New Releases

Bon Iver Drops Anticapitalist Anthem Featuring Bruce Springsteen and Jenny Lewis

"Each and every person on earth deserves to live fully with dignity, equity, justice, and joy. Instead, our capitalistic societies have created a world that is most supportive of the wealthy and the elite, and the predatory corporations and policies that drive their disproportionate success."

Bon Iver

Bon Iver has shared a surprise new song entitled "AUATC."

Produced by Justin Vernon, Jim-E Stack, and BJ Burton, and featuring contributions from Jenny Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner, Phil Cook, and more, it's Bon Iver's second single of 2020.

The song dropped today along with a music video created by Aaron Anderson and Eric Timothy Carlson and starring Randall Riley. Filmed in New York, the video is mostly a montage of simple, beautiful footage of Riley dancing across bridges and through neighborhood scenes, all while wearing a mask. It's distinctly summer-in-the-time-of-COVID-core, from its DIY feel to its vaguely anticapitalist implications. (The video begins and ends with a few brightly colored cartoons depicting engorged, Monopoly Man-like men in suits all eating vast amounts of cake).

The song's acronymic title stands for "Ate Up All Their Cake," so its anticapitalist arguments aren't exactly covert.

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MUSIC

13 Musicians Influenced By Psychedelics

Some wild stories from great musicians who dabbled in hallucinogens.

Harry Styles at Capital's Summertime Ball 2022

Photo by Matt Crossick_Global_Shutterstock

The story of psychedelics is intertwined with the story of music, and tracing their relationship can feel like going in circles.

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Jenny Lewis (Opening for Harry Styles) - Love On Tour - Atlanta, GA - 10/28/21 - State Farm Arena

If there's one thing that could be said of our modern era, it's that nothing exists in isolation.

One could even say that nothing goes in just one direction anymore—instead, things are moving in multiple directions, operating in loops, often meeting at crossroads. For a long time, at least in the music industry, things appeared to be stratified, separated by genre, linear visions, and arbitrary categories. Rock artists toured with rock artists; indie stars opened for indie stars. Patrician music lovers looked down on pop-lovers, and pop-lovers bullied indieheads. Success could be purchased with a record deal and marked by a position on a top chart. Gender was divided between a man and a woman. Feminism was disconnected from race and class.

Times are changing. Pop, like fashion, has become fluid and multidimensional. Elton John can collaborate with Young Thug. Lady Gaga can ricochet from electronica to folk and back. Harry Styles has become a bisexual icon and a truly great songwriter, capable of drawing from multiple genres to create nuanced and political pop music.

And now he's going on tour with Jenny Lewis, Koffee, and King Princess. They'll all be opening for him on different stops on his 2020 "Love on Tour" tour, which will begin in April.


A little background: Jenny Lewis is an iconic songwriter who fronted the band Rilo Kiley before creating a body of intensely powerful solo work. Koffee is a singer-songwriter, rapper, and musician from Jamaica who's generated a huge amount of buzz in a short time by putting a fresh and experimental spin on reggae. King Princess is a dream pop star who may or may not be capitalizing on queer aesthetics but still embodies an inspiringly out and proud image.

Styles' choice of openers is brilliant because it brings together so many different devoted and passionate fan-bases. Queer fans will relish the chance to dance along to King Princess, while indie traditionalists and older millennials will come for Jenny Lewis, and Gen-Z fans of cutting-edge music will show up for Koffee. All these musicians are bound together by one common thread: Their music is really, really good. And isn't that what matters in the end?

Rilo Kiley - A Better Son/Daughterwww.youtube.com


King Princess - 1950www.youtube.com


Koffee - Toast (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Unfortunately, the existing tickets sold out with stunning speed and cost an exorbitant amount of money, sadly prohibiting many of Styles' fans from enjoying the experience. (Many of them feel scammed). If Styles were to truly embrace the ethos of his commitment to breaking down all genres and boundaries, he'd make his concerts free, but alas, one can only dream... Until then, let us keep listening to our descriptively titled crossover Spotify playlists (shoutout to "Creamy" and "Pollen"), saying "okay" to Boomers who insist that there are only two genders, checking Co-Star for evidence of discernible meaning, and praying for the day when everything and everyone will truly be free.

Harry Styles - Sign of the Times (Video)www.youtube.com

CULTURE

Lana Del Rey, Billie Eilish, and the Sexist Backlash Against Female Sadness

Sure, the topics they sing about might be destructive and controversial—but typically, we let men get away with writing about the same themes without blinking an eye.

Photo by Paola Chaaya on Unsplash

Who could forget the firestorm that erupted around Lana Del Rey in 2012? The number of think pieces and posts smashing her for her purported glamorization of depression and sadness rose to the thousands, maybe millions.

She wasn't a feminist. She ran around with gangsters and slept with old men in her music videos. She loved Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. She wanted to die.

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MUSIC

Jenny Lewis Plays With Nostalgia on "Wasted Youth"

The new song is the third single from her upcoming album, On The Line.

Jenny Lewis

The arrival of Jenny Lewis' fourth solo album, On The Line, is imminent.

And if "Wasted Youth" is any indication, the new record promises to be a wrenching and gorgeous trip. The third single released from On The Line bounces with a deceptively easy-going twang while meditating on addiction and lost time. It's a sound that lives somewhere between Dolly Parton and Carole King, sowing a saccharine sadness under its nostalgic pulse, but Lewis still effortlessly stakes her ground.

Beginning with a jaunty piano trill, the song's foreground is Lewis' voice lilting around a beautifully-echoing guitar lick, giving depth and vigor to the act of memory. But her lyrics are resigned and somewhat barbed in their look back: "Why you lyin'? / The bourbon's gone," she sings exasperatedly at one point; "Mercury hasn't been in retrograde for that long." The song rings with the sound of regret, but "Wasted Youth" makes a point of not wallowing in the pain of what's past. Instead, Lewis seems more interested in remembering as an act of survival, taking the days lazed away with drink and drugs "just because," as just more stories she alone gets to tell.

There's a lot to be said for a nostalgic artist playing with a walk down memory lane like this, recasting youth as something lost while not letting that loss consume her. Jenny Lewis makes "Wasted Youth" as an affecting experiment in memory while surrounding it safely in a wistful melody. The remorse of hindsight rarely sounds this self-aware, but Lewis has whole-heartedly nailed it.

Jenny Lewis - Wasted Youth (Audio Video)youtu.be



Matthew Apadula is a writer and music critic from New York. His work has previously appeared on GIGsoup Music and in Drunk in a Midnight Choir.


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