Arts & Culture

Powerful, Personal, Pretty and Petty: Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo

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Kanye doesn’t want his fans to be able to pick and choose. He wants them to love it all and to see all the pieces — his music, his outfits, his fashion line, his Twitter account, his family and their celebrity status — as part of one unified art project. He makes art for the age of social media celebrity, when persona and work are more inextricable than ever. He doesn’t want the art separated from the artist, because he is part of his art. His desire to synthesize was on full display at the bizarre event called Yeezy Season 3 that he threw at Madison Square on Thursday.

Arts & Culture

JONES | They Made a Monster: Future’s Nihilistic Reinvention

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We love the story of a good Fall. Ever since the Garden of Eden, humans have lived in sin; and for as long as there have been sinners, others have relished the task of exposing them. It seems that few things fascinate us as much as a figure that rises to great heights and seems morally unimpeachable, and then is exposed as something else entirely. From Bill Clinton to Bill Cosby, our culture has a special appetite for those who claim to have high morals and are then exposed as ignoble imposters. Maybe this explains Future’s popularity.

Arts & Culture

JONES | Crime Dramas and the Wages of Sin

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What is the allure of fictitious criminals? It seems counterintuitive for there to be such huge entertainment value for an audience in having their moral compass tested by a sympathetic villain. Nonetheless, stories that feature criminals as their protagonists have been and continue to be hugely popular. At their best, such dramas manipulate the audience’s sympathy for the criminals, punishing us for making excuses for evildoers. Here, I would like to focus on three examples of intelligent crime stories that intentionally twist the knife in the viewer: The Godfather films and the television series The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.

Arts & Culture

JONES | A Band I Believe

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One of my first musical memories is of sitting in the backseat of my dad’s car, a place where the air tasted stale and hot and comforting, listening to R.E.M.’s mandolin-driven masterpiece “Losing My Religion.” I was four when we moved to my current hometown, and I remember beginning to learn the layout of Petaluma, California as my dad drove around playing Out of Time. I loved the abrupt shifts of “Radio Song” (especially to KRS-One’s boisterous rap verse) and of course, the fantastically kid-friendly “Shiny Happy People” (a song I probably should have outgrown by now, but that gleaming guitar riff still does it for me) — but even my four-year-old ear could pick out the hit. “Losing My Religion” was melancholy, adult and was saying something absolutely real. It didn’t matter that I didn’t quite understand what that was; I felt it and believed it. However, as it turns out, I don’t think that gap in understanding was between my childish mind and an adult one.

Arts & Culture

JONES | Everything Except Country

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I remember this being a very fashionable response to “What kind of music do you like?” back in junior high California. Country wasn’t a cool thing to like: too safe and too corny, too all-American for an age when kids are excited by anything that claims to challenge authority, like the aggressive punk and rap to which my friends and I gravitated. “Everything except country,” besides being a non-answer, really only addresses the genre of music that is currently played on “country” radio. These songs are far in sound, style, and substance from the music that formed in the American South as an amalgam of blues and folk. There is really nothing on country radio today that is simply country.