The Weekender #14: Bonnaroooooo!
Here's what we're reading, watching, and listening to this weekend.
The Weekender is a curated listening, watching, and reading experience to give your weekend a sensory upgrade. Subscribe to get The Weekender in your inbox free every Friday.
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What to Listen to This Weekend
Good Looks - Lived Here For A While
Get Vinyl: Magenta
Austin rock band Good Looks sure knows how to turn bad luck into rock gold. After their 2022 debut album Bummer Year dropped, lead guitarist Jake Ames got hit by a car, fracturing his skull and tailbone. Miraculously, Ames bounced back, and the accident only brought the band closer together.
But fate wasn’t done with them yet. A few months later, their tour took a fiery turn when their van got rear-ended on the interstate, slammed into an eighteen-wheeler, and spun into a ditch. Within minutes, the van was ablaze, and they lost nearly everything—instruments, gear, merch, you name it.
Most bands would have thrown in the towel. Others might have churned out a lackluster second album. But not Good Looks. They harnessed their experiences into Lived Here For A While, a hook-filled album produced by Dan Duszynski (Loma). Think Tom Petty's Americana charm mixed with War on Drugs guitar riffs, all wrapped in passionate, blue-collar lyricism.
And the best part? This album is a joyride from start to finish. No slog, no pretentious experimental detours—just 40 minutes of pure, good vibes.
Perennial - Art History
Get Vinyl: Kelly Green Splatter | Black inside Kelly Green | Black
Connecticut trio Perennial has unleashed a sonic tornado with their album Art History. In just 21 minutes, they cram in 12 frantic tracks bursting with loud vocals, electric organs, fuzzy guitars, and drums that could wake the dead. This isn't an album you listen to—it's one you feel.
My personal favorite, "Up-tight," is a must-blast track that transports you to a sweaty mosh pit. You gotta love garage punk that gets your head banging and feet stomping.
Night Train - Transcontinental Landscapes 1968-2019
Get Vinyl: Petrol/Magenta Sky
I’m a big fan of UK label Two-Piers and their compilations, specifically last year’s Waves of Distortion: The Best of Shoegaze 1990-2022 (currently on sale at Mondo).
Their newest mix is “a collection to accompany the change of the fields, the coastline the color of the sky outside your window as you take your journey.” It features tracks from different decades and styles, blending together into something magical.
The compilation will be released on physical media June 28th, but you can stream the mix right now.
Album of the Year Leaderboard (45 songs)
Stream: Spotify | Apple Music
Let’s check in on the Album of the Year Leaderboard, which saw new entries this week by Good Looks, Perennial, Charli XCX, The Marias, Dehd, and This Is Lorelei. Expect a Best Albums So Far roundup article soon.
The Best Songs of 2024 Playlist (145 songs)
Stream: Spotify | Apple Music
Plenty of vibes were added to the Best Songs of 2024 Playlist this week, including new songs from Jamie xx, Phantogram, Nilüfer Yanya, Blondshell, Bully, Toro Y Moi, Bonny Light Horseman, and Florist.
What to Watch This Weekend
Bonnaroo Festival Live Stream
Stream: Hulu
Bonnaroo, my all-time favorite festival and the source of countless memories, is beaming straight to your couch this weekend, courtesy of Hulu! With two channels running simultaneously, you won't miss a beat. Scroll down here to see the full streaming schedule. As for me, here's my viewing itinerary, featuring an especially jam-packed Friday night:
Friday (times are EST and subject to change)
8:05 PM - Gary Clark Jr.
9:10 PM - Faye Webster
10:45 PM - TV Girl
11:45 PM - Lizzy McAlpine
12:00 AM - Post Malone
12:30 AM - Interpol
1:45 AM - Thundercat
Saturday
10:15 PM - Brittany Howard
12:10 AM - Cage the Elephant
1:35 AM - Parcels
2:00 AM - Idles
Sunday
6:05 PM - Yves Tumor
8:15 PM - BadBadNotGood
9:30 PM - Khruangbin
10:50 PM - Joey Bada$$
11:50 PM - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
12:00 AM - Red Hot Chili Peppers
Ren Faire
Stream: Max (free 7-day trial)
Think you know what a documentary on a Renaissance festival is all about? Think again. HBO's new three-part narrative non-fiction series Ren Faire is a medieval Tiger King meets Succession, and it's a wild ride.
When 86-year-old founder "King" George Coulam decides to hang up his crown, a few festival workers go to battle for control of the park. This isn't just about jousting and turkey legs—tens of millions of dollars is at sake in this darkly funny, Shakespearean tale of power, obsession, and drama in the quirkiest modern workplace.
At just 28, director Lance Oppenheim is entering a class of his own as one of our most exciting documentarians. His latest hits include this year’s SPERMWORLD, diving into the unregulated online sperm donor market, and Some Kind of Heaven, exploring the pursuit of happiness in Florida's massive retirement community, The Villages. All three projects are must-see.
Six Schizophrenic Brothers
Stream: Discovery + and Max (free 7-day trial)
One of the most shocking books I read during the pandemic was Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.
This chilling true story dives into the lives of the Galvins, America's "most mentally ill family," where schizophrenia rampaged through their household, impacting six out of twelve siblings and resulting in psychological breakdowns, sudden bursts of violence, and hidden abuse.
The Galvins became one of the first families studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their saga offers a shadowy history of schizophrenia research, from the dark days of institutionalization and lobotomy to the quest for genetic markers, amidst a fierce nature vs nuture debate about the illness itself.
Now, this gripping story has been transformed into a four-part documentary featuring interviews with the surviving Galvin family members. It's a fascinating, albeit depressing, watch.
What to Read This Weekend
The Rot-Com Bubble by Ed Zitron
Head over to Ed Zitron’s Where's Your Ed At newsletter for a spot-on take on how tech companies and social media platforms seem hell-bent on making their products worse in their AI obsession.
Today, we're being told that our glorious AI-powered future is imminent, yet what we've actually got is unprofitable, unsustainable generative AI that has an unassailable problem of spitting out incorrect information, which Google CEO Sundar Pichai says is "an inherent feature" of a technology he's now plugged into Google Search, generating hilariously incorrect "answers" to queries based on the links of a decaying search engine. And at the forefront of the AI boom is Sam Altman's $80 billion juggernaut OpenAI, a company that allegedly will build "artificial general intelligence" that experiences human-like cognition, an idea that is simply not possible based on how generative AI works. […]
Every major tech company is "integrating AI" into their products and services, yet underneath the hood, the "AI" they're integrating doesn't actually seem to do anything new, or generate a profit, or solve any particular need. […]
I believe we're at the end of the Rot-Com boom — the tech industry's hyper-growth cycle where there were so many lands to conquer, so many new ways to pile money into so many new, innovative ideas that it felt like every tech company could experience perpetual growth simply by throwing money at the problem.
It explains why so many tech products — YouTube, Google Search, Facebook, and so on — feel like they’ve got tangibly worse. There’s no incentive to improve the things you’ve already built when you’re perpetually working on the next big thing.
This hits the nail on the head. As visitors leave these platforms in droves (Facebook has seen a 27.7% drop in web visits since 2021!), a reckoning is on the horizon as markets wake up to the reality that generative AI isn't a trillion-dollar industry. It seems inevitable that this bubble will burst, and hopefully it’ll steer the tech industry on a better course.
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This one is packed! Thx for the heads up on the Hulu broadcast. I first saw Gary C JR in Austin at the Continental Club. I think he was 14. Had to play day shows because of his age. So happy to see him as a headliner.