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Sam Lansky
Sam Lansky is an editor at Idolator.
His writing about entertainment and culture can be found in places like
New
York Magazine, The Atlantic, Grantland, OUT, Billboard & MTV.com.
Taylor Swift once called him "an intelligent writer." To his face.
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Work
- selected clips// NYMag
Diva Roulette
The Life of the Pity Party
// Grantland
Hallyu Tsunami
// The Atlantic
Who's Left To Defend Tom Cruise?
// MTV.com
Pop Think
// Billboard
Whitney Houston: Remembered
// The Fix
Where Do Broken Hearts Go?
Britney Spears Is Finally Sober
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Tweets
- Cause of death: Daft Punk fatigue
- @mehpatrol IS THAT A REAL THING & CAN IT BE FROM NOW ON
- @mehpatrol WELL PLAYED CARYN
- I'm getting new business cards and some of them have Lindsay Lohan's face on them. @ SPIN http://t.co/oj9hnpXr18
- RT if there's a part of you that fears Beyonce
- Does anybody know if Lady Gaga is still alive?
- @emmacargo She's been trying to shake them for years but she just can't get rid of them
- @emmacargo That's literally just the people following Beyonce around cheering for her
- @emmacargo That's not fake, Emma
- The best thing about the new Beyonce song is that it sounds like a Solange song
- I had Fifth Harmony come to my office and sing Taylor Swift for me and it was amazing and here's some video of it. http://t.co/p9AbYSZblG
- Farrah Abraham is in New York City. No one is safe
- #InsecurityNight may be trending on Twitter tonight, but IT'S ALWAYS TRENDING IN MY HEART
- On treacherous things. http://t.co/vAA35GozcJMay 20, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Heroin addicts: Does heroin feel as good as learning that you're better-looking than the ex of the person you're dating? If so, I "get" you
- @cadygroves Fact: You're either flawless or basic. There is no in-between
- I'm fairly convinced that someday I'll either be wildly rich and successful or homeless and insane but definitely not something in between
- One of my favorite things about humid weather is that it makes me sweaty and uncomfortable all the time
- "Don't try and tell me you don't want to see / What it would be like to grow old with me" is such an amazing pop lyric
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Info
- Summary
Editor at Idolator, the pop music website. Formerly an editor at Wetpaint and a weekly columnist at MTV Buzzworthy.
My work can be found in New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Grantland, Out, and The Huffington Post.
Specialties: Digital media, entertainment journalism, cultural criticism, copy editing, social media.Experience- Sept 2012 - PresentAssociate Editor, Idolator / SpinMedia
All things pop music.
- Oct 2011 - Sept 2012Contributor / MTV Networks
Authored a weekly column for MTV Buzzworthy, "Pop Think," writing analytically about a pop culture figure or phenomenon.
- Jun 2010 - Sept 2012Editor / Wetpaint
Wrote, edited, produced, and published news and feature stories for show sites; coordinated and performed celebrity interviews.
Education-
2010 - 2011New School UniversityB.A. in Creative Writing
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2008 - 2010Portland State UniversityCreative Writing
- The Dwight SchoolH.S. in International Baccalaureate
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Interests:nonfiction writing, editing, music journalism, copyediting
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Posts
I’m getting new business cards and some of them have Lindsay Lohan’s face on them. (at SPIN)
This video — titled “LADY GAGA IN NEW YORK CITY (MAY 19 2013)” — is the best thing I’ve seen today.
1. I used to call it “Adderall love,” because that’s what it feels like, sometimes: Love that comes fast and hard, all those heady surges of exhilaration and want, a quickening pulse, your heartbeat sticking in your throat, sweats, a speedy rise and a big empty numbness after it’s over, crashing down and wanting more, a growing panic that things may be spiraling out of control, even though they shouldn’t be, and it gets scary. This was supposed to be safe, I think. This wasn’t supposed to be quite so intense.
“Intense” — that was the word he used, lying in bed in the morning. We’d been up all night and he’d drawn shut the blinds in his bedroom, heavy wood slats shielding us from the summer daylight. We were trying to keep it from coming in. And he said, “You’re just really intense.”
“I know,” I said. I rolled over on my side, and I felt that familiar embarrassment again, of having shown my hand too quickly, of having revealed myself to be just as emotional as I’m always trying not to be. And then, after a minute, I felt his arms snake around my torso and pin tight around my chest, and I thought that maybe it was okay after all.
2. In Manhattan this weekend, a gay man was shot in the head point-blank on the street while the gunman yelled homophobic slurs at him. The police are investigating it as a hate crime.
My best friend sent me the link to the story. “Terrifying,” he said. “He was just wearing a tank top.”
“Thank God I have fat arms,” I responded — instinctively, glibly — and then burst into tears. Out of sadness, out of fear, out of some stupid helplessness.
3. I was thinking today about safety: The things that frighten me and the things that don’t. A shot in the dark, a baseball bat; I’ve always been too fortunate to fear those things in any way, although maybe I should. Hate crimes are increasing in New York City, and even if there’s a part of me that wants to be proud and brazen, if facing down the choice between risking getting beaten to death and holding hands with a boy I like, I’d choose survival. I’m politically ignorant and borne of millennial privilege: I don’t have anything insightful to say about what it means to be a gay man living in fear in 2013. And it makes me feel so frivolous and self-involved that the things that feel most dangerous are the unanswered text, the too-vocal admissions, the displays of vulnerability. The dizzying feeling of being too high, knowing that eventually — necessarily — it has to end.
The night after he told me I was intense, I called a friend. “I think he’s fine with it, though,” I said. “I think he might like it.”
“Then what’s the problem?” she asked.
“How can I trust him?” I said. “How can I trust him when I know that everyone always leaves?”
I don’t see why not. At least from my perspective, because I feel like nowadays we’re more in tune with individualism. Maybe it’s the lens I see things through, but I just feel like we’re living in the days of self-expression and we’re seeing more of that on many levels. Whether it’s the person who you are, what you like to wear, or what you like to do. It’s just so cool when you meet people who are different than you are. That can give you a different perspective, a view point on life, or inspire you. I mean, what would the world be like if we were all the same? I think it would be very boring.
Ciara in The Advocate. The question asked was, “Basketball and hip-hop stars frequently cite one another as inspirations. Do you think the hip-hop community will embrace Jason Collins like it has other athletes?” So the question becomes: Does anyone have a single fucking clue what Ciara is talking about in her response? She literally just strung words together in a sentence.The year’s most jaw-droppingly lovely single gets an (unsurprisingly) jaw-droppingly lovely video.
An absolutely fucking pristine slice of post-“We Found Love” house-pop from Ask Embla, and (however ironically) my summer comedown cold-glittering-New York nights soundtrack.
I would be so fine with it if this song (which sounds like a lost Heart single) was for the summer of 2013 what Icona Pop’s “I Love It” was to the summer of 2012.
- No more Internet people.
Last weekend, I went out on a date with a nice guy. He had a nice watch and a nice smile. He worked in finance. He tried to explain it to me; I listened patiently as he talked about micropayments.
“I don’t know what any of this means,” I laughed.
“That’s okay,” he said.
Absently, I took out my phone and set it on the bar and the screen lit up with notifications, rapidly scrolling. He saw it.
“Shit,” he said. “You’re blowing up.”
I shook my head. “It’s just Twitter,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t tweet.”
In that moment, it occurred to me how long it had been since I’d dated someone whose life wasn’t mostly on the Internet. Someone who didn’t think about commenter culture or the politics of unfollowing or the people you know in common through various editorial channels, about the heavy weight of wondering what strangers think about you based on your public-facing persona, and the absurdity of all of that, the outrageousness of being stupidly self-important enough to think about any of it. The awful mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing that motivates people like me, compliments and accomplishments as powerful an incentive as the detractors and, worst of all, the silence, the sinking horror of saying something on the Internet and having no one notice or care.
There’s only room for one narcissistic creative in any relationship, I decided. I hoped it would be me.
So I put my phone away. “Don’t start,” I said.
This song from the great, underrated songwriter Priscilla Renea was leaked as a demo about two years ago and I spent many a night on the stoop of my old apartment in Chelsea listening to it and crying, as I am wont to do. (Now I have a fire escape to sit and cry on, but still.) I’d thought it had disappeared into the industry ether, one of those warm secret songs I get to keep just for myself, but lo and behold, Demi Lovato cut it as a track on her new LP, which premiered yesterday.
Lovato’s version is great, but there’s a feeling in Renea’s original that I keep returning to: The delicate resignation in those finely rendered details, so evocative in their mundanity, which then builds to the sharp anguish of the chorus, and the way her voice almost cracks on the word “waist” on the bridge — oh, it’s just so fucking sad. “In Case” is as perfect a pop ballad as they come, and I’m glad it’ll be heard. In somebody’s voice, in anybody’s voice.
- Things to do when you're not texting someone you want to text.
1. Eat Oreos (currently being sold in a limited-edition Birthday Cake flavor)
2. Listen to an underrated Miley Cyrus ballad
3. Catch up on your favorite Real Housewives franchise
4. Subtweet
5. Trace the origins of your pathological need for validation to your father’s emotional neglect
6. Read the poetry you wrote in middle school
7. Send artistic Snapchats
8. Fantasize about all the people you’re jealous of becoming jealous of you
9. Make a list of your friends and organize them in order of the likelihood that they would be there for you in a crisis
10. Go to bed early.
I guess I’m just going to keep posting Betty Who songs until there aren’t any left, because with each listen I become more convinced that she’s the one to save pop music in 2013, and this song in particular gives me so many thrilling happy-sad chills it feels like my heart is going to collapse in my chest. It’s like Katy Perry, but Madonna, but better.
And I mean, really, fuck. Find me a more heartbreaking lyric this year than “Don’t try and tell me you don’t want to see / What it would be like to grow old with me.”
I spent the day with Betty Who today and I think she’s probably the most talented new pop act I’ve heard this year. Similar spunk to Robyn but with the sugary pop sweetness of early/late Kylie Minogue. I’m excited to watch her blow up.
- Oh, a huge dance remix of Ciara’s “Body Party”? Don’t mind if I do.
(No streaming audio available)18296 plays - I guess I’m just going to keep posting Betty Who songs until there aren’t any left, because with each listen I become more convinced that she’s the one to save pop music in 2013, and this song in particular gives me so many thrilling happy-sad chills it feels like my heart is going to collapse in my chest. It’s like Katy Perry, but Madonna, but better. And I mean, really, fuck. Find me a more heartbreaking lyric this year than “Don’t try and tell me you don’t want to see / What it would be like to grow old with me.”
(No streaming audio available)11160 plays - I spent the day with Betty Who today and I think she’s probably the most talented new pop act I’ve heard this year. Similar spunk to Robyn but with the sugary pop sweetness of early/late Kylie Minogue. I’m excited to watch her blow up.
(No streaming audio available)7465 plays - Song of the day. Maybe of the week, I dunno yet. But definitely the day.
(No streaming audio available)616780 plays - My friend Brad Walsh covered The Roches’ “The Angry Angry Man” and it’s really great.
(No streaming audio available)771 plays - Tove Lo is like Ke$ha and Robyn had a baby. A really fucked-up baby. Anyway, she’s still unsigned, but she won’t be for long, since “Habits” is your new favorite tune.
(No streaming audio available)185692 plays - Christ, what a song.
(No streaming audio available)29810 plays - 1109 plays
- 69 plays
- Oh my God this song is so fucking amazing why aren’t we all just listening to this song all the time.
(No streaming audio available)26111 plays - I know this is about as subtle as a sledgehammer but oh, I just love it.
(No streaming audio available)685850 plays - 123 plays
- New Miley Cyrus is the real shit.
(No streaming audio available)1475419 plays
