Maxim May 2015

IT HAPPENS WITH ENOUGH regularity that I should be better equipped to deal with it: an awkward silence and the pressure to think of something, anything, to fill it. But then, small talk is not my strong suit. Now social media has added even more pressure to generate crafty one-liners, all while trying to digest a constant stream of pings from friends and followers. Amid so much noise, I often find myself fantasizing about the opposite: silence. The world’s most quiet room, the “Anechoic Test Chamber” created by Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, is said to be so devoid of sound, most people can last only 20 minutes in there before being driven mad by the gurgling of their own organs. That sounds like heaven to me. The closest I came…

OLD LADY holding purse tight shout shut off that racket / But that racket happen to be me rapping out my tax bracket / I told her one man’s noise is another man’s symphony / And one man’s trash lid another man’s timpani / Couldn’t afford guitars, we took the sounds that we wanted / To speak on how we felt unwanted. They say we wanton / But it don’t warrant them wanting us with arrest warrants / They say our music is stupid cause it don’t sound like Warrant? / Who decides what’s wanted and what’s unwanted sound / In rap, we take what’s around us to make art that’s found / Like the leftovers and waste that they cooked up with soul / They would take all these…

“IT’S JUST A DJ NAME. PEOPLE ALWAYS WANT ME TO GIVE THEM SOME BULLSHIT ANSWER ABOUT LOVING DISNEY.” ALEX SCHOLLER, AN AUSTRALIAN DJ, was getting steady work playing graveyard shifts in Sydney nightclubs—often to just a handful of patrons—when a promoter called her with a proposition. He had a prime-time slot to offer, but only if she came up with a stage name to go on the poster. She had five minutes. With that, Scholler—who kicks off her first major U.S. tour at Coachella 2015 and whom Diplo recently called one of the best DJs Down Under—stepped through the looking glass and became Alison Wonderland. “It’s just a DJ name. People always want me to give them some bullshit answer about loving Disney,” she says with a laugh. EDM is…

MEL TILLIS AND I were good friends during my first few years in Nashville. One night in 1965, I went to his home already pretty tanked and rang the doorbell. Just as his wife opened the door, I dropped and shattered a fifth of vodka all over the front porch. (I don’t remember the brand, but it was definitely whatever was cheapest at the time.) I can’t imagine why, but she wouldn’t let Mel go out with me that evening. I decided I would drive up to Fort Campbell and see my old Army company before they flew off to Vietnam. On the way, I blew a tire and rolled my car and ended up hanging upside down, wheels up and still turning, when a police car arrived. I was…

IN THE EIGHTIES, the “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers were as well known for their off-court conquests as their on-court dominance. Players had their pick of the groupies swarming the Forum. Only a small percentage of this massive fangirl population ever found their way to Magic Johnson’s house, the setting for scenes of debauchery worthy of Caligula. The ones who did had to pass a three-part test. “First, they had to be gorgeous,” writes Jeff Pearlman, an expert on all things Los Angeles and all things basketball, in his book Showtime. “Second, they had to be promiscuously dressed. Third, they had to be willing to…do things.” The culture of professional sports has changed in the intervening years, and the breed of dedicated sports fan known as the “jersey chaser” has changed…

WOMEN IN the music industry have been playing the “weird” card since well before Lady Gaga donned her meat dress (Stevie Nicks and Kate Bush come to mind), and for good reason! It forces listeners to move beyond the sex appeal of the typical pop chanteuse and actually hear the songs. Here’s how three of our current favorites stack up. BJÖRK Björk Gudmundsdóttir SIGNATURE SONG “Human Behavior,” Michel Gondry–directed video featured giant teddy bears ADORABLY ODD MOMENT Too many to count, but wearing a stuffed swan to the 2011 Oscars is definitely up there COOL COLLABORATORS Nurtured careers of Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq and Finnish multimedia artist Heidi Kilpeläinen VOCAL STYLE Can soar from Icelandic baby talk to celestial bellow capable of grinding eardrums into dried fish EXTRA CREDIT…