“To a 2001 native’s ears, hip hop might seem to have warped and contracted like a cassette tape left in the sun. Hip hop’s sonic landscapes have become dense and opaque, as if producers have eschewed ocean-front mansions in favor of mood-lit penthouses as their architectural inspirations. Rappers are less bombastic, less self-satisfied, less jubilant. Even the most successful of today’s emcees seem cagey, apologetic, paranoid. Where the capitalist of choice in the early aughts might have been the world-conquering CEO with a rainbow of revenue streams, recent rappers seem to have more in common with an over-leveraged hedge-fund manager, skittish from too little sleep and too many stimulants, waiting desperately for the one bet to come through and make things right again.”
“Those who count on Hollywood for support need to understand this industry is watching very carefully,” Dodd said in a Fox News interview Friday. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay attention to me when my job is at risk.”
Pazz & Jop 2k11
It’s that time of year again: Pazz & Jop or as some call like to call it, “music critic Christmas”. Here’s my ballot for 2011; my extended top 20 albums list is after the break. I’m thrilled to see that Tune-Yards clinched the overall #1 album spot this year—that photo of Merill Garbus on the front page pretty much sums up the collective sense of surprise. It couldn’t be more well-deserved, though—Garbus is a truly idiosyncratic voice in pop, one of the few artists out there making records that are as original as they are accomplished. Also, it’s encouraging to see that female artists topped both the albums and singles lists this year—I wonder when the last time was when that happened, if ever (online results only go as far back as 2008)?
The last time I saw Girls and Real Estate play, I walked away feeling disappointed by the former and pleasantly surprised by the latter. This time around, my reaction was the exact opposite, though the choice of venue might have had something to do with it. In the two years since I last saw Girls, they’ve learned how to scale up their live show to fill big rooms; during their headlining set at Terminal 5 on Saturday night, they looked like a band that has been playing to crowds of 3,000 from the start. Real Estate, meanwhile, looked and sounded a bit out of place in that warehouse-sized space—as it turns out, theirs is a sound best savored in small spaces. At any rate, click over to MTV Hive to see my photos and read my impressions of Saturday’s show and to see Christopher Owens win the Kurt Cobain lookalike contest.
Pitchfork Reviews Reviews: Interviewing Lil Wayne at a Skateboarding Apparel Launch Party
In the back room of a basement club in Chelsea, past the bouncer who mercifully let me in, through the front door and down the stairs, past the coat check and across the dancefloor and down a narrow hallway, I am staring at Lil Wayne through a very thin, almost transparent curtain. There are models and reporters and bottles of liquor and champagne all around me, and smoke in the air and Lil Wayne music playing over the club’s PA. Lil Wayne is the most popular rapper in America and also my personal hero, and right now he’s standing in the encurtained VIP area of this club because he’s here to promote a new line of skateboarding clothes that he either founded or is endorsing. Lil Wayne is wearing all-white Moon Boots that go up to his knees, which he cutely tucks his pants into, and I am watching him as he raps along to a Drake song and extends his arms and dances, like when someone on the new York Jets scores a touchdown and they run around the field impersonating a plane. I am nearly in heaven.
The best tumblr-er in the game interviews the best rapper in the game.
On Beige Ford Tauruses, Carcinogenic Summer Jobs and the Impending At the Drive-In Reunion
In the summer of 1999, at the age of 16, I got a job working at the vehicle emissions testing station in Racine, Wisconsin. Wisconsin, like many states, requires that all licensed vehicles be tested for emissions every few years and for a couple of months, I was paid minimum wage to stand behind cars and collect noxious petrochemical fumes with a rubber hose. I soon fell in with a co-worker named Charlie, a spindly, dark-haired kid who played drums in a local hardcore band and sported a Black Flag tattoo on his right arm. Charlie drove a beige, late ’80s Ford Taurus that always seemed on the verge of collapse—whenever he drove the car on the highway, it was the duty of whoever was riding shotgun to hold the dashboard in place so that it wouldn’t detach at high speeds. That summer, Charlie and I wiled away many an afternoon chatting about music while pretending to mop the breakroom and it was during one of these sessions that I asked him what the single sticker on his bumper—a rectangular, sky blue piece of vinyl with the words “at.the.drive.in” printed on it—meant. He explained that upon first purchasing the car, he had decided to honor only one band by affixing their sticker to his Taurus and since there was no such thing as a Fugazi sticker, At the Drive-In had been chosen for the prestigious spot.
Track:
The Privilege
Artist:
Parenthetical Girls
Album:
Live at Shea Stadium 12/6/11
108 plays
In keeping with their practice of releasing free recordings of all their shows, the good folks at Shea Stadium have uploaded a full-length recording of the Parenthetical Girls’ headlining set from early last month. I really can’t recommend this recording highly enough—as I’ve mentioned on here in the past, I think the Parenthetical Girls are one of the most underrated indie-pop bands of the last decade and this was without a doubt the best show I’ve seen them play. Announced at the last minute and tucked away in a back-alley warehouse space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, this show was aimed squarely at the die-hards and provided the band an opportunity to indulge their more confrontational side without holding back. The recording quality here is great (the folks at Shea obviously know a thing or two about recording bands live), the setlist is near ideal and the band, coming off of a string of back-to-back east coast dates, is firing on all cylinders. Despite claims of being under the weather, Zac Pennington, especially, was in rare form that night, pivoting between vulnerable, sinister and harrowing with ease while repeatedly running into the crowd to serenade unwitting showgoers. Whether you’re a fan of the band or a Parenthetical Girls neophyte (or maybe especially if you’re a neophyte, since I would argue that this bootleg provides a great overview of the band’s Privilege-era output, their strongest yet), do yourself a favor and give the full show a listen by visiting this Soundcloud page or hitting this Mediafire download link.
Morrissey easter egg found in Google Earth | The Verge
Salford, here we come.
This is cool and all but way to slight 75% of the band here, Google.
“And yet, as significant as this shift in listening habits might be for the music industry, the streaming revolution may seem like little more than a software upgrade for the average listener. While it’s true that these new services reduce the amount of friction we experience when attempting to listen to a certain song right this minute, the paradigm of how we experience music remains largely unchanged. We’re still listening to music on the computer, or on our phones or in the car. All that’s changed is that we no longer need to remember to sync our iPod before heading out the door.”
I photographed and wrote-up the not-so-Christmasy Atlas Sound “Christmas show” for MTV Hive.
Above you’ll find a video demo for The 4D Pop-Up Book of Halloween, an augmented reality children’s book that I built as part of my research at NYU ITP. It’s a handmade pop-up book that’s embedded with a different QR code on each page. When the reader scans the codes using a webcam-equipped device and a companion Mac/Windows/Android application, it produces an animation onscreen that places the reader inside the story. My goal was to build a book that could bridge the gap between one-of-a-kind artifacts and purely digital experiences. If you’d like to see a live demo of the book in person, come on by the ITP Winter Show tomorrow from 2-6pm or Monday from 5-9pm and I’ll be happy to show you how it works!
For my final project for my Physical Computing class, I built a magnetic swipe gumball machine. In order to receive a gumball, you need to swipe a magnetic stripe card (i.e. a credit card, subway card, student ID, etc.). The idea is that you’re buying a gumball without knowing what it’s going to cost you (personal information? money? a subway ride?). If you’re interested in learning about what went in to building this thing, you can read this detailed post over at my ITP blog.
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Um, we’d gladly donate like $20 to a Kickstarter campaign to make Belle & Sebastian a) stop putting out songs that sound like musicals and b) resume releasing singles about sad sex.
Ditto! Hell, I’d pay $50 just to get one more song that’s even half as cutting as “I’m Waking Up to Us”. Time to start submitting alternate reward ideas via the comments?
Stuart as in Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian. As you may have gathered, that’s one of the rewards being offered on Kickstarter for helping to fund Murdoch’s God Help The Girl film. It’s a pity that the Kickstarter video is so painfully unfunny (I blame Hollywood). And yet, it’s still taking every ounce of my willpower not to click on that button. The thought of riding around in a minibus in Glasgow with Stuart Murdoch is almost too much to bear.
If you’re looking for something to do in NYC this Sunday and Monday, might I recommend the NYU ITP Winter Show? I’ll be showing some of my most recent work (an augmented-reality-enhanced pop-up book), alongside 100+ other interactive projects that will amaze, delight and surprise. I attended the show last year and was blown away by some of the stuff that I saw there, so I really can’t recommend it highly enough. Protip: it tends to get really crowded as the night wears on, so show up early!
