Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Nearly six months before his death, the embattled 20-year-old rapper XXXTentacion shared an urgent manifesto via Instagram Live. Eerily prescient, his words belied a sense of macabre resignation. “If I’m gonna die or ever be a sacrifice, I wanna make sure that my life made at least 5 million kids happy or they found some…
Image: Youtube If you were thinking that Spotify’s new “hate content and hateful conduct policy”—which was faulty to begin with—would stop other alleged abusers’ music from being promoted, think again. Only R. Kelly and rapper XXXTentacion (who was charged with battery of a pregnant woman) were initially singled out as part of the policy, which…
“I’m free! I’m free!” Screenshot: Walt Disney Pictures For the first time in twenty years, as the Atlantic points out, a whole year’s worth of copyrighted works will enter the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2019. Under the terms of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, works first published in 1923 will enter…
Here are just a few, tiny things that happened in a dark, bizarre, depressing Year of our Lord 2018: A somewhat famous white guy who goes by Lil Dicky released a music video, called “Freaky Friday,” that he wrote and stars in alongside and a much more famous black guy, Chris Brown. In this music…
Image via Getty Recently, famous musicians like Dr. Luke, CeeLo Green, and the Gaslamp Killer have been publicly accused of using date rape drugs. But it’s important to remember that drugging occurs at all levels of the music industry, as The Fader notes in its report on the horrifyingly common practice of drugging in the…
Sometimes when Michelle Branch goes out for coffee, the barista recognizes the name on her credit card. Assuming that said server was alive and watching MTV or VH1 in the early aughts, they’ll almost certainly ask Branch what she’s been up to since the release of her platinum-selling 2003 sophomore record, Hotel Paper, which is…
So, President Donald Trump is supposedly upset that a woman played his White House press secretary on “Saturday Night Live” last weekend. Politico is reporting that seeing Sean Spicer depicted by a thunderous Melissa McCarthy bothered the president so much, particularly because he “doesn’t like his people to look weak.” Spicer himself said that he thought…
“I will not allow Justin Bieber to taint an entire genre for me,” said the street artist and Obey founder in a video for Hypebeast which is interestingly not at all ironic. “If you’re gonna wear a band tee, you better know about that band,” says Shepard Fairey, forty-nine seconds into a video interview for Hypebeast spectacularly…
“A MASTERPIECE” reads the poster of Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea in a font larger than the title. It’s a font so large that the blur of motion doesn’t render it illegible—it’s in, I think, every subway station along New York’s L line, which means I’m confronted at least a few times on most…
Media center-infused smart speakers and Bluetooth speakers are pretty common these days, but over on Hackaday, user Carlo Maria Curinga made one of the slickest looking little speakers we’ve seen yet. The hardware here includes a Raspberry Pi, a DAC, an amp, speaker, and a little LED matrix for visual feedback. On the software end,…