- The chorus is full on 90s Euro-trance-pop-whatever. As far as contemporary stuff, it's much closer to mining the same territory as Cascada than Gaga, Katy, or Ke$ha.
- The breakdown will code as dubstep because of the wobble (and because dubstep is becoming just popular enough with certain folks that something will be able to "code as dubstep" in 2011), but rhythmically it's not at all extreme for, like, a slightly R&B leaning pop song.
- I actually really like the breakdown, Brit sounds great on it.
- Whoa trance buildup
- If this is actually just Max Martin and Dr. Luke, what the hell did Britney's actual sessions with Tiesto sound like? (did that even ever happen?) Actually, with the breakdown being what it is, it's like Luke and Max were just like, "she's working with Tiesto and Rusko? We can just do all of that ourselves!")
- I guess I don't like this very much, but if a track can fairly accurately be described as Dr. Luke doing Tiesto, I guess the odds of me liking it aren't very high.
Maybe this Sky Ferreira song will get a push and a re-release next year and maybe her album will come out. But with the way pop music works these days maybe it won't, so it's #1 for 2010. Another great year of traxxxxxxxxxxxx. Assembled for your listening pleasure is a YouTube playlist of the tracks from my top 90 of 2010 (the ones available at YouTube). Power Hour available upon request.
1. Sky Ferreira - "One" (Parlophone) 2. Taylor Swift - "Mine" (Big Machine) 3. Kingdom - "Mind Reader ft. Shyvonne" (Fool's Gold) 4. Willow Smith - "Whip My Hair" (Columbia, Roc Nation) 5. Young Jeezy - "Lose My Mind ft. Plies" (Def Jam) 6. Gyptian - "Hold Yuh (remix ft. Nicki Minaj)" (VP) 7. Girl Unit - "Wut" (Night Slugs) 8. Ciara - "Ride ft. Ludacris" (LaFace) 9. Big Boi - "Shutterbugg" (Def Jam) 10. Katy B - "Katy On a Mission" (Rinse) 11. The-Dream - "F.I.L.A." (Radio Killa/Def Jam) 12. Tensnake - "Coma Cat" (Permanent Vacation) 13. Robyn - "Dancing On My Own" (Konichiwa) 14. Yelawolf - "Pop the Trunk" (Interscope) 15. Caribou - "Sun" (Merge) 16. Javiera Mena - "Hasta La Verdad" (Unión del Sur) 17. The Fives - "It's What You Do ft. Vanya Taylor" (?) 18. Sade - "Soldier of Love" (Sony) 19. The Crystal Ark - "The Tangible Presence of the Miraculous" (DFA) 20. Little Big Town - "Little White Church" (Capitol Nashville) 21. FaltyDL - "My Friends Will Always Say" (Planet Mu) 22. Wacka Flocka Flame - "Hard In the Paint" (1017 Brick Squad/Warner Bros/Asylum) 23. Nebraska - "This Is the Way" (Rush Hour) 24. jj - "Into the Light" (Secretly Canadian) 25. Gucci Mane - "Electricity" (mixtape) 26. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - "Bottled in Cork" (Matador) 27. Subeena - "Picture" (Opit) 28. Ludacris - "How Low" (Disturbing Tha Peace) 29. Duck Sauce - "Barbra Streisand" (Fool's Gold) 30. Justin Bieber - "Baby" (Island) 31. Roll the Dice - "The New Black" (Digitalis) 32. Keri Hilson - "Pretty Girl Rock" (Interscope) 33. Storm Queen - "Look Right Through" (Environ) 34. Diddy-Dirty Money - "Ass On the Floor" (Bad Boy) 35. Arcade Fire - "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains" (Merge) 36. Joanna Newsom - "Esme" (Drag City) 37. Funkystepz - "For U (ft. Lily McKenzie)" (Safe and Sound) 38. Kanye West - "Power" (Roc-A-Fella, Def Jam) 39. Jazmine Sullivan - "Love You Long Time" (J Records) 40. The Extra Lens - "Some Other Way" (Merge) 41. Lloyd - "Lay It Down" (Young Goldie/Interscope/Zone 4) 42. Lil Silva - "Perfussion" (Night Slugs) 43. Young Dro - "Freeze Me" (Grand Hustle?) 44. Hole - "Samantha" (CherryForever/Island Def Jam/Mercury) 45. LCD Soundsystem - "Home" (DFA) 46. Brad Paisley - "Water" (Sony) 47. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - "Round and Round" (4AD) 48. Los Campesinos - "Straight In at 101" (Arts & Crafts) 49. Enrique Iglesias - "I Like It" (Universal International) 50. Andre Nickatina & the Jacka - "My Middle Name Is Crime" (I-Khan) 51. Justin Martin and Ardalan - "Mr. Spock" (Dirtybird) 52. Zinc - "Wile Out (ft. Miss Dynamite)" (Zinc Music) 53. Miranda Lambert - "Only Prettier" (Columbia Nashville) 54. Glasser - "Mirrorage" (True Panther) 55. Wiz Khalifa - "Black & Yellow" (Rostrum, Atlantic) 56. Katy Perry - "Teenage Dream" (Capitol) 57. Corrine Bailey Rae - "Paris Nights/New York Mornings" (EMI) 58. Moody - "It's 2 Late 4 U and Me" (KDJ) 59. Laura Marling - "Alpha Shallows" (Virgin) 60. Rick Ross - "MC Hammer (ft. Gucci Mane)" (Slip'n'Slide/Def Jam) 61. Mad One - "House Girls 6" (Devine uk) 62. Horror Inc. - "Aurore" (Haunt) 63. Kourtney Heart - "My Boy (ft. Magnolia Shorty)" (?) 64. Teengirl Fantasy - "Cheaters" (True Panther) 65. Grinderman - "Worm Tamer" (Mute) 66. J Stalin - "D-Boy Blues 2010" (SMC) 67. Keith Urban - "Put You In a Song" (Hit Red/Capitol Nashville) 68. Emeralds - "Genetic" (Editions Mego) 69. Beeda Weeda - "Baserock Babies" (?) 70. Lindstrøm & Christabelle - "Lovesick" (Feedelity) 71. Ost & Kjex - "Continental Lover" (Diynamic) 72. Oneohtrix Point Never - "Returnal" (Editions Mego) 73. Damian Marley & Nas - "As We Enter" (Universal Republic/Def Jam) 74. Cassie - "Fuck U Silly ft. Nicki Minaj" (unreleased) 75. DVA & Fatima - "Just Vybe (Soul Power Mix)" (Hyperdub) 76. Dam Funk - "Hood Pass Intact (ft. MC Eiht)" (Stones Throw) 77. Shit Robot - "Take Em Up (ft. Nancy Whang)" (DFA) 78. School of Seven Bells - "ILU" (Ghostly International) 79. The Gathering - "In My System (Jef K System Mix)" (Silver Network) 80. Actress - "Maze (Long Version)" (Honest Jon's) 81. Erykah Badu - "20 Feet Tall" (Motown) 82. Yolanda Be Cool & Dcup - "We No Speak Americano" (Ultra) 83. Trace Adkins - "This Ain't No Love Song" (Show Dog/Universal) 84. Ramadanman - "Glut" (Hemlock) 85. Alphabeat - "Hole in my Heart" (Polydor) 86. Ajay D - "Sax Breeze" (?) 87. Âme - "Rrose Sélavy" (Innervisions) 88. Jam City - "Ecstasy Refix" (Night Slugs) 89. E-40 - "Lightweight Jammin' (ft. Clyde Carson and Husalah)" (Heavy on the Grind) 90. Nina Sky - "You Ain't Got It (Funk Dat)" (self-released)
It was a great year. These records are all awesome.
1. Caribou - Swim (Merge) 2. Yelawolf - Trunk Muzik 0-60 (Interscope) 3. Waka Flocka Flame - Flockaveli (1017 Brick Squad/Warner Bros/Asylum) 4. Taylor Swift - Speak Now (Big Machine) 5. The-Dream - Love King (Def Jam/Radio Killa) 6. Big Boi - Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (Purple Ribbon/Def Jam) 7. Actress - Splazsh (Honest Jon's) 8. Ost & Kjex - Cajun Lunch (Diynamic) 9. Jazmine Sullivan - Love Me Back (J Records) 10. Lindstrøm & Christabelle - Real Life is No Cool (Feedelity Recordings) 11. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh (Motown) 12. Diddy-Dirty Money - Last Train to Paris (Bad Boy) 13. Rick Ross - Teflon Don (Slip'n'Slide/Def Jam) 14. Los Campesinos - Romance is Boring (Arts and Crafts) 15. E-40 - Revenue Retrievin' (Day Shift) (Heavy on the Grind Ent.) 16. Ciara - Basic Instinct (LaFace Records) 17. the Extra Lens - Undercard (Merge Records) 18. R. Kelly - Love Letter (Jive) 19. Mad One - House Girls - the Album (Devine uk) 20. Mr. G - Still Here (Rekids) 21. Twin Shadow - Forget (4AD) 22. Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me (Drag City) 23. Sade - Soldier of Love (Sony) 24. Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here? (Editions Mego) 25. Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can (Virgin) 26. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - The Brutalist Bricks (Matador) 27. Roll the Dice - Roll the Dice (Digitalis) 28. Grinderman - Grinderman 2 (Mute) 29. Ikonika - Contact Love Want Have (Hyperdub) 30. Efdemin - Chicago (Dial)
More writing to come. Singles list (w/ YouTube playlist) on 11/9 after it is counted down in a power hour format at my birthday party.
The ever-forward-thinking Sony (via J and Arista) (who did such a great time promoting this album, btw, have you heard about it?) won't let me post a YouTube of the huge, Salaam Remi-produced "Love You Long Time", so listen to the also very-good single, "Holdin' You Down", and then check out Jazzy's album Love Me Back.
A lot of the modern R&B I'm into (Dream, Ciara, etc.; Erykah is the big exception) spends most of its time going for futurism, and that's not what Jazzy does at all. But hers (and her producers') is not a conservative retro, but rather one open to playing and having fun with 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s R&B (and hip-hop and reggae), and her voice is one expressive and varied enough to put a lot off.
Year-end lists are coming, figured I should do some writing.
The bad: Most of the guest appearances by the less-known rappers are pretty forgettable, and there are a lot of them. The Wale verse in the middle of the otherwise excellent "No Hands" is such that I'm probably going to make an edit of the song without it ("I'ma put her on the train/little engine could" is the actual closing line of his verse) and the Gudda Gudda verse is a typically embarrassing affair.
The good: Pretty much everything else. Driving from NY to Chicago and back in July, I told fellow traveller Molly (who loves Waka) that I didn't know if I could take a whole tape's worth of Waka at once but this album proves me about 100% wrong. He's not a bad rapper, but he's a great performer. If you think that ad-libs and yelling can only take a rapper so far, I think this might be the album to prove you wrong (listen to the last minute of "Bustin' At Em" to start. The mostly Lex Luger produced tracks are busy and jarring and loud-as-hell and they combine with Waka's energy as well as any producer-rapper tandem have in a while, and when Drumma Boy stops by with a Roscoe Dash hook for "No Hands", Wacka kills it as well. I'm still trying to figure out how this doesn't get boring for me over 72 minutes, but it's just such great high-energy rap that I keep putting it on. WAKA WAKA WAKA WAKA FLOCKA FLOCKA FLOCKA FIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT! (oh, also, there's a song with Pastor Troy called "Fuck the Club Up" so you should listen to this now).
The Ghost Writer (dir. Roman Polanski, 2010) Anyone hoping for an Auteurist reflection on Polanski's legal flare-ups (are those people out there? I'm prolly just strawmanning) probably won't find much here, but it's definitely a solid thriller that falls apart in the last act (fucking Google) but is still totally worth it. MacGregor is fine, but Brosnan is great whenever he shows up as either a patsy or a master conspirator who's losing it or both. Olivia Williams is great too and Tom Wilkinson comes in at the end to grab a scene with his teeth and take it the hell away from Ewan. Finally, the score is ill.
Leaving Las Vegas (dir. Mike Figgis, 1995) A few Sundays ago I went to a bar at 11am to watch Liverpool play, then took a cab to a different bar to watch the Bears play, then went home and roommate Sarah wanted to watch this one, which she had on Netflix. I hadn't seen it since the first time I saw it, at which point I was probably way too young to see it. The fact that Nic Cage won an Oscar for this amazes me, cynical Oscar obsessive that I am, because he's really not holding back any of his ridiculousness. The exchange about whether Ben is drinking as a way of killing himself or killing himself as a way of drinking is awesome in how the movie acknowledges the line's cleverness and dismisses it at the same time.
The 19th Wife (dir. Rob Holcomb, 2010) Of course we were gonna watch a Lifetime Mormon Murder Mystery, though we probably could also have predicted that it might get boring after a while. It did. I'd rather be watching Big Love for my LDSploitation kick (though we are watching TLC's Sister Wives tonight).
Piranha 3D (dir. Alexandre Aja, 2010) Aja is a talented dude (even Mirrors had like 2 good things in it) and it's nice to see he can do horror-laughs as well as tragic murder/rape/burning alive scenes. This was pretty much exactly what I wanted it to be, and Jerry O'Connell is surprisingly hilarious as Joe Francis. The only disappointment is (SPOILERS, but not ones that should make much difference ) that the main character doesn't end up leaving Jessica Szohr (not any more fun here than she is on Gossip Girl) for Kelly Brook. Elizabeth Shue is suitably heroic.
Greenberg (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2010) I don't think the advertising for this accurately portrays how much of an asshole Ben Stiller's character is. So, for a while, I avoided the movie, thinking, though I don't know why I was being so pessimistic, that they gap between what the movie would expect me to feel for the character and my actual opinion would be huge. It turns out, Stiller's Roger Greenberg is a monster of a character prone to ill-timed freak-outs and being completely inappropriate, and he's not all that charismatic or charming, but Stiller plays him well enough to allow some empathy. and Rhys Ifans and especially Greta Gerwig are king-sized in this. Looks pretty too.
Catfish (dir. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010) Whether it's faked or not (and if I had to bet money I would bet that at least some of it isn't exactly on the up and up), I'm kind of split on Catfish. On one hand, it does have an interesting subject (the one the fillmmakers "stumble upon", not the protagonist, who is not at all interesting) that raises some good questions about what we do with reality in the virtual space. On the other in hand, the more I think about the movie the more I think that the filmmakers could do better with it. The visual style that constantly reminds you that the movie is about the internet could go, for one. But the worst part for me is the narrators and how, once they find a subject that is obviously more interesting than their original subject (co-director Ariel Schulman's little brother Nev), they can't pull back a little and take themselves further out of it. I would still probably recommend this, but it would probably be better as a short subject that cuts a lot of the stuff with Nev out of it.
Kick-Ass (dir. Matthew Vaughn, 2010) Kick-Ass has an oddly similar problem to Catfish, in that if it dumped it's main character for a movie about the endlessly more entertaining Hit-Girl and Big Daddy (the latter played by Nicolas Cage, so obviously he's awesome), it would probably at least stand a chance. As it is, I really disliked most of this. I've never read the graphic novel this is based on and I haven't read Wanted either, so maybe it's just a coincidence, but I think after these two movies it's safe to say that if you're adapting a Mark Millar book for the screen, you should probably just find a way to cut out the voice-over narration.
The Town (dir. Ben Affleck, 2010) (SPOILER below) I had pretty high expectations for this after Affleck's excellent Gone Baby Gone, and I'm happy to say that I liked it a lot. The acting is the best part, especially from Jeremy Renner as a little pitbull of a man and Affleck as a local-boy-makes-good-makes-bad-tries-to-just-even-out. Blake Lively is a pleasant surprise too, more or less playing a younger version of Amy Ryan's Gone Baby Gone character as filtered through J-Woww. There's a good car chase, the heists are well-staged, and while Affleck is playing with a lot of types here, the characters work. Just like in Good Will Hunting and Gone Baby Gone, the concept of neighborhood is a major theme here, and I really dug the kind of optimistic fantasy of the ending, which has it both ways as Affleck's character is forced/able to leave the neighborhood but is still able to contribute to the neighborhood by donating money to build a new hockey rink. Considering the harsh moral decision at the end of Gone Baby Gone, it caught me off guard in a good way. If Ben wants to keep adapting crime novels or Boston novels or whatever, let 'em do it.
Machete (dir. Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez, 2010) A few weeks after The Expendables comes another long-awaited B-action movie and on the whole this one is probably a little better. Everyone here is king-sized, Michelle Rodriguez (once finally revealed in the eye-patch/leather ensemble) making as striking of an entrance as Trejo. But Trejo is great, no doubt about it; just like the Expendables wins by focusing on the faces of Stallone, Rourke, Lundgren and co., Machete makes the most of every wrinkle in his face (along side his comic timing, which is awesome, but not nearly as awesome as Cheech Marin, who is as funny here as he has been in a while). Also, the way Jeff Fahey's (villainous) character eats Mexican food at lunch ("pass the salsa") without comment is a better than anything in (the bad) Crash or Babel by far. (okay so the deaf club scene in Babel was pretty great).
the Crazies (dir. Breck Eisner, 2010) It's kind of a sum-of-its-parts Horror Movie (let's see if I can make this work), by which I mean that the overarching concept isn't revolutionary or super-interesting (it is a remake, and I haven't seen the original but don't really know anyone who loves it), but the horror scenes themselves are so well done that it all works wonderfully. American Horror movies (dramas too obvi) have been mining the terror of rural Americana for almost half a century, but Eisner uses the grey landscapes more effectively than I've seen anyone do in a while. Farm equipment and (especially) a car wash are also used well, and hey, I guess I do pretty much like Timothy Olyphant.
...what is it about the framing of this shot (from the trailer) that makes me almost sure that Carrie Mulligan is about to get hit by an oncoming truck?
52. Funkadelic - "One Nation Under A Groove" (Warner Bros., 1978)
Perhaps the clearest statement of the part of the P-Funk ethos that sets out to unify everyone into one groove nation (and maybe the clearest statement of that by anyone, it's certainly not an ideal limited to George Clinton), "One Nation Under A Groove" is the kind of sloganeering that gives sloganeering a good name. I would say that if you only had to hear one P-Funk song it would be this one, but if you hear this song and don't feel like looking further into the catalog for more bass lines, harmonies, and total-body grooves like this one, we have fundamental differences, you and I. The 12" version is 11 and a half minutes long and about 8 and a 1/2 minutes in, when the synth-bass groove starts changing it up under the chorus, is when it goes from next level to that other level.
Dude, Where's My Car? (dir. Danny Leiner, 2000) Watched this on Saturday night with roommate Sarah and friend Petey, trying to take a drink every time they said "dude", "shibby", or "continuum transfunctioner", which I would imagine is, at worst, the second best way to watch this movie. One thing that seemed drunkenly apparent was that Ashton Kutcher was like ten times more entertaining than Sean William Scott (this might be because of the screenplay, I noticed Kutcher once in a while getting to say something that sounds like it makes sense, and then undo it with something incredibly stupid, whereas SWS just has to be dumb right off the bat). Either way, a Saturday night well spent. And Pete passed out before the movie ended.
The Time Traveller's Wife (dir. Robert Schwentke, 2009) We decided that this was going to be better than the Emmys, and in the end that was probably the right choice (of a set we limited to two for no real reason). It gets a bit repetitive after a while, but it's not that bad, and the melodrama is at least focused on two very likable people. Bana's affability almost became a joke around the hour mark, actually, but what can I say, I like the dude. Honestly, the fact that it's a sci-fi movie very clearly targeted at the Nicholas Sparks audience is almost enough to make me like it on principle, and while it could be a little clearer on some of the details, it's still not a bad little movie.
I apologize that it has taken me so long to let all 4 of you know about Ost & Kjex's Cajun Lunch, one of my favorite albums of the year, and a treat for those of us who were close to giving up on the possibility of "quirky" as an adjective without a negative connotation. It's basically a house record with white-boy falsetto singing and lyrics mostly about (and sometimes from the point of view of) cheese, but it's well produced enough for all that to work. "The Yellow Man" is like the fifth different favorite song I've had on here, but it's the current one so it's the one I'ma use here. The drum programming is kind of bonkers, I think, in the way the hi-hats and sparely-used snares manage to hypnotize while not upstaging the (endearing, I think) vocals and then go kind of kitchen-sink interesting with a minute and a half to go. Cop this shit.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (dir. Jacques Audiard) I should note that I watched this in two parts about 3 weeks apart, but I enjoyed this Audiard crime flick almost as much as his Oscar-nominated Un prophète. Like that movie, The Beat... focuses on the development of a young criminal, in this case a not-completely-legit real estate broker named Thomas Seyr and played by Romain Duris with a great nervous grin. Seyr's never altogether realistic dream is to escape a life of shady business to follow in his mother's footsteps as a concert pianist.
The way Audiard, who also co-wrote the movie, uses music is a great variation of a kind of cliche in which a troubled urban character is calmed and refined by art. Seyr never seems as nervous terrorizing squatters as he does trying to get his Bach piece right. Overall, it's an interesting portrayal of the difficulties of changing one's life, more specifically reconciling what one really thinks one wants (concert pianist like yr dead mom) with what one is used to (crook like one's dad, played here by Niels Arestrup, who is good but doesn't quite steal the show like he does in Un prophete).
The Brood (dir. David Cronenberg, 1979) I'm going to slowly work my way through all the Cronenberg I haven't seen in the fall, I think. I guess it would be spoiling to say who the villain here is exactly, but the way his/her psychological damage is manifested is awesome. The colors, the blood, Oliver Reed's menace, the terrifying children, yes this is very good end-of-the-70s horror.
Friend Sarah informed us last night of the curse-filled trailer to the next in MTV's series of RW/RR Challenges, which have, despite the excellent Back to New Orleans season of Real World, been for the last few years consistently much more entertaining than the Real World itself. The preview gives no indication that this season is gonna be any less entertaining. But I would like to draw attention to the logo, which is well...
...at least somewhat confusing in what it signifies? Maybe I'm just more sensitive to this because I'm Eastern European (and love fonts) but why the Cyrillic Яs combined with the Bio-hazard imagery? Not that I don't think it would be cool to set a whole season of the Challenge in an abandoned but still highly radioactive Chernobyl reactor, but this is set in Prague (they use the Roman alphabet with some vowel accents there). Obvi "nuclear meltdown" is easy shorthand for tempers flaring and that's fine (again, can't wait for this shit), but the specifics of this logo are mad silly, no?
The Expendables (dir. Sylvester Stallone, 2010) It's not fair, really, from a critical standpoint. How could I not like this? Jet Li fights Ivan Drago here. Many modern action movies aim for intertextuality by referencing shots, quips, and cliches, but bringing together so many iconic actors (of so many iconic characters) to do an action movie is a whole different thing altogether.
There are things here that are not so good, the foremost of which is the CGI blood. I wonder what the price point difference is between CGI blood and physical fake blood, and whether it gets bigger for something that necessitates as much blood as this movie does, because this shit looks terrible (the fire isn't so good either).
For the most part, though, Stallone knows how to direct this kind of movie. He spends a lot of time on faces, which is awesome when the faces are so iconic. A speech delivered by Mickey Rourke, for example, is a-ok in its content, but the tight (blue-lit) close-up on his face is fascinating. I would imagine that if this movie sounds like a good idea to you, there is no reason you won't enjoy it (do I even need to say that Statham is great?).
Symbol (dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto, 2009, no US release yet scheduled) Symbol is partly about a man that wakes up in a mysterious all-white room but it's not a horror movie. Instead, it's a (seemingly) absurdist existential comedy. The story of the man (played in kiddie pajamas by Matsumoto) is cross-cut with the (seemingly) unrelated story of an aging Mexican Wrestler getting ready for a match he is not expected to win (pro wrestling is competitive here). It's kind of hard to describe what happens without spoiling a major development that is presented with awesome cross-cutting about 3/4ths of the way into the movie, but let's just say that the scope of Matsumoto's story expands greatly towards the end.
Even before that revelation, however, I was having a lot of fun. The parts with the man stuck in the room, flicking little switches (which are actually little cherub penises) that make seemingly random objects appear and disappear are a great send-up of a style of video-gamey logic in which completely unrelated tasks eventually lead to a reasonable goal. Symbol really strikes me as quite a brilliant, original work and it's really worth going out of your way (internets) to see.
The end of summer is near, so it's our duty to rectify the mistake of not yet writing about the song I've most enjoyed hearing blasted from car stereos in Bushwick and Beyond.
Much like Gucci's "Wasted" last year, "Lose My Mind's" most immediately gratifying feature is Plies absolutely ridiculous verse in the middle of it (it even has "white girls fun, cuz all them swallow" to rival last year's "I don't wear tight jeans like the white boys, but I do get naked like the white boys"). And I'm still not 100% on whether the hoes call Plies "fantastical" or "Fantastico" (I rap along with the latter) but it's an amazing line either way.
But much like on "Wasted", I realized after a few listens that I like the main rapper's verses as much or more than Plies'. There's the endlessly quotable "goons got goons/rooms got rooms" couplet (actually, it does that a disservice to quote that without the "house stupid-dumb-big" doesn't it?) that ends the first verse, but even that isn't as good as Jeezy's final one, on which his flow gets as playful as ever ("my nickname in the A: strapped up shorty" stuck in my head 24-7) over the lurching monster of a beat. The Recession is one of my two or three favorite rap albums of the last decade and while this isn't as amazing as the first single off of that one (few things are), it has me very very excited for Thug Motivation 103.
The Invention of Lying (dir. Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, 2009) This was on HBO On Demand so I watched it on a Sunday night not expecting much, and I don't regret it. It certainly has many funny moments and Jennifer Garner does a very admirable job playing a character who is required by the plot to speak almost entirely in dialogue that would normally be obvious subtext (that's a way to look at this movie, I guess: a society without lies is a society without subtext?). The tone here sometimes edges from surprisingly sad to boringly sad though and, well, is it wrong to ask a comedy to be slightly, I don't know, nerdier? That is to say, if you're creating an alternate reality, shouldn't it be a little more detailed? Everything we know about this reality in which lying hasn't been invented seems to suggest that history for the most part has played out exactly the same as it did in our reality (except for/despite the absence of religion). This might be too much to ask, I dunno.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (dir. Edgar Wright, 2010) Not being nerdy enough is certainly not a problem for this one and it totally exceeded my expectations, which were basically that I would enjoy some of the form but would be super-turned off by the story. I was happily only half right. From the initial 16-bitty Universal logo, Wright's synthesis of video game and comic imagery is totally fun, full of witty sight gags and useful transitions and characterizations (PS though, with regards to using video game stuff in movies, let's not forget Crank: High Voltage, which does it in a completely different spirit but just as successfully). And my fear that I would find Scott Pilgrim himself to be somewhat of a turd wasn't off, but with pretty much every other character calling him a turd at some point it totally didn't bother me like I thought it would. Basically, the Seven Evil Exes thing was a much more complex metaphor for relationships than I expected it to be (haven't read the books obvi) and this was really fun. (Also there's a scene of Scott Pilgrim talking to himself that made me wonder, who's gonna have the balls to pull the trigger on the Michael Cera/Jesse Eisenberg buddy movie?).
By the time I had even heard about this leaking it was #1 on iTunes, such is the power of our Taylor. It's encouraging to hear her writing specifically about being a young adult ("yeah we've got bills to pay" and a line about cohabitation!) with the same skill that she wrote about being a high school kid. The "you made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter" is super-entertaining verging on annoying, almost in an Elvis Costello way, but I've grown to love it. Yet again Taylor takes a cliche and makes it beautiful.
So basically after a week or so with "Mine" (and, truth be told, a walk home from Greenpoint to Bushwick the other night listening to it on repeat) I couldn't be more excited for this album.
