Bad Band Names Part LXVI In a Never Ending Series: Natalie Portman's Shaved Head

You gonna let Idolator talk to you like that, Natalie Portman's Shaved Head?

Swedish pop darling Robyn, profiled here in this weeks' Stranger has postponed her scheduled Seattle show in favor of playing the View. Pitchfork reports:

Alas, Robyn's time with "The View" has forced her to push planned dates in Portland on May 13 at Berbati's Pan and Seattle May 14 at Neumos back to August to accommodate the taping. That's a bummer, Pac NW, but think about it this way: there's another North American Robyn tour in the works, and it is definitely coming your way.

Maybe we'll just publish a link to our archives for that one.

...from the smart mouth of my fella Jake, mulling over last week's nuptials of Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon.

"That marriage doesn't help either of them seem more heterosexual."

Moistworks is currently hosting a discussion of whether the term Indie means anything in music anymore. Some people are claiming that indie is the same thing as alt was in the nineties.

Now, I know that this isn't the most exciting topic in the world, since none of the words actually mean anything when applied to music, but there's actually some intelligent discussion, with authors like Jonathan Lethem chiming in. It's an interesting post about something that I previously thought was the deadest topic in the world.

So, the friendly neighborhood SPD just dropped by Comeback at Chop Suey, and told us that it was illegal to have our usual male nude posters up inside the club (they'll be back later about the noise). Now the posters have little strips of paper that say "censored" over the naughty bits. I'm no expert on municipal code, but that sounds like bullshit to me. Any lawyers out there on Line Out wanna weigh in?

In the meantime, because the pigs can't censor Line Out (and, yes, NSFW as well as blatant self-promotion):

Wired reports today that anyone who bought DRM-protected MP3s from Microsoft's now-defunct digital music store, MSN Music, is basically screwed:

Music fans who purchased music from Microsoft's MSN Music service are in for another cruel awakening about the harsh realities of digital rights management. As of September 1, it will become impossible to reauthorize songs purchased from the MSN Music store, which Microsoft shuttered to make way for Zune.

Music purchased from MSN Music will still play on authorized machines, but users only have five operating systems left in their entire lifetimes on which to play the music. I say "operating systems" instead of "computers" because even when a user upgrades, say from XP to Vista, songs need to be reauthorized.

What should you do if you want to keep your music? As Sony advised its users to do when it closed down Sony Connect, you can burn CDs of your purchased tracks and re-rip them. Of course, this degrades sound quality because it forces the music through the encoding process twice.

In related news: Did you know Zune has a radio built in?! You kids still like your FM radio, right?

After a couple decades of lazy avoidance, I recently spent some quality time with the recorded output of Talk Talk and the Fall, and learned some things that are probably common knowledge to many but were new to me.

Lesson one: Radiohead owes Talk Talk a gazillion dollars.

Lesson two: For the duration of 1992, Pavement (pictured above) was essentially a Fall cover band (and one that didn't even bother to come up with a clever "Hell's Belles" pun-style name.)

For proof of lesson one, consult Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock.

For proof of lesson two, consult the Fall's "New Face in Hell."

That is all.

The new Weezer album is almost certainly going to be a steaming, highly-polished turd. No one's being "punk'd", sadly—Weezer have just slowly and steadily devolved into a reliably terrible band apparently dead set on eclipsing past glories with the worst kind of alt-rock radio dreck conceivable (see: "Beverly Hills," "Pork & Beans," et al). At this point, holding out hope for these guys is like repeatedly forgiving an abusive boyfriend (see: cowboy hat, gut, mustache). Even if that cover is a farce, you can bet the album will sound as bad as it looks.

Yahoo Music made a list of the 25 worst rappers of all time which starts at #25 with these dudes:

And ends at #1 with this dude:

And in the middle falls Dan Aykroyd And Tom Hanks, Chingy, Nelly, K Fed, Fred Durst, MC Hammer, and 90210's Brian Austin Green.

See the full list here.

For the three of you following the Alicia Keys drama (her saying shit about gangsta rap and then taking it back... a week before her tour kicks off), 50 Cent is now speaking out against the Grammy-winning pianist. Via eonline.com (of all places):

Alicia recently defended her gansta rap quotes in Blender magazine, but apparently the explanation was not enough for Fiddy, who had some major dissing to do.

"I don’t like Alicia Keys no more...If she thinks what they consider [to be] gangsta music is [made] to bring black people down, then I think my s--t falls into that category. I don’t like people who don’t like me."

And from the sound of it, the rapper isn't a fan of her music, either.

"I don’t think that [her] classical s--t is cool. I don’t give a f--k if you can classically play the piano. I haven’t been classically trained, because my upbringing, nobody put me in front of a piano at that time...I could f--king care less about the s--t. So she don’t like the music that embodies the harsh realities because they’re not her realities. She hasn’t been subjected to the same things."

Tonight at Linda's somebody put the entire Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain album by Pavement on the jukebox. My reaction: "Awesome! I love this album!" My friend's reaction: "Meh." I was shocked to find out that my associate, who likes most of the same music as me, doesn't care about Pavement, one of the best bands of the nineties. Even if he didn't celebrate their entire catalog I figured that he at least would appreciate their finest album. "They're like Modest Mouse to me," he said. "Everybody else likes them but I just don't get it."

I never thought of Pavement as a band that someone just "wouldn't get." Do a lot of people feel this way? Who doesn't love Crooked Rain?

LONDON - Organizers of one of Britain's best-known music festivals on Tuesday defended their decision to book Jay-Z as their headline act after Oasis songwriter Noel Gallagher blamed the U.S. rapper for disappointing ticket sales.

The outdoor Glastonbury festival is a cornerstone of Britain's music calendar. But this year's festival has yet to sell out, in contrast to past years when tickets were snapped up within hours.

Gallagher, whose band headlined the festival in 1995 and 2004, said rap was to blame.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," Gallagher said in an interview, an audio of which was posted to the British Broadcasting Corp.'s Web site Monday. "If you break it, people ain't gonna go. I'm sorry, but Jay-Z? ... No chance." He explained that the inclusion of a hip-hop act went against the festival's tradition of guitar music, adding: "I'm not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. No way. No. It's wrong."

Read the whole story here.

The Daily Swarm is not impressed with the Pop Conference.

Like all normal people, I love Brain Eno, and have been enjoying a lovely spring Eno renaissance, involving the first two Roxy Music records, a few of the ambient discs, and, of course, the peerless "pop" quartet.

But the specific subject of this post comes from Before and After Science, the final installment of Eno's '70s pop run, praised by my beloved Robert Christgau for its "oblique, charming tour of the popular rhythms of the day, from Phil Collins's discoid-fusion drumming on 'No One Receiving' to the dense, deadpan raveup of (find the anagram) 'King's Lead Hat.'"

When Christgau tells me to do something—buy Have Moicy!, ignore Panda Bear—I usually do it, because I trust him. But goddamn me if I could honor his command to find the anagram in "King's Lead Hat."

For months I lazily puzzled over it, until the answer was handed to me an a Wikipedia-scented platter. Now that I know what it is, it seems impossible that I was ever incapable of seeing it.

Hint for those who haven't figured it out: It involves Eno's comrade in the bush of ghosts.

Answer for those who are even dumber than me: here.

Carry on.

Apparently, Moby's new record pays homage to late-night clubbing in New York City.

A excerpt of an interview he just did with CNN:

CNN: Your new album is kind of a concept album. What's the idea behind it?

MOBY: Well, it is a concept record, although there's a part of me that's wary of describing it as such because traditionally concept records tend to be a bit pretentious and self-involved.

The idea behind the record was to take a sort of crazy eight-hour night in my neighborhood in the Lower East Side and somehow condense it into 65 minutes on a CD. And so it's just me trying to re-create what it's like to go out in my neighborhood and stay out too late and get into trouble.

CNN: Do you still do that? Go out to clubs every night and crawl home as the sun's rising?

MOBY: I don't necessarily go out every night, but I'm 42 years old and at this point most of my friends are married and they have kids and they have quiet domestic lives, and I'm still going out like two or three nights a week until 5 or 6 in the morning. At some point I think in the interest of dignity I should probably stop, but I still find it really inspiring and it's still a lot of fun.

So what you're telling me is that a techno/electronic musician is inspired by the nightlife/club scene? Why is that interesting? Does it only not make sense because it's almost one in the morning?

And Weiland thinks Sebastian Bach should take his place. Ha ha!

From Rolling Stone:

Exclusive: Velvet Revolver’s Slash Talks Weiland Split, Search for New Singer

Rolling Stone spoke exclusively with Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash today regarding the band’s decision to split with frontman Scott Weiland. “Everybody’s just very relieved,” Slash tells RS. “This is something that’s been coming down for a while. I know everybody is tying the STP [reunion tour] thing to it, but it started way before that. We just had a lot of commitments to fulfill, so we just had to drag this thing out until the obligations were finished. Basically, we’re just excited about finding someone else and moving on.”

As far as the search for a new frontman goes, Slash says, “There’s some people, but it’s really premature to start naming names. We actually worked with a guy, I won’t mention his name, before we left to go to the U.K. and there just wasn’t enough time to break him in, so we’re gonna work with him again some more, and maybe some other guys as well.” As for Weiland’s recommendation that the band hire former Skid Row vocalist Sebastian Bach, Slash is unamused. “I thought [Weiland] could be a little bit more imaginative. I’m not sure if that was meant to be a pot shot or what. Whatever, it’s not worth any real drama.”

I feel some some kind of Some Kind Of Monster documentary should come from all of this...

As if you didn't have enough reason to hate Everclear (the domestic violence, the last 10 years of shitty albums):

On Saturday, April 5th Mars Hill Downtown has the privilege of hosting Everclear as they play a benefit show for a local Seattle homeless ministry. The proceeds from this event will go to support New Horizons Ministries, a Christian service agency whose mission as a multi-cultural organization is to be in relationship with homeless and street involved young people, serving and loving in the way of Jesus, equipping them to leave street life.

Showtime is 8:00 pm on Saturday, April 5th and doors will open at 7:00 pm. All tickets are for general admission seating and will go on sale at 10:00 am on Thursday March 24th. Tickets available exclusively through www.ticketweb.com for $15 plus service and other fees.

In case you're just tuning in, here's some choice sermons from Mars Hill (thanks, ECB):

God does not want women to have jobs. Their role is to get married, stay at home and have as many babies as possible. (Conveniently, birth control is immoral, too.) “Women will be saved by going back to that role that God has chosen for them. Ladies, if the hair on the back of your neck stands up it is because you are fighting your role in the scripture.”

Women also should not seek leadership roles, either in society (“There is no occasion where women led a society and were its heads and the men complied and followed. … It’s a matter of Biblical creation”) or in the church (“Every single book in your Bible is written by a man.”)

"Homosexuality is an abomination. People who are gay can change. “Your banners, your floats, your buttons—they’re not good. It’s just like letting cancer come into a body… until the cancer consumes the body and kills you. … We will extricate the cancer, and if that person who has the cancer is repentant and wants to kill the cancer, then we’ll welcome them back. But they have to accept that anything but one man, one woman, one God, one life is sexually immoral.”

"Evolution is a lie. Humans were descended from a man named Adam created by God a few thousand years ago. “The lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. This is the making of the first human being, our father Adam. We all descend from him and there was no human life before this man.”

"Hell is a real, physical place, and“it’s hot. Real hot.”

More ECB on Mars Hill here.

And here's Mars Hill pastor Tim Gaydos interviwing Art Alexakis:

(Thanks to Line Out tipper Joshua)

I really enjoy overhearing my roommate and his girlfriend argue about Vampire Weekend. She loves them, he doesn’t. It doesn’t sound like he’s ever going to like them either. I was talking to friends last night who liked them too, me… not so much. I downloaded their album to hear what all the fuss was about and didn’t make it more than two songs in before I made that Clipse “yeach” sound and turned it off. For me, my dislike for the band comes form a past grudge that has already been the cause of several musical quarrels – the fact that I hate “Graceland” by Paul Simon. I like Simon and Garfunkel just fine, but “Graceland” has always been like a torture record to me. I’m not entirely sure what it is about the album I dislike so much (one drunken argument in my living room devolved into me shouting at the stereo, “Leave Africa out of this Paul Simon!”), but it’s stuck with me since an early age and currently shows no sign of wavering. So here comes Vampire Weekend, lauded by Pitchfork, given the cover of Spin for the release of a debut album. The next big buzz band, and they sound exactly like fucking “Graceland.” They canceled some Florida dates for a chance to play Saturday Night Live last weekend:

That’s what these dudes look like? I try not to rely too strongly on movie archetypes, but every ounce of my being tells me that these are the guys you root against in the big fraternity boat race. These are the guys who rig the big downhill skiing competition. Why is this stupid band getting so much (positive) attention? Am I the only person who hates “Graceland,” and thus by default, Vampire Weekend?

I stumbled across this banner for a posi anti-war compilation.

2 discs of rebellion songs by some of music's biggest artists. Looks like a pretty decent comp.

I tried to find the song that Anthrax wrote about Kimya Dawson, but it doesn't exist. I wish it did.

Was, without a doubt, Joose. From the intentionally misspelled name to the terrible logo design to the ungainly big-gulp size of the can, this truly is the malt liquor/energy drink combination of Juggalos, meth heads, and the otherwise unemployable. Seriously, guys. Have a Sparks. Mix some whiskey into a bottle of coke. Down an airplane bottle of vodka with a Redbull. Chase yellow-jackets with Pabst if you have to. Just please don't "wease" the Joose.

I just spent five minutes on hold, on the phone, with a certain theater in a certain city trying to get tickets for my beloved to see a big old fashioned Broadway Show. (Please, when you say those last two words make Jazz Hands and say it in a stage whisper.)

While on hold, I started to hear two women bantering. I couldn't quite make any sense out of what they were saying. I knew what I was listening to came from a Broadway Show (please feel free to follow the above instructions again), but I didn't know which.

I eventually figured out it was from the show, Wicked.

It was totally annoying. How much sing-talking the characters had to do to get to the "song". A full minute until the words "Defying Gravity" were sung. Then this, I dunno, power ballade started. Holy fucking douche nozzle. That felt like the longest five minutes of my life.

It sounded like they had to really stretch to get the song to fit into the musical. It was so generic sounding and, well, boring.

This is the kind of song and exposition I HATE in musicals.

Will I ever get that five minutes back?

Will you?

LAist says Perez Hilton might be getting his own record label?

No, goddammit, NO!

As if the major label industry doesn't have enough troubles, now they're going to put Perez Hilton in charge of something?? Why? He doesn't do anything! He uses Microsoft Paint to draw dicks on pictures of celebrities and now he's gonna get to put out records?

I'm starting a petition to fight this:

We, the undersigned, are appalled by the possibility of Perez Hilton being given control in the music industry. This is an act of annihilation of the culture and history of music around of the world.

Megan Seling, Seattle, WA

Who's with me?

"In third grade I stopped liking Metallica because they made a music video."

Recently, on this comments thread, it's been suggested that I don't like rock & roll. It's also been suggested that I wear girl pants and suck dick, but we'll get to that in a second. First, a list of rock bands I've written about in recently:

Past Lives

No Age

The Teenagers

Les Savy Fav

Throw Me The Statue

Art Brut

The Thermals

But, of course, the real problem isn't that I don't write about rock & roll. It's that I don't write about rock & roll as narrowly defined by these commenters (many of them the charming partisans of King Cobra). Because I don't think rock & roll has to conform to a leather-jacket-slats-hat-and-tattoos aesthetic. Because I don't think it has to be juvenile or anti-intellectual. Because I don't think it has to be homophobic, misogynistic, or macho. No, the real problem is that I "wear girl pants," that I'm an "emo bitch," or that I'm the "main attraction at [Neighbors'] aids socket/glory hole." And if that shit's rock & roll, then you losers can have it.

Faux Rapper – Cologne Mogul, Puff Diddy Daddy claims that the man who is suing him over a fight outside the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood is the one to blame.

Duddy Diddy says (in music-news.com):

The man continued moving toward me and, without warning, lunged at me. Instinctively, I outstretched one of my hands to shield myself. Any contact between this guy and myself was caused by his forward motion against my stationary open hand.

Explaining to MTV why he's supporting Obama:

It's been sad for me, but I've had a real problem being able to get behind Senator Clinton in any real way, particularly over the last couple months. Six months ago, I would've told you I would've been thrilled to cast my vote for her, but the way her campaign has unfolded is so wrong to me. The mailers that have gone out in a couple of the primaries calling into question Obama's record on choice are particularly phony, and for her to try to attack him over that is counterproductive for politics; it's counterproductive to the cause. In policy terms, she's an excellent leader, but I feel that the way she's playing this game is so old, and the rulebook she's drawing from is so outdated, that it isn't translating to me, it's alienating to me.

This is a must-watch:
[now after the jump since this vid is freezing Firefox]

Continue reading "Cam'ron Takes on Jay-Z" »

British Sea Power

Idiot Pilot

Billy Ray Cyrus

Phil Collins

Pink Spiders/The Horrorpops

So, anybody listen to any good music lately?

An anonymous letter writer has some rumors and gripes about KEXP and John Richards (surprise, surprise, right?):

Now KEXP has given John Richards a big raise and he was able to sell his house here and buy a new big house in New York. He's going to "split his time" between NY and Seattle? Are my membership dollars going to support this? How much is one DJ worth? Why is my membership money going to support them doing a broadcast in New York?

I can't understand how asking people for a donation can be justified when they are paying a DJ to live in New York. Please DON'T use my name, because I volunteer at the station and really love KEXP, but I don't make alot of money, and when I give to them I don't want it to go to a raise. And he's not even the best DJ.

Update: KEXP has declined to comment at this time.

From this week's Fucking in the Streets:

For his solo set, Deacon lowered his table of electronics onto the floor, hoisted his trademark neon green skull onto a pike (the hoisting of this freak flag elicited ridiculously huge cheers), and proceeded to complain about my review of Ultimate Reality from last week's paper.

"Have you ever had to play a show after reading a really bad review of yourself in the Seattle Stranger that says you ripped off your friends?" he asked. "Let's just try to expunge that from our minds."

I understand the appeal of Dan Deacon's live show. He's a natural entertainer—funny and absurd and (usually) relentlessly positive. But with a few exceptions—"Crystal Cat," "Wham City"—the music just feels like it's there to pad out his odd monologues and audience-participation stunts. It's like watching Tim Harrington or Atom & His Package without any of the songwriting, and being friends with Paper Rad (ooh) doesn't make his aesthetic any less of a melted-down pastiche. Still, when he finally launched into "Crystal Cat," by far the catchiest song from last year's Spiderman of the Rings, the crowd became a surging mosh pit, speckled with flashes of Day- Glo apparel.

I took off, but apparently later Deacon accused me of having not even watched Ultimate Reality (which I did) before writing my review and complained that I shouldn't have been on the guest list for the show if I'm such a hater (so much for expunging). No one's ever going to accuse Deacon of not being tacky, but what kind of guy needs to bitch about one bad review in front of a 400-person-deep crowd of rabid, wild-eyed fans? I'm just one critic not drinking the Kool-Aid, dude. No need to be an asshole about it.

The offending Ultimate Reality review may be read here.

Open your workbooks to page 28:

Or just color this guy:

From yesterday's New York Times:

After intermission it was Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” in the face of which attempts at music criticism simply break down.

So I think I did okay.

Have you ever gotten excited about a show solely because of the number of red flags along the path to it? To review:

* A flyer whose art is a photocopied NES controller
* A band web site hosted at this URL, for real: greatestbandever.com
* A sign at the show's entryway informing fans that, unfortunately, opening act Beefy couldn't make it out tonight
* A robust, two-microphone recording rig in the Jewelbox's tiny room that would confound even the most dedicated Wilco taper
* The band opening the show by giving a shout-out to the guitarist's girlfriend in the crowd

But the best red flag of them all, of course, was the band's name: Press Start to Rock. Holy shit. They're an instrumental four-piece out of Kirkland who specialize in "rock" versions of old video game background music, much like national acts The Advantage or The Minibosses. PStR are, by far, the worst band I've ever seen. And I absolutely loved them.

It helped that their crappiness was so shameless. Their equipment was trash across the board--like they'd bought their guitars, bass, drums and amps in a bulk set from Costco, just to make sure their tone matched the sound of an 8-bit synthesizer. Between nearly every song, the drummer yelled, "Improv solo!", and the rest of the bandmates would yell back at him as if this were an actual threat. And in spite of the drummer obviously making everything up as he went, the two guitarists held their own as best as they could--to be fair to these guys, they did a decent job with the complicated riffs that were originally meant for a computer sampler. Their struggles with the songs made me rethink my opinions about bands like The Minibosses--if you want to call their source material a shtick, at least give them credit for nailing some relatively complicated tunes.

But nothing-no-nothing topped their plump dynamo of a bassist, a man who looked like he had dreamed about this concert for his entire life, and he had a special hand-signal to prove it. At the beginning of a song? Devil horns in the sky. When his left hand didn't need to hold a fret? It needed to rawk. Perhaps the middle of a song required a horn interruption? Fuck yeah it did. End of song? Conclude with pinky and index finger bah-lazing. This man, by himself, put more horns in the air than the entire crowd at the Family Values Tour.

Also, don't tell him the theme from Tetris doesn't slay--he headbanged the hell out of that jam (and most of the others) while the rest of the band stood pretty much frozen in fear. And how else to prove that you're a member of the greatestbandever.com than to take your left hand off the frets to drink a beer mid-song, only to earn pissed-off stares from your guitarist duo? But my favorite moment came after only 20 minutes of the band's complete shlub of a set, off tempo at all times: "We're gonna do the Mega Man 3 medley, and then we're going to take a 15-minute break. After that, we'll do Zelda."

You might wonder what the rise of Guitar Hero has wrought; ladies and gentlemen, it has wrought this.

Press Start to Rock plays again on March 6 at the Skylark Cafe. One can only hope that in the meantime, the guy with the two microphones uploads last night's show to the Internet.

Does it bother anyone else the way it has bothered me since the beginning of (my) time that on the song "Fool in the Rain," Robert Plant, on the word "right," is ever-so-slightly but definitively FLAT?

This has been said before, I'm guessing by the same people, but according to this email that came to us over the weekend, they're still furious:

An open letter to the fraud calling itself Alice in Chains:

This letter is on behalf of the numerous fans of Alice in Chains who are appalled and disappointed by Jerry Cantrell, Sean Kinney and Mike Inez for replacing Layne Staley and calling this monstrosity Alice in Chains. To have this replacement sing personal, touching and passionate songs written by the late, great Layne Staley is not only a gross insult to his memory but a slap in the face to the fans who were impacted by him.

Layne was NOT just a lead singer, but he was the FEELING in the band; the EMOTION that came through in Layne's vocal delivery was Alice in Chains' sound. Layne's voice and lyrical contribution were this band's chief selling factor, the special something that made them unique, the thing that listeners couldn't quite put their finger on but that made the band.

Now another man, a physical substitute, stands at that microphone and delivers watered-down, weak versions, hollow versions, of the songs that defined Layne Staley's soul.

Jerry and Sean have both said they would not replace Layne. Yet here you are touring and making new music under the name Alice in Chains.

Jerry, Sean, and Mike's blatant exploitation of Layne's memory in order to further their careers and dupe their fans needs to be exposed for the fraud it is.

Amanda Slaughter (Russellville, Ark.), Carolina Millan (Valparaiso, Chile), Annik de Dios (Melbourne, Australia) Thomas Poussard (Bordeaux, France), Mary Lane(Bloomington Indiana)

Respect for Layne Campaign www.respectforlaynestaley.com

In my column this week about highly-successful Blue Scholars marathon the Program I got a little glib, hyperbolic even, about Seattle's hip hop message-board beef:

According to a source, there was a fight backstage. Smack talk posted on message board 206Proof between the "Wake Up and Smell the Hiphop" T-shirt guys and Saturday Knights MC Barfly grew into a confrontation; Barfly reportedly landed several punches. Only in Seattle, or maybe Microsoft's Redmond campus, would a real, fist-fighting hiphop beef come from some message-board bullshit.

Now, I've got message-board bullshit of my own. (Raindrop Hustla has the pictorial version here.)

The main point of contention from Barfly himself:

If you're gonna get into the topic of hiphop and internet beef, you don't act like it's some uniquely Seattle phenomenon. You reference Vordul Megallah getting his jaw broke by Will High over El-P's online taunts. You bring up Okayplayer's history and Ras Kass and The Game and Yukmouth. You can bullshit your way through it with some "internet beef is typical nerdy Seattle" cliche because it speaks to the prejudices of people who still read print media but it's not very astute.

So, yeah. This kind of thing isn't at all specific to Seattle. I was exaggerating to poke fun at how typically passive-aggressive and nerdy, how typically Seattle, is the phenomenon of internet beef. But it doesn't just happen here, and it certainly doesn't just happen in hip hop. If the joke bombed, chalk it up as a misfire. No biggie. Mostly I just think it's funny/sad when shit escalates from html (or just talk) to fisticuffs. (So let's, you know, keep this one online-only, okay, Barfly?)

Eric Avery has a record coming out next April called Help Wanted. The advance just showed up at the office today.

It's awful, fucking awful.

That is all you will read about that in these pages.

If you care about Spin, who cares about Kanye, who doesn't like George Bush, who doesn't care about black people, who don't have desirable credit ratings:

“I’m a pop enigma. I live and breathe every element in life. I rock a bespoke suit and I go to Harold’s for fried chicken. It’s all these things at once, because, as a tastemaker, I find the best of everything. There’s certain things that black people are the best at and certain things that white people are the best at. Whatever we as black people are the best at, I’m a go get that. Like, on Christmas I don’t want any food that tastes white. And when I go to purchase a house, I don’t want my credit to look black.”

Miss West, you cannot be in a Kid Sister nail salon video, pose with Jeremy Scott and Cory Kennedy, use the word "bespoke," and not expect us to think you're the living, breathing incarnation of On the Down Low.

Um, can I smell your dick, at this time?

Can you feel it? That feeling in the air? Full of numbers and hard decisions that actually couldn't matter less? It's beginning to look a lot like the time of year for best-of-the-year lists. Kirby tackled Rolling Stones's top 100 songs of the year last week (a quote: "Jesus, Rolling Stone, fuck you"), and today Pitchfork put up their own list.

In response to Pitchfork's list, New York magazine's Vulture blog made this here pie chart. A chart about a list!

"So let’s get-get-get-get-get-get-get-get-get it on!"

Point taken, Grandy.