Man, if Sleigh Bells had been around back in 1982, when I was taking guitar lessons from Chaz at Red Bank Music but never actually learning how to play guitar because it was too hard to memorize scales and twist my fingers into the uncomfortable positions required to make actual chords, so I just learned how to make power chords because you could do it with two fingers laying flat across the fretboard, and learned the riffs to just the hooks of only the biggest, dumbest Black Sabbath and Deep Purple songs, and how to get crazy distortion feedback sounds by hooking my guitar up through my stereo speakers instead of my amp, I would have played the shit out of this!

The Fool

                     I

Preceding memory traipsing this single
track,—each step a flat greenish note
released in payment to relentless rent—
green path bisecting greener landscape.

                     II

Everywhere millimeters wound & wound
through those greenest degrees, beckoned
with promise of home. Autonomy cleft me
—by mind, a man & by heart, a hound. READ MORE

You may remember how last Memorial Day, Miami Beach police officers gunned down black tourists and seized the cellphones of anyone recording the cops in action. (Spoiler: the shot bystanders, ignored for a full year now, are suing!) Well, Urban Beach Weekend is back again this weekend, and the city is ready! They've installed a "one-time" DUI checkpoint, some watch towers, scanners that record everyone's license plates, some "light towers," some road blocks—and a whites-only bridge. Oops sorry, "residents-only" bridge. (Ahem: "tourists will be given the impression that they can’t get in.") Let's look at some notable quotables from the Herald today, which are likely causing strokes over at the ACLU! READ MORE

"It was the stuff of legend. Regardless of how the surprising reunion of the Afghan Whigs turns out, their show last night at the Bowery Ballroom will go down as the '90s alt-rock heroes' greatest concert ever."
—Newsday's Glenn Gamboa enjoyed the show last night.

The Wanted and One Direction are killing it. This two-pronged British boy band behemoth has hit the shores of the U.S. hard with myriad magazine covers and morning show appearances—1D even became the first British group ever to see their debut album hit number one in the United States. They’ve sent Tumblrs and young fans into a tizzy, and set the stage for what could possibly be a veritable boy band revival this summer. But as K-pop expert Jeff Benjamin, and others, have pointed out, something’s off with these two bands: they don't dance in their videos.

What the hell?! As part of a generation that grew up during the boy band heyday of the late-90s, heralded by Olympians like Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC—groups with fierce style and unforgettable dance moves that permeated living rooms and spring breaks everywhere—we find this curious and straight-up tragic. Unable to bear the thought of a world without flying-V formation dance sequences, we surveyed the relatively recent landscape of boy bands to examine the state of choreography in boy bands today. Our goal wasn't necessarily to crown a champion, but to see—as you jump from New Kids to *NSYNC to today—to who falls and who gets down. READ MORE

"The man does whatever he wants. Doesn't like smoking in outdoor, public places? Poof, gone. Doesn't like trans fats? Poof, gone. Doesn't like protestors in his neck of the woods? Poof, gone. It's people like him that have all but killed the New York that I love. We now live in a city inundated with self-righteous, self-conscious, nosy, do-goody, premium day care-using, cause-loving goons."
—I dunno who Michael Elka, Times blog commenter, is, but he cracks me up and he's real mad about Mike Bloomberg's illicit heliport use.

This time it's Newhouse/Advance's turn to destroy a newspaper: the New Orleans Times-Picayune, to be specific, which will fire a bunch of people, stop publishing daily and generally be suckier. (Also: "a new company, NOLA Media Group, will run the newspaper and its website, and another new company will print and deliver the paper." Innnntriguing.) Enjoy your new life blogging on this hot mess! Your move, McClatchy! Oh wait, Jake Gyllenhaal's uncle has got the destruction covered, okay, great. The whole thing about corporate reorganizing is most interesting: "Tribune and Advance are creating subsidiary companies for their newspapers." Hey, that's what I would do if I were going to dump them.

Are you ready to cook me some big meat? Maybe you're not! Here, we will tell you what to buy to make the magic happen.

I was lucky enough to have been at Santos Party House on Monday night, where this great thing happened when Killer Mike came onstage at the release party for El-P's new album Cancer 4 Cure. They were going to perform a song called "Butane"—a duet from Killer Mike's new album, R.A.P. Music, which El-P produced—but there was a glitch with the music equipment. It turned out that El-P didn't have the R.A.P. Music instrumental tracks with him. So they did it a capella, and it ended up being even better that way. The whole concert was excellent. (I know I have been going on about these two lately. It really is a very exciting example of mutually beneficial collaboration, what they've been doing. They inspire one another, and it's fresh; they've both been making records for more than ten years, but they had never met before last year. And their music has been a bright spot in a pretty shitty month. Here's Rolling Stone's cover story about Adam Yauch.)