Her experience seems to typify her carnally confused generation. Record numbers of young people are identifying as queer; traditional dictates around monogamy and abstinence need no longer hold as much sway; porn and dating apps offer a buffet of on-demand eroticism. Yet young people are, statistically, having less sex than their elders were at their age. Desiring and doing have never been so separate.
~ Spencer Kornhaber via The Atlantic
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In 1989, a socially anxious handyman named Trent Reznor shut himself in the Cleveland recording studio that employed him and emerged with one of rock and roll’s great statements of sexual frustration. Nine Inch Nails’s debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, blended noise with synthesized melodies and dance beats; it sounded like the work of a loner who hated his own need for connection, intimacy, and other bodies. In the ragged rasp of a man dying of thirst, Reznor screamed a confession: “I just want something I can never have!”
~ Spencer Kornhaber via The Atlantic
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Is it the apocalyptic state of the world? Is it the internet’s endless archives? Is it a failure of corporate investment in the new? Or is it the fact that hazy, nostalgic music works well as a streaming bait, creating a dreamy backdrop for all manner of uses? The truth is that all of these factors have combined to create a distinctly contemporary reality of time-related confusion and slippage.
~ Spencer Kornhaber via The Atlantic
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The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ultimately capture the hope that a better life is at the end of a long drive.
~ Spencer Kornhaber via The Atlantic
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The song that has most influenced pop music of the past decade might be one released in 1984: Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire.” With a rhythm that was twitchy but not quite danceable, with desperate vocals and cooling puddles of reverb, “I’m on Fire” was ballad and banger, confessional and slick, embodied and ghostly. Springsteen sang of being trapped on the edge of catharsis, and the music seemed to want to suspend time.
~ Spencer Kornhaber via The Atlantic
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One of the great promises of artificial intelligence is that it will open new frontiers of creative expression—but so far, it is most famous for impersonating the artists we already have.
~ Spencer Kornhaber via The Atlantic
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Taylor Swift’s 1989 reminds me of 2014, the year of its release, which is to say that it reminds me of Tinder. That’s when the dating app, founded two years earlier, settled into ultra-popularity: It was logging 1 billion “swipes” a day as singles smudged their thumbs over pictures of strangers, judging and being judged. Tinder turned the classic, nervous thrill of the dating experience into a game, one that millions of people could play at once.
~ Spencer Kornhaber via The Atlantic
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