Best of April 2012 Spotify Playlist
Some of this stuff—the Big K.R.I.T. mixtape, for example—came out way before April, but I put it on here anyway. And keep in mind that I haven’t listened to Jim Jones’ Vampire Life 2 mixtape…yet. So all of this could easily be replaced.
Jai Paul’s hesitant but controlled coo “Jasmine” was my favorite song of the month. Because he whispers or intones the lyrics, it’s easy to pigeonhole it as a soft song, but that would be forgetting the lush hum of its bottom end. It actually sounds more dynamic with each listen.
I loved the Lotus Plaza and Suckers albums, but I probably became more obsessed with Future’s Pluto. I didn’t even like it the first time I heard it, but I’ve since become fascinated by his ability to tightrope around five or six melodies within one song. When he falls, it’s even more captivating than when he makes it all the way across. Each song is fueled by a sort of danger that the whole thing is going to unravel in front of you. On one hand, he can conjure the emotion of something like “Turn on the Lights”, using autotune to increase the raw and lost quality of the song instead of using it to distance himself from it. But elsewhere on the record, he can master a more bullheaded (but still accomplished) street song like “Same Damn Time”, and that versatility makes him even more impressive.
A few critics have pointed out that Pluto seems indebted to Lil’ Wayne’s 2008-era Luv Sawwngs experiments, and I have to agree that something like “I’m Single” or “Prostitute Flange” is a reference point for Future. Along with the Chief Keef mixtape, which takes Waka Flocka Flame and adds even more clenched-teeth menace, it goes to show that hip-hop’s web of influences is starting to move very fast.
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"With Friends Like These: A Friends Oral History"- Warren Littlefield- Vanity Fair
I can’t say I was ever a huge fan of Friends, but I loved this piece because it reveals that, even on one of the biggest shows in the history of TV, everything boils down to personal relationships. There’s a passage in which Littlefield, former president of NBC, recounts running into Jennifer Aniston at a gas station and, after a heartfelt discussion about her future, dedicating himself to casting her in the show. Beyond that, NBC executives specifically scheduled TV movies they knew would get high ratings against Aniston’s CBS show, ensuring that it would tank and release her to Friends. TV is a dog-eat-dog world, but only when it isn’t busy being protective and loyal.
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Lookin’ out at the world through my window pane,
Every day has many colors ‘cause the glass is stained.
Everything has changed but remains the same,
So once again the mirror raised.
And I see myself as clear as day,
And I am goin’ to the limits of my ultimate destiny,
Feeling as though somebody somewhere is testin’ me.
He who sees the end from the beginning of time
Looking forward through all the ages:
Is, was, and always shall be.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Chief Keef and Riff Raff- “Cuz My Gear”
I’ll put out my April mix later this week. Rest assured, any song featuring the line “diamonds dancin’ on my wrist look like a blank disc” will make an appearance. Mylanta!
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From Pre-K through seventh grade, I attended a small Catholic school that catered to the upper-middle-class. Especially in my younger years, it was an intimidating place far from home, full of people who controlled and confused me.
Every Wednesday, this school would send home “Childpost,” which was a charmingly pre-Internet clasp envelope full of announcements, permission slips, and other relevant information. The parents would take the papers—this is even how report cards were circulated—and the students would dutifully return the empty envelopes, their names neatly written in cursive on the front, to homeroom the next day.
I spent most of my childhood looking for something to read, so I would usually rifle through the papers before my mom saw them. The first page I checked was always the cafeteria menu, and, on one particular week, a Monday box simply read “Tribute to World Hunger”. Used to fish sticks and shepherd’s pie, I was confused and conflicted—by more than the complimentary word choice. I asked around about the mystery lunch without any satisfying results. In at least one way, for a half a week, world hunger—or the prospect of personal hunger—pre-occupied my mind. I was seven years old. I didn’t have a lot going on.
On the Monday in question, I entered the cafeteria in single-file with the other second graders, near the front of the line because of my last name. I didn’t smell anything familiar. When I got to the front, I was handed a cup of rice and a cup of broth, and the principal guided us to our seats before I could register any complaints.
Once everyone was seated, he led a prayer dedicated to a) people of the Third World who were hungry and b) the brave soldiers of Operation Desert Storm. He then told us what these two cups in front of us were. You see, this was a normal lunch to children in Africa. (And, of course, we knew Africa was a continent, but we talked about it as if it was some city/state of mind.) This probably underwhelming portion was all some kids got, and we should consider ourselves lucky as a result. We didn’t have to eat the meal, he said, but we did have to think about it. For a few minutes, we were going to sit there in silence and think about this rice.
My mind began racing. I didn’t want plain white rice, but what if this really was it? If it was, God forbid, my entire lunch, then I didn’t want to go hungry. What would the brave soldiers in the Persian Gulf think of me holding out for something else? So I mixed the two cups together and chugged, burning my tongue on the broth. I don’t think I was supposed to do that, since everyone else was still staring at the styrofoam.
The principal stared at me for a moment, then said amen. (We were still in prayer? Was that a tactic to keep people quiet?) Somewhat satisfied, he informed us that we could now get back into line for our “real lunch,” and the lunchladies unveiled hot dogs. One by one, the other students threw their cups full of rice into the trash and grabbed new trays.
It was the idea of sacrifice without any real surrender (but lots of denial). A can full of wasted food to remind us of the dangers of wasting food. Even at seven, I could see something wrong with that, but who was I to be self-righteous? I ate the rice with one gulp and would now get a second lunch, stuffed on a day that was supposed to be marked by hunger.
The school had the right idea but was misguided. I imagine the back-up lunch was a compromise to avoid angry complaints in Childpost, but if it was going to end like this, maybe they shouldn’t have done the experiment at all. If anything, I learned that day that even the authorities didn’t have all the answers. But they could catch me in their contradictory web.
Since then, there have been many times when, as an American White male, I’ve meant well but embarrassed myself by showing that I really have no idea what it’s like to be other and uncomfortable and poor, to step outside of the realm of my own experience. But it’s telling that I’m still confused about what this is all a metaphor for. Was I right to have eaten the rice? Would it have been more wrong to throw it away? I knew that I felt something more enormous than hunger that day, so was that the point of it all? Was it enough to acknowledge how wrong all this was? My White guilt sprouted with a vengeance, and I haven’t really worked beyond the question facing me since then:
What am I supposed to do?
"Our 'White People Problems' Problem: Why It’s Time to Stop Using 'White' As a Pejorative"- Noel Murray- A.V. Club
“There’s an element of ‘comfortable white folks picking on other comfortable white folks’ to a lot of the Girls criticism (though not all, I hasten to add). As other critics have pointed out, the hue and cry over the whiteness of Girls may be covertly about something else, especially given that shows like Bored to Death and How I Met Your Mother haven’t been so intensely scrutinized. Some of the Girls nitpickers seem to be funneling their issues with other aspects of the show—the depiction of privilege, the emphasis on women, the youth of its creator—into the race question, where their objections will seem less reactionary and more righteous.
I repeat: This is not the case with every column (or tweet, or blog post) criticizing Girls for being too monochrome. For the most part, this line of attack is completely legitimate. But that’s the big problem with the eruption of ‘too white’ as a putdown: It turns real complaints that deserve a fair hearing into part of the nagging buzz of self-satisfied snark that pervades our culture today. There are too many people who disingenuously gripe about how ‘white’ something is when they’re really trying to say that it’s not brassy or badass enough for their taste—that it’s salmon, not a buffalo wing.
So here’s the challenge to all you people who toss around ‘white’ as a synonym for ‘lame’ on the Internet: Suggest alternatives. Name a movie, a TV show, a book, a piece of music, or anything that meets your standards for non-‘whiteness.’ I’m not baiting you here; I’m asking sincerely. If you’re really interested in encouraging diversity, do so in a positive way, by calling attention to some valuable work that’s flying below the radar. Tell us to listen to Charles Bradley, or seek out the films of Ramin Bahrani, or read the comics of Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim, or appreciate the nuanced depiction of the black middle-class on the much-missed TNT drama Men of a Certain Age. Light the way instead of huffily trying to snuff others’ enthusiasm.
Unless of course you’re only race-baiting to score points and make yourself look cool. But you wouldn’t do that, would you? I mean, only a terrible human being would exploit centuries of struggle against oppression and marginalization just to get out of seeing a Wes Anderson movie.”
In 2009 Kodak announced that they were to stop making Kodachrome film, one of the most distinctive types of films ever created, because the company could not afford to keep up with the digital camera market.
Steve McCurry – the photographer who shot perhaps the most famous Kodachrome image of all time – was given the very last roll of Kodachrome film. This is frame 36 of 36 – the very last photograph taken with Kodachrome film – taken in a cemetery not far from the Kodachrome factory.
You can view the full gallery of all 36 photographs taken with the last roll of film here.
Mad Men Bittorrent Edition From artist Conor McGarrigle comes fantastic glitch video art is made from an episode of Mad Men incompletely downloaded from the internet via bittorrent.
Video comprising one episode of Madmen incompletely downloaded from the internet via bittorrent. The video has been linearly edited, no digital effects were used and all jump cuts and repeats are in the corrupted file.
The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent. The video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.
Resurrected via James Bridle’s new-aesthetic tumblr. [via]
Notes on a Lost Art: Meatloaf- “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”
1. If we have to choose between the truth and an easily-digestible story, we choose the latter every time. For example, I was listening to an oldies station at a Dairy Queenlast week—yep—and the Bee Gees’ “Love You Inside Out” came on. I enjoyed my Oreo Cookie Jar Blizzard for the duration of the song, and, as it faded out, a DJ informed me in a bumper that the song went to number one in June of 1979.
It’s a silky song, so I wasn’t surprised that it was a hit. But if you were to believe the narrative handed to people who weren’t alive back then, you would be surprised by the date. Supposedly, there was one night in 1977 in which the Sex Pistols and Ramones coordinated a guitar-string strangling of disco music, and nothing was ever the same again. The disposable plastic of disco burned up in the anarchic zeal of punk overnight. Haven’t you seen that Detroit Tigers game when those people burned all of the records?
Except that’s not what happened. A hundred influential people in New York listened to punk and wrote about it for the next twenty-five years, but everyone else in America didn’t care. As late as the summer of 1979, the Bee Gees were still replacing Donna Summer on the Billboard charts. Despite what every alternate history of popular music would have you believe, my mom still doesn’t know who The Clash were.
And I’m worried that people born in the ’90s believe Nirvana did the same thing to cheesy pop music. While hair metal and over-produced pop were all over your radio in the months leading up to 1992, the media would have you believe that Nevermind hit, and the authentic vitality of grunge replaced all of the trash. Except that’s not how it happened. In suburbia, cheesy pop music never went away.
2. In 1993, pop music wasn’t original, and it wasn’t even my own. I had a Nirvana CD and a Pearl Jam CD, but I was actually more interested in Aerosmith and Meatloaf, two artists that my parents had listened to twenty years earlier. If this repackaging isn’t proof that the record companies were doing whatever they wanted, I don’t know what is.
3. Michael Bay directed this video. I don’t know how it took so long for me to mention that. Michael Bay directed this, and it already has all the hallmarks of his style. It’s long not because it needs to be, but because length suggests some type of importance. Its fog, filters, lens flares, and deep focus photography* suggest a heightened (expensive) cinematic touch, but that approach is in service of something laughably derivative and bone-headed.
4. Because that’s what this Beauty and the Beast/Phantom of the Opera inspired schlock is: bone-headed. Take the prologue, in which our hero evades a cadre of police by…entering his garage. “Sorry, boys. Round ‘em up. We can’t go into the creepy guy’s haunted garage entrance. Let’s go look for some other criminals who don’t have garages.” But it doesn’t have to make sense because it’s a parable.
5. Let me see if I can unpack the narrative to this epic. Phantom Meatloaf evades the cops who are chasing him for some reason. Phantom Meatloaf sees a pretty girl in the field by his haunted mansion and leaves a dreamcatcher near her. Phantom Meatloaf becomes obsessed with her through a crystal ball. Uninvited, pretty girl starts hanging out and taking baths at the haunted mansion. Phantom Meatloaf doesn’t do anything about it. The cops (From earlier? From much later? At the haunted mansion at all?) are inspecting a crime scene. Pretty girl writhes around a bed with other pretty girls who are kissing her neck. No one ever explains who these girls are or why they’re there—are the cops investigating missing lesbians? Phantom Meatloaf smashes mirrors, which looks cool and, you know, suggests a destruction of his own fractured psyche. Phantom Meatloaf makes pretty girl levitate with some machine powered by his voice. I guess they’re in love now. Then the cops come in, all, “Are there any pretty girls consensually levitating here?” Those cops find the dreamcatcher, which no longer has any type of symbolic import. Pretty girl kisses Phantom Meatloaf, which turns him into regular Meatloaf, and they disappear onto a motorcycle riding off into the sunset. Okay. Cool. Want to make a movie about Pearl Harbor?
6. Jeffrey Oescher and I argued endlessly in his parents’ van about whether or not the lyrics said, “sex and drugs and rock and roll” or “sex and drums and rock and roll.” I argued against the improbable redundancy of the latter, but it turns out we were both right. On the actual record, Meatloaf prays to the god of sex and drugs and rock and roll (Jim Morrison?), and on the radio edit he reveals his affinity for, like, Echo & the Bunnymen by revealing that drums and rock and roll are mutually exclusive.
7. The Wikipedia page for the song states that Meatloaf’s video makeup took two hours to apply, and it still looks terrible. I love hearing reports about people sitting in a chair for hours at a time for completely underwhelming results. No one has really earned that whole “OMG wake up at four in the morning for make up” thing since Rick Baker’s work on The Nutty Professor.
8. On the third or fourth time the song should have ended, we get a female voice for a duet coda. In the liner notes of the album, this voice is credited mysteriously to “Mrs. Loud,” but Mrs. Loud was too fat for Michael Bay or something, because she was replaced in the video and on tour with someone more photogenic. This replacing-the-singer was a thing in the ’90s. C&C Music Factory did it for their “Everybody Dance Now” video too. But I’m just imagining the phone call to that poor woman: “Uh, you’re not good-looking enough to go toe-to-toe with Meatloaf. How are the kids?”
9. “Some days it don’t come easy / Some days it don’t come hard / Some days it don’t come at all / And these are the days that never end.” Lyrics.
*- Daniel Pearl was the director of photography for this video and, weirdly enough, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was notable because its look was so spontaneous and un-cinematic. I guess four days with Michael Bay will make you question everything that made you great.
"Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"- Stephen Marche- The Atlantic
I hate alarmist titles like that, but the ideas within are more sophisticated than any other essay of this type.
“And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence: The Pilgrims who left Europe willingly abandoned the bonds and strictures of a society that could not accept their right to be different. They did not seek out loneliness, but they accepted it as the price of their autonomy. The cowboys who set off to explore a seemingly endless frontier likewise traded away personal ties in favor of pride and self-respect. The ultimate American icon is the astronaut: Who is more heroic, or more alone? The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.
Today, the one common feature in American secular culture is its celebration of the self that breaks away from the constrictions of the family and the state, and, in its greatest expressions, from all limits entirely. The great American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” The great American novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick, the tale of a man on a quest so lonely that it is incomprehensible to those around him. American culture, high and low, is about self-expression and personal authenticity. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called individualism “the great watchword of American life.”
Self-invention is only half of the American story, however. The drive for isolation has always been in tension with the impulse to cluster in communities that cling and suffocate. The Pilgrims, while fomenting spiritual rebellion, also enforced ferocious cohesion. The Salem witch trials, in hindsight, read like attempts to impose solidarity—as do the McCarthy hearings. The history of the United States is like the famous parable of the porcupines in the cold, from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism—the ones who huddle together for warmth and shuffle away in pain, always separating and congregating.”
