Anniversaries
Rage Against the Machine’s The Battle of Los Angeles Is an Urgent Call to Arms
The band's full-throttle approach and staunchly political ethos made The Battle of Los Angeles a shock to the system. Rage Against the Machine’s The Battle of Los Angeles Is an Urgent Call to Arms Paolo Ragusa
25 Years Ago, System of a Down Embraced Eccentricity with Their Self-Titled Debut Album
The wildly eclectic LP broke through to the mainstream, becoming a surprising hit in the rock and metal world. 25 Years Ago, System of a Down Embraced Eccentricity with Their Self-Titled Debut Album Jordan Blum
10 Years Ago, Deafheaven’s Sunbather Challenged the Boundaries of Metal
Deafheaven's sophomore album brought the brutality and beauty of blackgaze into the spotlight. 10 Years Ago, Deafheaven’s Sunbather Challenged the Boundaries of Metal Jordan Blum
30 Years Ago, Tool Crafted a Masterful Debut Album with Undertow
A look back at the progressive metal band's first full-length LP. 30 Years Ago, Tool Crafted a Masterful Debut Album with Undertow Jordan Blum
good kid, m.A.A.d city at 10: How Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools” Helped Me Get Over My Own Toxic Relationship
Great albums are about more than the music. When they really hit, just mentioning their names evokes memories and elicits “Remember when…” conversations. good kid, m.A.A.d city — released on October 22nd, 2012 — is one of those albums, which is why its 10-year anniversary is a very big deal. Kendrick Lamar became a household name on the strength of everything he did on this album, while possibly becoming the voice of a generation at the same time. He got into our bloodstreams through touching topics that meant a lot to him, while hoping we related. I related in a way I never predicted and 10 years later, I understand how important just one song was because it truly changed my world in a way no piece of music ever has nor probably ever will. Addiction sucks. I’m pretty sure I’m not blowing ...
Boogie Nights at 25: How Paul Thomas Anderson Foresaw Changing Attitudes Towards Art, Porn, and Commerce
25 years ago, Boogie Nights arrived in theaters, introducing audiences to a promising-turned-renowned filmmaker (Paul Thomas Anderson) and showcasing a fantastic ensemble of young breakout performers (Mark Wahlberg, John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman), rising character actors (Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, Julianne Moore) and Hollywood veterans (Burt Reynolds, Philip Baker Hall) in an endlessly entertaining depiction of the Golden Age of Porn. Laced with colorful period detail and a vibrant wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop, disco, and Motown, Anderson’s sun-soaked chronicle of the San Fernando Valley in the late 1970s illustrated a seemingly halcyon time in American culture. As the film’s trailer posits, it was an era when “sex was safe, pleasure was a business, and business was booming....
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever Is the Worst-Reviewed Movie on Rotten Tomatoes — 20 Years Later, Is It Still That Bad?
According to Rotten Tomatoes, there has never been a movie quite like Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. The 2002 film, which stars Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu as espionage agents on opposite ends of an action-packed conspiracy, turns 20 years old today, and it bears one of the most unfortunate distinctions in the entire entertainment industry: It has 118 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and every single one of them says it’s bad. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is not the only movie with a 0% on the internet’s best-known review aggregator, but not all the zero-percenters are equal on that site. Even notorious duds like Jaws: The Revenge and Highlander II: The Quickening only have a fraction of the reviews have been logged for Ballistic. The odds that out of 118 critics, not a single one of them ever gave ...
How The Perks of Being a Wallflower Became a Generation-Defining Classic
The Perks of Being a Wallflower came at a very interesting moment for millennial/Gen-Z cusp high schoolers. Based on the popular 1999 novel by Stephen Chbosky and adapted by Chbosky in 2012, Perks arrived a decade ago during the height of “the Tumblr era,” when teens at the time like myself gravitated to the website’s curation of hipster trends and nostalgia-inflected aesthetics. On an average day in the early 2010s, chances were high you would come across a crying Logan Lerman GIF, an image of the Perks cast sitting on some bleachers, or a screenshot of one of the film’s iconic aphorisms, “In this moment, I swear we are infinite” and “We accept the love we think we deserve,” on your feed. Even though the overuse of those quotes and pictures ultimately sapped them of their poignancy, Perks...
Purity Ring’s Shrines Turns 10: How the Debut Laid a Masterful Foundation for the Future of Pop
Purity Ring‘s Megan James and Corin Roddick describe their debut album, Shrines, as one with very strict rules. “All the drums sound a certain way, all the vocals sound a certain way, all the synths… we created a strict palate of things that sort of worked together and tried to make as many different kind of musical ideas within that palette,” Roddick tells Consequence. Indeed, Shrines — which celebrates its tenth anniversary today, July 20th — is an album that represents Purity Ring operating with only their essentials, forging a path that would later define the sound of modern pop, if only for a portion of the last decade. When you look at Purity Ring’s output following Shrines (2015’s Another Eternity, 2020’s WOMB, and most recently, their EP Graves, which ...
Purity Ring’s Shrines Turns 10: How the Debut Laid a Masterful Foundation for the Future of Pop
Purity Ring‘s Megan James and Corin Roddick describe their debut album, Shrines, as one with very strict rules. “All the drums sound a certain way, all the vocals sound a certain way, all the synths… we created a strict palate of things that sort of worked together and tried to make as many different kind of musical ideas within that palette,” Roddick tells Consequence. Indeed, Shrines — which celebrates its tenth anniversary today, July 20th — is an album that represents Purity Ring operating with only their essentials, forging a path that would later define the sound of modern pop, if only for a portion of the last decade. When you look at Purity Ring’s output following Shrines (2015’s Another Eternity, 2020’s WOMB, and most recently, their EP Graves, which ...
30 Years Ago, Megadeth’s Countdown to Extinction Tackled Politics and Personal Demons
By the start of the ’90s, Megadeth were on track to dominate heavy metal. After all, 1990’s Rust in Peace garnered stellar sales and press reviews, with the corresponding Clash of the Titans tour — featuring Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax — further bolstering their hegemony. Plus, as he confessed to Guitar School in 1993, Megadeth mastermind Dave Mustaine was finally getting “stone sober” after years of addiction to marijuana, cocaine, cigarettes, heroin, and other vices. At the same time, however, the meteoric rise of grunge meant that metal was becoming “the red-headed stepchild of the music industry” (as Mustaine postulated to Goldmine in 2012). Advertisement Although they faced some industry pressure to follow the tides, Mustaine told Patch.com the same year, Megadeth chose instead to “...
In 2012, The Avengers Was a Huge Risk. In 2022, It’s a Relic of a Lost Era.
There’s an argument to be made that Joss Whedon’s The Avengers is the most important superhero movie of the 21st century. The reasons are numerous, from its proof of concept that a crossover event on this scale could work, to its staggering box office success, to the now-vast media empire which would not exist had this one film fallen apart. The MCU began with Marvel literally using its entire catalog of characters to secure a massive loan to produce its own films, and while the early success of Iron Man and the other Phase 1 films was promising, that huge gamble was still largely dependent on The Avengers succeeding. And that wasn’t necessarily the safest of bets, given that despite Whedon being nerd royalty and an established screenwriter, script doctor, and TV director, the film was onl...
