This is what happens when you let people with names like “Hermione Hoby” write newspaper articles

For those of us who’ve spent any time remotely close to the real world, being told to go and produce 1,500 words on The Strokes in 2011 is a bit like being asked to provide a form sheet for Al Gore’s chance of becoming the next president, or writing up a piece on why Ashley Judd is Hollywood’s next golden girl. Thankfully Guardian journalists have never encountered the real world.

Your 2011 XXL Freshmen issue cover

Oh wow yeah, these guys were all certainly in exactly the same room when this photo was taken.

Pitchfork review of new MIA album: “it’s shit”

Beef update

While bored-ass rap bloggers and habitual “first” posters with absolutely nothing better to do/contribute to to society (delete as applicable) work themselves up into apoplexy by this frankly feeble piece of concern trolling from Potholes In My Blog, ILB keeps it more local like Londis.

No country for vapid men

I can’t lie to you: I would love it if ILB returned to full-scale positing with positivity in its heels. My Gamblers Anonymous pamphlet even tells me to put aside 30 minutes a day to reflect on “being more positive”. I should really be hitting you off with some enlightened music debate, unearthing the stars of tomorrow, passing comment on the classics of yesteryear, putting them all in some sort of critical context. But, no, this is still a place where I just go “Jesus Christ look at this shitty hack”. And reaching his 2000 wordcount before going “fuck it, that’ll do, invoice enc” today is Simmy Richman.

Which rap blogger wants to have sex with a 10-year-old girl?

So anyway, in between its usual award-winning mix of K’Naan MP3s and Jewish self-loathing, Hip Hop Is Read recently contained this little post. The “HHH” in question refers to “hot Hebrew honey”, rather than pro-wrestling’s favourite Lemmy fanboy.

Matt Wendus loses stare-out contest with the void

As all the cool kids say these days, “hat tip” to ILx poster and scribe for a bunch of websites and magazines we don’t read, DJ Mencap, for alerting us to Ripfork. The name may sound like the third-ever piece of shareware you grabbed from download.com back in 1999, but in fact it’s basically much-missed zingblog The Shins Will Change Your Life, except for 2010. And like absolutely everything else related to music, it’s a lot shittier in 2010 than it was in 2007.

Andy Gill prefers The Slits to Ballboy, is a fucking idiot

ILB switched newspapers from The Guardian to the Indie about 18 months ago, mainly in protest at the former’s dumbing down of their cryptic crossword (Dac goes hard). So we’re gonna come out and say this with the benefit of background reading: when it comes to lead music critics for British pinko broadsheets, Andy Gill is inutterably worse than fashion hack Al Petridis.

Shots fired, parts one and two

I think there’s two reasons I’ve been more embraced by the rap blogging community than the indie one. The first is, obviously, my casual homophobia, misogyny and anti-semitism passing itself off as “edgy”comedy. The second is that I like to think I can do beef properly. In outlined examples, here’s how shots have been fired across the blogosphere in the past day:

Critical discourse pt 2

More to the point, judging by its output in recent years, it’s become a deadening force: as a listening experience, but also as something that maintains a deadlock on the musical imagination (and personal ambitions) of Black American youth. I doubt very much that this demographic has no more surprises up its sleeves in terms of sound and style, judging by past form(s) (jazz, rhythm and blues, funk, house, et al ). But that New Thing won’t come until they tire of hip-hop themselves and turn against it.