i don't know about you guys, but uh

Lil' Mama's VYP—Voice of the Young People > The Roots' Rising Down

Miscellany:

~?uestlove interview is in the can. Tomorrow I talk to J Spaceman. I'm not looking forward to transcribing these.

~This weekend I picked up Aerosmith's Get a Grip, Pixies' Bossanova and Laurie Anderson's Big Science for a grand total of $8.

~Pitchfork Fest trip: 65% a go.

~Also, for those keeping score, I like Get Awkward more than Nouns again. But both are pretty effin' great.

conflict of interest

Why does every review I read of Rick Ross' Trilla have to take a shot at him being fat? Being Rick Ross, he just gives you so much material...song called "Money Make Me Come," rhyming "Atlantic" with "Atlantic," etc. So why are good critics reduced to this cheap shit? I don't think anyone ever made a fat joke about Biggie Smalls. Rick Ross does not suck because he has man-tits. Rick Ross sucks because he is Rick Ross. I mean, the funniest thing about the dude is that he has a daughter. Rick Ross. The Boss. Fathered a child. Someone has allowed the seed of Ross to penetrate their sex. And didn't take the morning-after pill. And I haven't seen that mentioned anywhere once. This is fertile ground, gentlemen. No pun intended.

livejournal.com/~kotj

why you being a dickhead for?
stop being a dickhead

you're just fucking up situations

i wish that you were more intelligent
so you could see that what you are doing is
so shitty, to me

an exercise in conventional crit wisdom

What a dumb article:

-The Modern Lovers, Ready to Die, Marquee Moon, Blank Generation...right, guys. Because follow-ups were sparse or nonexistent. I mean, where's Nevermind the Bollocks while you're at it?

-Is This It and Get Rich or Die Tryin' are by overrated (or weighted) artists whose three albums apiece were never as far apart as people thought, including the troublesome third.

-College Dropout? I personally buy that Late Registration is its Sandanista!, but many don't.

-Diary? I'm as big a Sunny Day Real Estate fan as there ever was, and this pick is hardly accepted wisdom, besides being wrong (How It Feels To Be Something On for the tuneful win).

-Refreshing lack of Reasonable Doubt and Paid in Full.

-...but this Illmatic bullshit has to end. I feel an urge coming on.

No Age - Nouns

I'm not gonna pretend I would've made this statement without the mutual excitement of an awesome new friend to bolster it, but yeah. The three people I know who've heard the No Age record already (self included) all consider it the best thing 2008's coughed up so far.

I'm not gonna give it an A+ like I bestowed a certain, slightly-less-essential-in-retrospect iTunes-only EP a few months ago, but I'll say this. Nouns is a fantastic record that meets all my favorite requirements: short, loud, noisy, simple, exciting, unusually produced, catchy, hits all the right nostalgia buttons, follows the right rhetoric (THIS IS FOR THE KIDS!), uses techno as a basis for sound effects and odd timbres rather than a compositional ideal. And for all the post-Sebadoh/Pavement slightness, they're all songs. Even the instrumentals. They also occupy the perfect integer of resonance in my cortex, upright enough to retain the effect when it's over, blurry enough to obscure the songs. This elicits the same reaction every single play, when the all-songs-under-three-minutes-but-one lunchbox opus starts up a new one with a title I forgot and a riff I instantly recall.

And to go out on, I'll do the Dombal thing and paraphrase co-Ager Dean Allen Spunt from an as-yet-unpublished interview I spent a week transcribing out of dutiful intern love:

"We really just wanna make music that we…there’s no parts in our music that we don’t like. That’s why a lot of times, the songs are one part over and over again. Or like, two parts, you know what I mean? A lot of times you don’t need the third part, a bridge or a fucking verse. You just need like one part to be so dynamic, one part can be changed, it’s like “ha ha!” then it’s over. Right, right, one good part. There’s no time for that…like we’re gonna fucking die at some point. Like, why put an ok part, why waste people’s time? Why waste our time, you know?"

That's a man I'll entrust my ears to.

glut

As of two weeks ago, I'm an editorial intern for CMJ, and I love it. Finally getting around to something resembling actual reporting. I've never felt more at home in a work environment and I've never been more convinced that this is what I want to do for a living. And rumor has it I have a ?uestlove interview coming up.

Miscellany:
Kylie Minogue
The Breeders
Peter Moren
Blitzen Trapper

And finally, after much shit-talking and stump-thumping, I have started writing my book. Unfortunately, it's top secret. But it will be non-fiction.

desperate times

Adam Moerder describes the new Man Man album as having "little to apologize for, no serious blemishes or ill-advised shifts in direction."

That's the kind of record that gets an 8.0?

The new Man Man album is okay.