This podcast does not advocate harming or otherwise harassing local hero Pat Kiernan tonight. (iTunes)

Some Advice On Sleeping

Man, I love to sleep. Sleeping is one of my Super Powers, I’m not kidding, I can go to sleep anywhere, any time, on any mode of transportation, I can achieve the Rapid Eye Movement or whatever the good part of sleep is right away. I can get a good night’s sleep, like eight hours, nine hours, ten hours, eleven hours, and come to and still be looking forward to a nap later, or maybe even a little lie-down after I get up and perform my morning ablutions, or afternoon-blutions, even. What’s for breakfast, lunch? Twelve hours, I can sleep.

Sleeping, to me, is one of the most enjoyable things in life. Otherwise why would most of us do it for like eight hours a day? Or more? Sleeping is when you don’t have to do anything for anybody! “Me Time,” if you will, or “You Time” or whatever. Also, all the wilde träume you get to have where you are flying or being nude without your homework! Not including nightmares, I enjoy dreaming, but there’s this one non-nightmare dream I really do not enjoy, and that is the one where you are dreaming about being at Work? Argh! What a waste of a dream, man, seriously. You are supposed to Get Paid to be at work, and here I am dreaming about being at my desk moving my stupid computer mouse, click-click-zzz, that is the crappiest dream of all time. That dream is so boring it makes me fall asleep inside my dream, at my dream-desk, only it’s not like my “Dream Desk,” as in the desk I wish I could have so much I dream about it, because seriously: see above.

Recently I have spent a lot of my sleepytime-nitenites inside of my dreams controlling them, I’m not kidding, you can do that, especially if you dream the same dream a lot, and you don’t like the way it turns out, you can get inside of it and run it, and not like that stupid movie Inception, although there were some cool parts to it, the movie. I wish I could go to sleep and dream the movie Inception and make it better.

You people out there who cannot get to go to sleep, you have my sleepiest sympathies. I see the ads on TV all the time about how you have to resort to giant butterflies and “cold medicine,” and I feel bad for you and I hear about Ambiens and Prescription Medications, and now I guess there’s a Tylenol PM without the Tylenol in it, just the PM part?

I don’t get it. Do you have a night shift at work so you’re trying to sleep during the day? Do you ever get any good sleep? Are you always awake, and then you can’t sleep, or is it that you can’t sleep under pressure, like when it’s supposed to be Time to Sleep, do you get stressed out about it, and then you can’t sleep, and then when you are supposed to be Not Asleep, like at your click-click-job or something, is it then that you maybe wish you could sleep but you are slugging down coffee with four shots of espresso in it and Five Hour Energies and Sugar Free Rockstar “energy drinks” and stuff?

But then later when you are done with your whole day of Being Tired, What do you do then, do you lie in bed still not being able to sleep? Do you try, really try hard, to go to sleep? You can’t do that, right? Concentrate on going to sleep? You have to Not Concentrate to sleep! I’m good at that, not concentrating on stuff.

I think maybe I could do a seminar at The Learning Annex of a local Junior College or something on How to Sleep. First off is Television, which is the Greatest Non-Narcotic Sleep Aid ever. Sometimes I fall asleep in front of the TV. That’s not good because it can screw up your Sleep Hygiene, which is very important for people who can’t sleep. You’re supposed to have a Sleeping Chamber, where pretty much all you do is sleep. If you are living on somebody’s couch, that could be a real problem, so I would suggest constructing some kinda tent over your area so there’s a Chamber-ish quality to your area. It could just be a sheet or a blanket, but I think it would create a good Environment, if you are on somebody’s couch. Generally I think if you are mooching some couch, you’re already in a bad mental state, so I would suggest finding better accommodations, most importantly so you can have a Television all to yourself.

I don’t like the Internet as much as TV, because with the Internet, you have to Do Something, you know? You have to click on stuff or read things or think thoughts. Television does not require any of that, all you gotta do is make a selection and sit there. My training for you initially would be you should sit in front of the TV with it off, and then later turn it on, but don’t change the channel, just watch whatever is on.

TV is great because you don’t have to Concentrate, all you have to do is let it glow at you, the TV, and you are Watching Television. I think watching Television on the Computer is too much like Work, so I would Proscribe that, as your Sleep Coach. Learn about TV, and sitting in front of it at a distance, as it emanates. You are like a Rock in one of those “Zen Gardens,” where the waves of Television meet you and then surround you as they move on to Outer Space and The Infinite, forever moving out, Television is, not judging who gets to watch it. As Television moves over you and Through you, part of you is now moving out into space, Forever. Go to sleep.

Previously: The Olympics Wrap-Up Wrap-up

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias.

“Now the brand has retrenched, with a label that brings back ‘Goldenberg’s’ and resembles its original design, a regional rather than national growth strategy, and an advertising and marketing campaign that celebrates its heritage.”
 — Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews are my all-time no. 1 ranked favorite candy bar in the world. I was very disappointed in 2004, when they changed the company changed its wrapper design, and, as today’s Times puts it, “removed the historically prominent ‘Goldenberg’s,’ which was thought to sound too homespun for a national player.” More so because, Yeah right! Too “homespun.” That was the most egregious example of self-loathing assimilation we’d seen since Ralph Lipshitz changed his last name to “Lauren.” So I’m happy they’ve come to their senses.

The Ugly-Beauty Of Brutalism

by Anthony Paletta

Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago

Updating a cultural canon, in any form, is an endless battlefield due to our persistent tendencies, 1. to create ever more art and 2. to fail, just as rapidly, to agree on its value. Witness debates about revised editions of any literary anthology, or, say, the National Film Registry. At times worthy works receive just recognition; other times, age seems all that’s required to give mediocre works the gloss of historical grandeur. But let’s not get off track discussing Sex, Lies and Videotape vs. Forrest Gump. Rarely is the navigation of this question of aesthetic value more difficult and commercially charged than in architecture. After all, one needn’t tear down The Thin Man in order to add Silence of the Lambs, nor did the Wizard of Oz’s landmarking entail that Taxi Driver couldn’t be built. Architecture sometimes involves exactly these either/or choices, though, and the increasing debates over the aesthetic merits of Brutalism have found multiple flashpoints in recent months, from Chicago to Baltimore to Minneapolis to Oklahoma City to Goshen, New York.

Brutalism. It doesn’t exactly skip off of the tongue, does it? I know plenty of educated people for whom “Brutalism” is simply shorthand for any recent architecture that they happen to dislike. Here “Brutalism” fulfills the same role as “jam bands” as a shorthand category for sweeping disdain. It’s be tempting to attribute the misfortunes of Brutalist architecture to semantics; after all, no other 20th-century form of architecture — the International style, Constructivism, Postmodernism — directly conjours images of violence and force, unless you have a particularly paranoiac attitude towards any sort of contemporary theory. And yet this doesn’t quite explain away the recent difficulties of Brutalist architecture. There are, of course, accurate aesthetic objections — bare concrete, however improperly labeled, doesn’t inspire much popular enthusiasm. Look to any list of “ugliest buildings” or “buildings to demolish now” and you’re sure to find multiple Brutalist structures represented. The Trellick Tower in London was said to be the inspiration for J.G. Ballard’s novel High Rise, in which society breaks into conflict, chaos, and dog-eating amidst in a self-contained concrete tower mass. Ian Fleming titled a villain after that building’s architect, Erno Goldfinger. That doesn’t happen to Frank Gehry.

Trellick Tower in London

Despite a pronounced lack of public enthusiasm for Brutalism, it’s financial and planning concerns, not aesthetic ones, that have temporarily saved or at least postponed the destruction of several recently threatened structures. In April, Paul Rudolph’s water-damaged Orange County Government Center, which is located on Main Street in Goshen, New York, was preserved in an 11–10 vote of the Orange County Legislature. And the votes for saving the building seemed significantly inspired by doubts as to whether demolishing the building and constructing a replacement would actually prove cheaper than repairing the facility. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been cagey about preserving the Bertrand Goldberg-designed Prentice Women’s Hospital, but seems unwilling to approve Northwestern University’s plans to demolish the facility until there’s a concrete indication of what might replace it. In Minneapolis, the city is currently conducting fundraising for a thorough redesign of the Peavey Plaza in downtown, which the American Society of Landscape Architects recognized, in 1999, as one of the most significant examples of landscape architecture in the U.S. The John Johansen-designed Morris Mechanic Theatre in Baltimore, for which there is an extant replacement proposal, has drawn criticism from the city’s Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel for its proposal to locate a three-story retail building, and not a tower, along a principal street. In each case, renovation seems to have been dismissed peremptorily as impossible. Not helping, in the case of the Orange County Government Center, was the seeming inflated costs of the renovation: The cost estimates for refurnishing the building, some observers pointed out, were some $24 million higher than the actual costs of renovating the structurally quite similar (the architect was the same) University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth library.

The Morris Mechanic Theatre in Baltimore

Financial questions aside, the question of what would replace these structures is vital. Though it’s difficult to deny that Brutalism has its flaws. The term, derived from the French word for raw concrete “Béton brut,” came, via some gradual tweakings of meaning, to encompass a range of 50s to 70s architecture granting a central role, obviously, to unfinished concrete, but also to abstract geometries, and the frank exposure of functional architectural elements. After sleek International-style modernism, Brutalism represented a turn towards a very different sort of functionalism, often dripping with overhangs, podiums, and articulations designed to enhance its physical immensity (for more on this, check out this recent article). These plans often achieved a sure monumentalism, but also often left humans in the literal dust, in lifeless plazas from Boston City Hall to Dallas City Hall to L’Enfant Plaza that made no attempt to accommodate the pedestrian. And, as with any genre of building, some Brutalist buildings have been well consigned to the wrecking ball — few would argue that cities haven’t benefited from some necessary pruning of the Brutalist past.

The Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York

Its proposed replacement

In these current disputes, however, the briefest look at replacement plans confirms that demolition proposals would scrap truly intriguing buildings in favor of thoroughly anodyne replacements. The projected replacement for the Orange County Government Center resembled nothing so much as a collegiate neo-Georgian physical sciences building. The proposed residential tower replacement for Baltimore’s Morris Mechanic Theater looks like any dozen recent American mid-sized glass towers, its mild articulation of façade about as distinctive as the idea of, well… living in a condo in a glass tower downtown. Not to mention countless cases of demolition in which no replacement has yet materialized. The former New Haven Coliseum site sits still vacant. The Leeds International Pool site is now occupied by a parking lot. As Paul Goldberger recently pointed out in Vanity Fair, Northwestern University owns a vacant plot of land across the street from the Prentice Women’s Hospital, and yet, without an extant plan for either site, it insists on demolition.

The principal frustration in all of these recent cases is that the architecture of each of these buildings is unquestionably more inventive and even fanciful than most architecture that directly preceded them, let alone other Brutalist peers. Brutalism enabled plenty of bare walls; but it also birthed some structures that, if you can get beyond the ready wince at the idea of scraping a knee on them, are unquestionably playful. Naturally, there are blank concrete walls; there are also countless intriguing geometries; the Mummers Theater in Oklahoma is a riot of catwalk-linked cubes at varying orientations and elevation; the Orange County Government Center is a lively spilling-forth of windows and canopies, and the Prentice Women’s Hospital is a space-age cloverleaf whose lower portion accordingly looks more like a launch pad than a podium. In all of these cases the argument for preservation is clearly strong, having more to do with the worth of the buildings than any rote hostility to progress or an eggheaded taste for retaining every drop of Brutalist ugliness.

Boston’s South End

1973 photo of Boston City Hall Plaza

There’s little doubt that the preservationist community, as valiant and lonely as its efforts to save Brutalism have been, has made its case in ways that often seem rather hard to swallow. Frequent comparisons to Victorian architecture, and the fact that it too was once regarded with broad distaste, seem justly out-of-touch. No one, in fifty years, or ever, is going to stand in Boston City Hall Plaza and gain the feeling of cozy preservationist joy that they find in Boston’s Victorian South End — any more than, to go back to our beginning, audiences are ever going to find a historical moment at which the now 70-year-old Moses und Aron sounds about as fun as Aida does — nor should they. Brutalism should be addressed, and preserved on its own terms, which are unquestionably more difficult than earlier examples of preservation, although arguably just as worthy.

These terms, for forthrightly evaluating the legacy of Brutalism, are almost invariably civic; nearly all of the structures at present risk are public in purpose and function. The residential legacy of Brutalism has weathered time most poorly for obvious reasons. In the realm of public architecture, however, whether one cares for Brutalism or not, it’s difficult to assert that since its demise we’ve devised much better molds for civic architecture. Occasional commissions might result in a distinctive product, but for the most part we’ve arrived at an age, as Nathan Glazer has convincingly argued, when the scale of necessary public construction, and its attendant cost, has foreclosed on any older, more universally admired models for building. Given the clear mediocrity of likely replacements, to discard wholesale the legacy of a distinctive moment in architectural history out of a feeling of spite seems capricious.

I’m personally very fond of much Brutalist architecture, and find in its mass and geometry an unmistakable majesty, but I recognize that this is hardly a popular proposition, save on some awesome Tumblr accounts. There’s no doubt that Brutalism remains associated with the very worst of top-down mass-planning tendencies in American cities, of the sort that bulldozed vibrant neighborhoods into arid plazas. We’ve happily discarded the notion that anyone wants to live in a Brutalist city, but to then efface any trace of Brutalism is no sort of urban progress. Proposals for intriguing adaptive reuse are in no short supply; let’s not throw away a physical era that seems mildly at odds with our own. Remember, the alternative isn’t likely to be something interesting: it’s likely to be something strenuously banal.

Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Metropolis, The Daily Beast, Bookforum, and The Millions on urban policy, historic preservation, cinema, literature, board wargaming, and comparably brutal topics. Photo of Prentice Women’s Hospital by Jim Kuhn; Trellick Tower by Jim Linwood; the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre by Andrew Bossi; the Orange County Government Center by Daniel Case; the Dallas City Hall Plaza by Kent Wang; Boston South End by Tim Sackton; 1973 photo of Boston City Hall Plaza by Ernst Halberstadt.

★ The dim gray light of limbo. From morning through midday, nothing changed or brightened under the leaves. A hummingbird, darker green against the green, worked the trumpet vine outside the back window. A hummingbird moth did the same in miniature, on miniature blossoms, at the side window. Up out of the mossy woods and onto the hard-paved highways, what had been cool and tranquil became chilly and oppressive: featureless stratus all the way to the horizon, as the Turnpike traffic thickened and slowed to a crawl. Maybe the sky shaded a little darker in the rear-view mirror. Only on the approach to the city did some texture appear in the clouds. At the moment of arrival, the upper floors of nearby towers were briefly flooded in orange-red alpenglow. Before the car seats could be unstrapped, it had already faded.

A bus will be available for transport from @occupywallstnyc to the RNC in Tampa (and DNC in Charlotte!) Signup thingy: docs.google.com/spreadsheet/em…

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 20, 2012

Would anyone like to take the Occupy bus from New York to Tampa this weekend and then not let us know what happens? That would be great.

Consider this advance warning so that you can get your (ahem) ducks in a row: The nation’s favorite new holiday, National Duck Out For A Drink Day, is rapidly approaching. Unfortunately, August 25th, the day the holiday has traditionally been celebrated the last few years, falls on a Saturday this time around, which means we will be celebrating on the Friday before. That’s right, this Friday, August 24th, is National Duck Out For A Drink Day (observed). For those of you unfamiliar with the festivities, a quick primer: To recognize this special occasion, you need only to slip away from work for a quick shot at a nearby bar. (If you have time to down a beer as well then by all means do so, but it is not a requirement.) It’s fifteen minutes out of your life that will almost certainly be the best part of your day and, to top it off, you’re getting paid for it! This is particularly nice for those of you who have Summer Fridays, as you can turn your ducking out into an afternoon-long celebration. Anyway, this Friday: We will all be Ducking Out For A Drink! Start making plans with your colleagues and work-adjacent saloons now so that when the happy day comes you will be completely prepared. I’m going to be in a good mood all week just thinking about this.

Photo by Kzenon, via Shutterstock

Other Things Missouri Representative Todd Akin Believes To Be True About The Uterus, Besides Its Ability To “Shut Down” A Legitimate Rape

by Mallory Ortberg

• The average uterus is “cash only.”

• When provoked or frightened, a uterus emits a high-pitched scream that instantly stuns its attacker.

• The natural enemies of the uterus are the locust, the hawk, the carpenter ant, and the witch.

• It is possible to use a uterus to determine the nearest source of fresh water or magnetic North but not both.

• A uterus will freeze at any temperature below that of 15C.

• The touch of a uterus will blight and cripple the oak, the pine, and the larch for a generation. A cactus is impervious to the uterus’ touch.

• A uterus that has come into the full realization of its powers can only be killed by the seventh son of a seventh son. However, he cannot be Jewish.

• It is possible to summon an inhabitant of the drowned city of Atlantis by blowing upon a uterus like a conch shell. This can be done only once.

• No uterus can survive under the gaze of a wizard; it will wither and shrivel into a harmless stone mask (do not attempt to wear the mask).

• The more uteruses a woman can collect during her lifetime, the higher her status, and the more servants she will command, among the dead.

• “It all” is stored within the uterus of a single righteous woman in every generation. Could she be found and cut open, women everywhere would then “have it all.”

• A uterus cannot enter a public library or pass in front of a Wendy’s during business hours.

• A uterus that has been attacked or divided into several parts can, given enough time, regenerate the lost tissue and develop rudimentary powers of speech (Spanish only).

• You can substitute up to three tablespoons’ worth of a uterus for any recipe that calls for baking soda.

• If trapped outside of a female body and unable to find food, a uterus is capable of living off of its own tissue for up to 80 days.

• Like the mythical tent of Peri-Banou, a uterus can contract to fit within the palm of a human hand or expand to cover an entire jousting field.

• A woman born with two or no uteruses is left exposed to the elements in the nearest forest. Should she attempt to return home she will be hunted by the elders of her village.

• A uterus is capable of holding up to twelve ounces of venom but cannot experience the human feeling of regret.

• No uterus can bear the touch of salt, or the smell of the sea.

Mallory Ortberg is a writer in the Bay Area. Her work has also appeared on Slacktory and Ecosalon; Kate McKean’s her agent.

Dwight Garner’s case for critical criticism came out just in time, looks like! “What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics — perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.” Well he’s in luck… on part of that?

Five days previous came this NYTBR piece on the latest by Dale Peck, by Ron Powers, who you likely don’t know, but was the first TV critic to win a Pulitzer. In 1973. Lesse: “self-­absorbed overreaching, a compost of glutted detail, absurd simile, strained and repetitive metaphor, forced aphorism; of dialogue that ricochets from the pulpy to the dead-on to the flagrantly author-imposed, disgorging exposition under the pretext of speech.” Hi-o!

And then this weekend brought another harsh takedown of another small literary writer: the novelist, critic, memoirist, editor and teacher (local man so busy!) William Giraldi, on novelist Alix Ohlin. What to even quote? Maybe “schooled not in Austen but in Susan Lucci,” or, “When self-pity colludes with self-loathing and solipsism backfires into idealism, the only outcome is insufferable schmaltz.” Or I guess try: “her language is intellectually inert, emotionally untrue and lyrically asleep.” What on earth does one do then?

Alix Ohlin hasn’t tweeted in four days, since before the review came out. She is presumably now in the stage of a bad review that comes after “drinking” and before “revenge.” (Probably she’s currently in “hysterical laughter.”)

Dale Peck, on the other hand, dug in and found the pullquote from the review, occurring in a parenthetical: “(Please don’t ask. Read the book.)”

And then he did some therapeutic meme Photoshopping for his Facebook.

It works.

Of course, this being the age of everyone being a critic, you can always decide for yourself, by buying Ohlin’s book or by buying Peck’s.

I love rap and I think it’s really good right now. I mean, to the extent that we can assess a type of art in the present tense, which I think is not very much, because of the not-being-able-to-see-a-forest-for-the-trees thing. We get a better gauge with ten or twenty years’ perspective. But between El-P and Killer Mike, and A$AP Rocky and Danny Brown, and Kendrick Lamar and Schoolboy Q, and Meek Mill and Gunplay and the enormous Maybach Music beats, and the thing where Kanye West just keeps making undeniably excellent, important music: eight straight strong years, six straight great albums. (I don’t know of any other rap artist who has put together this kind of run, ever. Maybe RZA, I guess. He made eight straight great albums, counting his production work on Wu-Tang solo albums, as I think we should, between 1994 and 1997. That’s pretty incredible. Oh, and Dr. Dre’s work with N.W.A and Death Row Records — those were eight flawless years. But neither of them matched Kanye’s rapping.) And the forthcoming Cruel Summer albums seems to be shaping up in kind. And also considering how Andre 3000 continues to melt every microphone he touches for a guest verse, and that the venerable E-40 is making the best music of his career, and the thrilling singles from new, if as-yet-unproven stars like Azalea Banks and Chief Keef, rap seems really, really good to me right now. Like, I think 2012 will go down as a good year for the form.

All that said, something has been very much bothering me lately. And I’d like to complain about it.

I first noticed it when I was listening to a song on Rick Ross’s new album, God Forgives, I Don’t, called “Sixteen.” The song features Andre 3000, so I was listening extra close. But what struck me came at the beginning of the song, as Ross is introducing it.

“This is special,” he says. “Extremely special.”

Hard to argue with. Andre is famously picky about the songs that he’ll appear on. And sure enough, his rhymes here are jaw-dropping. And the beat is gorgeous, like so many of those that Ross has his producers construct. (Though Ross’s rapping is as boring and as clunky as it usually is. I have come to appreciate his taste in music and his talent at finding talent. But I don’t know why he is a rap star and not just an executive.) And Andre even plays guitar on the song — a terrific, sloppy, garage-rock solo that nods to his portrayal of Jimi Hendrix in the forthcoming biopic. So I guess this song is, technically, “special.” But that is still such a lame thing to say. I mean, does Ross not remember Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” bit from Saturday Night Live in the 80s? Hasn’t he ever heard my mom talk about what it’s like when our extended family gets together for a meal? “Special?” That’s the best he could come up with? Apparently so, since he really stresses it, with that “extremely” he puts before the repetition.

There are so many cooler ways to describe a song, or anything, than “special.” How about “this is extremely dope.” I mean, if you really want to keep the over-formality of “extremely” in there. But I wouldn’t. If I was in Ross’s position, introducing I would instead say something like, “Okay, everybody… Whooo! Whooo boy! I’m trying to keep it together here now, trying not to lose my shit, but… Really, you know what, don’t even listen to anything else I say. Like, just, really, you should just skip ahead for the next three minutes, past whatever mediocre rap I’m about to waste your time with… Because, check it out, I got Andre 3000 on this song! From Outkast! And he is pretty much the crème de la crème when it comes to rapping. So, gosh, I dunno. Listen to this, listen to what he’s gonna say. He’s gonna rap for a really long time. Like more than four minutes. And he’s gonna play the guitar, too!”

Or if I was Rick Ross himself, and so was heavily invested in playing it super cool, and also reliably over-impressed by five-cent vocabulary words, I’d say something like, “This is rarified rap.” And I would draw “rarified” out long and luxurious, enunciate it in a way that implied that I knew I was being kind of silly, but I didn’t care, because I knew that you, the listener, was about to learn that I got Andre 3000 on my album. “Rarified.” That would do it. That pretty much means the same thing as “extremely special.” But it sounds way better.

Things got worse a few days later, when I was listening to the radio, and I heard the DJ announce that the new DJ Khaled song. Now, DJ Khaled is another person who I can’t figure out why I’m hearing his voice on records — he was a DJ and then he became friends with Fat Joe and got very good at assembling everybody around Miami at parties and in video shoots and stuff. (People like Rick Ross, for example. And Lil Wayne, and Plies and T-Pain and Flo Rida.) And then he became an executive, and now he’s pretty much running Def Jam, it seems. And, good for him! From everything I’ve ever heard, he’s a very nice guy. But for some reason, he started making records himself.

I’m never even sure what he actually does on the records, other than exhort his friends and colleagues to rhyme — which he doesn’t really do himself, I don’t think. And he always shouts these inane catchphrases like, “Listennn!” and “We the best!” and “We the best forever!” And the records he makes are terrible. At least those that I’ve heard, which are too many. (“I’m On One,” from a couple summers ago, had an undeniably catchy synth beat — made by Drake’s producer Noah “40” Shebib — and the usual impressive-but-still-detestable rapping from Drake. It’s a well-written song. But even that one grates on me as much as I find myself singing along with it. And I don’t much know why it’s a DJ Khaled song!)

Anyway, so DJ Khaled has a new song called “Hip-hop,” and it features Scarface, Nas and the scratching of Gangstarr’s legendary DJ Premier (leaving Khaled even less to do, right?). These are three huge and important figures in rap music history, for sure, and bringing them together in collaboration qualifies as an event. It’s something that I’m interested in listennning to. But, lo, what do I hear within ten seconds of the song’s start? DJ Khaled’s very serious voice talking to me. What does he say?

“This shit’s special.”

That made it so much less… special, just his saying that. Why would you say that? Why would anyone? Has DJ Khaled been hanging out with my mom? (Which, like, that would be fine with me. Again, I’ve heard nothing other than that he’s a very nice guy. Very positive. They could go bird-watching.) Why is DJ Khaled making records? I don’t get it. It’s like P-Diddy. Same thing.

Then a couple days ago, I was checking Rap Radar to see what new music had come out recently. There’s this guy from Lawrence, Massachusetts, DJ Statik Selektah. He’s good at making the kind of rap music DJ Premier so magnificently defined with his partner Guru in the mid-90s: “boom-bap,” people call it. There’s a thriving underground audience for this stuff. Statik Selektah does what he does well. Solid, straight-up-and-down, traditionalist boom-bap. He often works as a duo with a rapper from Lawrence named Termanology. The two of them have a new song with another rapper named Ea$y Money.

It’s all right. It’s pretty good. I like the beat, the rhymes are fine. But that’s a terrible title.