Selected weekend reading

I enjoyed reading these articles this weekend:

* “Letting Her Finish” [heh!] — Idolator on Taylor Swift & the history of the country-to-pop crossover:

“… [T]hink of this week’s charts as the culmination of a two-decade pendulum swing. For the first time since probably “Islands in the Stream,” the most-played song on American radio is a country tune—sung by America’s new sweetheart, who, usurping rappers aside, just put her first MTV Video Music Award on the mantle.”

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on MF Doom— “The Mask of Doom” (The New Yorker, September 21, 2009, p. 52):

“Dumile is uninterested in hooks, displays a flagrant disregard for linear storytelling, and insists on cutting songs that time out before the three-minute mark.”

* This Recording on WHY? & the vegan wonder known as Yoni Wolf