NYU Local’s Entertainment Section Picks Its Impending Summer Popculture Favorites

Exams are almost (almost!) over, and pretty soon you’ll be able to hang out and binge watch on Arrested Development while bumping the new Daft Punk album, torrenting The Bling Ring, and tweeting all at the same time. We don’t mean to tease or blue-ball you here, but NYU Local’s Entertainment section is particularly pumped about this summer’s pop culture offerings — from the meta-mindfuck that will be This Is The End, to the final season of Breaking Bad. We know it’s not quite summer yet, but we put together a guide of our own impending favorites to get you pumped about sitting inside this June through August as you ignore the beautiful weather.

Could One Of These Teen Pop Songs Be This Summer’s “Call Me Maybe”?

In middle and high schools, I used to pride myself on being a Top 40s junkie. If a song was hot, I not only made sure to know it, but also attempted to memorize every word, study every music video, and in some extreme cases, teach myself associated dance routines. (Yes, I can still do the “1, 2 Step”)

I’ve always assumed that I’ve carried this borderline obsession with Top 40s with me throughout college, but this past weekend, I had a rude awakening. I was checking out the top trending songs on Twitter’s new #music app, and although I recognized some familiar ones — like Ciara’s “Body Party” and JT’s “Mirrors” — there were a ton of teen pop songs that I had never heard of. Who is this Cody Simpson character? I thought. Why is a Nickelodeon star collaborating with Mac Miller? And why did no one tell me Selena Gomez has a new song? 

In an attempt to reclaim my identity, I binge-listened to all of these teen pop songs. While some are just as bad as you might expect, others are actually pretty great. But with summer just around the corner, the question remains: Are any good enough to become this summer’s ultimate pop hit, á la 2010′s “California Gurls” or 2012′s “Call Me Maybe”? We investigate.

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Red Bull Music Academy To Serve Concerts, Lectures, & Well, Probably Red Bull

Red Bull executives know their product serves as both a study and party companion. So evidently, they chose to combine both worlds, offering creative ~intellectuals~ a month-long excuse to rage face.

From April 28 to May 31, Red Bull Music Academy will host thirty-four public events around New York City. The traveling workshop will feature 236 artists, film screenings, live concerts, and paneled discussions with people like ERYKAH BADU.

Here is a short preview of events to save cash money for next week. If tickets are sold out, there are many more events and StubHub alternatives.

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What’s The Deal With Twitter’s New #Music Discovery Platform?

After a few weeks of speculation and a (most definitely planned) confirmation from Ryan Seacrest, Twitter has finally opened their #music discovery platform to the masses. Emphasis on masses — the public announcement headlined yesterday’s episode of Good Morning America, which means that in the span of one hour, the launch directly or indirectly hit every demographic. Or at least anyone that was awake.

The announcement comes less than three months after Twitter launched video snippet app Vine, which moved to the top spot in Apple’s App Store following a sudden jump from the tech community to mainstream media coverage. (Vine’s announcement was on the Twitter blog.) Both Vine and #music began as independent startups that, without an acquisiton from Twitter, would have been left to fend for themselves against comepting startups. That might say more about Twitter’s influence rather than the quality of their acquisitions, though. Read more…


NYU Local’s Guide To Record Store Day: From WTF To Weed Heaven

Ah, Record Store Day, the annual event that brings bearded man-children out of their moms’ basements and into the world, questing for limited vinyl and acting more harried and vicious than moms at Black Friday sales. But is it really that nerdy?

The short answer is no, even though you will find your fair share of pale basement-dwellers and obscuro pressings should you venture out to one of our many local record stores this Saturday (4/20!!). RSD was created to keep independent record stores afloat in an age of economic downturn for most of the music industry, and attempts to do so by releasing a ton of exclusive albums. In years past, most of these releases would struggle to attract attention from anyone but obsessive music nerds, but this year, there seems to be an increased variety of RSD exclusives.

The full list is available on RSD’s site here, but you don’t want to scroll through hundreds of albums to find the few that matter to you, do you? NYU Local’s done the heavy lifting for you and broken down RSD releases into more manageable chunks, namely “Classics,” “Cool New Shit,” “WTF,” “4/20 Friendly” and “Über-nerdy.” Peruse at your convenience, without the presence of sweaty hipsters to distract you.

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Spring Albums You Should Listen To, And The Ice Cream You Should Eat While Listening To Them

Warm weather is finally here! With it, as usual, comes a bunch of albums from bands looking to tour the festival circuit that begins with Coachella this weekend. Another inevitable aspect of rising temperatures is a profound craving for frozen desserts, especially when you live in a city that’s constantly raising the bar in terms of ice cream creativity.

While you can match music with its most appropriate alcoholic beverage online, no such option exist for the pairing of chill jams with even chiller treats. By using intense flavor science that’s usually reserved for wine-and-cheese tastemakers, NYU Local has done the unthinkable and created an algorithm that perfectly matches new music and frozen desserts. Here are some of our favorite results:

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KEN Mode and the Brooklynization of North American Metal

KEN Mode are a metal band from Winnipeg, Canada, whose new album Entrench (out on March 19th) will probably sell less copies in their hometown than it will in a borough of a foreign city that’s 1500 miles away. Today, Brooklyn is more often associated with indie rock, producing artists like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio and Grizzly Bear. But in fact, the borough has a sizable metal scene of its own, and a storied history of metal.

Sir Lord Baltimore, often hailed as America’s first legitimate metal band, were born and raised in BK, and brought their brand of stoner rock on tour with ’70s British metal heavyweights like Black Sabbath and Humble Pie. In the latter decades of the 20th century, Brooklyn bred such stellar metal bands as the shock-rocking Carnivore, nu-metal-before-there-was-nu-metal pioneers Biohazard, Injustice (featuring the guy who would later do the “Huzzah” beat), and goth metal titans Type O Negative.

But several decades and terrible late-career albums later, the forefathers of Brooklyn metal have been surpassed by the borough’s other music scenes — namely hip-hop in the ’90s, and indie rock in the ’00s. With indie rock came an influx of the “hipster” archetype, a type of person that the media loves to attempt to describe. For this article’s purposes, defining the hipster in terms other than their general music taste would be irrelevant. But suffice “hipster music” to mean anything that attempts to situate itself as separate from the mainstream, which in early ’00s Brooklyn usually meant indie rock. Thus, the American hipster has become inextricably linked with indie/alternative music.

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This Week In Geek: Gary Marcus

This Week In Geek profiles professors, grad students and undergrads who are blinding us with science. If you or someone you know is making notable strides in the lab or around the city, send all tips to mrc403@nyu.edu.

Gary Marcus is a professor in the Psychology Department at NYU. He’s also the Director of NYU’s Center for Language and Music. His research creatively blends linguistics, biology, neuroscience, computer science, and even music, to arrive at an integrated and multi-dimensional understanding of the mind. He also jams on his guitar in his free time, proving it’s never too late to pick up new tricks.

Marcus is the author of several books that explain the complex construction and cognitive processes of the brain. He’s got a recurring column at The New Yorker, and has contributed to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. In his most recent book, Guitar Zero, Marcus chronicled his attempt to learn guitar and along the way explored the cognitive underpinnings of musical talent and the processes related to developing musical skill.  Read more…


Last Night’s Ultra Violet Live Showcased Some Of NYU’s Most Talented Performers

NYU’s top talents faced off last night at Ultra Violet Live, NYU’s annual talent show. Hosted and judged by famous NYU (read: Tisch) alumni, the competition set out to find the university’s next star. Read more…


Treat Your Music Better With Our Favorite Headphones

There are a lot of headphones out there. Every color and shape, endorsed by every celebrity, counterfeited by every third-world country and marketed to make innocent people like you believe that your headphones are somehow better than everyone else’s.

If you spend at least an hour listening to music with headphones each week, it’s worth upgrading your crappy earbuds to something that really will let your music shine. And if you don’t spend that much time plugged into your music, you might want to try it. It’s nice to escape for a little and surround yourself with tunes.

We’ll spare you all of the juicy audiophile details like which headphones have better midtones and skintones or which pairs have the tighest bass or the widest waist. If you want to obsess over that, do spend a few days on Head-Fi. Make sure to think about what style of headphones you prefer: open-air tend to produce better sound but don’t isolate outside noise, whereas in-ear and around-ear styles tend to block external noise at the cost of comfort. Take that generality with a grain of salt, though, because every pair is unique.

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