We Approve: Your Friday Freebies
Junkee-endorsed free bits and bobs, to make your weekend better. Featuring a Nile Rodgers doco, a New Yorker article, a Cassie mixtape and more.
Each Friday, our contributors send in a bunch of (legally) free stuff that’s come out this week, to help you make the most of your weekend. You’re welcome.
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Doco: Nile Rodgers: The Hitmaker
Recommended by: Nicholas Fonseca (Roger And Me: Why Everyone Loved Ebert)
You can’t really overstate his astonishing pop-music legacy; as the tagline for his 2011 memoir Le Freak put it, “You will hear a Nile Rodgers song today. It will make you happy.” This absorbing BBC documentary was uploaded to his website, and pays righteous tribute to the man who reinvented disco, David Bowie, and now Daft Punk.
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Article: Lizzie Widdicombe: ‘The Bad Boy Brand’
Recommended by: Steph Harmon (While You Were Sleeping, The Rainbow Crossing Was Being Secretly Destroyed)
Published in the New Yorker and made available in full online, Widdicombe’s takes a close look at Vice Media, the self-described “Time Warner of the streets”. Pegged to the launch of Vice’s new weekly series on HBO, the story opens on a spectacle the company managed to put together, bringing members of the Harlem Globetrotters to play North Korea’s national team, and having Dennis Rodman – cross-dressing ex-Chicago Bull star – meet North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un. Soon after the visit, the communist regime started threatening nuclear war: “What had seemed like a bold P.R. stunt by Vice now looked like cozying up to a dangerous dictator,” writes Widdicombe.
It’s an immersive investigation, charting the beginning of the company as a free Montreal streetpress, its ongoing expansion into a multi-platform enterprise, its complicated relationship with journalism — more interested in entertaining than informing — and the tension between that and massive corporate sponsorship. The writer finds Vice caught in an interesting state of flux, redefining media without a clear philosophy, and helmed by an oddball CEO: Shane “the poor man’s Hemingway” Smith, who says things like “Is it journalism? It depends on what the definition of journalism is,” and “To be honest, I get a hell of lot more jazzed hanging out with Google engineers.” Dappled with wonderful observations, it’s a long read but a great one.
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EP: Lorde – The Love Club
Recommended by: Alasdair Duncan (Luigi’s Mansion 2 review)
New Zealand’s Lorde is just delightful – she makes sweet, wistful electro pop, and there’s a fairly good chance her single ‘Royal’ might be about Beyonce and Jay Z. Grimes and Diplo are fans of her debut EP, The Love Club, and she is very kindly streaming it for free on her SoundCloud page, so you can be a fan too!
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Podcast: By The Way with Jeff Garlin, feat. Zach Galifianakis
Recommended by: Matt Roden (Mad Men recap: ‘The Doorway’)
Jeff Garlin’s live interviews, recorded at the UCB Theatre and distributed as the podcast By The Way, continue to be a reasonably interesting option over at the Earwolf Podcast Network. That might sound like a hesitant endorsement, and it kind of is. Jeff Garlin in real life is a whole lot more jubilant and, well, loud than he is when playing Larry David’s agent on Curb Your Enthusiasm. In real life, very little of his enthusiasm is curbed.
But with guests like Mitch Hurwitz, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Will Ferrell and, most recently, Zach Galifianakis, it’s proving to be a jovial if bloated alternative to Marc Maron’s WTF, if what you’re after is very long audio interviews with American comedians. Which is what we’re all after at the moment, right?
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Mixtape: Cassie – RockaByeBaby
Recommended by: Caitlin Welsh (Five Things I Yelled At The Scren During This Week’s Game Of Thrones)
Cassie’s new mixtape is a sexy little beast, full of sinuous collabs with Rick Ross, Pusha T, Jeremih, Wiz Khalifa and Fabolos, all of whom are at their least irritating.