Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, ‘The Sopranos’ was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.
Rob Sheffield | future Read More »
‘American Horror’ is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.
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At an incredibly divisive point in pop history, Donna Summer managed to create an undeniable across-the-board experience of mass pleasure – after ‘Bad Girls,’ nobody ever tried claiming disco sucked again. It set the template for what Michael Jackson would do a few months later with ‘Off The Wall.’
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Watching the evening news in 2011 is a strange time-travel experience. ‘The CBS Evening News,’ ‘ABC World News’ and ‘NBC Nightly News’ haven’t changed their style over the decades, still going for that old-fashioned mix of voice-of-authority pomp and feel-good fluff. The difference is that people aren’t watching.
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‘American Horror’ goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience – ‘Flowers in the Attic’ paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like ‘Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.’ It even has ‘Go Ask Alice’-era urban legends.
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Most of an award-show host’s job is showing up and keeping a cool head and soldiering through it, whether it’s the Oscars or the Hallmark Channel’s ‘Hero Dog Awards.’
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Big Star invented a vision of bohemian rock & roll cool that had nothing to do with New York, Los Angeles or London, which made them completely out of style in the 1970s, but also made them an inspiration to generations of weird Southern kids.
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The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.
Quote from Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape Read More »