the fact that it is entirely Chinese-made, from the director to the special effects and postproduction teams.
Much of the discussion surrounding Trump’s tariffs has focused on its impact on things like food prices and the auto industry. But anime fans might also start to feel the pinch when they import toys and other merchandise.
Japan’s toy imports from China last year were valued at more than ¥334 billion (US$2.2 billion), about 80 percent of the country’s total toy imports, according to an Animenomics analysis of trade data published by the Ministry of Finance.
While toys are not yet subject to import duties, escalating trade conflict between the U.S. and China could eventually result in U.S. consumers being asked to pay duties and tariffs on these products.
Animenomics notes that Japanese companies might start using Vietnamese companies to produce toys, since Vietnam and the U.S. currently enjoy a free trade agreement.
Related: Artists and creators will likely feel the pain of Trump’s tariffs, too.
Earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance used the Catholic concept of ordo amoris to defend President Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, claiming that it commands people to prioritize loving their family and immediate community over foreigners like immigrants. In a recent letter to U.S. bishops, however, Pope Francis says that Vance, who is Catholic himself, is wrong.
While not mentioning Vance directly by name, Francis used his Feb. 11 letter to directly reject that interpretation of Catholic theology.
“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” wrote the pope.
Who will Vance submit to? Trump or his religious leader? Will he concede that he was wrong, or will he claim that the Pope is as wrong as a federal judge?
Related: Michael Warren explores Vance’s antagonism towards his own church. “J.D. Vance is the highest-ranking Roman Catholic in the U.S. government, so it was astounding when the vice president accused the bishops conference of being more concerned with their ‘bottom line’ than their pastoral work helping refugees and immigrants.”
Also related: Trump declined to endorse Vance for the 2028 presidency in a recent interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, which has to sting at least a little bit. (Maybe Trump’s holding out hope that he can run a third time, though that would require amending the Constitution.)
From the Blog
I’ve been a fan of Denison Witmer’s quiet, unassuming folk pop for decades now, so naturally, I was excited to hear his latest album: the Sufjan Stevens-produced Anything At All, which was released yesterday by Asthmatic Kitty Records. I did not, however, expect it to hit me as hard as it did.
When faced with the possibility of the world’s end, Martin Luther apocryphally claimed that he’d plant an apple tree. As for Denison Witmer, he’s opted to release a new album, for which I’m deeply thankful. Anything At All feels like the perfect record for our troubled times, a collection of gentle and plainspoken songs about the solace that can be found in family, nature’s beauty, and the work of one’s hands.
Read my full review. I suspect I’ll be returning to Witmer’s album quite a bit in the months to come.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $2.50/month or $25/year.