Stephen Colbert highlighted the worrying testimony of ousted public health official Rick Bright — and President Donald Trump‘s attempts to drag the spotlight away from his depiction of how the government has handled the COVID-19 crisis — on The Late Show Thursday. Bright, the former director of the Biomedical Advanced …
Read More »Kurt Cobain's 'Unplugged' Guitar Headed to Auction
The guitar Kurt Cobain played during Nirvana‘s famed MTV Unplugged in New York concert is headed to auction with a starting estimate of $1 million. The guitar will be part of the “Music Icons” sale at Julien’s Auctions, taking place June 19th and 20th in Beverly Hills and on the …
Read More »How Kraftwerk's Synth Wizard Florian Schneider Rewired the World
Farewell to the great Florian Schneider, co-founder of Kraftwerk, the German electronic duo who changed everything about the way music sounds. “Kraftwerk is not a band,” Schneider told Rolling Stone in 1975. “It’s a concept. We call it ‘Die Menschmaschine,’ which means ‘the human machine.’ We are not the band. …
Read More »Are People Really Having 'Coronavirus Parties'?
With baseball season effectively over, Americans have a new favorite national pastime: shaming people on the internet for not properly socially distancing. Whether it’s a viral (albeit arguably misleading) photo of a crowded park on a sunny day or people wagging their fingers at joggers on the street, the narrative …
Read More »'TFW No GF' Is a Deeply Uncomfortable Portrayal of Incel Culture
Pity the poor young white man. They are unemployed. They’re living at home in record numbers. They’re not having sex (or at least, they’re not having particularly good sex). And they are unhappy — sometimes miserably, aggressively so — with a portion of them turning to the darkest abysses of …
Read More »Afrobeat Pioneer Tony Allen: 9 Tracks That Show His Drumming Genius
“I wanted to be one of the best — that was my wish,” Nigerian drum legend Tony Allen said on the Trap Set podcast during a 2015 interview. “To be the best, it’s not when you are doing the same thing with others…. To be the best means I have …
Read More »Grateful Dead Unearth Rare 1993 Concert for 'Shakedown Stream' Series
The Grateful Dead have unearthed a rare 1993 gig for the third installment in the jam band’s Shakedown Stream series. Premiering Friday, the weekly streaming series will showcase video from the Dead’s June 11, 1993 concert from Columbus, Ohio’s Buckeye Lake Music Center in its near-entirety for the first time. …
Read More »'In My Room' With James Bay
Rolling Stone and Gibson have teamed up to offer a special weeklong series of music performances and the first-ever chance for music fans to make a charitable donation to support musicians and walk away with a signature guitar. Rolling Stone‘sIn My Room, presented by Gibson, will feature performances from iconic …
Read More »Watch Eddie Vedder Perform Pearl Jam's 'River Cross' on 'Together at Home' Special
Eddie Vedder, accompanied only by an organ, performed a solo version of Pearl Jam’s “River Cross” during Global Citizen’s One World: Together at Home special, which raised over $127 million for COVID-19 relief. “All this talk of rapture / Look around at the promise now / Here and now,” Vedder …
Read More »Anti-Vax Doctor Promotes Conspiracy Theory That Death Certificates Falsely Cite COVID-19
In the midst of an unprecedented global coronavirus pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, it can be hard to make sense of the destruction COVID-19 has wrought. In this context, the proliferation of conspiracy theories downplaying the dangers of the virus is sadly unsurprising, though disheartening …
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