ILB spotters’ guide to inane platitude Twitter accounts

Every now and then ILB will get commission from elsewhere to drop a guest post that turns out to be a “little too real” for them or “contains too many references to former ECW midcarders” or “has a joke about raping a minor feminist cultural commentator in it” so they just drop me a kill-fee that I end up spunking down Shakeaway (Turkish Delight and peanut butter 4life, bb). Anyway rather than ship it elsewhere, here’s an example of it for my ILB bredders.

Rachel Miller: star of stage and Summer Jam screen

Benoit balls

Every now and then, people will ask me to justify, as an adult man with a job and perfunctory social skills, my love of professional wrestling. This video is probably the perfect encapsulation of why I still bother with it aged 27. Let me break it down for you.

Mia Culpa

ILB, and its associates, will never tire of clowning on Simon Reynolds, but in fairness the man is right a lot more frequently than he’s wrong. I think his real problem is that he’s never been fully comfortable with the 1500 to 4000 word long article, so he tends to throw in a lot of obvious padding, needless diversions and poorly conceived “hey, here’s a thought” moments, which then get turned into the main thrust of his article by sub-editors. Case in point: his famous “don’t let the brown skin throw you off” comment about MIA seems like what you’d expect from a private-school educated Oxford graduate, a culturally awkward “they bring a lot of colour to this tournament, but they’re so naive defensively” moment.

ILB: The year in comments

Word to Down The Line’s Early D, you people need to big yourself up dread. I may be the sole decent blogger left in music journalism these days, but I’d be zero without the people who get me up to that 700-hit-a-day level, you, the readers. And sometimes you don’t just fuck off elsewhere after reading my blog to see if Bol’s posted some Youtube clips of fat girls today, you actually post comments. I’m showing some love here, and trying to disguise the fact that this blog really has gone to the dogs recently, by celebrating some the comments that made ILB’s 2009. If you’re listed, kudos. If not, idk, maybe post to comments on Dutty Artz for a bit instead until you’re ready to move up to the big leagues.

Namedrops in the latest Game mixtape: we count them

A few weeks or so back, dunno when don’t care, The Game released a new mixtape. It appeared on the “new” page of Spotify and everything. It’s pretty mediocre, unless you really enjoy Young Buck guest verses. However, we had nothing better to do here at ILB, so instead we’ve decided to tabulate every single name drop in every single track and see if we could draw some mathematical conclusions from this. I know there’s little I enjoy more of a Saturday than doing such.

Roc Raida is dead

ncfilms a famous dj named Roc Raida died i believe

less than 20 seconds ago from TweetDeck

Brief thoughts on Sicily’s approach to music based on a whole six days there

1. Sicilians love themselves some Pink Floyd. I have no idea why, but for some reason every tenth Fiat you walk past is bumping out “Money”. One of my cousins has even gone to the extent of shoving “Dark Side of the Moon” decals on the side of his Cinquecento like some sort of parallel universe version of Pimp My Ride where Xzibit was replaced by Cedric Bixler Zavala. One of Italy’s leading comedy routines involves some dude wandering on stage and talking about how great Pink Floyd and Genesis are (without irony), before throwing a few zingers out at now-dead 60s Italian crooners. To the Italians, this shit is Dead Parrot, Delboy falling through the bar, and the episode of 2.4 Children where they bought the turkey for Christmas but it was still alive all rolled into one. I have no real comment on this, but I get the feeling a lot of English still feel that Italy’s bloodstream is 99% piano house. It isn’t. It likes its rock stadium-shaped.

We should probably talk about that Raygun YouTube clip, then.

Dear American readers of ILB: I apologise, but this post concerns some inane UK indie bullshit that you could only possibly care about if, as a kid, you timed your Sunday baths to ensure that you wouldn’t have to watch Last of the Summer Wine on the family TV. Just be happy your nation has More to Love and leave us limey cocksuckers to it.

Your updated guide to “Wild World”

Stylus Magazine, to me now, is like a favourite, deceased great-aunt: I miss it on the two or three occasions a year I remember that it ever existed.

One of Stylus’s great recurring features was the Summer Jamz colums: every June, Stylus writers would pretend that they ever got invited to cookouts, and didn’t instead just spend time at home wolfing down a pack of lamb burgers on their dolo, and told you what they’d be playing at said spectacular. A mixtape, a themed CD of 10 or 15 songs. The Summer Jamz concept still continues elsewhere to this day. I for some reason am not invited, possibly due to my leaving Stylus in the same way Brian Pilman left WCW.