Kristen Sinclair

This article originally featured on the now-defunct altmusicbox in 2015. Anthems like ‘We Are Family’ are usually synonymous with drunk uncles at family reunions and novelty songwriting as opposed to true musical hidden gems. It’s misconceptions such as this that have plagued Sister Sledge’s 1979 album in the eyes of the music-buying public and left the sisters’ 12” singles resigned to the graveyard of charity shop vinyl crates. And what an absolute shame! A perfectly crafted blend of disco, funk and R&B, commercially viable for pop radio yet with a nod to classic soul, Chic-produced We Are Family is an album that has gone on to be a central influence on the dance and even hip-hop scenes for decades after its release. Formed around the talent of four actual sisters – Debbie, Joni, Kathy and Kim Sledge – We Are Family was the group’s breakthrough record, spawning four hit singles thanks to the sprinkling of magical production courtesy of Chic masterminds and godfathers o...

Source: fatgirlscanruntoo.ca Recently I asked my Mum if she wanted to have my copy of Elle as I’d finished reading it, and she took me up on the offer. Sometime later, getting into her car, I found it dog-eared and tossed onto the back seat. Being the complete neat freak that I am, I wondered how she could possibly have chucked it away like that, letting the edges of the pages tear and the covers bend. It cost a whole four pounds after all. The now slightly warped face of Kim Kardashian pouted up at me from the glossy cover. And this wasn’t a one-off encounter with a discarded magazine; battered, years-old stacks of issues of hairdressing periodicals and stereotypical women’s weeklies adorn the coffee tables of salons, waiting rooms and even houses worldwide. It has become a regular occurrence to be faced with magazines bearing a crisis-ridden Katie Price two husbands and four boob jobs ago whilst waiting to see the dentist. The magazine is a bit of a diminishing art form, ...

"Would you like me to seduce you?" Everyone knows the iconic still of Dustin Hoffman and a wedding dress-clad Katharine Ross looking relived and slightly bewildered sitting at the back of a bus. The actors’ expressions in this scene have gone on to become synonymous with Mike Nichols’ 1967 classic The Graduate . Recent East Coast graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), something of an over-achiever at college, returns to his home in the shallowness of white southern Californian suburbia, unsure of where his life is heading and surrounded by “plastics”. Following a family dinner party, Ben is seduced by his parents’ friend Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), spawning the classic line “Would you like me to seduce you?”. This then develops into a full-blown tremulous affair between the married and much older Mrs. Robinson and the virginal Ben. It soon becomes clear that Mrs. Robinson is in a loveless marriage and is only using Ben for sex. Coerced by his parents, ...

Listening to certain records, it’s sometimes hard to believe that they’re as old as they are. There are the obvious game changers – Sgt. Pepper’s , The Wall , Electric Ladyland , Highway 61 Revisited , Kind of Blue , I Feel Love , Nevermind , Dusty in Memphis , to name a few – but there somewhat less obvious records that have helped to shape modern music. After a lot of narrowing down, I settled with these five as my personal picks. ·          Rapper’s Delight – The Sugar Hill Gang Released in 1979, this ground-breaking hip-hop track sounds like something straight out of the nineties. Nurtured from freestyle created at a hip-hop event in the Bronx in ‘78, it has gone on to be, arguably, the first song to bring rap into the mainstream. The track features a bass line from Chic’s ‘Good Times’ and has influenced huge hits from Blondie’s hip-hop-inspired ‘Rapture’ to essentially Grandmaster Flash’s entire career. Fourteen minutes and thirty-fi...

Title: How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits Author(s): Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline De Maigret, Sophie Mas Publisher: Ebury Press (2014) ★★★★ “Be unfaithful: cheat on your perfume, but only on cold days.” This book is the bible of every wannabe-Parisienne. Four best friends and life-long inhabitants of the City of Light indulge supposedly satirical yet strangely convincing aphorisms, faux pas, colloquialisms, tips on etiquette, style, sex, home décor, recipes and how to spend idyllic days among the boulevards of the Île-de-France. Teeming with sometimes amusingly useless advice (“Always hire the less attractive babysitter”, “Randomly exclaim, ‘This is the most wonderful day of my life!’”), you often find yourself mentally taking note of the odd nugget of uniquely Parisienne wisdom: “Never wear your glasses, especially if you’re nearsighted. That way, you won’t have to acknowledge people you know. You’ll have that aloof look…”. It...

When it comes to films, I’ve never really been one for happy endings. It’s just too satisfying when you know that everything works out in the end and you can just forget about it, safe in the knowledge that the guy got the girl; the bad guy lost; they all lived happily ever after. I love a film that leaves you guessing, wondering long after you’ve left the cinema and brushed the popcorn off your clothes. I love a film with an ambiguous ending that’s open to endless interpretations, where there’s no definite answer and it’s all left to the viewer to decide what happens and how they want to story to end. Or perhaps not how they’d like it to end, but how they think it ends. A film like that will open discussion and linger on your mind even when you’ve forgotten the predictable finale of Endless Love . My Own Private Idaho: "This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world." An unclear film ending differs from a plot twist. Sure, unexpected twists are gr...

Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler, 2014 (Source: huffingtonpost.com) A few weeks ago I went to see Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal’s latest movie. The plot revolves around Louis Bloom, a petty thief who stumbles into a new career as a ‘nightcrawler’ – a nocturnal cameraman who, along with his assistant Rick (played by Riz Ahmed), scours the streets of LA in search of shocking and grisly crimes to photograph and film before the mainstream media. Gyllenhaal’s character catches people at their worst: dead, dying, mutilated, and all to satisfy the public’s morbid curiosity. Like Bloom says, “I like to think that if you see me, you're having the worst day of your life.” When Louis realises he can make some serious money ‘nightcrawling’ by selling his best and bloodiest footage to a failing news station, his hell-bent obsession with getting the ‘money shot’ has dire consequences. As someone who would like to work in journalism in the future, the film got me thinking: when...