-Ice-T vs. Soulja Boy…
Stuff like this is always fun because it shows how everyone’s full of shit. Ice T looks like an asshole for even going after someone like Soulja Boy whose career is essentially over already and Soulja Boy keeps looking like an illiterate retard on this video…until the end where he pretty much makes perfect sense.
I’m not sure why there’s a need to justify one’s taste but everyone’s so “hipster”-phobic that they have to be like “See?! She’s on a Wu-Tang album!”. Good eye on Jeff Weiss for spotting this but if anything, it proves how hype-oriented Santogold is and what she started off as and always should’ve been: The broad who sings back-up on a 2nd-rate Wu Tang album. I don’t think she was rolling tight with Wu Tang or gets GZA’s co-sign, I think she was just another girl who could sing back-up for a decent enough fee. Even this stupid blog gets e-mails and demos in the mail from plenty of girls like this.
While we’re on the topic of Santogold…she basically makes Gwen Stefani-style weirdo pop, only it’s not catchy and more annoying and way less interesting or experimental. She’s spoken out against it herself, but the whole connecting her to M.I.A or hip-hop or anything is pretty amazingly blind and racist on the part of critics. It’s also unfortunate how the only black, female artists that get taken seriously are the ones that “break the mold” in a totally by-the-numbers way. Quantifiably weird, calculatingly original…etc.
-Erykah Badu featuring Pharoahe Monch ‘Healer Remix’
And on the topic of calculated originality…there’s Erykah Badu’s album and this terrible remix. Just because he chooses to rap like twice a year maybe, doesn’t mean every–or any– new Monch verses are worth a shit. Critics, especially the rockists not out of it enough to totally hate rap– they’ll tell you ‘The Chronic’ is a masterpiece– love Badu’s new album because it’s full of black music history that they think they understand and screams-out “masterpiece” instead of just being a masterpiece. It’s easy to write about too, just reference like ‘Cosmic Slop’ and Eddie Kendricks and put that Fleet Foxes album back on.
-What’s the Deal with Lenny Bruce Revisionism? by Josephlovesit from Geek Down
This excellent post by Joseph touches on the snark indie/alt comedians decision that Lenny Bruce is just not cool and was apparently not very funny. Oh- and his references are out-dated! The thing about Lenny Bruce is comedians still haven’t caught-up to his style. Comedians took his politics or “social commentary” but reformatted it back into complacent punch-lines, hip rants, or anti-punchlines (which is just another kind of punchline really…).
-Coldplay’s Insurmountable Fire by Rob Harvilla for the Village Voice
The only thing I know about the new Coldplay is that at the Borders where I work, it won’t fit in any of the security cases– because it’s their big, fancy, smart album, no?– so it’s behind the counter and every twenty minutes some queer in sandals asks me where it is. But this quote from Brian Eno on their music and his appeal to produce them is hilarious: “Your songs are too long. And you’re too repetitive, and you use the same tricks too much, and big things aren’t necessarily good things, and you use the same sounds too much, and your lyrics are not good enough.”
-Wolverine #66: Old Man Logan by Millar/McNiven
So…there’s this great new mini-series about Wolverine in the future and he’s given up being a superhero because all the heroes lost to the villians– who now own parts of the United States– and he’s just this poor redneck-ish dude living with his wife and kids and he has to pay rent to Bruce Banner’s gamma-infected cracker-asshole kids or suffer an ass-kicking and so, he’s got no money until a grizzled, blind Hawkeye gives him an opportunity to make some cash if he’ll navigate him across the U.S in the Spidermobile (!!!). Written by Mark Millar, who can be a genius when he wants to be and some great artwork that I’m going to describe as “stringy” by Steven McNiven. Pick it up, it just started.
Album for the Week: German Oak ‘Bunker’
I was digging through an old box of crap from a few years ago and found a CD-R of this Krautrock album that’s really heavy and bizarre and totally Nazi-obsessed. Next to Faust’s ‘The Sad Skinhead’, this is one of the bravest popular music confrontations with Germany’s WWII past. ‘Swastika Rising’ sounds exactly as it should: an ominous slow-build freak-out full of echo and metallic pings. ‘The Third Reich’ begins with a Hitler soundclip and then turns into a German funk song, ‘Shadows of War’ is just noise-music until it busts open at the end on some totally early-Tangerine Dream electro-bliss. The rest of the album’s not bad either, but those first three…fuck.
Movie for the Week: Cemetery Man
I’ve been reading the late 90s ‘Dark Horse’ reprints of Tiziano Sclavi’s ‘Dylan Dog’ (they all have these really nice Mike Mignola covers too) and this movie is loosely based on a novel Sclavi wrote that references some of the Dylan Dog stuff. Apparently, Dylan himself was based on the image of Rupert Everett, which makes it even better that this movie stars Everett. A surreal zombie movie farce that avoids wacky ‘Shaun of the Dead’ style bullshit and is ultimately pretty emotionally affecting.
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?