Rolling Stone, bless them, republished their list of “The 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s” on their website this week. The feature – originally published in 1989 – makes for strange and occasionally bewildering reading. For a start, it’s topped by The Clash’s London Calling, which is undeniably a masterwork but also was undeniably released in 1979 (and no, we’re not buying the January 1980 US release date as an excuse here). Now, we know better than anyone that lists are always subjective, and whatever you include people are going to complain (hey, it’s actually nice to be complaining about someone else’s lists for once). And admittedly, we’re evaluating this list with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight. But even so, there are some glaring omissions from RS’s selection – here are 10 records that really should have featured somewhere near the top, but didn’t feature at all.
In Paolo Sorrentino’s forthcoming film, This Must Be The Place, which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival next month, Sean Penn plays an aging rocker — who looks a hell of lot like The Cure’s Robert Smith — on the hunt for ex-Nazi war criminal who killed his father. And now you can hear his character’s band in action! While David Byrne, who composed the soundtrack with Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) performs the titular Talking Heads song at one point in the film, we think it sounds more like Oldham’s voice in this clip. Or maybe that’s actually Penn singing? After Colin Farrell’s solid turn as a country star in Crazy Heart, nothing would surprise us. What do you think?
Mike Leavitt has a giant Art Army. Hand-crafted from scratch out of 20 to 30 custom-made parts, each lil famous artist busts out with physical likeness and personal aesthetic sensibility. His grinning Jeff Koons is karmically turning into a big balloon animal. Matthew Barney is in full-on Cremaster Cycle mode, Takashi Murakami is mid-metamorphosis into a psychotic Kawaii toon, and Julian Schnabel comes with a removable ceramic plate halo. And those are just his freshest four!
The Seattle-based proud Pratt drop-out is having a solo show at the Jonathan Levine Gallery later this year. Meanwhile, enjoy Ron English a-clowning, Banksy a-pranking, and Damien Hirst getting sliced.
People are oddly vulnerable when they’re eating. Food can be sloppy, it screws up your makeup — and perhaps most of all, like a sex tape, it gives rare insight into a person’s basic appetites. So it’s especially fascinating to see those who look the coolest and most distant (or those who are so skinny or seem so drug-addled they must never eat) stuffing their faces. After the jump, we round up photos of hip music icons, from John Lennon to Joan Jett to Thom Yorke, enjoying food.
Photographer Marcia Resnick — whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone and the Paris Review, and exhibited internationally in galleries and museums — has helped create icons; as writer Glenn O’Brien once put it, she is “the insider among the outsiders of art.” Her portraits of defining figures of ’70s counterculture are unique collaborations between her camera and her subjects. Unlike the omnipresent paparazzi of today, Resnick had intimate relationships with the personalities she photographed, who include William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, Blondie, Lydia Lunch, John Belushi, and David Byrne.
Ambient pioneer Brian Eno teams with like-minded musicians Jon Hopkins and Leo Abraham on Small Craft on a Milk Sea, an album that both recalls and rivals his innovative works of the ’70s.
Eno has said that Small Craft was born out of improvisations intended to conjure sonic “landscapes,” which may explain the songs’ transportive powers. “Slow Ice, Old Moon” evokes an ancient, glittering tundra, while the muted “Written, Forgotten” gives the sense of calling, faintly, across a great distance. Elsewhere, the glitchy “Horse” really does gallop, while the title cut is the perfect accompaniment to a late-night voyage over silent waters.
If you’re a fan of David Byrne’s artwork, then you’re going to want to check out the latest edition from 20×200, The Roots of War in Popular Song (forest of no return), a print that’s based on an original piece from his Tree Drawing series. “The Tree Drawings are particularly resonant — no artist myself, I find my creative comfort in words (as evidenced in the abundance of text-based works in our archives) and have been an inveterate connector of the unlikely and the disparate since childhood,” explains 20×200′s Youngna Park. “With on-the-surface simplicity and humble source materials — ‘straight from the sketchbook,’ he writes in his statement — Byrne’s sketches reveal an enviable breadth of knowledge, wit and humility, all in the pursuit of making sense of the often nonsensical.”
Proceeds from the sale of these affordable prints benefit our friends at Creative Time. The first 200 prints, which were priced at $50 each, have already sold out. The second 200 are $100 each, and the final 200 are $150 each. There is a limit of one print per collector. Translation: Hurry up and buy one!
TV on the Radio’s David Andrew Sitek indulges his dancier side with Maximum Balloon, a collaborative project featuring vocals from Karen O, David Byrne, and Theophilus London.
The eponymous album also includes appearances by Sitek’s bandmates Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, but he keeps things clear of darker TVotR territory by lacing the tracks with bright, dance-floor ready beats and bleeps. As with most multi-vocalist undertakings, the results vary with the contributors themselves, but Sitek’s skill as a producer shines throughout.
We’ve previously discussed how buildings have a cozy relationship with music, nabbing starring role in so many songs. Inspired by David Byrne’s recent TED talk, our friends over at Architizer have rounded up some of the most architecturally sound album covers of all time. Is it any surprise that our favorite example features a digitized “home” designed by Stefan Sagmeister for Everything that Happens Will Happen Today, the 2008 collaboration between the Talking Head and Brian Eno? (We’re also pretty partial to Wilco’s Yankee Foxtrot, which features Bertrand Goldberg’s real-life structure, Marina City.) After the jump, we’ve pulled together a few more indie additions for their list. Leave any albums we’ve missed in the comments.
It seems like every day someone is sending us a new TED talk. We are big fans of the forward-thinking smart-people conference, but there’s just no way we can watch everything posted on the site. That said, there’s no way we would miss “David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve,” a speech from this year’s event that just appeared on the site. Once we checked out that show stopper (seriously, watch it now), we couldn’t help scanning the TED archives to find the best arts and culture-related talks. Our ten favorites, spanning the realms of art, design, literature, music, and TV, are after the jump.
