Madness makes men do strange things — it’s an obvious truism, and it was the overriding theme of tonight’s episode of The Strain. Dutch and Eph undertook some unusual experiments in the continued hunt for a means to disable the strigoi’s telepathic network, while Fet, seemingly for fun, tagged a couple of vampires in the street in attempt to root out their nest. What he discovered, a massive swarm of sleeping strigoi huddled beneath Central Park, would be enough to loosen anyone’s grip on sanity. Read More...
Sometimes there's just magic in the moment. When the Strokes first stumble-swaggered into fame nearly two decades ago, they hardly seemed primed for breakfast before 2 p.m., let alone immortality. Their defiantly lo-fi videos beamed like dispatches from some lost cable-access frequency; their clothes were a thrift-store freebie pile; even the name of their debut, Is This It, came on like a cool-kid shrug, so offhandedly blasé it couldn’t be bothered with the implied question mark. Read More...
At a Harlem birthday party in may 1979, Sylvia Robinson heard a new kind of music. An ex-R&B singer who ran the All Platinum label, she immediately grasped the potential of what the partygoers called ”rap.” The next day, Robinson, 43, and her son, Joey Jr., 17, set out to round up some rappers—and a radical pop genre (with roots in the African-American tradition of ”doing the dozens” and the talkin’ blues) was born in the back of their Oldsmobile. Read More...
