Kanye West-Love Lockdown
Since youtube won’t allow the embedding of Kanye’s new video, here’s the link. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXUzuk_wd0k
-Today, hip-hop’s little prince stopped by The Ellen Show to premiere the video for “Love Lockdown”. There’s tribal drumming, stainless steel and lots of jumping. Perhaps the man has lost his touch, perhaps he’s out of touch…
Deerhoof:
Offend Maggie
[2008, Kill Rockstars]
“Offend Maggie” attempts to kick off much the same as Nick Hornbys Rob Gordon (High Fidelity) describes his perfect mixtape should, in which he writes, “The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick it off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules”. Deerhoof blew their wad. Despite the fact that the first fifth of “Offend Maggie” is groovy yet rough, Deerhoof manages to bring the rest of the album to reach a seemingly endless lull of questionably improvised jams for the middle eight tracks or so.
“The Tears and Music of Love” seemed strategically symphonic, reaching moments of orchestrated celebration in peaks of pop sensitive pseudo choruses, sporadically intertwined with whiney guitar cuts and snappy reverb ridden drums maintaining a tap-your-fingers-on-the-steering-wheel-in-time-with-worthy beat. To break a new listener in to this creative combination of cuts, I advise one to check out the Youtube referenced live video of this rockin’ record opener featured on Deerhoofs website, deerhoof.killrockstars.com. The mixing on the drums, when they come together like such, leaves the listener with the soulful low end painfully absent in tracks such as “Numina O” and “Don’t Get Born”, where I can’t help but feel the attempt at sensitivity is too strongly blended with obscure, treble-torn vocal anti-harmonies, making it sound forced at times.
On a preliminary listen through of the album, the first discernable lyrics I was able to make out were “Bas-ket-ball, Bas-ket-ball, Bas-ket-ball”, off of (you guessed it) “Basket Ball Get Your Groove Back”. It was a let down as far as a deeper meaning is concerned, not to mention too far into the album to give a listener such a shallow message for so long to wait. If Captain Willard stuck it out for that long up the Nung River to find Captain Kurtz sipping mojitos and blowing Cambodian transsexuals he would have terminated with more than extreme prejudice, and so shall I. I dig the NCAA Final Four as much as the next keg chugging, toilet paper throwing, diaper-donning destitute of a frat boy, but proclaiming your undying love to shooting some hoops (and not hot off the cut of “Detox”) in such an obtuse manner craps all over my soul.
When done with the album I some how wound up with Stereo Totals “I Love You Ono” stuck in my head, if anyone else remembers that Sony Handycam commercial. The high, preteen, semi-melodic jig is reminiscent of the more poppy moments of “Offend Maggie”, minus the euro-synth and discoteque beat. I’m not so sure this adds to the album for me. In order for me to best summarize the entire work as descriptively as possible, I’d like to pretend “Offend Maggie” was composed by Princess Peach (Princess Toadstool to all you Yanks) while she was waiting for Mario and Luigi to rescue her from her tower of imprisonment. Despite me never really being attracted to Princess Peach/Toadstool myself, the superb snare sound adds and possibly creates rare, but enjoyable moments of cohesion, thus delivering moments of blissfully catchy pop, when not squeakily working against their hit or miss guitar grinds and esophageal squeaks.
“Offend Maggie” coincides mix-matched guitar notes and vocal tones, often in the same key, yet going different directions, sometimes slathering your ears with just the high end of each manipulating, discordant melody created between the two, intermingled with the occasional cohesive collaboration of absurd pop sensibility. These rare moments seem to make the album worth it, filling up the empty spaces created by walls of high ended six stringed riffs, and whining (moaning, singing, whatever). This seemingly random competition between chaos and catchy riffs often leaves one pondering if the album itself has an imbalance of its glutamate neurotransmitter, giving you this schizophrenic/Angelina Jolie in “Girl Interrupted” vibe. Forget Maggie, I was offended.
Fabakis Rating: 6.8
Before you get too involved in reading the news, throw this on.
-Bob Dylan’s latest set of Bootlegs/rarities is currently streaming on NPR, check it out here.
-PopMatters interviews singer and songwriter Nellie Mckay
-On Wired.com’s Listening Post Blog, an article about the rebirth of album art.
The album cover — once a crucial part of any band’s identity — has been dying a slow death for decades. For the most part, music fans put up with the shrinkage of album art from expansive vinyl records to hand-size plastic jewel cases. But with the music experience moving almost exclusively online, album art has suffered another compression — this time all the way down to thumbnail images. (Worse still — they’re missing from most of the music files we’ve all ripped and downloaded.)
-According to Pitchfork, Tokyo Police Club will be appearing on the ABC drama Desperate Housewives.
-Paul Mccartney’s little group Fireman will be releasing an album of new material on November 18th. His latest single, “Nothing too much, Just out of sight” is online and ready for your listening pleasure. It’s pretty awesome and is supposed to be about that woman.
-So this is what people are actually buying these days>
These are recently certified (Gold, Platinum Platinum x??) albums on Billboard. An album being certified as Platinum means that 1 million units of the album have been shipped.
Disturbed-The Sickness 4x platinum
Guns n’ Roses-Appetite 18x platinum
Lil’ Wayne- Tha Carter III 2x Platinum
Journey- Greatest Hits 15x Platinum
Disney-Camp Rock Soundtrack Platinum
To put these numbers into perspective. Michael Jackson’s Thriller has sold over 100 million copies worldwide. The Top five selling records ever? Here they are:
1) Michael Jackson-Thriller (1982) 100-108 million copies
2) AC/DC-Back in Black (1980) 42 million copies
3) Whitney Houston- The Bodyguard OST (1992) 42 million copies
4) The Eagles- Their Greatest Hits (71-75) 41 million copies
5) Bee Gees/Various- Saturday Night Fever OST (1977) 40 million copies
-In other news, Kanye West’s new album will be released November 25th. That’s final!
-From Billboard.com
Dozens of U.K. artists, including Radiohead, The Verve, Kaiser Chiefs and Kate Nash, have signed up to a new representative body, the Featured Artists’ Coalition. The London-based organization was officially launched at Manchester’s In the City conference on Sunday (Oct. 5). It will campaign for the protection of performers’ and musicians’ rights and argue for greater control for members over their own recordings. So far more than 60 artists have joined by signing the founding charter. Other members include David Gilmour, Billy Bragg and Klaxons. It takes its name from “featured artists” credited on recordings who are the primary named performers, describing them as “responsible for the majority of income in the music industry.”
In a statement, the Featured Artists’ Coalition has outlined six areas where it is seeking the following changes:
- “The making available right should be monetized on behalf of featured artists and all other performers.” It states that artists have been obliged to assign this digital music right in recording agreements and says they should be fairly compensated.
- “Copyright owners to be obliged to follow a ‘use it or lose it’ approach to the copyrights they control.” This would exist to ensure that artists’ work is always available physically and digitally, preventing fans having to download it illegally.
- “The rights for performers should be the same as those for authors (songwriters, lyricists and composers).” It wants to address some of the areas where authors get paid for the use of a work but performers do not.
- “A change to U.K. copyright law which will end the commercial exploitation of unlicensed music purporting to be used in conjunction with ‘critical reviews.’” It claims that several companies are producing DVDs in the U.K. which use an artist’s audio-visual footage and avoid the need for permission or payment by including a review at the end of the DVD, so that it qualifies as a work of “critical review.”
