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Photos of Sara: The Fake Stalker and His Secret Tumblr
by Mike Barthel Michael Walker was acting strangely. The 23-year-old Seattle soundman had just been re-introduced to Sara Merker, a college student a couple years older than he was, and the first...
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When Did The Remix Become A Requirement?
by Mike Barthel Consider this: according to Discogs.com, about 800 remixes were released in 1983. In 1990, more than 4,000; in 2000, almost 15,000. And in 2010, there were 22,750 remixes released, an...
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Ian McShane Made An Album In 1992: Would You Want To Listen To It?
by Mike Barthel "The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity," Nietzsche wrote, but then he never had to listen to a Keanu Reeves album. What might possess a...
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Listening To The Corey Feldman Prog-Rock Record
by Mike Barthel In 2002, Corey Feldman was the canary in the reality-show coal mine. Before starring on the first season of VH1's "The Surreal Life," a show that spawned something like 16 spinoffs,...
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The Awesome Album Milla Jovovich Made When She Was 16
by Mike Barthel So far in this series dedicated to forgotten vanity projects past, we've addressed a pretty-good album by Ian McShane and an awful one by Corey Feldman. Now it's time for our first...
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The Cornel West Album That Larry Summers Kept Calling A Rap CD
by Mike Barthel While we've discussed Ian McShane, Corey Feldman and Milla Jovovich, this series on vanity projects has so far not addressed any album responsible for a major cultural scandal,...
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Crispin Glover's 1989 Novelty Album About Clowns and Screaming
by Mike Barthel So far in this series on vanity projects, we've sampled the pleasant, the sad, and the surprisingly great, but now it's time to venture into the area most frequently associated with...
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The Lessons Of Yo La Tengo's Long Run
by Mike Barthel Last week, Gotham Books released Jesse Jarnow's Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. It's a biography of the Hoboken indie rock lifers who've been a working band...
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What Are The Politics Of The Internet?
by Mike Barthel First in a series of two essays today on freedom and the Internet. Next: Google, Sci-Fi And The MTA. Late last Friday, news broke that the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, an online...
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Listening To Lindsay Lohan's 2004 Debut Album
by Mike Barthel If everyone you know is making an album, is it really a vanity project when you make one, too, or is it just peer pressure? Such is the taxonomic problem with which we're faced when it...
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Christopher Lee's Concept Album: When Saruman Went Metal
by Mike Barthel Generally the problem with vanity projects is that the vanity object/subject seems less interested in making a good album than in getting credit simply for having made one at all. But...
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Brian Austin Green's "Beverly Hills 90210"-Era Rap Album
by Mike Barthel For some entries in our series on vanity projects, it was perhaps unfair to refer to them as such. Christopher Lee and Milla Jovovich's albums were legitimate art products made by...
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Eddie Murphy's 1980s 'Party' Album
by Mike Barthel A promo ad for this album says it all: "EDDIE MURPHY SINGS!!! / 'HOW COULD IT BE' ?!?" Nine years after Richard Pryor's …Is It Something I Said? held the number-one spot on the R&B...
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The Japanese Pop Album Alyssa Milano Made As A Teenager
by Mike Barthel Celebrities may cut a vanity single, and some take the time to put together an entire album. But rarely do they get 5-album deals on the strength of their performance in an Arnold...
View ArticleThe 15 Vanity Singles By "Real Housewife" Bravolebrities: One Is Actually Good!
by Mike Barthel While we have already addressed many fine full-length vanity albums, our album-oriented format has not allowed for the discussion of vanity singles: songs released by otherwise...
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How Should A Game Be?
by Mike Barthel Just like every year for at least the past half-decade, 2013 was the GREATEST YEAR EVER for games: the graphics more realistic, the worlds bigger, the narratives more cinematic....
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Let's Regulate Facebook!
Apparently, if Facebook wanted to repair its reputation, all it had to do was seem like it was helping to topple an authoritarian regime. Now that the U.S. media is loudly pushing the idea that social...
View ArticleIn Defense Of Offensive Art
When I was fifteen, I prank-called a rape hotline. I called and asked if it was true that women who get raped are asking for it. This is maybe the worst thing I have ever done! But let me explain....
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Some Advice For Young Grads
It’s college graduation season, and with the blooming of the cherry trees comes that cherished annual journalistic tradition: telling new graduates they’re screwed in a way that no one else in the...
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The Weird, Frictionless Politics Of 'Parks And Recreation'
There are a lot of different ways to say that NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” is a very upbeat show. Willa Paskin classified the show as a “comedy of niceness.” Showrunner Michael Schur points out that...
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Things Jonathan Franzen Likely Finds Cowardly, In Ascending Order of Their...
51. Pert Plus 50. Rhyming dictionaries 49. Fencing 48. Lifetime achievement awards 47. Air freshener 46. Autoplay 45. Supergroups 44. Grade inflation 43. Urinal cakes 42. Sherpas 41. Flag football 40....
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Selections From V.S. Naipaul's Yelp Account
Wienerville, USA Categories: Fast Food, Hot Dogs My fellow Yelpians, do not be fooled by the exterior trappings of this eatery. Yes, the vividly saturated jonquil marquee and the weathered red-brick...
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You Got Gamified! How Our Government Runs Like Foursquare
For all the political heaving to-and-fro that characterized our recent efforts to raise the debt ceiling, what President Obama signed on Wednesday wasn’t really a piece of budgetary policy. Aside from...
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"We Are The World": When Michael Jackson Got Political
Part of a series on collaborations that we now take for granted but initially made little sense. In November of 1984, Band Aid, an impromptu UK super-group organized by former Boomtown Rat Bob Geldof...
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We, The People, Against The Zombies
The first in a series about monsters happening here through Halloween. As usual, Tina Belcher put it best: “I’m not a zombiephile. I have a complicated relationship with zombies.” Over the last decade,...
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