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.
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.
All things pop music.
Authored a weekly column for MTV Buzzworthy, "Pop Think," writing analytically about a pop culture figure or phenomenon.
Wrote, edited, produced, and published news and feature stories for show sites; coordinated and performed celebrity interviews.
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.
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.
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.
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.