Okay kids. SXSW 2010 Music is just two weeks away. I thought you might need some help figuring out who you should be excited to go see live. Or, if you are sadly unable to go, you should at the very least know who I am super excited about seeing. Last year I fell just short of my goal to…
This past summer I wrote about the top commercial songs. I liked that I could use advertisements to find new bands. And while I am still discovering artists this way, I’ve found recent commercials to be using bands I already know and love. This post is an amalgamation of both. You can stream most of the tracks at the end…
Not just anyone can be a convincing and successful pitchman. (Look no further than Luke Wilson’s AT&T commercials for proof.) The best pitchmen fall under three main categories: the average joe, the celebrity endorser, and the professional. Here are the decade’s top ten:
10. Bob – Bob’s Furniture
“My Bob’s,” “The Bob-O-Pedic,” and “I Doubt It” are all phrases that I can…
So we here at popten got together and assembled a gigantic list of our favorite albums of the past decade. Then we voted on each others choices. It is amazing how wide a variety of listening styles your trusty pop culture gurus have. I’ve assembled the top vote-getters into a trusty A to Z list. Albums are in order by…
I will be the first to admit, my love of Christmas is somewhat irrational. I was raised to be a good Jew, but I can’t get enough of lights, stocking, and carols. Heck, I even send out a holiday card with me and my dog in matching sweaters. Part of this obsession with all-things-Christmas is amassing an unreasonable amount of…
Summer Jams have a way of defying everything you hold sacred about your music tastes. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, your entire aesthetic jumps right out the window, in favor of a radio-friendly, beachy, head-bopping soundtrack. You know you have succumbed to the allure of the most infectious Summer Jams when they can be heard multiple times in a…
I recently stumbled across a Flickr photoset entitled “I Like Your Face” and spent over an hour of my life looking at all 274 items. Mostly, I think I just enjoyed getting lost in the simplicity of presentation of such bold and beautiful statements. I tend to associate everything in my life with music in some way, that’s just how…
I took what Hawkes wrote last week to heart, and I took time to let the balloon boy hullabaloo set in. (Full Confession: It doesn’t hurt that I am in England and had minimal internet connectivity until now.) And what this time off helped me to see is what balloon boy really needed: a mix to chronicle his journey, I mean,…
In procrastinating packing for my pending trip to England, I started to think about all of the traveling I’ve done as of late. And it’s actually quite a lot. If I only count the places I need to procure non-public transportationto get to (i.e. rent a car/take a bus/book a flight), I could name ten cities in the past ten…
Here is a quick mix in the spirit of the working man.
Stream it in full here.
Ben Harper – Jah Work
Jim Croce – Workin’ At The Car Wash Blues
Mos Def – Workers Comp
Kanye West ft. Consequence & GLC – Spaceship
Owen – In The Morning, Before Work
R.E.M – Finest Worksong (Mutual Drum Horn Mix)
Randy Newman – Mr. President (Have Pity On The…
Matt Ellsworth and I met while making Second Skin, a documentary I directed on virtual worlds. He’s one of the boys from Indiana who loves to game. Our conversations over the years have led to a few things, one of them was finding a common love for Johnnie Walker Black Label, and the second was a penchant for postulating about…
The geek have officially inherited the Earth, as was prophesied in Psalms 37:7 (more or less) so many bearded men ago. It’s a fairly recent thing, having happened somewhere between Google’s ascent to ubiquity, the second installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the eyebrow-raising popularity of Weird Al’s White & Nerdy. And since history is told by the…
How much does James Cameron ride George Lucas’ dick? Only enough to base an entire movie, Avatar, on the final battle sequence from the last good film in the Star Wars franchise, Return of the Jedi. Each film has its ragtag band of native creatures, each film pits basic bush weaponry against mechanized slaughter machines, each film has exploding trees.…
Come with me, friends, to another time. Let’s say 1998ish. Ross and Rachel rule the airwaves, ER is hailed as the Best Drama Evar. As the sun sets on Seinfeld, critics mourn its passing, proclaiming that we’re not likely to see a show of its brilliance ever again.
I watched an episode of Seinfeld yesterday. It’s still funny, despite the canned…
I sincerely hope I made every attempt to be fair and honest and if I left off a film you love, please know that it was not with malice and there are only ten spots. I even split them into two genres because taking any of these off the list kind of made my heart hurt. Also, feel free to…