This is an Earn This Mixtape For the sixth entry in the Earn This Mixtape Series, Grant and I came up with twenty songs that give us serious cognitive dissonance. The first half of this mixtape is a list of songs where the chorus overpowers the rest of the song. The second half…
I got into Taking Back Sunday and Brand New completely at the wrong time. When I was in high school, I listened to music for 20somethings. Now that I’m in my mid-20s, I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to stuff written for, consumed by, and most heavily applicable to high schoolers. And few groups…
In the fourth entry of our ongoing Mixtape series — in which one or more writers picks about twenty songs from under a single umbrella — we’re digging deep into some of our favorite non-singles from well-known artists. As always, we’ve included a Spotify playlist to listen to as you read. Someday’s Gone – All-American…
Sigh. Some of our four loyal readers may be all Oscar‘d-out, but after that atrocity exhibition of a telecast last night, I just can’t sit idly by while it goes largely accepted. As I’ve chronicled, I love (the idea of) the Oscars, which is why it irritates me so much that we can’t get the…
I’m a bigger fan of the Academy Awards than anyone else I know. That’s not all on my end—I don’t view the Oscars as some flawless representation of entertainment or anything. No, I make that statement in part because the Oscars—coming up this Sunday night—are one of the easiest punchlines in the world. No one, it…
The Wolf of Wall Street, I can already tell, is never going to get its proper discussion. Whenever someone says anything bad about the movie, it’ll concern its vulgarity, its garishness, maybe its running time—not the actual content of it. And that’s a shame, because Wolf—based on a memoir from Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who…
A little while back, you might recall, Dan wrote a paean to Billy Joel’s 100 Greatest Songs. Naturally, as a male, my first reaction was: I have to equal or surpass his work–by providing a list of the top 100 songs from my favorite (probably) artist, U2. As someone whose number of U2 concerts is in…
This is the first in a hopefully-recurring feature where the writers of Earn This will choose some genre or theme, collectively pick twenty or so of their favorite songs under that umbrella, and write a few words about each song. If we’re motivated, we’ll even embed a Spotify playlist. For our first entry, Dan and…
Rating: 3.25 stars (out of 4) I’m not sure another movie has produced a bigger disconnect between its teased images and final product than Spring Breakers. The advance buzz promised…well, let’s not sugarcoat this—a T&A film with a bunch of attractive, heretofore-innocent girls going sexy, plus James Franco as a BAMF gangster. And it’s not…
The next time somebody complains that a supposedly ‘real’ movie takes liberties with the truth (like, say, The Social Network), I want to show them The Bling Ring. This is what happens when you don’t dramatize your movie. For all I know, the events portrayed here may well be accurate representations of the actions of…