High-res For whatever reason, the folks at STATUS Magazine decided to include me in their “Almost Famous” feature on up-and-coming music critics (click the above image to embiggen). Bear in mind that they interviewed me for this back in February, so most of my “predictions” now seem a little quaint. I’m glad they included my plug for Future Times, though—those dudes aren’t getting nearly enough love, if you ask me.

For whatever reason, the folks at STATUS Magazine decided to include me in their “Almost Famous” feature on up-and-coming music critics (click the above image to embiggen). Bear in mind that they interviewed me for this back in February, so most of my “predictions” now seem a little quaint. I’m glad they included my plug for Future Times, though—those dudes aren’t getting nearly enough love, if you ask me.

High-res Photographer Brick Stowell followed Odd Future around for a couple of weeks and came back with some pretty candid, behind-the-scenes-type shots from the “Yonkers” video shoot and the band’s brief east coast tour. Here’s a shot of Hodgy Beats and Tyler on my block in D.C. There’s often a very confrontational panhandler who stands outside of that 7-11 at night and loudly berates anyone who doesn’t give him change on the way out. The staff at the 7-11 seem to tolerate his presence, for whatever reason.

Photographer Brick Stowell followed Odd Future around for a couple of weeks and came back with some pretty candid, behind-the-scenes-type shots from the “Yonkers” video shoot and the band’s brief east coast tour. Here’s a shot of Hodgy Beats and Tyler on my block in D.C. There’s often a very confrontational panhandler who stands outside of that 7-11 at night and loudly berates anyone who doesn’t give him change on the way out. The staff at the 7-11 seem to tolerate his presence, for whatever reason.

Pop Sins: Fuck Gen X: OFWGKTA Edition

popsins:

I dig Jayasuriya’s enthusiasm and his hopefulness, but he’s appealing to sympathies Gen Xers’ don’t have. They will not stop playing artists against the canon, like sports nuts pitting a computer-generated Rocky Balboa against Mason Dixon. It does not matter that H.R. and Tyler, the Creator speak to different audiences, come from different places (geographic, social, and cultural), make different music, and espouse different philosophies: Bad Brains and OFWGKTA both feature black guys who dance funny, and connecting them to each other, and to the other mummies in the post-Sex Pistols menagerie, gives cynical Gen Xers something to sell. Namely, the bitter taste in their mouths. 

Mike Riggs went quite a bit further with the whole Generation X critics vs. Odd Future thing—any of you Gen Xers care to defend yourselves?

“The problem is that in 2011, punk as a subculture encourages conformity more than creativity, its countercultural potential all but sapped through years of commercialization and calcification. In defining Odd Future as “punk,” we’re crafting a narrative where Tyler and friends are descendants rather than insurgents, where their rebellion is mimetic rather than an authentic reaction to the world in which they live.”

I wrote a thing about Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All for Thought Catalog.