Brow Beat

The Week in Culture, “Cellists Make the Best Lovers” Edition

Thom Yorke of Radiohead performs at the Park Stage at the Glastonbury Festival site at Worthy Farm, Pilton on June 24, 2011 in Glastonbury, England.
So frustrated with Apple Music that he turned to maracas? Thom Yorke of Radiohead performs at the the Glastonbury Festival in 2011.

Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Leon Neyfakh used to love collecting music, first CDs and later MP3s, but gradually the frustrations of iTunes and Apple Music turned him from a musicophile into a crank who grumbled about syncing and couldn’t figure out where his files lived. This week Neyfakh tried once and for all to understand why iTunes and Apple Music are so user-unfriendly, and he came out of the experience with a few hives but also a new resolve to rebuild his music collection. (That is, if this video doesn’t prove that Apple is quietly deleting music off some people’s hard drives.)

Radiohead has a new album out, so that might be one place for Neyfakh to start. In his review of A Moon Shaped Pool, Slate’s Carl Wilson comes to peace with the “Last Great Rock Band” after years of annoyance with them, or more accurately, the fan discourse surrounding them: “I think the band benefits as much as everyone else does from the shake-up and expansion of musical pluralism in the new century, as the music world has fractured and the channels of conversation have multiplied,” he writes. He also calls Radiohead “the Rolling Stones of Gen Y.”

If you want to read about the actual Rolling Stones, step right over to this excerpt from Rich Cohen’s new book that tells the story of how “Satisfaction” transformed the band from coulda-been-a-contender to big-league status. But Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have nothing on cellists, the outlaws of the classical music world: Brian Wise explains the long history of the cello’s association with “rowdy activists, sultry libertines, genre iconoclasts, and all manner of rebellious spirits.”

A few more highs and lows from the week in culture:

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