Capital New York

Lady Gaga flunks out of the College of American Pop Vestals

To become a pop star, she didn’t join the toddler beauty pageant circuit or have her mom put home videos on YouTube. She went to college, habituated the New York downtown music and club scene, read all the critical texts on the subject, surveyed the industry’s employment scene, put together a five-year plan, networked incessantly, and went out and nailed the interviews. She became Britney Spears the way Britney Spears would have if she knew what it meant to be Britney Spears.

Is that enough? More

Posted on May 25th, 2011 9:16am

What is to become of Rihanna?

For those willing to pretend such a thing exists, the present century has, ten years in, produced exactly one incontrovertible addition to the Great American Songbook.

“Umbrella,” the new single from R&B songstress Rihanna, is not the best top-40 opus of the era (“Since U Been Gone,” “Ring the Alarm”), or the era’s most definitive (“Jesus Walks,” “Rehab”); it achieves the status of standard precisely by dint of its instant unremarkablility, its uncanny time– and place–lessness. “Umbrella” simply sounds as if it's always been here. More

Posted on November 18th, 2010 9:16am

Taylor Swift's immodest proposal: One million units of blond suprematism

Tomorrow Taylor Swift’s new album, Speak Now, will be Billboard-certified as the fastest-selling album of the year (and decade!), having moved over a million copies in the week since its release.

This handily bests the country-pop singer's last record, Fearless, which had a 592,000-unit debut in November 2008, and the legs to eventually become the top-selling album of 2009 and go, at last count, sextuple-platinum. More

Posted on November 2nd, 2010 7:48am

Shoegazing in flip flops: No Age sings sitting down

Dean Spunt, the drummer for art-punk duo No Age, is also its lead vocalist, which accounts for perhaps the main charm of the raucous two-and-a-half-minute buzzsaw concertos he makes with guitarist Randy Randall: They sound like they’re sung sitting down. Already plenty limited, the biomechanical handicaps sitting puts on diaphragm control, and forceful thoracic function in general, no doubt render Sprunt’s voice weaker and more ragged still, and not always artfully so. But even—or especially—when he’s gasping, assuming the position does wonders for our suspension of punk disbelief: Paeans to youthful ambivalence and romantic ennui can’t help but ring a bit false when delivered with the posture and conviction of a stump speech; much better to produce the words as they’re meant to be received—hunched over, gaze fixed, limbs flailing. More

Posted on September 30th, 2010 11:31am

The Big City turns off the Bright Lights

What killed Interpol's claim to fame as New York's brooding alpha-soundtrack mixers? The news once-fawning voters and backroom fixers have had to break, ever more frequently, to Rudy Giuliani since he stopped being our mayor and started fancying himself America’s: It’s not you, Interpol. It’s us. Really. More

Posted on September 8th, 2010 11:28am

Antony Hegarty and the gender-jammers of 2010

The world’s caught up to Antony Hegarty, we might say, or he’s become obsolete, or both. Five years ago, when men were men and women were breathy, desperate coquettes—2005’s second-bestselling LP was 50 Cents’ Massacre; its bestselling was Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi—the remarkable second album from Hegarty’s band Antony and the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now, was something like the most subversive thing to be found on a second-generation iPod Mini (pink). Featuring original Superstar Candy Darling on its cover, posed in full kabuki pallor and laid up dying of cancer, Bird imbued drag signification with the liberating majesty and ennobling tragedy that had rarely, if ever, filtered through so unalloyed to a mainstream audience. More

Posted on August 31st, 2010 11:20am