A REMIX.
Starring Daft Punk & Ariel Pink.
Stream here.
Friday, December 09, 2011
Thursday, December 08, 2011
DOO-WOPS & HOOLIGANS: The Albums, 2011.
"Put the needle on it."
23/Holy Ghost!/Holy Ghost!
Meet Alex and Nick. Masters of the Remix, and members of the esteemed DFA label club who, together, are "Holy Ghost!". Album #1 from the New York duo is a groove heavy piece of work whose mission and thought process is not too far removed from that of former [gone but not forgotten] labelmates LCD Soundsystem. Here we have 60+ minutes of disco tinged shape shifting melodies that set the dancefloor ablaze and activate dancing limbs like a needle hittin' wax. Stuntin' like Disco never left, Holy Ghost!'s debut lays down the rhythms, and keeps it movin' for the party [and the after after party] you never want to end.
KEY TRACKS: Say My Name/Static on the Wire/Some Children
24/Patrick Stump/Soul Punk
25/Beyonce/4
Wednesday, December 07, 2011
DOO-WOPS & HOOLIGANS: The Albums, 2011.
Aijuswanaseing.
24/Patrick Stump/Soul Punk
When we last saw Patrick Stump, he was the full voiced, cherub faced frontman & bringer of the melodies for Illinois' favorite pop-rock outfit, Fall Out Boy. That was 2009. Skip ahead to the present, October 2011. The band that helped bring him fame and notoriety is still on an "indefinite hiatus", but Patrick is back, minus his comrades, and holding true to that promise he made post break of gifting the world with this, a slick and sonically bombastic pop record of the highest order. Freed from the musical trappings of FOB's genre, Patrick finds a place called home in the upper echelons of male fronted pop, rock, and R&B. His crew may have disbanded "temporarily", but Patrick Vaughn Stump is still Patrick Vaughn Stump, and the main instrument that may have drove you to him and the band in the first place is still alive and in full effect: Yes, that voice, expressive as all get out. It rides the waves of Patrick's compositions expertly, making singalongs cathartic, while elevating many a song contained within to anthemic stadium status. Look, I enjoy Fall Out Boy as much as the next man, but if there's more where this came from down the line, I wouldn't mind if their "indefinite hiatus" remained intact for just a little while longer.
KEY TRACKS: Spotlight/The "I" in Lie/Everybody Wants Somebody
25/Beyonce/4
DOO-WOPS & HOOLIGANS: The Singles, 2011.
AND
24/Holy Ghost! featuring Michael McDonald/Some Children
AND
Maroon 5 featuring Christina Aguilera/Moves Like Jagger
ALBUM VERSION:
AND
25/Florence + the Machine/Shake It Out
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
DOO-WOPS & HOOLIGANS: The Albums, 2011.
Love On Top.
25/Beyonce/4
This girl's in love. And she just wants to shout it from the rooftops. It's written all over her face, spilling out all over the liner notes, and present in every track. Yes, love -and the happiness that comes along with it- is in the air at the Knowles-Carter compound, 24/7, 365. And when you listen to 4, it is impossible to miss or overlook. 4 "ain't nuthin' without love". Even the less personal (and more commonplace)"Independent Diva Woman Done Wrong that Rises from the Ashes" tracks. Beyonce is having a blast here. Giddy, "Boo'd Up", and hopelessly devoted, eager to have it all come across in the songs. Yes, this girl's in love, and 4 shines because this much is true.
KEY TRACKS: 1 + 1/I Care/Countdown
2012.
An Ongoing Discussion/Moment of Clarity.
"OBAMA!"
Words.
"In a season of curious political phenomena — Michele Bachmann’s unnerving stare, Herman Cain’s last-minute launch of “Women for Cain,” a planned debate hosted by a reality TV star who makes the Kardashians look cerebral — one development is curiouser than most: the buoyancy of Barack Obama.
...This is not to argue that Obama is in a strong or enviable position. If he were to have his current job approval of 43 percent on Nov. 6, 2012, his reelection would be unlikely. The incumbent is vulnerable.
But in light of objective conditions, Obama should be more vulnerable.
...Obama’s loyal base and personal appeal do not assure his reelection. While a campaign of personal attacks against the president would probably backfire, any Republican nominee would have a potent strategy at his or her disposal: the relentless application of damning economic statistics. Obama is vulnerable because his economic performance is poor — a verdict unlikely to be reversed before Election Day.
But Obama’s strange buoyancy should sober Republicans. To defeat him, they will require a nominee who makes few unforced errors and no unnecessary enemies."
THE WASHINGTON POST: Obama is giving Republicans more of a battle than expected
SEE ALSO:
THE WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s luck holds with GOP contenders
Words.
"In a season of curious political phenomena — Michele Bachmann’s unnerving stare, Herman Cain’s last-minute launch of “Women for Cain,” a planned debate hosted by a reality TV star who makes the Kardashians look cerebral — one development is curiouser than most: the buoyancy of Barack Obama.
...This is not to argue that Obama is in a strong or enviable position. If he were to have his current job approval of 43 percent on Nov. 6, 2012, his reelection would be unlikely. The incumbent is vulnerable.
But in light of objective conditions, Obama should be more vulnerable.
...Obama’s loyal base and personal appeal do not assure his reelection. While a campaign of personal attacks against the president would probably backfire, any Republican nominee would have a potent strategy at his or her disposal: the relentless application of damning economic statistics. Obama is vulnerable because his economic performance is poor — a verdict unlikely to be reversed before Election Day.
But Obama’s strange buoyancy should sober Republicans. To defeat him, they will require a nominee who makes few unforced errors and no unnecessary enemies."
THE WASHINGTON POST: Obama is giving Republicans more of a battle than expected
SEE ALSO:
THE WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s luck holds with GOP contenders
Monday, December 05, 2011
Battles.
Words.
"...the Grammys’ fatal problem is that the entire enterprise is transparently and unforgivably lazy. In the age of the internet, thousands of songs are released each year and with the advent of technology, it’s incredibly easy to browse a larger selection of material to truly award “outstanding achievement” in the music industry. It’s really not that difficult to take a sampling of obscure but critically acclaimed, independent or underground artists to determine if Lupe Fiasco really did have one of the five best rap songs of 2011. Yet this never seems to happen. This happens in genre after genre and category after category. Does anybody really believe that Jeff Beck’s “Rock And Roll Party Honoring Les Paul” is really one of the finest offerings that rock music has to offer this year. Does Jeff Beck?
“The Show Goes On” is a morbidly awful song, but because it has the right promotional heft behind it, it manages to weasel its way into people believing its one of the five best songs of 2011. For an enterprise that presents itself with the pomp and circumstance to be the Academy Awards of music, it ends up presenting a historical worldview that is at best terminally biased, at worst, patently false. If the Grammys are ever going to matter beyond a smug celebration of the music industry’s gigantic sense of entitlement, its going to have find a way to change. I’m not saying you can do better.
I’m saying you have to do better."
PASSION OF THE WEISS: Not A Blogger: My Beautiful, Immediate, Ill-Thought Reactions To This Year’s Grammy Nominations
How High.
Words.
"The contest for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination has been described as a reality show and a circus. But what’s happening inside the GOP is quite rational and easily explained.
...The Republican Party’s core electorate has changed radically since 2008 — and even then John McCain won the nomination against the wishes of many on the Republican right because the opposition to him was splintered.
A party that lived by the tea crowd in 2010 is being severely hobbled by it now. The Republican right wants the kind of purity that led it to take candidates such as Cain and Bachmann with great seriousness for a while. The same folks took Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell and Joe Miller seriously in the 2010 Senate primaries, too. None of them got elected.
...There is talk of the “Republican establishment” swooping in to save matters, and things certainly seem ripe for a draft write-in campaign for some new candidate. But the Republican establishment, such as it is, is essentially powerless. It sold its soul to the Tea Party, sat by silently as extremist rhetoric engulfed the GOP and figured that swing voters would eventually overlook all this to cast votes against a bad economy.
...Republican leaders unleashed forces that may eat their party alive..."
THE WASHINGTON POST: A GOP reality-show race, thanks to the Tea Party
SEE ALSO:
THE WASHINGTON POST: Romney and Gingrich, from bad to worse
Saturday, December 03, 2011
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Singles 2011.
Pusha T & Tyler the Creator - Trouble On My Mind
Pusha T - Cook It Down
Katy Perry - Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)
Junior Boys - Banana Ripple
Britney Spears - Til the World Ends
CULTS - Go Oustide
Death Cab for Cutie - You Are a Tourist
Ke$ha - Blow
Jill Scott & Anthony Hamilton - So in Love
Black Lips - Modern Art
Miguel - Quickie
Destroyer - Savage Night at the Opera
Wilco - Born Alone
SBTRKT & Roses Gabor - Pharaohs
Rihanna - Cheers (Drink to That)
CANT - Believe
Beyonce - Love On Top
Patrick Stump & Lupe Fiasco - This City
Jill Scott & Paul Wall - So Gone (What My Mind Says)
The Raveonettes - Apparitions
DJ Khaled, Drake, Rick Ross, & Lil Wayne - I'm On One
Friday, December 02, 2011
The Femme Fatale.
Words.
"Happy 30th birthday, Britney. It's safe to say you had the awesomest 20s of any pop star ever. Ten years ago, Britney rang in her 20s by to do "I'm A Slave 4 U," a song about seething party-girl desperation that compares her vagina to a kitty cat; she rings in her 30s with "How I Roll," a song about seething party-girl desperation that compares her vagina to a kitty cat. If you don't think that's artistic integrity, there's something wrong with you.
... Just look at her output in her 20s: "Boys" in 2002, "Toxic" in 2004, "Do Somethin'" in 2005, "Piece of Me" in 2007, "Womanizer" in 2008, "3" in 2009, "I Wanna Go" in 2011. She just never fucking stops, and never should. She's been easily the most influential pop singer of that timespan, expanding her signature Brit-growl into the distorto-robot glitch-glam computer-blue vocal style that everybody else imitates now.
...Britney always gets underrated as a hitmaker, because people like to assume she has nothing to do with her own music. That's understandable but not necessarily persuasive, given the freakishly consistent sicker-than-the-remix excellence of her musical output. She keeps nailing the fizziest, splashiest, bestest synth-pop records of the moment, in a deceptively quasi-anonymous robo-voice that any pop fan can recognize in seconds. If she gets snaps it's for being a star, or (that most chickenshit of compliments) an "icon," but how many brilliant hits does she have to release before people give Mrs. Oh My God That Britney's Shameless credit for doing it right?
...We've seen so many pretenders to her throne come and go. (Thanks for the memories, Miley! Don't ever change, Bonus Jonas!) We'll see more of them. People keep waiting for Britney to be over. They can keep waiting. When people stop claiming she's over, I guess that'll mean she's over. But they won't. And she won't be. So happy birthday, Britney. And gimme more."
ROLLING STONE: Happy 30th Birthday Britney Spears: Here's to 10 More Years of Pop Awesomeness
Charades.
Words. For Your Consideration...
"If you want a gauge of an America on the downward slope, you could look at the recent poll commissioned by the newspaper the Hill, in which a startling 69% of respondents said they considered the country to be in decline. Or you could just consider the soaring language of this season's presidential candidates. Mitt Romney, in a recent Republican debate on foreign policy, was typical, insisting that "this century must be an American century" in which "America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world."
...As a 67-year-old, I grew up in a post-World War II era that, by any measure, was the height of the first American century. As much of the rest of the developed world struggled to rebuild devastated cities, the United States couldn't have been more exceptional, a one-of-a-kind country in producing the big-ticket items both of peace and of war, often from the same corporations.
Back then, there was no need for presidents or presidential candidates to get up and repetitively reassure the American people of just how exceptional we were. It was too obvious to state. After all, when you've really got it, you don't have to flaunt it.
...Decline is upon us, and every assurance that it isn't only serves, however subliminally, to reinforce that reality. At whatever pace, our "warriors" and "heroes" are coming home to a distinctly unhappy, unheroic and insecure country, lacking in jobs. In the meantime, our leaders doth protest too much."
LOS ANGELES TIMES: The American century: That was then
Born to Die.
A "New flava in ya ear!" production starring Lana Del Rey.
PITCHFORK: New Lana Del Rey: "Born to Die"
PITCHFORK: New Lana Del Rey: "Born to Die"
Thursday, December 01, 2011
"OUR HOUSE!"
A Moment of Clarity.
Words.
"If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.
As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.
“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.”
“If you had some old bag lady walking down the street and she had a decent credit score, she got a loan,” he added.
Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.
...These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.
...In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted.
...what is scandalous is the basic unfairness of what has transpired. The federal government rescued highly paid bankers from their reckless decisions. It protected bank shareholders and creditors. But it mostly turned a cold shoulder to some of the most vulnerable and least sophisticated people in America. Last year alone, banks seized more than one million homes.
...That’s why the Occupy movement resonates so deeply: When the federal government goes all-out to rescue errant bankers, and stiffs homeowners, that’s not just bad economics. It’s also wrong."
THE NEW YORK TIMES: A Banker Speaks, With Regret
Words.
"If you want to understand why the Occupy movement has found such traction, it helps to listen to a former banker like James Theckston. He fully acknowledges that he and other bankers are mostly responsible for the country’s housing mess.
As a regional vice president for Chase Home Finance in southern Florida, Theckston shoveled money at home borrowers. In 2007, his team wrote $2 billion in mortgages, he says. Sometimes those were “no documentation” mortgages.
“On the application, you don’t put down a job; you don’t show income; you don’t show assets,” he said. “But you still got a nod.”
“If you had some old bag lady walking down the street and she had a decent credit score, she got a loan,” he added.
Theckston says that borrowers made harebrained decisions and exaggerated their resources but that bankers were far more culpable — and that all this was driven by pressure from the top.
...These less savvy borrowers were disproportionately blacks and Latinos, he said, and they ended up paying a higher rate so that they were more likely to lose their homes. Senior executives seemed aware of this racial mismatch, he recalled, and frantically tried to cover it up.
...In late 2008, when the mortgage market collapsed, Theckston and most of his colleagues were laid off. He says he bears no animus toward Chase, but he does think it is profoundly unfair that troubled banks have been rescued while troubled homeowners have been evicted.
...what is scandalous is the basic unfairness of what has transpired. The federal government rescued highly paid bankers from their reckless decisions. It protected bank shareholders and creditors. But it mostly turned a cold shoulder to some of the most vulnerable and least sophisticated people in America. Last year alone, banks seized more than one million homes.
...That’s why the Occupy movement resonates so deeply: When the federal government goes all-out to rescue errant bankers, and stiffs homeowners, that’s not just bad economics. It’s also wrong."
THE NEW YORK TIMES: A Banker Speaks, With Regret
Oooh.
A "New flava in ya ear!" production starring Pusha-T, Hodgy Beats, Tyler, the Creator, and Liva Don.
Stream here.
Stream here.
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