Liner Notes

When 2PAC appeared onstage as a hologram at Coachella a few years back, the crowd cheered themselves into a frenzy. MICHAEL JACKSON, FRANK SINATRA and other late-greats have also performed posthumously through the illuminated stagecraft. South Park has even picked up on this growing trend by having the hologram of Michael Jackson, in a recent episode, escape from his technicians and get up to, well, some of his old business. But PAUL MCCARTNEY, very much alive unless you believe some hand-over-head rumors, has just appeared as a hologram in his own music video for the song “Hope for the Future.” 

The song will be featured on Destiny, a video game project that McCartney also scored with the assistance of a 120-piece orchestra. While the video will no doubt give further evidence to the Paul-is-Dead truthers, it is nonetheless a beautiful effect and shows McCartney adapting himself to the times and even pushing the envelope in more graceful ways than other musicians near his age. 

NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL, a band who made two lo-fi albums in the late ’90s and dissolved after the lead singer’s nervous breakdown, has grown in popularity and gathered folklore for more than a decade. Less than two years ago, they announced they would be touring again and have, since then, seen quite a bit of the road. They’ve toured all over the United States and elsewhere. Now, coinciding with a large 2015 tour announcement, they’ve announced that they will be hanging up their hats for the indefinite future. 

“[D]ear friends,” their announcement read, “we love you but it’s time to say goodbye for the never ending now.” This departure is much more gradual and healthy than the one we got last time, and fans should be grateful that they’ve been able to keep their act together for this long and perform phenomenal shows across the country in venues big and small. 

JOANNA NEWSOM, another multitalented musician with a cult following, has been busy with her music and film careers lately. The singer announced that she’s putting together a follow up to 2009’s Have One on Me. “I’m working on something new—I should hopefully have a little more news soon,” she told Dazed Digital in an interview. “I’ve been working hard for a lot of those five years on a new idea.” Newsom’s first album, The Milk Eyed Mender was one disc; her second, Ys, was two; Have One on Me was three. Does that mean her new idea is four discs? 

Newsom is also starring in (and narrating) the new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice, based on a novel of the same name by Thomas Pynchon. The film, she said in the interview, is even more important in light of recent events like Ferguson. “The words ‘civil rights violation’ come up a lot in this film, and I think that that applies more today than it has for decades.”

BEYONCÉ was nominated for another slew of Grammys, making her the most nominated recording artist of all time, with 47 total over the course of her career.  

Torrent site The Pirate Bay was taken down in early December and its servers were raided by Swedish police. The co-founder, Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij, was arrested in Thailand in November after evading charges of copyright infringement since 2009. Charges against the site have been outstanding for more than a decade and the first raid occurred almost nine years ago. The Pirate Bay, in the past, has been able to slip through the fingers of law enforcement; but sites of similar size and activity have gone down for good consistently over the years. The site was still down at the time this periodical went to press. It may have just gotten harder to steal intellectual property.