Lil B Panel Discussion at 285 Kent Street Presented By The Silent Drape Runners and Participated In IRL By People Of The Internet

After a DJ set that saw Chief Keef mix with Moby, and a live re-soundtracking of a popular internet video, Sophie Weiner kicked off phase three of last Thursday night’s “I’m Lil B” event by saying, “I think this may be the first panel discussion ever held at 285 Kent.”

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Songs of Love and Hate: "Swimming Pools (Drank)"

I think “Swimming Pools (Drank)” is the best song Kendrick’s ever done. Maybe, since I’m not a twenty-something black kid from Compton, it’s the most relatable for me. I think it’s probably partially because of that, but also that it’s his most generally relatable song that’s also very good. I think it also plays strongly against type, i.e., like Pitchfork’s starry-eyed treatment of “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe”, “Swimming Pools (Drank)” is the odd rap song about drinking that’s also against drinking. (I know there are a lot of rap songs against drinking, sort of, but this song is special because, see below.)

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Why? Grow Up: What Happens When You Fall Out of Love With Your Favorite Band

George Lucas ruined everything great about my childhood. Now substitute “Yoni Wolf” for “George Lucas” and “confused young adulthood” for “childhood.” I know, I know – we all grow up, see The Dark Knight and feel vaguely disappointed when we agree with the re-heated idea of our heroes either dying or becoming our villains. But this is not nerd rage or the voicing of an unreasonable wish that adulthood had not occluded my childhood. I’m not saying Yoni Wolf is a Time Lord. He didn’t travel back in time and ruin Elephant Eyelashfor me. But he is making me second guess my devotion to his music.

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Strip Clubs, "Bands a Make Her Dance", and Music That Just Sounds Good (Mike Will Made It)

I’ve only been to three strip clubs. The first one was called Cheeks. It’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and my girlfriend-at-the-time brought me there on my twenty-second birthday. I don’t remember why. It was terrible. There was a small lake of vomit in front of the mens room door, and it didn’t seem like anybody’s job to clean it up. Drinks cost about $20. We saw someone get bounced for licking a dancer’s chest, almost motorboating her, really.

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How Should A Person Be Dressed?

My girlfriend thinks I’m “really into bro culture” because I watch the NFL, think Tom Haverford is the best character on Parks and Recreation, listen to Dave Matthews Band, and wish to own a cloth top Jeep. Is she right? Sort of. Again, as far as, I guess, superficial cultural signifiers go, she is. Or, more to the point, whether someone is or isn’t a part of any culture depends on the intimate relationship between their own self-conception and their notion of that culture. It’s easy to slip into caricature or offensiveness if one, the other, or both are too far off from would reasonably called ‘accurate’. It’s a difficult sort of equation to balance.

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Online anonymity advocate Cole Stryker on why namelessness gets a bad rap

"Online privacy" is increasingly starting to feel like an unintended oxymoron, along the lines of "military intelligence."

But privacy is a matter of utter seriousness for Cole Stryker, author ofHacking the Future: Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity on the Web. It’s a slim book that makes a few intricate arguments, eventually tying online minutiae like Facebook privacy settings and web browser cookies to free speech and self determination.

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September is the Cruelest Month: The Event Horizons and Turning Points of Kanye West

It must feel weird being even a relatively old-school hip-hop head. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, you only knew Kanye West as a Roc-a-Fella producer with occasional placements on semi-underrated Jay-Z projects. The College Dropout leak and College Dropout album were game changers, but for critics, they often had more to do with narrative — i.e. making the leap from producer to rapper and bringing together backpacks and Bentleys. A decade later, it’s illegal in Dubai to stare directly into Yeezy’s Gucci shades. Oh yeah, and my mom knows what a “Yeezy” is. Things done changed.

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On a frank and, sometimes, heated conversation between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Ilan Stevens

Last night the 92nd Street Y staged a suprisingly frank conversation about race. Or, not quite a conversation: Henry Louis Gates Jr.monologued—and it was a funny and erudite monologue—while Ilan Stavans burst in with the odd question, and tried, with some success, to get a word in edgewise.

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Four Pictures Of Instagram

Instagram does not infect me with retromania. I’ve never seen an Instagram photo that made me think of old family photos. I have had boxes and boxes of undeveloped film from high school trips abroad moulder and eventually meet a landfill. I was just never that plugged into the film ecosystem, and I’m 28. Maybe I’m an aberration, but I’d guess that people who are younger than I are also not that cognizant of the film tradition.

Shitty faded photos are just shitty faded photos — they don’t signify old except in the most shameless and desperate manner.

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Album Review: Nicki Minaj's "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded"

The best ten songs on Roman Reloaded run about as long as Illmatic, and they are as definitive a statement about music today as Nas’s was back in ’94. Minaj’s louche, hermaphroditic lyrics shit on dichotomous thinking about sex and gender with vigor unimaginable by the epicene girly-boys who’ve approached the issue from the other side since before David Bowie became Lady Stardust.

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Report: Odd Future Live in New York

The average age among the mass of people waiting under the Hammerstein's majestic awning for the Odd Future show looked to be hovering around eighteen years old, bumped up a few notches because of the parents interspersed throughout. The crowd was still extremely, ridiculously young. Even the non-teenagers seemed young. Standing in line for a 21+ wristband, the guy behind me asked his buddy to share his (forthcoming) drink with him, saying, "I don’t have any money for drinks. My mom only gave me $20 for the train."

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The Flaming Lips Could Never Happen Now

The 90s were a good time for chaos. The record labels were in the midst of a compact-disc bubble, and the "alternative" scene looked to be a fecund new market. A lot of bands like the Flaming Lips scored deals. The Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beck, Mudhoney, and a thousand others were all scooped up to fill the void left by hair metal’s precipitous fall. You get the sense that, in those salad days, bands were given a significant amount of room to develop. Some of them ended up like Beck and the others ended up in the $0.99 used CD bin.

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Album Review: Dustin Wong's "Dreams Say, View, Create, Shadow Leads"

The output of guitarist Dustin Wong has gradually shifted from chaotic to crystalline. His early work with Ecstatic Sunshine veered toward shaggy guitar rock, while Ponytail was like an unhinged version of Deerhoof with odd hooks and wordless vocals. Wong's solo work, though obviously springing from the same headspace, consolidates and unifies his aesthetic.

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Apple’s Avarice: Efficient, Excellent, and Economically Sound. Is It Fair?

We might not have the flying cars, yet, but we’re sprinting to the future anyway. One company in particular, Apple, has constructed fabulous technological edifices that effortlessly extend our capabilities. Its contributions — inaugurating computer revolution after revolution, revitalizing digital media, bringing technology to bear on education’s problems — they seem miraculous. But a spate of recent news has delineated their actual human cost. These stories are a somber reminder that Apple’s seemingly ex nihilo tech goodies come to market because of its implacable business drive.

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Album Review: Himanshu Suri's "Nehru Jackets"

Heems clearly puts a heavy emphasis on community-building in many ways. Like the RZA twenty years ago, Heems is building a small rap empire in New York City. He elicits strong performances from Lakutis, Despot, Big Baby Ghandi, all artists on his own Greedhead record label. There are also appearances by similar-minded blog A-listers Danny Brown, Mr. Muthafuckin Exquire, Action Bronson, and of course Victor Vasquez. Das Racist/Greedhead releases tend to use similar guest artists, evening out their inconsistency with an underlying artistic unity. And throughout the mixtape, there are little melodic and verbal callbacks to older songs that give the crew something like a mythology by simply hewing closely to catchy leitmotifs.

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The One Thing I Learned From "Runaway"

When “Runaway”, and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy more generally, were getting heavy initial play in my life, I think it was pretty out of control. They say it’s easy to lose yourself, but I don’t think it is. You don’t lose things that you’re not looking for. If you don’t realize that you’ve really strayed then you’re not lost — you’re changing.

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My Variety Of Religious Experience

Music is not an intellectual exercise. Nothing — or hardly anything — is. Mathematical propositions are tautologies, a balancing act of equivalent notions by a sanguine equal sign. Language — despite its near-endless elasticity — is also a closed system, incapable of describing (here, again, notice the tautology) incapable of describing experiences outside its purview. Experience itself, phenomena, exist as aesthetic objects only insofar as there are people to notice them.

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My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Won The Loudness War

I will be perfectly honest with you. I do not believe in ‘listener fatigue’ or ‘ear fatigue’ or whatever it is: the phenomenon where music listeners have to take breaks or get tired from listening to ‘loud’ albums — with one exception. That exception shows me reasonably well that the phenomenon must exist. Like how when I was twenty-two, I didn’t believe in hangovers, it’s probably just a matter of time before I, too, get listener fatigue. But right now, I can, have, and do sit here and listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy all day long.

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The Case Against 808s And Heartbreak

I think a big part of my antipathy for 808s and Heartbreak is that it’s taken by many to be such a singular achievement within West’s canon. It is not. Some people like it for its emotional heft. That’s a fine reason to like something, but it’s not a great reason to think it’s a great work of art.

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The Case For Graduation

Graduation is the beginning of a climax that Kanye is still riding out. Virtually everything I like about Kanye’s work is present in Graduation, and there are a lot fewer of his really nasty parts.

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