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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
- What are you guys doing tonight? I'm thinking about going home and Googling the phrase "toxic shame"
- One of my favorite things about humid weather is that it makes me sweaty and uncomfortable all the time
- RT @idolator: We're in love with @BettyWhoMusic's new video for "You're In Love." Watch the rising pop star get all lovey-dovey: http://t.c…
- "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
- Here are some thoughts about last night's abysmal Billboard Music Awards: http://t.co/nLUu6ne1PW
- I hope a time never comes where TV fails to distract me from my emotions
- @Possessionista I should have known that was my fatal mistake
- "You are the longest and best relationship I have ever had" -me to a pint of ice cream just now
- What if Taylor Swift and Celine Dion had just kept on hugging for the rest of eternity
- Sometimes I feel like Britney Spears' "Lucky" was written about Justin Bieber
- @katespencer He is literally either saving us or crushing us and those are the only options
- @emilyzemler Oh right I almost forgot
- Akon, Pitbull and -Will.i.am. Is this really what the people want? Is this what it's come to? It just feels so hopeless you guys
- What the actual fuck is this performance though (this tweet can apply to almost anything that's happened tonight)
- I spend a lot of time defending pop music but the Billboard Music Awards have proven to me why so many people hate it :(
- Pitbull is an infectious disease
- Miley Cyrus is the coolest person in the world right now
- Everybody take a shot because Jason Derulo just said the word "top"
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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
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.
- The first five years.
Five years ago today, drunk and high, I boarded a plane from Boston to San Francisco, and when I landed I was no longer drunk or high and I haven’t gotten drunk or high at all in the five years since, and I think that’s the simplest way to explain it. I am proud of that now, which is odd, since in the beginning I was so ashamed. Ashamed of the fact that my arms were so knotted with track marks and abscesses that it was a week before I could raise them over my head, and I wore long sleeves for months because I didn’t want anyone to see. Ashamed of the things that I had done when I was drunk and high. Ashamed of the fact that at age nineteen, I had made such a mess of my life, and I was fairly certain that no matter how hard I worked I probably wouldn’t amount to much.
Getting sober is strange in that most of the people who are in my life now never saw me the way I was then, and so if they offer congratulations (which always feels a little funny) it’s without the context of my sobriety’s relative necessity — like they think I’m looking for a pat on the back for giving up gluten when I don’t appear to be that allergic to it in the first place. Good for you, but you seem fine, they seem to be saying. And I do, because I’m sober, but I wouldn’t if I wasn’t. I’m sure, too, that I seem holier-than-thou or self-aggrandizing sometimes when I talk and write about it and it’s annoying or even threatening, especially for the people I care about who have troubled attachments to alcohol or drugs. I have thought many times, in relationships with men who drank, after it was over, that it probably would have worked out if I drank, if I’d been able to loosen up, if we’d been able to get on the same level.
But we wouldn’t have been on the same level, because I was never on that level. I was on another level. I was falling down a flight of stairs at Grand Central Station. I was in the hospital, getting my face stitched up. I was in a coma. I was back in rehab. And the things that were funny, the nights that started with one drink and ended with mornings waking up from a blackout in New Jersey with my underwear on backwards and a half-eaten Pop-Tart on my chest, stopped being funny, and it was just sad, the nights that started with one drink and ended a week later with strangers and sickness, closed-circuit cameras and rubbing alcohol and no spoons left in my apartment. So it was clear to me, when I got on that plane to San Francisco five years ago, that I was heading toward a future of necessary sobriety, because the only alternative at that point was death, and I don’t say that in a melodramatic or self-serious way. It took me a long time to understand that addiction wasn’t a moral failing, but a terminal disease borne of genetic predisposition and environmental factors (just like a lot of other diseases), a disease for which you either accept treatment or you die.
It’s like those diseases, but it’s not; it’s different, because the treatment is behavioral and self-imposed. And I would be lying if I said it hadn’t been difficult, these last five years, deprived of the luxury of anesthetizing my feelings when they are agonizing in their intensity, forced to navigate social situations that feel like minefields, turning down drinks over and over and over again, struggling to negotiate the way my sobriety impedes the warm and convivial intimacy created by sharing a few drinks with friends, being the only sober one at the end of a long night, never having the excuse of intoxication for my bad behavior. Happy hours and birthday parties and corporate retreats and lonely evenings. It’s been hard, and often it’s exhausting, and it’s a beautiful gift and a maddening curse and of course most of the time I just want to be normal.
But it’s also been very simple, because — even if this sounds terribly self-important — on that day five years ago I chose life, and not just any life, but an extraordinary one; and I’m so very grateful that, for whatever reason, I was lucky enough to have that option. Some of my friends didn’t; they’re dead now. That’s what happens when people who really need to get sober don’t. And so I celebrate today, the anniversary of the day I got sober, with much more ferocity — as much as I can muster without getting drunk — than I do my actual birthday. (As someone glibly but accurately once told me, “That was something my parents did; this is something I did.”) For better or for worse, sobriety has made me who I am — earnest to a fault, eager to talk about my feelings, too tolerant of a type of confessional honesty in my own work and the work of others that many people find repellant, intense and demanding, fond of risible self-help jargon, fiercely protective of anyone as broken as I was, so incapable of having just one drink that I am only capable of having none — but I am not ashamed of who I was nor am I ashamed of who I have become. And I hope I stay lucky enough to keep choosing life for the next five years, too.
- The walls will tumble.
I was trying to write about the first boy who ever broke my heart, the way it felt the first time he held my hand, on a public bus, our fingers intertwined underneath his backpack, and the tooth that he chipped on a bottle of wine when we were twelve. It started the afternoon he pushed me up against the brick wall behind school, so hard I could feel my hot breath stinging in my throat, and he clasped my wrists in his spindly hands and kissed me and it was strange and soft and wet, so I kept my eyes open and stared at his ear like I was getting an eye exam (and the doctor would say, “Look at my ear” as I waited, all stuck-breath anticipation until that blast of air), and I wondered when it was going to be over.
And I remembered how, on nights when he would sleep on my bedroom floor, the comfortably apneic wheeze of his breath keeping me awake until dawn, his bare chest facing the ceiling, I tried to memorize his freckles so I could map the constellations across his forearms and calves like glow-in-the-dark stars on childhood wallpaper, but how there was such safety in apathy, and it was easier to be cruel than vulnerable, so I didn’t say anything like that: Instead I said things like, “Sink or swim, faggot,” and after awhile he didn’t like me anymore, and I didn’t like me anymore, either, and then — incredibly — I had the audacity to be heartbroken when he didn’t want to be with me.
He’s famous now, so I see him everywhere, but I didn’t see him in New York when he was here last month — he was at an awful club downtown and he invited me and I left my apartment and walked west but halfway to the subway stop it just felt undoable, like more than I could handle, and I turned around. And as I walked home I remembered the days when we used to make out in the second-floor boys’ bathroom, how time never knocked on the bathroom door but just left us there for what felt like hours, and he would say things like, “We’re so lucky to have found each other,” and I thought that was terribly stupid and so I’d let the silence hang for awhile without saying anything, but when I’d reciprocate his affections his eyes just lit up like firecrackers on the fourth of July.
Where did I fall, I wondered — that place, once the sparks were all gone?
So actually, the demo for The Wanted’s catchy-abysmal new single “Walks Like Rihanna” — sung by its original writer, a British singer-songwriter named Cass Lowe — is oddly sweet and dynamic. (That “Hearts go boom boom” bridge is pretty phenomenal.)
- This is a metaphor, too.
When I was 17, I spent a summer in the high desert of central Utah at a wilderness boot camp for troubled kids. (I was one.) One night, sitting by the campfire, my counselor pulled me from the log where I was squatting, eating my dinner out of a blue spackled tin cup. “Follow me,” he said. “Bring a sweater.” I went with him. He led me up a mile into the forest, the bobbing beam of his flashlight marking a tenuous path through the gnarled roots of aspen trees with their distinctive oviform markings like eyes. The aspens are always watching, one of the other kids had said ominously, and I had laughed at the absurdity of it, but there, in the dark, it didn’t feel so funny. In a clearing, I heard the whistle of a bow drill and saw the neon glow of embers as he lit a fire and blew into its belly, making it rise into a flame.
“I’ll come back for you in the morning,” he said. “You need to keep the fire burning all night. If it goes out, you fail the test.” And then, in a ballet of hushed footsteps, he was gone, and I was left alone in the night with only the light of the burgeoning flame and nothing but darkness around me. “Oh God,” I said out loud. “Oh God.” There was an initial flash of relief — finally I was alone, after so many weeks of traveling in a pack. Then, that yielded to a growing consciousness of that aloneness, and what it meant. I gazed into the inky beyond. A gust of air galloped through the clearing, and the hairs on my arm saluted the night. The fleece of my thermal, rolled up past my sleeves, stiffened against my sunken chest. I could feel the drumming of my quickening heart. Dread prickled at the nape of my neck.
I blew into the fire and it grew, mercifully. Twigs and bark fueled its strength, but there weren’t enough pieces within arms’ reach. I stood and hurtled forward into the darkness, tripping over my clumsy limbs, groping madly for kindling. I snapped a branch off a tree and tossed it into the fire, spraying embers to and fro. Pain needled in my eyes. Blasts of rage whipped my face, then terror as the wind scattered the flickering fire away from me. I wanted to burn down the forest, burn down every lying teenage dream that I’d been stupid enough to have. I was alone in the woods. As the fire waned, I began to cry. I sobbed and blew ashes everywhere, and the world collapsed around me — there was nothing but my panicked breath. How many minutes had it been, I wondered. How long would I be out there, alone in the darkness?
“I can’t do this,” I said into the night. “I can’t do this.” And then my tears stopped. The night was still around me. I counted the minutes until morning. And as I fed the fire, it grew, and I felt powerful for a minute, and then it died, and I was afraid again, and it went on for hours like that, hours that felt like days, until the night was nearly over.
When the sun began to rise, I heard the faint thumping of a drumbeat in the distance. Then, at daybreak, there was a rustling and snapping behind me. I turned slowly and stared into the watery umber eyes of a fawn. Her ears perked up as she studied me. I inhaled and exhaled slowly and deliberately. We looked at each other for a long time.
By the time I turned back to the fire, it had gone out.
- Oh, a huge dance remix of Ciara’s “Body Party”? Don’t mind if I do.
(No streaming audio available)17318 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)10744 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)7225 plays - Song of the day. Maybe of the week, I dunno yet. But definitely the day.
(No streaming audio available)610150 plays - My friend Brad Walsh covered The Roches’ “The Angry Angry Man” and it’s really great.
(No streaming audio available)769 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)182491 plays - Christ, what a song.
(No streaming audio available)29420 plays - 1105 plays
- 71 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)25697 plays - I know this is about as subtle as a sledgehammer but oh, I just love it.
(No streaming audio available)657667 plays - 122 plays
- New Miley Cyrus is the real shit.
(No streaming audio available)1468308 plays
