Why Kate Nash is terrible and Kitty Pryde probably isn’t

Of all the creepy skeezballs in music journalism, Everett True has to rank… somewhere in the middle. I mean, he doesn’t write for Complex so he can’t be in the top 10 percentile.

Was Gil Scott-Heron the most bigoted, pro-government musician of all-time?

Things I know/care about Gil Scott-Heron:

1. His dad played for Celtic
2. Literally nothing else

Alyx Vesey likes black people a hell of a lot more than you do

I recently came to realize that I hate the Evening Standard. Not in the standard, “oh boy, these provocative journalists are sure saying some provocative stuff in their columns that makes me want to shake my fist in the air like Blakey in annoyance.” No, hate as in “I would like everyone and everything Dan Jones loves to die in his arms before he writes yet another smug, meandering, football-started-in-1992 piece of shit sports hackery.”

How I learned to start worrying and love Media Take Out

There’s a tendency among journalists to toss the word “minstrelsy”, or at least  the misspelled “minstrelry”, at any rap album they don’t approve of. For instance here’s someone calling Gucci Mane a minstrel, here’s someone else tossing the accusation at Jay-Z, and here’s noted scholar on the taxonomy of racial integration Nick Cannon taking shots at assorted southern rappers for being minstrels (video contains the only decent beat Nas has been on since 2005).

Mistah F.A.B. Explains Why Kreayshawn Isn’t A Racist: ILB Exclusive Interview

Investigative journalism into the world of rap isn’t just for interns at Complex who’ve mastered the dark arts of typing Earl Sweartshirt’s real name into youropenbook.org before passing it off as a world exclusive. Those of us further down the journalistic food chain, who operate with just a basic WordPress default theme, aren’t afraid to wear out the shoe leather on some Woodward and Bernstein ish, digging behind the headlines to find out some startling revelations.

Youtube makeup tutorials are the final significant artform

Like a lot of people, I process and store “shocking” statistics taken from surveys in my head, but I have no real idea of where that information came from. This is the lasting contribution of the Daily Mail to the collective psyche. In very much the same way that your grandmother will all of a sudden become wary of Sikhs because 1 in 5 newbuild houses are purchased by them, I know for a fact that obesity as increased 30% in Greece since McDonalds began installing franchises there. I just don’t know where I got that number from.

Working Girls: Or How Mick Foley Proved Wrestling Fans Were Smarter Than Most Feminist Bloggers

The professional wrestling term “working” has hundreds of vague definitions, but perhaps the most accurate is “attempting to convince people that the scripted actions they’re seeing are legitimate.” So when a wrestler grimaces in pain at a punch that went absolutely nowhere near his face, he’s working. When Jerry “The King” Lawler and Andy Kaufmann brawled on the David Letterman Show in the early 80s, they were working. In the late 80s, The Iron Sheik and “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan were arrested for drug possession. They were fired from the WWF not for this crime, but because they acted as if they were co-workers when speaking to the police, rather than feuding rivals. They were not fired for committing a felony, but because they weren’t working.

How 4Music made me increasingly aware of my own mortality

Cheap ‘n’ cheerful landfill music video station “4Music” is currently in the middle of a series of themed programming based around the Royal Wedding. This strikes me as the kind of idea that was okayed in a meeting of top brass somewhere and then left to the interns to work out the problems with the technicalities of it all. The main problem is that there is absolutely no connection between what happens in the build up to a Royal Wedding and the day-to-day content of a music video station, unless we suddenly find out that Kate Middleton used to be the drummer in Love Bites, or Prince William finally gets around to that “TOP 50 INDIE FLOORFILLERS” article he’s been sitting on.

The Game and Lil Wayne eagerly download an emulator to play the quite frankly stupidly overrated “Mayhem In Monsterland”

This isn’t a very good song.

People who say “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” are really really smart

Dommy P’s not really the type to cross-promote but I’ve had some shit up on the Vice blog recently. One piece is basically an “INTERNATIONAL ITUNES EXCLUSIVE SPECIAL EDITION” version of an old ILB piece, but if artists weren’t allowed to recycle themselves over and over again without expressing any desire for originality we wouldn’t have Mark Heap’s career, and that’d be a disaster.