The New Yorker's Alex Ross on Adorno, Benjamin, and popular culture

Benjamin once wrote, “Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.”

More here.

Afrika Bambaataa's archive

Bambaataa's record collection, amazingly, is now held at the Cornell University Library, in its Hip Hop Collection. Learn about it here, as archivist John Kugelberg shows it to us, and Bam himself discusses it and how his method of collecting and his incredibly eclectic use of it onstage.

Crocheting gangstas

Reading: 

Angela McRobbie, "Settling accounts with subculture: A feminist critique."  

Screen Education 34, 37-49 (1980).

Semiotics explained with hipster beards

This is soooo great, and it is a wonderful complement to the first chapter ("From culture to hegemony") of Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

The post is actually called "Post-Structuralism Explained With Hipster Beards Part 1," but in fact it explains structural linguistics, or semiotics, and Part 2 gets into post-structuralism.

Please read, you will enjoy, and you will learn.