Offend Maggie

Some people find Deerhoof unlistenable, with sometimes manic, screeching vocals over strange instrumentation. Some critics think they're twee, and some think they’re the best of noise rock. Most cannot slap a genre label on this expectation-bending band. There is occasional yelling and human-made sound effects, "Beep beep!" You have no idea where the songs will go, or when they will end.

Circus

In a past life, I put Brit-Brit tracks on my iPod for the gym. Manufactured sounds make my booty shake, and no matter how high-minded I may be about independent music, I can appreciate pop anthems and radio hits. In my present state, I have compassion for the ubiquitous starlet, her public breakdowns, and her compulsive need to set the record straight in her own tangled way. The spotlight is a heat lamp.

Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

Guyland is less of a place than an attitude, a realm of existence. Occupied by young, single, white men, its main demographic is middle class kids who are college-bound, college co-eds, or recent graduates in the United States. They live in communal housing with fraternity brothers or other recent grads. They work entry-level jobs but act aimless. They have plenty of time to party like they did in college and subsist on pizza, beer, and a visual diet of cartoons, sports, and porn. They hook up with women, but rarely form meaningful relationships.

Red Letter Year

Red Letter Year is one of those records about—dare I say it?—hope. Its folksy tunes praise Mother Earth and the blessings we all share at the end of a devastating political era. You don't have to be a longtime fan of Ani DiFranco to be convinced that it is desirable—hell, even possible—to live in the woods, knit your own socks, grow your own food, and exist in a woman-centric world (assuming you don't already).

Things Are Getting Sinister and Sinisterer

This is perhaps the ultimate postmodern album of the year.

Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics In Hard Times

Brittany: I came to this collection with a lot of skepticism, mostly because I’ve grown quickly weary of the narrative about cyberactivism as a fun, accessible substitute for real-time work. I didn’t grow up with a particular activist model, but working as a communication and media scholar in recent years, my response to technology has been lukewarm at best, particularly when it is touted as a surrogate for working with people.

O

The next greatest soundtrack to your decidedly indie rock life, Tilly and the Wall deliver nothing short of compositional greatness on their third album, O. Known for their youthful, glossy, happy-go-lucky doses of indie pop, this album takes on fun fare while addressing a few deeper issues. “Pot Kettle Black,” for instance, critiques girl cliques and name-calling all too familiar to women of all ages.

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

I hate to make the comparison, especially so quickly, but I will: Snoop is like Blink’s half brother. They aren’t technically related, but they live in similar worlds, have similar parents, and sometimes their content overlaps.

When Mothers Kill: Interviews from Prison

Perhaps predictably, _When Mothers Kill: Interviews from Prison_ is not a fun or heartening read; it is a somewhat scholarly book featuring in-depth accounts of women who have murdered their own children.

Shapeshifters

The state of mainstream hip-hop is pretty damn depressing. The entire genre has been declared dead a number of times, and the best of a generation make reality shows instead of change. Similarly, the city of Detroit has been ridiculed as economically depressed and full of unprosecuted crime in the shadow of police scandals that have come to prominence again this year. Some might say these are symptoms of a dying city, if it not a dead one. Of the respective states of Detroit and hip-hop, it is also sometimes said that one death begets the other.

Bright Shiny Morning

I have no beef with James Frey. I think he’s a talented writer; a zeitgeist of a generation; a younger and less punctuationally-correct Don DeLillo, of a sort; and I believe Oprah is a mean and deceitful ratings leech. I think memoir is a complicated genre at best, and I tend to believe most (if not all) of the story as told in this recent Vanity Fair article.

Sex and the City: The Movie

Far as I can tell, there’s never been a consensus on Sex and the City’s feminist appeal. It shows intimate female relationships, but it’s heteronormative, white, and the characters often talk past each other. The women live (mostly) sexually liberated lives, but they’re nevertheless forever in search of the perfect man to fulfill their emotional needs.

FabricLive 39

This record is sick. By 'sick' I mean off the charts wicked, all night booty-shaking, dance party-inspiring, screaming while you crash down the rollercoaster of noise sick. Woah. DJ Yoda, the mastermind behind this collaboration, hails from the UK and focuses on hip-hop turntablism, making a name for himself since the late 1990s with his How to Cut and Paste album series. Joining the ranks of Fabric DJs, he’s outdone himself.

Chart Your Cycle and Adventures in Menstruating #1-3

I’m one of those women who has never been terribly fond of her period. I spent years trying to escape my own bodily functions and wrote my undergraduate thesis on suppressing menstruation by using birth control pills. More recently, I’ve discovered that my lifelong migraines are linked to my cycle. My period and I have come to an understanding, so while I don’t make up funny nicknames for it, I use cloth pads and organic tampons whenever possible. But I have never been overly fond of my menses and to say my feelings about menstruating are conflicted is quite an understatement.