Pop Studies | The Smart Set

Shots Fired

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s feud felt almost like it started with an inextricable bang and ended with a dull murmur. Everyone resides in the aftermath wondering if this is just a mere ceasefire – a pause before the next clash. But – and I’m just going to speak for everyone here — a fortune […]

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A Year that Defined a Lifetime

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Any given year of one’s time roaming the earth unavoidably has some effect on who they are as a person. It is perhaps especially so when a person has just turned 14, been forced the previous year to swap daily life with his family for the company of strangers and is on the cusp of […]

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The Holy Spirit of Alice Coltrane

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:22:00 +0000

Alice Coltrane has been lionized for her light and her loving devotion to God and the spirits since her first collaborations (on albums with Terry Gibbs and her husband, John Coltrane), and her earliest band-leader albums on “Impulse!” such as 1971’s “Journey in Satchidananda” and “Universal Consciousness.” With her newest work, however, the posthumously released […]

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A (Stone Cold) Stunner of a Picture

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 12:31:43 +0000

Despite only recently breaching his 20s, director and writer, Pedro Vasquez, a 2024 Drexel University graduate, completed an ambitious project: a film that marries existential anxieties, action-packed sequences, and challenging counterpoints to those with preconceptions about the life of professional wrestlers. Within this interview, we talk about his road to completing the film Slow Dancing […]

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More Human Than Ever

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 13:05:21 +0000

For Alejandro Jodorowsky, art is life. An artist’s role is to follow a continuous thread of liberation between worlds. Over his nearly eight-decade adventure in art, he has dealt in literature, theater, mime, comic books, tarot, spiritual texts, repulsive performance, cinema, poetry, visual art, music, therapy. He intended his unrealized film of Dune in the […]

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15 in ’59

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 11:30:00 +0000

“I still love Tom Petty songs/and driving old men crazy” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” Nostalgia, as many of us undoubtedly learned from this classic Mad Men scene, literally means, “pain from an old wound,” which raises the question of why we seek to relive and revive that pain. For about as long as people […]

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The Un-Making of Made in America

Thu, 16 May 2024 11:30:00 +0000

As far as popular music goes, 2024 will be remembered for Beyoncé’s reach into her Houston country roots for Cowboy Carter, the return of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band to stadium rocking, the continuing bad beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, and the multi-billion-dollar streaming sales of Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets. For better […]

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The Creator Almost Broke Me

Thu, 09 May 2024 18:46:21 +0000

Typically, the career path to film criticism doesn’t start with a 7-year-old in class declaring that they want to review movies when they grow up. As a kid from Nairobi, my journey toward a life dedicated to analyzing film began when my elder brothers exposed me early to movies that required me to access more […]

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Let By-lines be Bylines

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 12:09:37 +0000

Something unprecedented in the history of the English language occurs in Chapter II of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises. Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris, interrupts a conversation with Robert Cohn in order to attend to an assignment. While Cohn sits in their outer office, Jake and his colleagues spend two hours […]

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Town and Country

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Some time ago, I embarked on a personal reading project: An informal survey of books that once had been widely read — so widely read, in fact, that they had earned their place in the literary lexicon. The criteria for my project did have certain strictures. The operative word was once. The contents of these […]

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