Blog: The Tape

On Yeasayer's overlooked and dismissed Fragrant World.

The first interesting research paper I wrote in college was for a class called “African American Photographic Culture.” In it, we looked at the ways photography’s development helped to benefit (and damage) colloquial notions of the black body, as well as black identity, and how black photographers attempted to adopt and reconstitute the photographic apparatus [...]

Emanuel Vinson's 2012 in review.

Will Schube looks back at his musical 2012.

Tristan Rodman looks back at his musical 2012.

An in-depth look at musical function in Richard Ayoade's 2010 film, Submarine.

Will Schube explains why WHY? is WHY?

David Adler responds to "What Are We Collecting?"

Following a "URL CLUB EVENT WITH DREAMS AND FANTASIES OF BECOMING IRL PHENOMENON"

• TEMPORARY SUICIDE - YOU ARE (SLOPPED & WETTED)

Five things we liked this past month.

David Adler's observations on the globalization of popular music in India.

Sam Schube on hip-hop’s “fantasy football” period: grab whoever you can, pretend you’re all pals, and use that association to sell records.

Daniel Stump in conversation with Erik Gage, the founder of Gnar Tapes, the cassette label and zine.

Tristan Rodman on what the advent of streaming music does to the notion of a collection, and why nobody wants to pay for music anymore.

At the end of summer, Dyl’s come back from the YACHT show; he keeps checking himself saying he knows it’s crazy but he felt so sure that everything they were saying was in line with the Illuminati shit his corners of the internet talk about.

Five Things we liked this month

Tracing four decades of pop music to figure out just what, exactly, makes a song timeless.

Will Schube turns Delicate Steve's Positive Force into an NBA tournament of champions.

In a music industry where it’s the norm for bands to implode and artists to spiral into self-parody and irrelevance before there’s a grey hair on their heads, Nas, The Walkmen, and Fiona Apple are bravely wading into the mysterious, murky waters of adulthood.

It was while I was away, working in New York, that Frank Ocean released his debut studio album Channel Orange, and my sense of bizarre marvel at all that differentiated Los Angeles from New York came into focus.