“Have a Good Time All the Time”: ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ and the Art of Longing
1984’s This is Spinal Tap is all about the pining—epic pining, as high and fulsome as the band’s hair and the wailing notes they (try to) hit…
“One Nite Only”: When Frank Zappa Played at State U
In the summer of 1970, the launch of the humor magazine National Lampoon was not going well…
Pop Culture Jam: The Mainstream Subversion of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel
The subversive paradox created when Max Headroom turned pitchman for corporate cola is just one of many in the career of Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel…
Authentic Music from Another Planet: The Howard Menger Story
From the opening years of the 1950s, various terrestrials came forward claiming to be in contact with the occupants of flying saucers. Their stories were often quite similar…
No Bondage, No More: ‘Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché’
By Eve Tushnet
I first heard about the X-Ray Spex from a Riot Grrrl flier handed out at punk concerts in the mid-’90s. Their one album, Germfree Adolescents, was on a list of woman-led punk music…
Shopping Mauled: Revisiting ‘The Mall: An Attempted Escape from Everyday Life’
By now, dead shopping malls are as much a part of the popular imagination as they are blighted fixtures of suburban landscapes: sprawling vestiges of a bygone era when droves of consumers flocked to self-contained hubs of retail commerce…
Doom, Détente, Dr Pepper: ‘Godzilla 1984’ and ‘Godzilla 1985’
By Alex Adams
Also known as The Return of Godzilla and simply Godzilla, Godzilla 1984 is what we would now call a reboot: part remake, part sequel, a fresh start that retrieved some things from Godzilla’s past while discarding others…
The Lonely, Horny Prophecies of Lynne Tillman’s ‘Weird Fucks’
By Sam Moore
What’s prescient about Weird Fucks is how everything both is and isn’t a matter of life and death; violence is an undercurrent, and every breakup may or may not be the end of the world…
The Violence of Reason: ‘Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985’
By Eve Tushnet
Dangerous Visions is the third in a series, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, exploring the radical elements in pulp and genre publishing of the Cold War era. (We Are the Mutants has reviewed the first volume, on postwar youth culture, and the second, on revolution and the 1960s counterculture.)
The Golden Hydra: King Ghidorah, Astro-Colonizers, and Cold War Empire
By Alex Adams
In Toho’s 1965 tokusatsu spectacular Invasion of the Astro Monster, humanity makes contact with ruthless hive-mind aliens from Planet X, a new stellar body discovered on the far side of Jupiter…
We Are the Mutants 