Going down

Boxed out

I didn't end up sticking around the Redman/Ghostface/Raekwon show for too long. It's a killer lineup for sure, but panic attacks have no respect for hip hop, and they'll just do their thing whenever. But I did stay long enough to mistakenly barge avec posse into the talent's private opera box. Raekwon was standing there in a long, diamond-y chain and a Nike box under his arm. He looked at me and my dudes -- the skinny hipster guy with one (1) large white guy, one (1) large black guy, and one (1) short half-black/half-Asian guy in tow -- and asked, "These dudes fam-fam?"

My new favorite insult

"[Y]ou sassy cretin."
From this thread.

We've all been there

Don't tell me you never did.

Memes within memes

The most meta thing ever?

Thang-thang, thang.

Jim Jones comes back again with the quote of the month:
"I need to feel that eggnog flowin’ and things like that[.]"
That is some fire.
Also, from Jones' reply to Jay-Z's diss over "We Fly High":
"You say 30's the new 20 / But you 40, I'm 30 / So who's 20?"
I don't know why Jay bothered. Arguing with Jim Jones is like trying to have a conversation with the mysterious crackhead on my street who's always got fresh Nikes on: everyone's talking, but not a whole bunch of useful information is exchanged.
I was kind of thinking that someone should invent a Jim Jones quote generator, but then I realized that there isn't any way to get a computer that high. Not even with a bong. Maybe if someone invented some sort of . . . computer bong.

Blood sports

Lara writes MySpace messages that are better than my blog posts:
I wanted you to be the first to know that I dripped blood out of my nose on to a child, a child no more than 6. He wore a fake leg brace, for he is playing Tiny Tim. Every day my ovaries don't spend in guantanamo is another day the terrorists have won.

I like the internet

This:
"Translated, that means, and I’m sorry for being so graphic, Screech wants you to pay 50 bucks to watch him put his privates in a woman’s behind, pull it out, then paint her a mustache with his thing.
I say 'No.'"

And also this:
"Whether American or Australian, every human life is valuable; otherwise it makes it appear that Mr. Stainton thinks that only one man's is."

Booze helped too.

Are you sick of reading "the iPod turned five let's all talk about the iPod," stories yet?


"It would be a bit much to say that the iPod helped us heal from the wounds of 9/11 –- or would it?"

Okay, how about now?
That is shit writing on such a profoundly shitty level that it not only makes me hate the article (normal reaction to bad writing), and by extension feel like the guy writing it is kind of a douche (severely bad), but is actually making me second-guess my plan to buy a new iPod (off the scale, must buy a new scale because this one is broken now). You know what helped us heal from the wounds of 9/11? Booze and terror sex and the scene from Young Frankenstein where they sing "Puttin on the Ritz," and as much of all of those as we could handle. Not a hard drive with headphones.
Don't try to cheapen terror sex's contribution.

Rollllin' (?)

So you guys can't even mention something that may or may not allude to another male-type human being without having to say, "No homo," and yet you are down with rollerblading. Thanks, Dipset, for finding even yet still more ways to make no sense at all. You've done more to damage my mind than drugs ever did.

We have a winner

From the comments section of Stereogum's post about Ice-T's explicit new album art:

"stripper-wife" is not a phrasal adjective, and therefore should not be hyphenated. stripper-prostitute wife would be a correct use of a hyphen to denote a phrasal adjective.

Congratulations, "redbook." You just won the internet.

ZAP!

People bag on supergroups all the time, like saying they're never as good as the members' original bands. But whatever. Damn Yankees were way kickass, Coverdale/Page was like, "Zeppelin what?" and that one band that had Linda Ronstadt playing with Captain America, Doctor Strange, and C-3PO was the fucking shit.

If your band doesn't have a guitar player who shreds by shooting bolts of magical lightning out of his fingers you should just give up. Maybe work on your ping pong game instead.
Found by clicking on a link to the Portland Mercury on the J-Shep Cowboyz n Poodles blog.

The truth, however humble

From Julianne's interview with DFA/LCD/WHTVR homeboy James Murphy:

Murphy: I liked hip-hop, but not as dance music. I liked Public Enemy. I liked Native Tongues. But I never thought of it as dancing, never really thought about dancing at all until '99. It was good music for my car.


URGE: What happened in '99?


Murphy: I took ecstasy, like everybody else.

Free Dece Jams

You can stream the whole new Hold Steady album Boys and Girls in America over here. If the Killers have any good sense in them--and judging by their facial hair styles, they do not--they will pull Sam's Town from stores because if the Hold Steady's past records have been taking people to school on how to do the "Springsteen thing," Boys and Girls in America is like signing up for an intensive senior-level seminar in Boss Studies.
EDIT: Hold Steady's in the NYT.

Desert Island Top 5 Ironies: Number 4

If you have no respect for musicals, music, Nick Hornby, yourself, or any combination of the four (the last two generally being mutually exclusive), head on over to the website for the upcoming Broadway musical based on Hornby's novel High Fidelity and its simpering-heavy John Cusak film adaptation. I'm sure you'll have a ball. They've not only adapted a novel about desperately trying to hang onto your cool into the uncoolest entertainment form ever, but also adapted a story about an obsessive love of good music by telling it through the most unspectacular, cliche-ridden showtunes I've ever heard outside of parody. No, actually it's at or below the level of most showtune parodies I've heard. And I love it. I hope it makes every whiny baby-man who ever read High Fidelity's opening chapter as a way to passive-aggressively hate their girlfriend (or women in general), or got distracted by John-Cusak-as-Rob's record shelves and never caught onto how pathetic he is, cry a little bit. Or at least get mad that "their" book is getting played like this, that Hornby's sold out about as hardcore as you can get. Or better yet, both. I thought ironies on this level only ever happened in Greek myths or in Hell. I never thought I'd get to see it happen for real.

Raps about drugs

Fuck, man. Still Listen to Gangsta Music posted a new Streets remix today, this time with vocals by Pete Doherty, and it's a heavy fucker. The song is Mike Skinner's coke paranoia jam, "Pranging Out," which makes drafting Doherty for it either a macabre bit of stunt casting or else total brilliance. But I don't even know that anyone did cast him. Doherty's vocals sound sort of lo-fi/home-recorded, and the edits are sloppy. He may have just done it on his own and put it on the internet. Who knows.
The important part is how equally brilliant and fucked up the final piece is: Skinner's epic, stuttering beat and Doherty talk-rapping through it, speaking lyrics that are garbage or stunningly honest and good. He sounds like a messed-up friend on the phone at 3 AM, he sounds like he have been wasted while he recorded it. He sounds like he's already dead.

Flying death fish

Some of you may be overpowered by my blogging abilities and can only bear the relatively mild heat of the sporadic, half-assed blogging I do over here at Critical Darling: As Good As An Internet Web Page Can Be Without Showing Full Penetration. The braver sort among you can among you can point your web browser's prow towards the paradise that is Crickets, the Chicago Reader's official music crit bloggy. If blogs places to buy sushi, this one would be a Jewel at 1 AM and Crickets would be a place that serves $200 hand rolls and the chef periodically whips a still-breathing fugu fish at patron's faces.

No cheap jeans

Last night I played the You Say Party! We Say Die! track "The Gap" in my DJ set and it kind of killed. If you want to listen it you can click here: mp3
As far as I can tell the song is not actually about the Gap, but rather a gap, one which is more of a metaphor and which doesn't have posters of Pete Wentz wearing too much eye makeup all over the fucking place.

It's a saggy-dude sandwich.

Hank Williams Jr. leads the audience vote at the Bad Rock Face World Championship finals between Rick Nielsen and Little Steven Van Zant.

We will all sleep on the floor.

Tim and Mike Kinsella were on Chicago Public Radio's Chicagocore show recently. It is on the internet now, so you just have to click here in order to hear the dudes getting down a la some outre John Lennon (Tim)/George Harrison (Mike) interview styles. At various points Tim appraises a table's "vibrations," offers to fight every member of the Pitchfork Media staff at the same time, and predicts the imminent collapse of America's economy and lifestyle. Mike predicts that in the future we will all end up sleeping on the floor.
Aside from the interview I listened to Tim Kinsella stuff for over two hours yesterday. The next Make Believe record is beyond "slays." I will say it again, and probably not for the last time: Make Believe is the best punk rock band in the world. And not "punk rock" like "Public Enemy was totally punk rock" or "Arthur Lee was truly the first punk rocker." They are punk like Black Flag was punk--maybe even more so--and just because you don't understand it doesn't make it any less true.