April 2010
25 posts
1 tag
Great lines from Pitchfork reviews →
Luckily, Tre doesn’t devote the whole mixtape rapping about drinking. On “Sideways”…
(but to their credit the ‘Fork was one of the first outlets outside of the hip hop blogs to give Tre his props)
1 tag
April 2010 top ten
God Help the Girl, “God Help the Girl”: Catherine Ireton is, along with Winehouse, the best singer to come out of Britain this millennium. The precision with which she sings “Their promise never meant so much to me” is delightful, but more typical and more meaningful is the way slurs the beginning of her notes. Forget the movie, Stuart, the album needs a sequel.
Mika,...
1 tag
ACM award predictions
(noms)
Entertainer of the year: This one is Internet-voted for some reason. Taylor Swift in a landslide, unless somebody can be bothered stuffing the ballot box.
Male vocalist: Probably Brad Paisley for the fourth straight year, but I wouldn’t count out Darius Rucker pulling a shocker.
Female vocalist: If the Official Taylor Swift Backlash was born at the time of her Grammy debacle,...
2 tags
What I learned from listening to the top five...
(poll)
How did I not know Vijay Iyer covered M.I.A.? And I thought I was on top of things.
For Henry Threadgill’s sake I need to get over my antipathy to flutes (blame Xgau).
Hopefully while Joe Lovano recovers from his two broken arms, Them Four will rehearse a bit more.
Darcy James Argue creates some fine silly moments, but if he really wants to be steampunk he should run his record...
1 tag
Kent Brockman: “I’m here with Rainer Wolfcastle, star of the McBain movies, telling me about his new film, The Brothers Karamazov.” Rainer Wolfcastle: “Three brothers return to their hometown to fight their dad over the family fortune. I play the father, who is kind of like Eric Cartman.” Brockman: “I’m laughing already.” Wolfcastle:...
Nicki Minaj and the Titillating Female Rapper →
agrammar:
alexmacpherson:
tomewing:
Guardian blog piece on Nicki Minaj bemoaning her T&A marketing but writing only about said T&A marketing: which makes for a more focused piece, yes, but reading it you really wouldn’t come away with any idea of what makes Minaj an interesting (for good or ill) RAPPER. […]
The Missy omission is doubly frustrating because - as Lex has pointed out -...
1 tag
Brad has little of substance to say about...
PICK HIT: Alfred Schnittke, Piano Concertos (Ewa Kupiec): The kitchen-sink approach is cute; now incorporate an actual kitchen sink and Tom Ze might deign to look upon you. Sofia Gubaidulina, In Tempus Praesens (Anne-Sophie Mutter): Tucked away after two Bach concertos is this violin-against-the-world piece. Despite the non-standard instrumentation, it’s much more “look how great I am...
1 tag
“We thought that soon, in a few years, the Jews would be the majority here, and...”
– Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (tr. Nicholas de Lange)
2 tags
Journal of Ke$ha Studies, Vol. 2
It’s almost this simple: the songs on Animal that Dr Luke has a hand in are terrible, and the Lukeless songs are terrific. You might like to spare the title track from deletion, because it provides a neat if tonally inapt ending to the sequence. Everything else Luke touches is unclean. Particularly since the success of “I Kissed a Girl”, he’s been reaching for lower and...
2 tags
WatchThings none of us except me care about: Best races of the indoor athletics season
This stuff is so marginal most of it isn’t on YouTube, I mean who wants to view the peak of human physical performance when you can watch funny cats? Well I guess the cats aren’t on roids, though they might be funnier if they were.
2/6 Sparkassen Cup, Stuttgart: Women’s 3000m, Defar vs...
2 tags
WatchTop ten Thirties toon directors, #5: Wilfred Jackson The best of the early Disney directors at matching music to image. The Band Concert (above) is the best example of this: the old 50 Greatest Cartoons list put it at #3 all-time, though I wouldn’t go that far. Nearly as good is The Tortoise and the Hare, the first cartoon to successfully depict ultra-high speed — and the inspiration...
2 tags
The most important sentence in the history of rock... →
Some discount Dylan as merely a popular cultural hero (how can a teen-age idol be a serious artist — at most, a serious demagogue). But the most tempting answer — forget his public presence, listen to his songs — won’t do. For Dylan has exploited his image as a vehicle for artistic statement.
NB1: tildebang at “teen-age idol”
NB2: Ellen Willis Tumblr wins the...
1 tag
“The century has just begun.
Shall we roll over and go back to sleep?
Such an...”
– Jennifer Moxley, “The Price of Silence”. That “Such” is killer.
3 tags
March 2010 top ten, #1: Jay Electronica, "Exhibit... →
Jay-Z played the master of the material world; Jay-E’s mastery, evident here, is self-characterised as metaphysical. A how-to: (1) Parallel your move to NYC with Southern rap’s infiltration of northern consciousness; establish your realness without look-at-my-bulletholes nonsense; begin to associate yourself with the mystical. (2) State moral failings of look-at-my-bulletholes...
2 tags
WatchTop ten Thirties toon directors, #6: David Hand Hand’s rep is as a limited artist who scaled Walt’s hierarchy by yes-manning. Michael Barrier wrote that “Hand probably lacked the ability to do anything particularly well, except be a boss.” But Hand, along with Disney, shepherded Snow White through to completion. You hardly need me to tell you Snow White changed animation...
5 tags
Watch2nd fall
3rd fall
It’s time again for our least popular feature (even less liked than the posts about 18th century poems I hate), Monthly wrestler rankings for February 2010, a good month for Black Terry Jr handhelds:
1. Black Terry 2. Negro Navarro These two put in good performances every time out. Navarro was better in the San Nicolas tag above, but Terry is playing a more versatile...
2 tags
WatchMarch 2010 top ten, #2: The Sound of Arrows, Into the Clouds
Where does one go when going west doesn’t cut it anymore? After Prop 8, one might be tempted to leave land entirely. Taking flight might not be a sustainable plan, but for those easily made seasick, it beats joining the navy.
2 tags
WatchTop ten Thirties toon directors, #7: Ub Iwerks
Turned out he needed Walt more than Walt needed him. The Flip the Frog toons were unfocused, with Spooks the best because dude could really draw skeletons. The ComiColor era saw more coherent narrative and an id run amuck — Ken Jacobs pointed out the phallic nature of Balloon Land (above). His contract work for Warners was unsuccessful, his...
1 tag
Journal of Ke$ha Studies, part 1
(mostly a response to Martin Seay)
“that Kesha song handily wins worst non-Chris Brown song of the year.” — Facebook status update, November 8, 2009 “Ke$ha’s album is kind of awesome if you remove the Dr. Luke songs.” — Facebook status update, April 2, 2010 New Zealand is a chart pop bellweather, small enough for a hit to blitzkreig in a couple of weeks....
2 tags
WatchMarch 2010 top ten, #3: Carolina Liar, “Show Me What I’m Looking For”
Max Martin doesn’t seem to care about fizzpop anymore: he mostly leaves that to Dr. Luke, to our detriment. Really he just wants to carve out gigantic ballads, filling all frequencies with bells and choirs. The beneficiary of this obsession is Some Guy Named Chad, and it’s a mark of our collective...
3 tags
WatchTop ten Thirties toon directors, #8: Burt Gillett
One of Walt’s most influential henchmen when it came to normalising the Disney style post-Iwerks. Downside: the kitsch; see Flowers and Trees, the inaugural animated Oscar winner, for a horrific example. Upside: cute character designs. The benchmark was set by Three Little Pigs (above), the second animated Oscar winner and the most...
2 tags
Game of the moment: The Linear RPG →
Typical console RPGs are mostly random encounters that don’t require tactics beyond slash-slash-heal. Almost all problems can be solved by backtracking and grinding two levels. And yet Sophie Houlden’s reductio ad absurdum demonstrates the essential appeal of the genre. Any structure is appealing in itself; linear structure is easiest to implement. CRPGs are Phil Spector songs, taking...
2 tags
March 2010 top ten, #s 4 & 5: Darren Hayman & the... →
(a) Amy and Rachel front a band that mixes “R&B and death metal”. It’s fun imagining what that might sound like — certainly nothing like Darren Hayman. Closest thing I can think of is Girl Talk’s Lil Mama/Metallica fusion. (b) “If we were to pour available capital and effort into New Towns instead of into starting to solve our many acute city problems, New...
2 tags
WatchTop ten Thirties toon directors, #9: Len Lye
Thirties Euro-animation drowned creative moments in flat and static structures. Example: Berthold Bartosch’s L’Idee wraps video game gunfire and amazing flying posters in an execrable allegory. Exception: Len Lye, a New Zealander working for the UK post office. The painted-on-film A Colour Box informed you it cost sixpence to send a...
2 tags
WatchMarch 2010 top ten, #6: Regina Spektor, “Eet”
To name a song “Eet” requires a lack of self-consciousness about one’s way with words. But the lack of self-consciousness here differs from the brazen jeweller-medulla-tumor-Pumas-Kahuna kind. Spektor, in contrast, deploys only three -eet rhymes, all exact. Most all the vocab is Seussian, which foregrounds the sounds of...
