“These days, he raps more like a condescending youth preacher than the aspirational older brother he first appeared as.”

I tried listening to The Big Day, last week, and it really is just boring and bad.  For a guy who seemed like he could do anything, it was just a crash, and he still hasn’t recovered.  It’s really just too bad.

via Chance The Rapper’s ‘Acid Rap’ Turns 10

(Source: stereogum.com)

“The performance seems like a partial rupture from the engaging phenom who stole Coachella in 2012 and the avant-garde D’Angelo heir seen at FYF in 2017. It’s crass to speculate on whether grief, the debilitating stress of celebrity, or mental health struggles contributed to this sensation of free fall. All that can be understood is an inescapable sense of anguish. When he addresses the crowd, there is genuine sincerity and authenticity—the desire to engage, but the inability to connect. The prevailing emotion of the set isn’t disappointment or resentment that this is some sort of scam, but rather an obliterating sadness that something sacred has fractured, becoming remote and only intermittently accessible.”

via Frank Ocean Is Human—and So Was His Disastrous Coachella Set

(Source: theringer.com)

“At this point, I don’t think I need to spend a lot of time describing what Celebration Rock actually sounds like. Critics like myself had to get more creative in 2012, whereas nowadays, I can just say “dudes rock” and be done with it — “dudes” as either an adjective and a noun, “rock” as either a verb or a noun. It’s a non-toxic masculinity, where a constant chorus of whoas, yeahs, high-fives, and bear hugs aren’t deflections from sharing deeply held emotions to friends and partners but expressions of them in their purest form — something closer to a purifying primal scream than the oversharing and self-deprecation and buzzwords that have arisen alongside the mainstreaming of therapeutic language.”

via Japandroids ‘Celebration Rock’ 10th Anniversary Review

(Source: stereogum.com)

“If you want to optimize your recommendations, the best thing to do is to act as much like “yourself” as possible, to remain resolutely and eternally in character—which is to say, to act in a way that is entirely contrary to the real complexities of human nature.”

via My Music App Knows Me Way Too Well. Am I Stuck in a Groove?

(Source: Wired)

“I’m shiftless when I’m idle / And I got time to waste” 

In 1981, America was shaking off the hangover of the scandal-plagued ’70s by virtue of the caffeinated buzz of Reagan-era jingoism. But not everyone was feeling the rush. As multiplexes became the province of pumped-up Rambos and Rockys exporting American exceptionalism, a different sort of archetype was taking shape in the shadows. In June 1981, Ivan Reitman’s comedy Stripes created the blueprint for Bill Murray’s cinematic persona, another Midwestern wiseass whose aggressive nonchalance served as a tissue-thin veneer covering up a simmering class-based rage. 

 The subtext of both Murray’s and the early Replacements’ rebellion is rooted in the suspicion that the top-down happy talk of the early ’80s was on some level even more pernicious than Vietnam or Watergate. In Stripes, Murray’s character is so thoroughly down-and-out that he resorts to joining the Army as a means of keeping afloat. That he is completely unfit to take orders is the gist of the joke, his eventual triumph the ultimate karmic turn of the wheel. By releasing their first LP, even on a small independent label, the Replacements perceived they were joining an army of sorts: the music industry. They were resolved to be untrainable on any terms.”

via The Replacements’ ‘Sorry Ma …’ Turns 40

(Source: theringer.com)

mppsyd:

“Every once in a while an indie-leaning album by a band my dad most certainly has never heard of comes out, full of songs my dad would most certainly enjoy. He loved A Deeper Understanding by the War on Drugs in 2017; in 2019, I told him to listen to Alex Cameron’s Miami Memory—specifically the song “Divorce,” which he liked, but which also made him ask profound questions I didn’t necessarily mean for him to ask. Last week, I sent him How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, the latest album from Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner’s Big Red Machine. Huge dad vibes on that one, like if the Band had grown up with Wi-Fi. 

 How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? comes out at an interesting time, as if it were fated to trigger a series of related events. A perfect Dad Album—full of hard-won wisdom, whiskey-soaked reminiscence, and just the right amount of jangliness—stands as a harbinger for a season that will soon be upon us. Dad TV Fall is coming.”

via Hot Vax Summer Fell Apart. Now It’s Time for Dad TV Fall.

(Source: theringer.com)

“Years later, it’s hard not to see this gambit on Frank’s part as intentional. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, R&B was still seen as a Black genre, which most likely seemed inaccessible to a generation of music critics that were either too white or elitist to enjoy something outside of their cultural purview. Bloggers couldn’t claim that they created a Ciara or Lloyd, but they could plant a flag in the career of new artists like Frank or the Weeknd, whose debut mixtape came out roughly a month after Nostalgia, Ultra. During this time, nearly any R&B boat could rise if you merely chose the right sample and were mysterious enough to warrant obsessive reblogs on Tumblr.”

via The Making of ‘Nostalgia, Ultra’—and the Unmaking of R&B

(Source: theringer.com)

mppsyd:

“Let’s talk about the album title: Anime, Trauma and Divorce. Divorce and trauma certainly fit together. How does anime fit into that?

It’s my sort of escapism. When I started making the album, it was specifically about Black people escaping through anime because in any hood in America man, there’s young people who fuck with Dragon Ball really hard. Who fuck with Naruto really hard. Who fuck with Bleach or Death Note. I’ve always been fascinated by that because that was my introduction to it too. I’m in the hood as a teenager and Dragon Ball is the best thing in the world. There’s an attraction to the power fantasy in all of these anime, especially the Dragon Balls and Narutos. The characters start out really weak, and over time they get really strong and they end up able to kick anybody’s ass in the universe. I think there’s always been some resonance in communities that I’ve grown up around.

Death Parade is an anime that I love because it’s an exploration of people’s choices and how they see themselves, and how they see people they’re in relationships with—and not to give away too much of what the show is about, but it ends up being this interesting exploration of how quickly you remember everything that you can forget at your moment of death and then you start to put your idea of yourself back together. Evangelion is an anime that I reference a lot through the album. It’s literally about trauma and how a character who’s been through a bunch of shit can remake their image of the world into something that is constantly attacking them because they haven’t processed anything. They’re scared of everything and they take every relationship or situation in their life and reframe it as something that’s out to get them, and that’s one of the most honest representations of trauma I’ve ever seen.”

via How Open Mike Eagle Channeled His Pain Into One of the Year’s Best Rap Albums

(Source: theringer.com)

““It’s all horseshit,” says Sturgill Simpson, his laidback Kentucky baritone gathering steam. “You sit down with a bio writer and they write out what this conversation’s going to be for the next year and a half. And then your publicist sends that to fucking everybody, and then (the media) rewrite their version of the same thing, and they publish it to sell advertising. And then the fans read the same seven answers to the same seven questions 7,000 fucking times, and then they regurgitate it like it was their idea on Twitter. And now you have a narrative.””

via Sturgill Simpson Has A Lot To Get Off His Chest

(Source: uproxx.com)

“She calls men out for refusing to show weakness, for treating their wives badly, for needing women to clean up their messes. Where The Idler Wheel explored a form of self-interrogation—“I’m too hard to know,” she crooned—on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, she unapologetically indicts the world around her. And she rejects its oppressive logic in every note. The very sound of Fetch the Bolt Cutters dismantles patriarchal ideas: professionalism, smoothness, competition, perfection—aesthetic standards that are tools of capitalism, used to warp our senses of self. Where someone else might erase a mistake—“Oh fuck it!” she chuckles on “On I Go”—she leaves it in. Where someone might put a bridge, she puts clatter. Where she once sang, “Hunger hurts but starving works,” here, in the devouring chorus of “Heavy Balloon,” she screams: “I spread like strawberries/I climb like peas and beans.” There is nothing top-down about the sound of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. “She wanted to start from the ground,” her guitarist David Garza told The New Yorker. “For her, the ground is rhythm.””

via Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters Album Review

(Source: pitchfork.com)