Aux.Out.
Articles about Aux.Out.
Thank You for the Remix to Ignition, R. Kelly
To celebrate one of the best songs ever made and the album and man who gave it to us, I asked several people to write a piece in the form of a thank you letter, thanking R. Kelly for creating “Ignition (Remix).” Each piece tells a different story but they all serve the same purpose. To remind people of why “Ignition (Remix)” is regarded as a classic, and how a song about fogging up windows and popping Cristal, continues to bring people together.
Reclaiming a Bright Eyes song after a bad breakup
My live-in boyfriend stood a few yards away from me, staring down at our apartment’s hardwood floor as though he would find the words he was struggling to string together there, carved in the boards in between his feet. When he looked back up, it was with an expression that had become painfully familiar in the last few months—equal parts anger, disappointment, and bewilderment, as though he had woken up in a strange bed one day with no knowledge of how he’d gotten there. It hurt just to look at him.
No Destination: Because I lived in Korea, I have obligatory thoughts on PSY’s “Gangnam Style”
By now, “Gangnam Style” is widely regarded as a modern-day “Macarena.” It’s got all the hallmarks of the ’90s phenom — the attendant silly dance, the indecipherable lyrics in a foreign language, the element of goofiness. And while I’m sure I’ll be horsey trotting around the dance floor between “The Electric Slide” and “C’mon N’ Ride It (The Train)” at my wedding (date, time, and groom TBD), I’m not so willing to brush off “Gangnam Style” as just another silly fluke of an import from somewhere far away.
Trash Collector: Ten Overlooked Trash Albums of 2012
With 2012 over halfway over, this seems like as good a time as any to start getting things together for the inevitable “year end” list. So let’s keep it simple. Here are 10 awesome and overlooked trashy, garage rocky, power poppy, grungy, grimy, slimy, noisy releases that I haven’t already talked about in this column this year.
Dreamlab: Christian Psychedelic Music of the ’60s and ’70s
While I’ve been known to make bold claims like, “Rebecca Black is advanced,” and, “LMFAO is self-aware,” the bold claim that generates the most gapes from people in my friend-circle is this assertion: “Actually, Christian music isn’t shitty, you guys.”
No Destination: How K-Pop Made Me Love Lady Gaga
It’s something like a cliché to say that, as broadening as traveling can be, one if its chief benefits is how it changes your perspective about home. Usually, the remarks we hear are along the lines of how nice it is to have running water, electricity, a life free of disease and other things relatively low on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. But the thing that traveling really made me look at differently was being a woman, how that experience is portrayed in pop music and how that portrayal influences women’s self-images. This was never more true than while listening to and watching music videos for K-pop.
Nod Your Head: My Blood Runs Copper: My Newfound Admiration for Arizona’s Music Scene
Recently, I spent a week in Chicago, walking the streets of Wrigleyville, trying to find all the locations where they shot The Dark Knight, and eating way too much pizza (I thoroughly recommend the mac n’ cheese slice at Dimo’s). When I wasn’t nursing blisters from over-walking or grogginess from over-eating, I took part in another of the Windy City’s great attractions: live music. From Jukebox the Ghost at Lincoln Hall to Killer Mike and El-P at the Bottom Lounge, and the endless rows of smaller clubs blasting jazz and dance music into the wee hours every day of the week. But like all great vacations, it ended way too quickly and I was snapped back to reality when I headed home to Phoenix. The worst part wasn’t reacclimating to the time zone change or the dry heat; it was that I had left a musical Mecca for, literally, literally a musical desert.
Component: The Weeknd’s Lyrics and My Sex Life
It’s one of my favorite interstitial rap soliloquies ever. Juicy J has this monologue on The Weeknd’s “Same Old Song” where he says, “We make music that makes ladies’ panties get wet!” J has a point: He sums up what The Weeknd does for me, might do for other critics, and definitely does for throngs of fans that sold out his first-ever shows in Toronto and his recent US tour. He makes people feel sexy. Be it his choir-boy tenor voice, Drake’s endorsement, or simply the allure of his shrouded existence, there’s no question that Abel Tesfaye’s luscious soundscapes can be filed alongside historical R&B names like D’Angelo, R. Kelly, and Usher that have been making ladies’ panties get wet for decades.
In Travel: Rock Werchter, Couleur Café, and the sights of Flanders, Belgium
As you do when you break free from the tethers of email, I left an auto-away message on my Gmail that read, “I am in Belgium of all places”. When I arrived in Belgium, I met with Tom Pieters who was organizing my stay through Tourism Flanders. “I noticed your auto-reply message. Why did you say ‘of all places’?” It was hard to convey to him what was both a little joke and my thoughts on Belgium pre-visit.
No Destination: Writing and Wandering with Wayfarer State
Since its inception, this column has been a venue for anecdotes of music and travel, the way the two enhance each other and music’s power to comfort, and to connect people and to transcend wide cultural divides. But music and travel are related in other ways, not all of which can be captured in the personal narrative form that this column has taken so far. Today, we’ll talk with a musician about the ways in which travel, experiencing music and creating original songs interact.
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