Junk Culture!

Awesome band! Awesome video! Awesome awesome!!

Dance Party!

Yeah! First, Big Freedia, a trans, Black MC from New Orleans. She's in New Orleans' bounce (NOLA dance music), self-described "sissy" scene. Based on the videos I've been watching, her shows look like the funnest things in the world.

Annnnnnd, Dominique Young Unique from Tampa. Homegirl's got skills--the beats are sick and her flo is tight.

Both are rocking me in my doing-dishes-dance-parties and each of them have songs about oral sex, and maybe its positive for them the shake my prude sensibilities. Probably not though.

Get up and face the day music

I love Future Islands.

Rick Ross is living vicariously through like three gangsters simultaneously

So I'm sure that a lot of hip-hop bloggers who are much better writers with much keener insights than me have already written about this, but I just want to say something about this. So on Rick Ross' current big hit track, BMF (Blowin' Money Fast), he evokes other legendary gangsters to describe his own awesomeness. Obviously talking about how awesome you are, and comparing yourself to others with greater status than you is nothing new in hip-hop. But is it me, or is Rick Ross the most explicit rapper when it comes to comparing himself to others by way of openly referring to himself with their names?

Big Meech and Larry Hoover are two notorious gangsters and drug cartel kingpins from Detroit and Chicago, respectively. I guess it's just interesting to me since most rappers ascribe their awesomeness precisely to their own essences. Or at least they repeat their own names enough so that whether their awesome or not, you know their names and you know how awesome they think they are. (Think Mike Jones or how DMX's method for proving his awesomeness is having other people adopt his name.) Even when a rapper compares himself to another, it's to say that he is better than the other person, different from him, or next in his succession (as in Jay-Z's brilliant line in Snoop Dogg's "I wanna rock": "It's no Biggie/I'm just the king now"). Rick Ross just straight up takes the names of the person he's comparing himself to. His moniker, Rick Ross, itself is the name of an infamous drug dealer.

I guess we all want to be someone else sometimes. And assuming a persona transcends musical genres. The "biggest boss that we've seen thus far" is just really honest about it.

Gorgeousness from down under

I'm psyched about Bachelorette--electronic dreampop from New Zealand. Mellow, loud, pretty, full and rich but not overproduced. This song is awesome and political--if you can get past the creepiness of the video.

Great video for an awesome song

Toro Y Moi "Talamak"

Half-assed blog posts

Okay, so I've been reluctant to post anything to this blog because I don't have the time to actually write thoughtful posts about music or art I like. But honestly, I think my thoughts are secondary in the process of me sharing awesome art and music with my friends--its the art and music themselves that are important. So after the encouragement of a couple friends, I'm actually going to post stuff. Consider this a disclaimer for the half-assed posts to come, but I hope you enjoy the stuff that I'm enjoying.

Make out sessions on the T!

Normally Bostonians are not an affectionate people. Adult couples on the T sit next to each other (maybe) and chat about each others' days in that exhausted and distant way. High school couples are a little cuter, one sitting on the other's lap as they share a pair of headphones blasting New Boyz loud enough for the whole rest of the car to hear.

Tonight was different. Couples making out on the train! Its enough to warm the heart on a February night. Or at least this heart. Happy V-Day, Boston.

When indie rockers grow up

Wednesday was supposed to be the biggest snowstorm of the winter. I psyched myself up in the morning, telling myself that no matter how much it snowed, nothing was going to stop me from seeing The Magnetic Fields.

The storm never came. But even if it had, the trek from Alewife to the Wilbur Theatre would have still been so worth it.

It was my first time seeing The Magnetic Fields, and it was like going to Heaven, you know, for a few hours. And yeah, in my mind, Heaven is this really awkward place. Awkward but pleasant.

The awkwardness came in spades in Stephin Merritt's and Claudia Gonson's banter across the stage--the kind of exchanges that make you want to say, "I'm sorry, am I interrupting something?" But then some of us thrive off of that kind of stuff. When the two of them weren't playing songs or talking to each other, Merritt lamented the fact that the band's merchandise was on sale in the lobby beside popcorn, which was potentially a more compelling buy. Gonson, for her part, spent much of the show talking about and trying to remove an irritating piece of plastic that had ended up in her bra.

The band has a pretty quiet live set-up with no percussion, so there was very limited rocking out. Thus providing space to focus on the awesomeness of Merritt's poppy melodies and amazing lyrics. It's just great to listen to people who are so brilliant at making music, who have been doing it for decades, and who keep getting better at it.

I thought on my ride home after that the show was definitely worth the three weeks worth of train fare or three meals, or various other quantifications of what I dropped to buy the ticket.

Seeing The Magnetic Fields made me want to fall in love again. How awesome is that?