Haikus About Rap
"Fif states he’s on 'it' But whatever 'it' may be 'It' is not the beat" —Ego Trip reviews eight new rap songs in haiku and it is just the thing today.
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The Return of the Vaselines
"The album's got a cute title, with the double meaning of 'check out how hot we are" and 'hooking up again with the person you used to date.' Almost any of these simple two-riff, verse-chorus songs would have made a perfectly acceptable addition to their original records (and they're better than anything either Kelly or McKee has come up with since they broke up); in particular, 'I Hate the 80's' is a welcome bit of grumpy oldsterism and 'Turning It On' is built on juicy love/hate sentiments. The band's twanging, strummy arrangements and McKee and Kelly's bedroom-eyed thrust-and-parry are exactly like they were the first time around." -Pitchfork gives [...]
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Will.i.am Rejects The Legitimacy Of Your Criticism
"Will.i.am has recused himself from the questions. He’s just rocking his club, and not badly." —Ben Ratliff, in today's review of the Black Eyed Peas' new album, The Beginning.
"I consider this tribunal a false tribunal and the indictment a false indictment. It is illegal being not appointed by the UN General Assembly, so I have no need to appoint counsel to (an) illegal organ." —Slobodan Milosevic, at the opening of his 2001 hearings before the International War Crimes Tribunal.
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The Source And Pitchfork Both Give Bun B's New Album A "5"
In a victory for subjectivism, the rap music magazine The Source and mostly-rock music website Pitchfork have both awarded Texas rap legend Bun B's new album Trill O.G. a quantitative rating of 5 in their record review sections. But the two ratings mean very different things, as a 5 is The Source's highest rating, while Pitchfork's scale goes up to 10.
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Bruce Springsteen And The E-Street Band And The Roots, "Because The Night"
Bruce Springsteen appeared on the Jimmy Fallon show last night, and played "Because the Night" with who-woulda-thunk-it backing from a supergroup combo of the E-Street Band the Roots.
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The Hold Steady Play "The Weekenders" On Letterman, Ben Ratliff Pretends He's Craig Finn
"She said, this band's still doing frumpy?/It's craft, but mock-unsophisticated/it's not what the kids this year really mean/It's got eighth-note riffs with hiccups/and after Sunday Mass and nitrous/it all sounds like the old MTV theme/So this is Brooklyn bar-band rock?/Springsteen in quotation marks?/Drop your lighters, hold up library cards instead?/She closed bars in Clayton County/it was two years before irony/and she doesn't think it was only in her head."
Oh yes, the Times' Ben Ratliff did indeed do a review of the new Hold Steady album, Heaven is Whenever, as a send-up-of/ode-to the lyric-writing style of the band's frontman, Craig Finn.
