Problem World

douglaswolk:

A lot of HxC inside-baseball jokes, but (and?) awesome. Plus: love the bit with Dave Grohl’s microphone.

I pretty much lost it when they went to the breakdown.

Right now it’s snowing outside, and has been for the last who knows how many hours. This is in Minnesota, granted, which means par for the course and everything, but everyone else has been having big winter-storm freakouts across the country for the last few months so it’s nice to have something approaching Snowmageddon in my winter-jaded region. In any case, it’s a fitting day for the amalgamated music junkies at Passion of the Weiss to debut their Winter Mixtape. I’m responsible for picking and blurbing two of the tracks, but even if I wasn’t, it’s well worth a listen in these conditions; bonus points for including a track, but not that track, from Liquid Swords. (Also: If you are not fully convinced of my endorsement due to contributor’s bias, Gentleman’s Quarterly gives it a thumbs-up.)

This is right about where I stopped following Mark Trail.

(via mothrapisces)

mackro:

1) Celebrate Black History Month by offering some food items on studio menu considered by many as soul food stereotypes. (-30 points)

2) Allow ?uestlove to stop by and see said menu. (-500 points)

3) Allow ?uestlove to use electronic gadget so he can take a picture of menu and tweet it to his 27,876,412 followers. (-8700 points)

4) Apologize to ?uestlove publicly on Twitter by using a new twitter account called @nbcu whose only purpose is for this apology. (-78957694858493784538&485748697*498j888Uiuer845ijtirutir49845^______________ points)

Grand total -78957694858493784538&485748697*498j888UiuerYEAHYEAH

(hat tip to @Marcissist)

Does this running tally factor in the fact that the “apology” was one of those “we’re sorry… if someone was offended (but, for doing it, maybe not so much)” things? In fact, the wording was “We apologize for anyone who was offended by it” (emphasis mine)!

Trans Am, “Orlando”

This song fittingly captures the rad-as-hell feeling of this signing.

Archie Shepp, “Mama Too Tight”

Not feeling too Tumblry lately — work being busy and all — but enjoy the first in an unknown-numbered series of video clips involving music that is of a quality I would call “good”. This is the second/title track of an album that was an infamous household Holy Grail for my jazz-enthusiast stepdad, and I like how it draws a line from “Watermelon Man” to James Brown while still having room for a bit of odd free-form dissonance.

This is basically me waiting for Joe Mauer to sign his contract extension.

I’d look psychotic in a balaclava

cureforbedbugs:

One problem I’ve had with music criticism is how doggedly it refuses to pay attention to the music and favor the story around it. And it’s not even a very interesting story — we’re already getting this story from ourselves, from the judgments and opinions we have already deemed correct. We’re not getting the story from the music. I don’t mean to downplay the significance of the surrounding story, or the music’s role in that story (I love me a good metanarrative), but it seems like music has actually taken a secondary position to the story altogether, and we go to the music to confirm the bits of the story we already know to be true. This is how Taylor Swift becomes “innocent” or “sexless” or “promoter of irresponsible fantasies” or any number of patently ridiculous things that are in no way present in her music.

Something that I try to strive for in my writing is a focus on approaching music on its pure aesthetic and stylistic terms — I might use some of this extra context as a framing device once in a while, but in the general sense I like to think of an album’s place in the scheme of things as it relates to other music and not necessarily some sociological construct that may or may not even be apparent in the music itself. There are a lot of reasons for this, but an important one to me is that a lot of music that people love is made by musicians who just so happen to be flawed amalgams of egotistical impulses at best and pathological monsters at worst. And in a corner of culture where we’ve had to deal with the conflicts of enjoying music by people we would later discover to be political troglodytes, insufferable pricks, perpetrators of sexual/physical/psychological abuse, self-destructive trainwrecks, people who lied about who they were and where they came from, unrepentant criminals, even convicted murderers, “they have money and went to a fancy school” feels like a pretty hollow thing to hinge your criticism of a band on, especially if you can stand in the background of said band’s press photo and get mistaken for their new percussionist.

So how do we get past these issues? That’s our own problem to deal with, and I’ve got a bunch of Ronettes songs on my iPod that ask me to solve it every time they show up on shuffle. But if we can divorce great art from a troubling artist, who’s to say that an upper-class band shouldn’t matter to a working-class listener? I’d never been so desperately broke and unsure of my place in the world than I was in the winter of 2001/2002, and there were few albums that I enjoyed at the time as much as Is This It — when I hear what, to me, is one of the best works of straight-up power-pop/new wave of the last ten years, the fact that their singer went to a private Swiss boarding school means what to me, now?

brokedownpalace:

Anybody that can tell me anything about the Dave Grusin Trio, give a shout: seanDOTfennesseyATgmailDOTcom. Particularly regarding this. MP3s welcome.

See also: