Glen Campbell’s “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife” troubles me

So yeah, Ad-Rock or MCA or Beck (I forget which one) died last week. We didn’t write about it.

So hey, I listened to that Beastie Boys comeback joint

So I held off on watching this video for a good… month maybe? I forget when it dropped, all I know is that when it did I knew I didn’t want/need to watch a Beastie Boys video in 2011. I mean, I still remember the trauma of listening to “To The Five Boroughs”. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool Springsteen obsessive will admit that the spree of post-9/11  “I Heart NY” releases were more “necessary” than “good”, but even with that proviso “To The Five Boroughs” is a fucking chore, like “Encore”’s grandfather.

Rainbow Noise > OFWGKTA

When Eminem was still relevant it was pretty common for music publications to run the same article every six months wondering aloud whether or not we’d ever see an openly gay rapper. I think the argument they were running with was “Who knows what would happen if you gave a gay rapper an absolutely amazing beat to work with, surely it’d be a hit?” Well I don’t have “Girl You Be Killin’ Em”’s chart positions to hand so I can’t answer that question. All I do know is I’ve not seen anyone mention Q-Boy, Caushun and the Deep Dickollective over and over again to fill up wordcount for a long time so: hey, journalists, bring back writing shitty articles about the four gay rappers out there.

Action Bronson and other dudes that rap about wrestling

For ages I used to think those stories about how people in the 80s were absolutely gobsmacked when they found out Madonna and Rick Astley were white were total bullshit, but over Xmas I saw a picture of The Waitress and found out that their lead singer was black so maybe there’s some truth in it. Anyway, the confusing thing/main selling point of Action Bronson is that although he sounds like a sleep deprived Ghostface he looks like a Scottish Games Workshop employee, not totally dissimilar to that hilarious late 1980s ventriloquist whose main gimmick was inviting people up on stage and giving them silly voices to talk with.

Rating the Odd Future memes

The moment that it clicked for me that Odd Future were going to make it, in a Robert Kubica way if not a Fernando Alonso one, was when I found out they had their own tag already set up on Hipster Runoff. Not used yet, just set up for when it needs to be dropped. And it makes sense, like Lil B OFWGKTA are an ideal band for the Carles lifestyle Tumblr generation because they trade heavily in memes. The original mediocre Pitchfork chinstroke piece on them was actually called “The /b/ Boys” but then didn’t go on to mention 4Chan at all for some reason, presumably when you come up with a pun that’s as 4/10 as that you don’t need to incorporate it into your article text. Anyway, while none of OFWGKTA’s memes are as good as “Link mah boi” there’s still enough there to get vaguely excited about. Here’s a spotter’s guide to them.

On Italy vs Slovakia

Italy is a sick and diseased nation. A country that is currently well-placed to be the rousing finale of Old Europe economic collapse, the “Don’t Stop Believin’” to Greece, Spain and Portugal’s “R&B track Mercedes gets to sing 15 minutes into the episode”. It’s a country whose lifeblood is organised crime, inherent corruption, tax evasion, the dumbest popular culture in the Western World and petty racism (directed at both foreigners and its own countrymen). When it comes to WWII leaders, you’ll probably find more Italians proud of theirs than Brits proud of theirs. Our electorate is populated by date rapists in diamond earrings eckying their balls off while driving around in circles on their Vespa, our leader is the single worst democratically elected global head of state of the past half-century, and we’ve made such a fuck up of our recent history that we’re having to sell our country off brick by brick to the Chinese and Arabs and hope they can make a better fist of it than we did. Even taking into consideration all of this: Italy is not a nation that deserves such a fucking shit national team.

Frank Sinatra – Mama Will Bark

On Good Friday, BBC4 rescreened the 1998 Arena documentary “Frank Sinatra: The Voice of the Century”, a piece of television that, although first shown in the week’s after Ol’ Blue Eyes’ death, had clearly been put together bit-by-bit over the preceding decade so they’d have something to go with when the Chairman of the Board stood down. The resulting effect of 10 years of adding new sections, segments, interviews and quasi-revelations gave the show a similar effect to the one you get when taking a Stanley knife to a terraced house wall and reveal five generations of wallpaper underneath.

Levi Roots’ Tears

One thing the kids of the post-print media generation are going to miss out on is the visceral thrill of having your name published in the letters pages of a magazine. Those of you with a British Newspaper Library membership and literally nothing better to do with your time could find the opinions4u of a 13-year-old me clogging up NME, Melody Maker and SFX magazine back in the day. Being a three-time When Saturday Comes subscribers email “Wikipedia Vandal of the Week”, while undoubtedly an honour, doesn’t really register in the same way.

How the internet ruined Slaughterhouse for me

So for the past 15 months, for the first time in my career, I’ve been regularly discussing football at work with colleagues who support the “big” teams (for the purposes of this argument, a “big” team is any one that has more prestige, history or fanbase than, say, Plymouth Argyle. High standards, I know). And you talk to these champagne charlies, and you realise they’ve missed out on a lot from not following football at the sharp end. You miss out on local radio personalities hosting the half-time raffle while a crowd of 3,912 vocally questions their sexuality. You miss out on all that time you spend pestering your mates who went to legal school for what the various stages of administration are, and at which one you become 100% fucked. You miss out on the amount of fag ash they include in the hotdogs at the Kassam Stadium. And you miss out on the chance to drink in the same bars as your squad’s first time.

Is “Senza Una Donna” one of the worst songs of all time?

As even the most cursory of read-throughs from any piece-of-shit debut novel by a Granta-feted second generation Jamaican or Indian author will make you realise, “coming to terms” with your “heritage” when you’re in your non-native land can be a complicated, and quite frankly tedious to anyone outside of your lineage, thing.