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Shannon Carlin

Arts & Culture Writer

Brooklyn, NY

Shannon Carlin

I'm a master of journalism. I'm a pop culture loving writer. I know my AP Style. You should hire me.

Featured

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How Jenny Lewis’ Past Helped Meryl Streep in ‘Ricki and the Flash’

Nearly a year after the release of her third solo album The Voyager, which tackles the death of her estranged father, the breakup of her band Rilo Kiley and her personal battle with insomnia, Jenny Lewis is in Mexico. Please don’t call it a vacation. “I don’t take vacations,” she tells Radio.com over the phone.
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Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is a Good Actor, Just Embrace It

From his “Shake It Off” Lip Sync Battle to officiating a super fan’s wedding, we all know Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is one of the most likable people in Hollywood. But can he act? It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves while watching Johnson’s movies. But after wading through hours and hours of footage, from The Scorpion King to San Andreas, we have come up with the answer: yes, The Rock can indeed act.
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‘Montage of Heck’: Found Footage Tells the Last Truths of Kurt Cobain

Brett Morgen's new documentary 'Montage of Heck' takes a closer look at Kurt Cobain by using recently unearthed audio and home video from the Nirvana frontman's own collection, and finally puts the image of 'St. Kurt' to rest. Seeing is believing, as the saying goes. Now more than ever, we’ve been trained to take whatever we read on the internet with a grain of salt until there’s some visual proof.
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Brandon Flowers, Contemporary Adult

Brandon Flowers has always felt uncomfortable with the term “artist” and what it can do to a young musician’s psyche. Way back in 2004, when the Killers frontman was just a fresh-faced 23-year-old from Las Vegas singing about the androgynous bedfellows of an ex, it was that one word that made him feel all kinds of inadequate.
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New Music to Know: Courtney Barnett Makes the Mundane Come Alive

While recording her song “Pedestrian at Best,” Courtney Barnett asked everyone to leave the room. The song, she tells Radio.com over the phone from Austin, TX where she’s playing South By Southwest for the first time, was one of the last she wrote for the album and was penned right there in the studio during a moment of weakness.
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Why ‘Broad City’ Is ‘I Love Lucy’ for Millennials

The Comedy Central show stars Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer as best friends Abbi and Ilana—playing heightened and often high versions of themselves—and each and every episode is a hi-jinx-filled lesson in survival. Sometimes the two women have to clean the house of a diaper-wearing-man-child just to scrounge up enough money to see a Lil Wayne concert.
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Let’s Talk About Love Songs with Father John Misty

To follow-up his 2012 debut, Fear Fun, Father John Misty wanted to write an album of love songs—not an unheard of topic but, nonetheless, a completely new one for him. Somehow the singer (born Josh Tillman), had written a song about making out in a graveyard before penning a true love song. When Tillman was done writing though, he was left with I Love You, Honeybear, a record that, through the guise of love, exposes him for the man he really is: a horny, man-child, Mama’s boy.
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Taylor Swift’s Lyrical Evolution, in Word Clouds

Over the span of eight years and five albums, Taylor Swift has had a lot to say. On her early country albums, Swift was a storyteller. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end to each song. However, look at the lyrics of her latest album, 1989, her first official foray into pop, and notice Swift’s vocabulary is far smaller and more repetitious than what it was before.
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Every Musician Who’s Hosted ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Ranked

Hosts of Saturday Night Live come in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life—provided, of course, they’re famous. So with its 40th season kicking off this weekend (Sept. 27), the time is ripe for a look back on the history of hosts on the groundbreaking comedy show, from the shockingly worst to stunningly best.
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Justin Vivian Bond: 20 Years of Sculpting Transgender Identity in Pop Culture and New York

Mx Justin Vivian Bond sits at a table in a fifth floor walk-up in the Lower East Side filling out a questionnaire for Christie’s. The New York auction house is selling some of Warhol’s male nude drawings in a show called Andy’s Eye Candy that runs in tandem with LGBT pride month. a transgender performer who does not identify as male or female—was asked to take part in the questionnaire because v (Bond prefers people use the pronoun “v” instead of he or she) played the late drag superstar and fixture of Warhol’s Factory Jackie Curtis in the 2012 show Jukebox Jackie.
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The Real ARTPOP: 5 Female Artists Expanding the Definition of Pop

Thanks to Lady Gaga, art pop is now one word. A word that will forever be used to describe music that is theatrical, dramatic, emotional, highfalutin and, more often than not, a little silly. But while Gaga is trying to make her ARTPOP a brand by hobnobbing with contemporary artists like Jeff Koons, Marina Abramović and the ghost of Andy Warhol, other musicians — like Julianna Barwick, Zola Jesus, Chelsea Wolfe, Anna Calvi and Glasser — are doing what comes naturally to them.
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About

Shannon Carlin

After earning my master's degree from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York, I worked as an associate editor for the website Radio.com. There I got a chance to write a lot about music, TV and movies; curate the site's weekly new music column and learn to write a kick-ass headline for any and all Justin Bieber stories.

I've also written for NPR, Spin, Beyond Race Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Times, Bust Magazine and Refinery29.

You can get in touch with my by email: shannon.marie.carlin@gmail.com

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Skills

  • Editing
  • Reporting
  • Copy Editing
  • Writing