February 2012
41 posts
“But illiterate DJ Huey Calhoun begins to break boundaries with this love of...”
– PBS to broadcast Oradell Native’s Award Winning Musical
With all these white people from history helping black people, it’s a wonder we ever had racism at all!
4 tags
2 tags
adventures in press kits
“…[T]hey were all drawn to the city out of the nostalgic goodwill that developed as the nation recovered. For four musically ambitious college radio devotees it didn’t hurt that the city was beginning a rapidly blooming indie pop renaissance.
In the last two years, however, the band has begun to think more about how life had changed after 2001, and devoted much of their energy to...
dot in the shark [UPDATE]
Anyone know anything about the following two bands/albums?
Person Tennis, Let! Take One [Mock Duckage]
Noodles, Etcetera [Makhani]
Internet info seems to be beyond my grasp here. Or they’re not real?
Part of my Pazz & Jop project. Chugging along. As I suspected, it’s getting much easier to find origin info by working my way up the points totals.
EDIT: Yeah, I should just email...
2 tags
“`Whether you like the old-school swagger of Stevie Wonder and Billie Holiday-`”
– Google Music lol
The Singles Jukebox: Whitney Houston →
thesinglesjukebox:
Whitney Houston’s voice was built for the ages. Fittingly, her success spanned a long period in a time when pop changed at a rapid rate. When presented with a fizzy 80s dance track, she sang the hell out of it and lifted you as high as her upper register. When an enormous ballad was…
I went so damn negative, to the point that I feel I need to swear fealty to this or...
“Mr. Cody, hook me up wit a glue stick… I`mma cut and paste this fuckin`...”
– http://ghettohikes.tumblr.com/
Can we fucking stop doing these? I don’t care if these kids actually say this shit - and my meter is tilting towards DOUBTFUL, for what it’s worth - do we really need to get these kinds of cheap chuckles?
P.S. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, YOU TAINTLICKERS
1 tag
fun fax
The only times Australians have appeared in the top two slots on the UK singles charts were the week of January 6, 1990 (Band Aid II’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” — with Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue — and Jason Donovan’s “When You Come Back to Me”) and this week, with Gotye and Kimbra’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”...
Grammy journal: the seventh half-hour
10:05 - Nicki Minaj being AWESOME. Glen Campbell as the Priest, ladies and gentlemen!
10:06 - WHAT IS HAPPENING I CAN’T EVEN
10:06B - THIS IS SO GREAT
10:07 - Ain’t nobody said boo about Gaga this time, and Minaj is going to make her pay. She is on some Opus Dei shit (never goes out of style, in case you thought otherwise). I hope Rick Santorum has an eyemask made out of sweater.
...
Grammy journal: the sixth half-hour
9:30 - I’m starting to lose it. Tony Bennett will be mailing so many birthday cards with five-dollar bills to Carrie Underwood. “I was named American Idol, and he’s so old he helped Aaron form the golden calves!”
9:31 - YIKES. YIKES.
9:33 - That was abysmal. I don’t want to talk about it.
9:34 - Best New Artist! The winner is… Toby from The Office! God,...
“unbornwhiskey said: `Aretha`s ‘Respect’ is probably my least...”
– That’s why I said “Aretha’s”!
Grammy journal: the fifth half-hour
9:03 - Ladies Lurve makes with the rippity-rap for a CBS promo.
9:05 - Finally, after more than two hours, my girl shows us how it’s done. I love you, Gwyneth.
9:06 - Adele sounds fine.
9:07 - Will she rep Whitney? I’m going to say no. Britain’s never hurt for actual soul figures.
9:08 - I can’t believe they haven’t made a video for “Rumour Has It”....
Grammy journal: the fourth half-hour
8:27 - Wiz Khalifa for Bing: the search engine of a new generation.
8:28 - Cool James voiceover: “Paul McCartney sings! Pretty cool.”
8:30 - We’ve given out, like, two awards. Trustee Awards go to Dave Bartholomew (awesome), Rudy Van Gelder (awesome) and Steve Jobs (/makes jerkoff motion). I guess the Jobs thing is a thank-you for dragging the industry into the digital age.
...
Grammy journal: the third half-hour
8:07 - Willie Nelson covering “The Scientist” for Chipotle! Synerjizz! JUKEBOX HO
8:12 - The NCIS lab tech comes out with her seeing-eye NFL world champions. Victor Cruz’s salsa is off tonight.
8:13 - Best Rock Performance! “Walk”… their induction into the Rock Hall is going to rile so many critics. I count myself among the to-be-offended, mind.
8:14 -...
Grammy journal: the second half-hour
7:39 - Had a phone call. Look like Kelly & Jason have stolen the steampunk motif from Sugarland.
7:40 - I guess I’d been waiting for an official call: earrings for dudes are right out.
7:41 - I thought the guitarist had a Cthulhu sticker on his axe. It was a monkey.
7:42 - They’re doing that car commercial with the plucky young white singer who sings “Billionaire”....
Grammy journal: the first half-hour
7:01 - Bruce! “We take care of our own,” he snarls. This has a 25% chance of being about unions, 45% for Arcade Fire winning Best Album. Props for not changing “Superdome” to “Meadowlands Sports Complex” or whatever.
7:02 - I remember a minute where I hoped Max Weinberg was the one who was going to be OK after he left Conan’s show.
7:03 - No Giants gear...
project
The Pazz & Jop project involves place of origin. I’m starting with the lowest vote-getters… my thought is this: the artists getting one vote are much more likely to be “obscure,” and thus more likely to have less info available online. So far I’ve been stymied a handful of times, but the one surprise is HyunA, whose birthplace is listed as “Jeolla,”...
99th blurbcentile
Five more 8+ scores and I can do a Kogan-style This Is Where I Stand-type post. Average score so far is 5.5 (last year’s was 5.16). 20% of scores are going to 8-plusses, which was my rate for 2011. Finding it harder to hate, I guess.
PUNK IN AFRICA →
douglasmartini:
Oh my god. Yes.
Passing on, sound unheard.
small immunities: On an ethical lifestyle and... →
rubyvroom:
conjuringseed:
fracturedrefuge:
hate-wizard:
I’m an organ donor. I also am somewhere in between vegan and vegetarian. I see a contradiction in this.
This means that if I die, any of my usable organs will be harvested and transplanted into another human being, if…
Tell ya what. I won’t accept a transplant from you, but I will cook your organs and eat them.
1 tag
Behold, M.I.A. not giving a shit
billboard:
Meanwhile, NBC’s worried.
Does Billboard kiss their mom with that mouth?
1 tag
“`Guests Cee Lo, Nicki Minaj and dance rockers LMFAO also appeared with Madonna.`”
– Fair enough.
white flag
I surrender: “singer-songwriter” is just something we employ to describe any pop vocalist with a co-writing credit. I’m off that particular Wikipedia beat.
“The album that lurks behind `Born to Die` is Kanye West`s `My Beautiful Dark...”
– Sasha Frere-Jones, “Screen Shot”
I mention this not because I enjoy bombarding you with LDR content (I’ve tried to be good, I really have), but because I drew a Kanye-Lana parallel in a previous blurb for the Jukebox.
On a note not entirely specific to Born to Die, I’ve...
January 2012
42 posts
1 tag
(Thank God): Question for/about the Singles... →
matthewtowles:
I’ve noticed that a large number of recent reviews (by “recent” I mean the past few weeks, but I’m sure this could be said about the past few/several months, etc.) have an aggregate score of around five (5) out of ten (10).
My question is this: are these average scores purely the result of simple mathematics (in that any relatively large grouping of numbers would result in a...
1 tag
Big Freedia`s on Kimmel right now!
The song is “Excuse”. The dancers are wearing a lot of clothes. Also, Jimmy said “his” twice; guess he didn’t scan the memo hard enough.
new project
Doing a little demographic work on the Pazz & Jop data. May take awhile. May learn nothing.
5 tags
Pazz & Jop 2011: Part Two (bloody consensus, my...
Part One is here.
It was totes adorbs when P&J dropped yesterday — a very specific piece of Facebook went a little nuts. People linked to their ballots, there was much gnashing over Goblin’s ranking (and much merriment over Bon Iver’s), and we got to see the first returns on griping.
One writer yawned that the top 40 was, with a handful of exceptions, utterly boring. (As is...
