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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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: 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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The Real Passion Of Kanye West

I’d thought of this album, idiomatically, as ‘the Jon Brion one’. But going back and reading some interviews and press, it’s more like ‘the origin story of modern day Kanye West one’. Let’s count down the ways.

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College Dropout On First Listen

College Dropout marked the beginning of a golden age of writing about music on the internet, and especially rap. At this point, the outsized musical personalities musico-cultural trends became almost more interesting to talk about than the music itself. It’s not like Kanye started that, but let’s say that it’s similar to how Harold Bloom argued that Shakespeare invented the modern human. I’d argue that Kanye West helped invent the modern music critic.

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Shit Everyone Says: What Does the Latest YouTube Meme Say About The People Making It?

The whole point of these Shit People Say memes is to highlight the minor ways in which we’re all different. A guy would say this to indicate hunger whereas a girl says this. The truly funny iterations of the meme make a good effort at being insightful about these differences. The more ignominious ones merely make fun of difference; they’re simply misogynistic.

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Apple, Amazon, and Google’s Dehumanizing Technologies

Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google perform fabulous feats and offer incredible products. Their ubiquity in the market means that they shape people’s existence as much as the government, family, and the larger cultural atmosphere. Maybe more than all those, and that’s fine. A lot of institutions have more power to shape people’s existence than the government. But very few do so under the guise of an ineradicable push to progress, with a real Law (cf, Moore) held up as describing its inexorable growth. And few institutions shape the course of humanity with humanity itself’s unquenchable approbation. This is a serious problem.

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Poor White Blight: How Rapper Yelawolf (and Eminem Before Him) Turns Hip-Hop's Eye to the Trailer Park

A white rapper is an odd sort of creature. A brief survey of the media tells us that, culturally speaking, there’s no higher accomplishment in America than being a white entertainer. Unless, that is, you’re a rapper: there’s a line of embarrassment spanning generations from Marky Mark, Vanilla Ice and Snow to Tommy Hilfiger’s kid, Tom Hanks’ kid and Bob Dylan’s grandkid. Apparently, it’s still too soon for rap to have its "stealing from Robert Johnson" moment.

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2011 Was an Amazing Year for Music

In a year dominated by women, lo-fi bedroom rap producers, and outsized albums, it makes sense for my favorite album to have aspects of it all. It does. EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints. The album is only nine songs, and less than 38 minutes, but it feels like gut-wrenching exodus through an arid, wracked life.

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Album Review: Yelawolf's "Radioactive"

Despite Radioactive’s second-half languor, it’s still a positive addition to Yelawolf’s canon. Based on his previous releases, the man is blessed with the high-velocity constitution befitting workaholics. And unlike other mixtape auteurs like Lil B and Gucci Mane, Yelawolf has benefitted from historically good quality control. It’s too bad that his major label debut is less than an unequivocal success.

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Drake's "Shot For Me" As a Template for Modern Masculinity

I really do not think Drake gets enough credit for being an intricately tuned asshole savant asshole. He’s the Rain Man of douchery. Drake’s a comfortable inhabitant of the post-“Runaway” world. (Side note: What happened to that post-“Milli” world we were supposed to have? It evaporated faster than Obama’s post-racial America.) Thing is, Drake doesn’t need to call himself a douchebag, asshole, or scumbag. Even less does he hoist a toast to them. Rather, he just is an asshole, and his toasts are meant to push the frazzled, beat-down women in his wake further into a pit of despair. I mean, yes, that is some scumbag shit.

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Do Year-End Lists Matter?

Of all people, based on skill and inclination, music writers should be the best at ranking the year’s releases. Somehow, though, instead of bringing a diverse set of experience, listening habits, and critical proclivities, most year-end lists end up the same.

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Will The Real Donald Glover Please Stand Up?

It seems like Glover’s automatic response to the (perceived) defect of being a nerd is to brag about how much he gets laid. This tactic seems like a miscalculation. Half the time, Childish Gambino sounds like an un-self-aware parody of Bigger Thomas — or a pale imitation of Kanye West.

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Unraveling The Drake Paradox

Throughout the admittedly hilarious review, Drake and his album get called "Renée Zellweger", "a crime against heterosexuality", "bitchmade", "false Beyoncé female empowerment", "audio vagina injections", and "gay ass music". And the nut is, believe it or not, I think this is a pretty positive review.

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Give A$AP Rocky Another Chance

The point is, ASAP Rocky earned an enormous mindshare in the world of blogs without actually crossing over in any significant way. No "Forever". No "Wonton Soup". No "Yonkers". Not even a "Justin Bieber 'freestyle' over 'Otis' ". Therefore, that Rocky would hardly try to come up with a full set of new songs for his big break really irked me.

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