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Jeff Bezos Becomes World’s Richest Person

Jeff Bezos
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

A 1 percent pop in the shares of Amazon.com — the internet company Mr. Bezos founded, which accounts for the vast majority of his wealth — was enough to bump him over the wealth of Mr. Gates, the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, according to a real-time list of billionaires by Forbes.com, which has tallied the fortunes of the uber-rich for decades.

Forbes now estimates the wealth of Mr. Bezos, currently Amazon’s chief executive, at about $90.6 billion, compared with $90 billion for Mr. Gates.

Hayley Williams Talks with Track Seven

Paramore
Jason Tate

Hayley Williams of Paramore sat down with Track Seven:

It was both of those things,” she says. “[The lyrics] literally came from a page in my diary. What I couldn’t have known at the time was that I was feeding into a lie that I’d bought into, just like so many other teenagers – and many adults – before me. The whole, ‘I’m not like the other girls’ thing… this ‘cool girl’ religion. What even is that? Who are the gatekeepers of ‘cool’ anyway? Are they all men? Are they women that we’ve put on top of an unreachable pedestal?

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Less Art Stream New Album

Less Art
Jason Tate

Less Art’s new album Strangled Light is up for stream on Bandcamp. You can read more about the project over at Bandcamp’s The Daily as well:

The term “supergroup” is bandied about these days with little regard for the “super” part of the term. But in the case of Less Art, the term applies: Ian Miller and Jon Howell of celebrated post-metal group Kowloon Walled City join Mike Minnick of Curl Up & Die and Riley and Eddie Breckenridge of Thrice to make a post-rock outfit combining elements of sludge and noise with more than a few jangly guitars. Using the project as an outlet for their various life stressors, on their debut, Less Art tackle in-your-face issues like suicide, animal extinction, and gun control in a way only savvy veterans can.

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Review: Arcade Fire – Everything Now

Craig Manning

When Arcade Fire won the Album of the Year Grammy for The Suburbs, it felt like the beginning of something. Six years on from Funeral, the record that made the band torchbearers of the critically acclaimed indie rock scene, here they were, finally being recognized on the big stage. The records they beat—pop juggernauts from Katy Perry, Eminem, Lady Gaga, and Lady Antebellum—were all more indicative of what the radio sounded like in 2010. But Arcade Fire’s victory showed that, maybe, the pop world was finally ready to embrace something darker and more nuanced. Maybe they were ready to let a rock band back into the fold.

Looking back now, the Grammy win feels more like the end of something. Future Grammy winners didn’t sound or look much like Arcade Fire. Neither did radio stars. Instead, on 2013’s Reflektor, Arcade Fire started looking (and sounding) a lot like the pop insiders. Just like most of the other marquee acts that released albums that year—Daft Punk, Justin Timberlake (x2), Jay-Z, Eminem, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga—Arcade Fire made it clear that they were going for a capital-B Blockbuster. The rollout was excessive and overblown; the album was long and ambitious; the hype stretched on for months. And the songs…well, they didn’t have that much to offer, at the end of the deep, deep rabbit hole that Arcade Fire dug for fans. Writing for Grantland, Steven Hyden called 2013 “The Year Music Failed to Blockbust.” He wasn’t wrong, and Arcade Fire was at the center of it.

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