Cr4Bdbgs

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Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:01:00 -0500

“…in some ways, “My Girls” feels like a life preserver for people tottering on the precipice of adulthood. Panda Bear might be apologetic about his craving (“I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things,” he hedges), but “My Girls” is ultimately a celebration of the simplification— of desire, of priorities— that comes with growing up.”

From the Pfork write-up of “My Girls” — I would love Amanda Petrusich to explain how one’s desires and priorities get simpler as they grow up!!! Even with Mint.com this shit is pretty overwhelming.

Also, uh, this is exactly why I like Ashlee Simpson and don’t like this song! I love me a good earnest discussion of the precipice of adulthood (in fact I may have used this exact phrase, or near it, to describe Ashlee in the rockcritics.com interview), but I still think that Panda Bear’s articulation of his own gee-shucks simple desires is ultimately a crock of shit (but, as I also say in that interview, reading the lyrics doesn’t even remotely convey what you actually hear; even now I don’t hear the lyrics very clearly when I listen to that song).

EDIT: And before someone claims that she’s using the other definition of “simple” to merely mean something like “plain,” I still think that’s false — as I’ve said before, adulthood is in the details, not in the broad strokes, and the details are neither plain-simple nor uncomplicated-simple. Ashlee gets it — toothpaste and coffee stains!

Damn it, Priscilla Renea, why can’t you have a proper...

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:58:38 -0500

Damn it, Priscilla Renea, why can’t you have a proper label push outside of my email inbox so that everyone would know how awesome you are before December 31 at 11:59 PM thus ensuring you fall through all possible critical cracks? THIS ALBUM IS SO GOOD.

Final round of listening before compiling my Top Ten for Pazz 'n' Jop

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:26:00 -0500

For reference, here is my list of albums I’ve liked/disliked with my tentative top 20.

The Very Best - Warm Heart of Africa
Sleigh Bells - s/t [This is Sasha Frere-Jones’s album of the year but I can’t confirm it exists…all I know of is a 5-song EP]
Dude ‘n’ Nem - Tinted Incubators [OK clearly this doesn’t exist either. COME ON, SFJ. Thx for the MOP nod, tho.]
Timbaland - Shock Value 2
Priscilla Renea - Jukebox

My Top 20:

The-Dream - Love vs. Money
Shakira - She-Wolf
Rihanna - Rated R
Taylor Swift - Fearless
Lily Allen - It’s Not Me, It’s You
Kutiman - ThruYou
Electrik Red - How to Be a Lady Vol. 1
Crazy Cousinz - UK Funk House Vol. 1
The Lonely Island - Incredibad
VV Brown - Traveling Like the Light
Ida Maria - Fortress Round My Heart
UGK - UGK 4 Life
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It’s Blitz!
Les Cousins Dangereaux - Enema of the State
Lovers Electric - Whatever You Want
New Boyz - Skinny Jeans and a Mic
Nellie McKay - Normal as Blueberry Pie
Pill - 4180 The Prescription mixtape
The Bird and the Bee - Ray Guns Are Not Just the Future
Gorilla Zoe - Don’t Feed Da Animals

My next 50-ish (alphabetically), with a “20” next to ones that could make a run at the Top 20 still:

Amadou & Mariam - Welcome to Mali
Amanda Blank - I Love You
Mariah Carey - Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel
Chino/Federation/Big Ship - The Formula mixtape
Ciara - Fantasy Ride
Chris Cornell - Scream
Dead Weather - Horehound [20]
Depeche Mode - Sounds of the Universe
DJ Quik & Kurupt - BlaQKout
Flaming Lips - Embryonic
Florence and the Machine - Lungs
Future of the Left - Travels with Myself and Another
Selena Gomez and the Scene - Kiss & Tell
Gucci Mane - Murder Was the Case
Hot Leg - Red Light Fever
Mike Jones - The Voice
Kid Sister - Ultraviolet
Adam Lambert - For Your Entertainment
Ryan Leslie - s/t and Transition
Lady Sovereign - Jigsaw
Miranda Lambert - Revolution
Lil’ Wayne - No Ceilings Mixtape
Demi Lovato - Here We Go Again
M.O.P. - Foundation [20]
Marilyn Manson - The High End of Low
Mario - DNA
Meanderthals - Desire Lines
Meg and Dia - Here, Here, and Here [20]
Modest Mouse - No One’s First, and You’re Next [20]
Morrissey - Years of Refusal
Music Go Music - Expressions
Omar-S - Fabric 45
Pink Mountaintops - Outside Love
Pissed Jeans - King of Jeans [20]
Platinum Pied Pipers - Abundance
Iggy Pop - Preliminaires
Rick Ross - Deeper Than Rap
Royksopp - Junior
Super Furry Animals - Dark Days/Light Years
Otis Taylor - Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs [20]
Andrew WK - Japan Covers
YACHT - See Mystery Lights

EDIT 1: Kelly Clarkson and Metric — listened to both and didn’t really rate Metric but liked it (will re-evaluate) and was disappointed with All I Ever Wanted. Which I’ll also revisit, since I haven’t listened to it in months. At the time, though, I was bitter that she seemed to be taking Katy Perry seconds (and I like the Perry originals better, which is INSANE) after writing an excellent and uncompromised album full of great originals on My December (which I think might be her best album).

Oh, also, didn’t know how to count Lady Gaga. A hand-picked of album with tracks from The Fame and Fame Monster that I liked would probably have an outside chance at 20, but I hate having to deal with all of it. (At least with New Boyz I can chop off the last four tracks…)

What else am I missing?

From Arcade to Ashlee: Interview with David Cooper Moore

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:22:09 -0500

From Arcade to Ashlee: Interview with David Cooper Moore:

Just did a (long) interview with Scott Woods at RockCritics.com in which we talked about how I ended up dippin’ my toes into the rock critical waters, how I started to dig Skye Sweetnam, how I got into a fight that one time with Simon Reynolds, and Ashlee Simpson Ashlee Simpson Ashlee Simpson. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to have me talk to/at you for an hour, click through!

wtfcomcast: Spoiler alert. Y’all should really be...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:17:26 -0500

wtfcomcast:

Spoiler alert.

Y’all should really be following wtfcomcast. Thanks…Yglesias? Uh, ok. Thanks!

afterworkspecial: veraville: The Short-Lived Trends of the...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:08:23 -0500

afterworkspecial:

veraville:

The Short-Lived Trends of the Decade - The 00’s Issue - New York Magazine

This list is confusing but fun. A few 90s references and things listed as dead that are STILL going strong sadly (Uggs).

Pantslessness, ‘09 - ??

So…about two years ago I looked for the song “No...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:04:42 -0500

So…about two years ago I looked for the song “No Anchovies Please,” a song that nearly traumatized me (though I always thought it was hilarious…) when I was a little kid. And the reason I didn’t find it at the time was because I just assumed, without listening to it, that this J. Geils Band song that was a B-side to “Love Stinks” couldn’t possibly be it.

BUT IT IS. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Deep Thought

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:29:00 -0500

thisisareallybadidea:

I do not understand how people can live in major cities and support themselves with writing/comedy/hourly job stocking shelves/training at my Bally’s. I would freak out if I didn’t know where my next 26 paychecks were coming from. Sorry, dream of living off my wits and my sparkling personality.

Ha.

As I recently said in an interview, I’d hate for music writing to be the way for me to pay for those adobe slats for my girls. I mean what kind of cheap-ass adobe can you even buy with music-crit money these days, anyway?

my ideal lilith fair bill from the artists announced so far

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:09:03 -0500

my ideal lilith fair bill from the artists announced so far:

maura:

• erykah badu

• mary j. blige

• tegan & sara

• miranda lambert

• metric

• PLEASE GOD NOT SHERYL CROW, YUCK

I would love to see Sheryl Crow live! <—yes, this is all I could manage to Tumbl today.

Is Taylor Swift Being Set Up For A Fall? - Taylor Swift - Jezebel

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:02:00 -0500

Is Taylor Swift Being Set Up For A Fall? - Taylor Swift - Jezebel:

chainofknives:

This was brought to my attention, and there’s really only one thing I can say to all the feminist bloggers bashing Swift: this is not a marketing construct. She really is that wholesome. And the girls who love her, the disparaged teenage girls? Many, many, many of them are that wholesome, too. Taylor Swift (tm) is not an attack on feminism; she’s not enforcing the patriarchy. Taylor Swift, age 19, writes pop songs that appeal to teenage girls. Because she is a teenage girl. Sure, there are marketeers that are cashing in on her image — but don’t try and decide what her future should hold, or what her art should achieve — just because it doesn’t mesh with your view of the world.

xoxo, michaela

Fairly extensive convo of the myth of Taylor’s “wholesomeness” (and the reality of her wholesomeness), role of sex in her music, lots of other thangs (most of which are at least implicitly taking this stupid article to task) over on the ever-cumbersome LiveJournal. I’ll repost a few observations at some point, but in her music Swift is neither squeaky-clean nor particularly “nice” (some conversation’s been had about how “nice girl” is a social category that doesn’t imply actual niceness), and above all precocious, writing eloquently about teenage experience from the just-older-than-that vantage of someone in (let’s say) their mid-twenties. And her technical songwriting is pretty amazing, girl wrote ~~“Nothing in This World”~~ “A Place in This World” (wooops, wrong “world…”), almost singlehandedly marrying the teenpop confessional template to a country-friendlier vehicle, when she was 13 years old!

I plan on writing a big-ass essay on Ashlee Simpson’s Autobiography at some point, but one important point is that, unlike Taylor, Ashlee is not writing about teenage experience — she’s my age, and writing about her early to mid-twenties with an astuteness (sometimes with the help of co-writers, sometimes not) that I’ve rarely seen, especially not in teen-confessional. Marit Larsen’s the only one who convincingly/consistently gives her a run for her money, and Marit’s not really close to being as on-point as Ashlee. More later, though.

I'm almost afraid to ask

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:42:26 -0500

But can someone give me the one YouTube link that will tell me exactly what “chillwave” is so that I don’t have to look it up myself and can go on to ignore it for the rest of my life unless it is secretly no-foolin’ the best thing ever?

(I ask because Matthew uploaded a great song by Tracy Jordan’s dad and I find it hard to believe that anything called chillwave could actually be that good.)

"The bigger dilemma with this entrant, however, is that the distance between Sufjan Stevens and other..."

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:38:42 -0500

“The bigger dilemma with this entrant, however, is that the distance between Sufjan Stevens and other solo male guitarists maligned by indie music media is not that great, but indie music media would have you believe it is a wide, wide river that is unsafe to cross.”

- There are a great number of excellent, totally on-target points made by Liz Colville in her 10 Overhyped Bands of the 2000s, but I’m probably most fond of this one. (via perpetua)

What I really like about this piece is that it sees hype cycles with a much broader and less annoyingly insular perspective than Pitchfork’s narrative through the decade — only one of these artists is explicitly linked to P4K (Hold Steady) and maybe two implicit ones (Vampire Weekend and Sufjan) but the hype cycles are seen as the bigger-picture confluence of mainstream publications (yer NME’s [Monkeys] and Rolling Stones [U2]) and all those fucking taste-deficient idiots who SUCK (yer [insert fan base of band you hate]). Also, the National.

tumbledore: Pixar’s Toy Story zoetrope at Disneyland. The music...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:00:07 -0500

tumbledore:

Pixar’s Toy Story zoetrope at Disneyland. The music they use really heightens the experience, the perfect blend of whimsical and vaguely dangerous mystery, like a cartoon bank heist.

I saw this installation at the MOMA (IIRC) a few years ago — the YouTube really doesn’t do the awe-inspiringness of it justice, but it was really cool.

My jaw actually dropped when she started playing the violin.

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:02:00 -0500

My jaw actually dropped when she started playing the violin.

Jukebox tourney commences

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:39:00 -0500

Jukebox tourney commences:

koganbot:

The Singles Jukebox year-end tournament begins. I love Phil Liggett’s characterization of Shipley, though I also like Shipley’s write-up, even if he does use the “r” word. (Tournament procedures…

A quote you would have missed if you didn’t click through this link:

“(NB: Dirty Projectors’ track sounds like puppets trying to dance to Minnie Riperton. Could have been good if done by professional puppeteers, but seems wooden to me.)”

This is pretty much the best description of “Stillness Is the Move” I’ve ever read.

Should be noted that Disco Tex himself is v. down with amateur puppetry.

feminally: ASL Party in the USA Pretty hard to hate on this...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:25:00 -0500

feminally:

ASL Party in the USA

Pretty hard to hate on this version. Also, how cute is he???

This version had me thinking that the lyrics to “Party in the USA” would probably be improved by two Google translations into another language and then back to English. Let’s find out!

When you go from English to traditional Chinese and back, you get:

“Too much pressure, I am very nervous
Dow Jones down, my favorite tune
And Britney Spears songs”

Suddenly “Party in the USA is transformed into an ironic commentary on living it up during the worst recession of our time. A swirl of the realist and escapist — the economy is crumbling. And Britney Spears songs. (Note to self: write haiku that ends in “And Britney Spears songs.”)

“Too much pressure, I am very nervous
At such times, the taxi man turns on the radio
And Jay-Z song is
In Jay - Z problems”

See, it was “99 Problems.” She was just baiting y’all with her seeming ignorance. (Can you not see Miley Cyrus screaming “I got 99 problems but a MITCH ain’t one” to Mitchel Musso on the set of “Hannah Montana”?)

Back ‘n’ forth from Arabic:

“My abdomen is turning and I feel a kind of nostalgia for the homeland”

FIXED.

“We get to the club in my taxi,
Everyone is now looking at me,
Such as “World Health Organization chick ravaging kicks?”

Actually, “ravaging kicks” is better than turning “who” into the WHO — esp. now that “rock star” is so ubiquitous in hip-hop swaggery, we should really switch over to “ravage ‘n’ roll.” Will await M.I.A. doing an answer track in which the WTO gets its kicks ravaging chicks!

From Yiddish:

“I Hopped off the plane in shabby
With the dream, my Cardigan.”

Ah, this is more evocative — though more realistically she should be hopping off the bus in shabby. She seems to have arrived with Nina Persson.

“So I put my trade to
them bad playing my song
The Butterflies fly away”

In this interpretation, when they’re playing “my song,” they’re actually playing Miley Cyrus’s song — more specifically, she’s performing it for them in the club, poorly. Wait, why didn’t Miley actually do that (a la “I’m Miley Cyrus all I got is four minutes” in her “4 Minutes” video)? Oh, right, because they wrote this song on a cocktail napkin on the way to the studio.

Combination Telephone and Autocar (Decade's End Outtake 1)

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:39:47 -0500

Combination Telephone and Autocar (Decade's End Outtake 1):

koganbot:

In the years after the invention of the telephone, when phone ownership became ubiquitous, did people say different things on the telephone than they would have otherwise before the invention of the…

Click through for the full post. Does anyone know offhand any good surveys/studies/papers/articles on how the telephone may have changed the way people spoke to one another? I’m reminded of Harry Potter, when Ron, using a phone for the first time, shouts into it thinking his voice has to carry for miles and miles through the wire to Harry’s house.

girlboymusic: When I was three years old, just before...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:37:54 -0500

girlboymusic:

When I was three years old, just before Christmas, ABC aired a Jim Henson production called The Christmas Toy. My parents were like, “They’ll probably show this every year till we want to kill ourselves, but let’s tape it anyway,” and THANK GOD THEY DID, because The Christmas Toy never aired again. I imagine thousands — nay, millions — of children grew up with a a gnawing, unsatisfied longing to once again watch Rugby the Tiger, his red-headed doll rival Apple, and a cat toy named Mew learn the true meaning of Christmas and friendship, but I? I had that old VHS tape, and I hauled it out every single Christmas to watch it over and over again.

Half the fun was watching the commercials — the show had been sponsored by Kraft, so every commercial break brought new “delicious” holiday recipes you could make using Kraft food products.

The Christmas Toy came out on video six or seven years ago, and on DVD a little after that, so I haven’t watched the original VHS in quite a while. I never realized how utterly fucking horrifying those Kraft recipes were. Enjoy.

You’ve been talking about this all day, but it was only when you described it here (“Rugby the Tiger”!!!!!) that you broke my brain as a Proustian black hole opened up and I remembered watching this on my parents’ bed as a small child. (IIRC it was piggybacking off of the weird Jim Henson Nu-Muppets with the white tigers and the spaceship and the…) And, um, almost started crying. I’m going to be having random chills for the rest of the day, awesome!

I almost -- ALMOST -- forgot how fucking insane the "Golden Compass" movie was.

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:48:36 -0500

But an old blogpost reminds me! Spoiler alert!

(1) Nicole Kidman hits on children before threatening them with castration/mutilation (“it’s just a…little…cut…”) PS her monkey strokes a ferret!!!!

(2) A large bear KNOCKS THE MUTHERFUCKIN JAW off another large bear and then rips out his juggalor. And, after his Mortal Kombat finishing move, proceeds to do a Tekken “KO” pose. Y’know, when you play as those bigass be-ahs.

(3) The Narrator from The Big Lebowski chastises said polar bear for drinkin’ too much whiskey.

(4) The costume designers decide to emphasize the first couple letters in the fantasy race of “gyptian” by bringing out the sortsa ethnic stereotypes Hilary Duff hilariously employed to bitch-slap her step-mom in “Gypsy Woman.”

(5) Suddenly, and without warning, a large horde of Cossacks are introduced to re-enact the final battle in X-Men 3. They actually speak Russian.

(6) So, apparently, everyone has a DAEMON (spirit animal sorta thing), and if you kill a daemon, you kill the bad guy attached to the daemon. Makes sense in a fantasy genre sorta way, but the visual impact of this is that the GOOD GUYS take shotguns and KILL THE BAD GUYS’ DOGS. Like, they have the bad guy in their sights and then think, wait, shortcut! And target a pooch and BLAM!

(7) When a bad guy or good guy dies, a buncha gold dust (some metaphor for God’s Nietzschean living impairment in the book that doesn’t translate in the film?) flies out of their orifices. Usually in children’s movies, death is a little ambiguous, as we just see bad guys hitting the ground and not getting up again. In this film, there is a huge, swirling outpouring of LIFE JUICE to signify DEAD. It’s kind of crazy.

What I’m basically trying to say is that this is (unintentionally) at least the fourth best movie of the year. And I kind of hated it! But I do want to see it again.

fireengines: I’m watching Paula Deen’s Christmas special. It’s actually really cute though. She’s...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:34:35 -0500

fireengines:

I’m watching Paula Deen’s Christmas special. It’s actually really cute though. She’s talking about how, instead of buying presents for each other, they raise money for charities.

Paula Deen, I wish you were my mom. You look like a huggy mom.

Just don’t cook me any dinner, ever, unless you get a kick out of seeing people go into ketoacidosis. Having Paula Deen for my mother would be a fitting “irony” circle of hell.