Magnificent Bastard

Vibrations - My Chemical Romance

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 05:07:02 +0200

Frontrunners of a bygone time, pariahs in public mind and physical gods in the eyeliner wearing angst brigade emo army. Nerdy, though their fans don’t get it and surprisingly deep at times, My Chemical Romance is an outfit of many tags, though few are favorable. Now let me brutally honest and hit you with two astounding truths before we begin; 1) I had an emo-period. And admitting that is, I imagine, as painful and embarrassing as having to bleed from your not-that-private parts for several days every month. 2) It’s currently five o’ clock in the morning and I have no clue how, but my jetlag has caused me to merely give an enthusiastic finger to my bioclock and go along with my new nocturnal lifestyle. What’s worse, though, is that I somehow felt compelled to do a blog at this time instead of sleeping, so fuck you, six frequent readers for ruining my life.

Right, so back in the glorious beginning of this century an army of otherwise cheery and well-adjusted teens decided to do what the comicbook industry did back in the 90’s and go darker and edgier. Which is to say, they went whinier and even more paranoid than normal teens. Also the totally missed the point of one of the better genres to emerge from the 90’s. At the same time, a bunch of nerds emerged from this army and decided to finally get laid by starting a band, and thus My Chemical Romance was born.

Many of their fans will argue with me on this one, but let’s be reasonable and agree that the bands first two efforts were largely stereotypical, uninspired and very blurry pile of genre stables, held together by fanfiction-inspiring lyrics and exuding the bands collective virginity, designed to make emogirls across the great american continent wet their pants like there was no tomorrow. To a darkened teenager this was adonis on viagra and steroids. Seeing how I was both male and not a complete retard, rather, closely resembling one, I should’ve probably just called it quits at that point as there were practically endless queues of black-haired bands waiting to drink my tears and eat my allowance at that point in life, but it just so happened that Gerard Way + band were releasing a new CD that week. Now, this is the part of their discography I actually give a care about, so you’ll have to excuse this article for being heavily subjective, although if you don’t then you’re probably not a regular reader and should move along quickly.

Like I mentioned earlier they’re a bunch of nerds, mostly Gerard the frontman, though, and since he’s the main lyricist this is very heavily emphasized. Welcome To The Black Parade is the strangely attractive bastard child of a rock opera and a concept album. It’s a somewhat entertaining narrative and my liking of it might be nothing but nostalgia, yet The Black Parade is both to me, and the army I fled and have been taking continous stabs at, at this point, a work that showcased personal as well as professional maturing and encouraged us to follow, as if we weren’t already very fucking blindly doing so. The album tells the tale of a cancer patient aptly named The Patient, who ponders his life on his deathbed - which, in my mind, nicely reflects the bands overall originality in its framing device, but that’s up to interpretation - the lyrics evolve from sad and whiny to grey and disillusioned and whilst Way will never be neither Bob Dylan nor Wil Butler, opting to go for some very obvious motifs and references, it’s fairly entertaining and, if nothing else, at least worth paying attention to. Along the way you have quirks like Liza Minelli doing cameos in both a chorus and a video and more importantly a very strong sense of identity, both in appearance and sound, which in this day and age is about as rare as an indie record that doesn’t rape the reverb effect or feature religious references.

Okay so Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys.. okay, screw it, I wrote this post to make fun of the band and express some genuine affection towards a quarter of their output, and I haven’t even listened to the whole of their latest album. There, I said it. But you know what? That’s because I’ve grown up, and the most essential part of growing up, is realising how much of an idiot you used to be and that’s why I won’t pick up Danger Days: The Extraordinarily Long and Pointless Name of a Record with so much as a rapier strapped to pitchfork in a hazmat suit. This record is the equivalent of taking and old black and white photo and trying to color it. Not only do you lose the inherent charm of said photo, but you’re left with something that looks like a rainbow just had violent diarrea on it. It’s just not the same. I get that Gerard wants to be a comics writer, I even enjoyed the series he wrote, but trying to marry comic books and the album format is a recipe for disaster even worse than letting Rob Liefeld draw that script you decided to turn into an album. It’s more than likely that the band has acknowledged this as they’ve employed more campy vibe than Adam West’s portrayal of Batman and probably kidnapped Grant Morrison’s family to make him act in their musicvideos, whom I won’t even begin with.

If it weren’t already clear, la romance is a very polarising band; trying to be so many things that they’re never really succeeding at anything that could be a selling point. At this point they’re shuffling through drummers faster than Jimmi Hendrix went through his pushers diverse selection of premium addictions and storming the internet with the entusiasm and self-realisation of a private at Normandy Beach. Not consent with being labeled as merely one crappy genre, they spent the spare time they’ve got when not searching for a new drummer, running through the vast landscape of utterly shitty rock music yet people to follow them into this ungodly dessert with their quirkyness. Actively engaging in My Chemical Romance is very much like a one night stand, in that you’ll have to be drunk out of your mind to actually commit completely and will damn well regret it when sober and reasonable.

Flickerings - Sons Of Anarchy

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 23:16:45 +0200

Hamlet with guns, bikers and pornstars. Sons Of Anarchy balances character-driven drama with high-octane action and ideological debates in a refreshing take on the bad guy protagonist formula.

Whilst I’m a born and bred cynic, I am able to appreciate great works of fiction, or really any work of any media, as long as it has an independence and strong sense of identity. As was the case with my last review, that of The Strokes, I have a strong animosity towards anything that goes the opposite direction, and shamelessly rips off a previously established concept without adding anything to evolve and develop that concept. Sons Of Anarchy is sort of a mixed bag to me.

On one hand, it wants to be Hamlet so freaking bad, you’re wondering just how they managed to inject their writing staff with Shakespeare’s DNA. And at some point it’s okay to let go of a joke, dear Shakespearean writing staff, instead of having your series filled to the oozing brim, with jawbreakingly outdone jokes, like landmines on a WWII battlefield. It’s a sure way to kill off any kind enjoyment fans previously got out of those characters, when one of the core cast, who’s otherwise an genuinely nice guy with a pretty tragic past, has apparently stuck his dick into this weeks problem, every effing week. No really. On the other hand, getting to see villainous protagonist being portrayed in ways that you can actually relate and connect to, even though they’re either killing people left and right or breaking the law in the most ridiculous of ways, is like a freshly brewed cup of coffee in a very dark morning, filled with rainbows, boobs and coffee.

Now, this series is blooming with manipulative bastards. In fact it could probably beat the shit out of most reality shows and David Lynch with it’s combination of massive webs of gambits and outright omnipresent characters respectively, and that’s probably why they chose to name it after the motorcycle club. You see, this is pure deception, as the club’s merely playing second fiddle to protagonist Jackson Teller, also delightfully known as Jax. He start the series by finding his deceased fathers manifest, and starts adopting his beliefs, and if a father tutoring his son from beyond the cold damn grave wasn’t enough Hamlet for ya’ll, it’s heavily implied yet never really answered, wether or not his mother, Jemma’s, new husband; his biological father’s best friend, Clay, killed off daddy Teller to be with Jemma. And I might just be the only reading it, but their chemistry is starting to smell a lot like an oedipus complex is in the works. It’s really better not to read too much into the whole situation.

The first season is all about establishing mythos and laying the stepping stones for Jax’ philosophical troubles. Unlike following seasons, a specific antagonist is never established and there’s no point at which the stakes feel all that high. That being said, skipping through to the second season will leave you more mindfucked than a crash course in japanese in zero gravity. Too bad only one of those contain a finally that leaves you craving for more.

Season two, to me, is the absolute peak of the series. That’s not to imply the rest of the series isn’t worth watching. It is. And yes, you should. The second season is so stuffed with fanservice, awesome casting, haunting tragedy and explosive surprises, that it’s one of the few things, other than Alan Moore’s pickled brain and a coffee machine, that I would risk my life to preserve, once the world inevitably commits to WWIII and I’ll be forced to vacate my dungeon.

A bunch of white supremacists move in and upset the chaotic neutral status quo. They’re led by wellspoken businessman Ethan Zobel (Pictured above, middle), with his trusty and very ideological lieutenant AJ Weston (above, right), played by none other than Henry Rollins. Yes, Henry Rollins, the punk legend, outspoken human- and gay rights supporter Henry Rollins is playing a violent white supremacist. The sheer brilliance of that casting choice is probably the best way to describe the season in general; brilliance in subtlety. All of this, topped off with the quinessential season ending; utterly destroying the lives of your cast, leaving them in despair and continued conflict, yet closing up enough plot threads to make room for an entire new seasons worth of fresh plot. It’s so damn satisfying.

Season three is very uneven; it’s feeding on the residual awesomeness of season two, though weighed down by severe amounts of pretty darn strange production choices. Prime of those; filming and casting the entire trip to Ireland in the states with american actors. Now, normally you wouldn’t notice anything like that, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the great accountants bible. Unfortunately, it’s painfully obvious. Fake accents, locations and customs make it very hard to watch the very tense plot without simultaneously rubbing bucket loads of onions in your eye sockets, to compensate for the amounts of unintended laughs you’ll be having.

That being said, I’m very fond of Sons Of Anarchy. It’s a great series that manages to actually handle some very grim and gritty stuff with a straight and believable face, making me care about every supporting character whilst teasing me that it’s more than willing to kill off anyone. There are some bumps in the roads, mostly brought on by the few characters who’re still stuck in the same gear they were when the show started, but as of this writing, the fourth season is rolling and is hastily proving to be a return to form, driven by the introduction of Danny Trejo and his mexican cartel connection. You really should cancel your plans for tonight, and engage in this showcase of drama done right. If nothing else, it’ll still beat your previous plans of American Idol and a wank-marathon.

Vibrations - The Strokes

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:51:00 +0200

The anthropomorphic personification of everything Indie-, Garage and Rockabilly shouldn’t be.

I’m going to start this out with a disclaimer, for so help me fish-deity if I don’t start out by proclaiming how my thoughts on The Strokes have absolutely nothing to with their personal origins, my inbox will look like Vietnam, post-American “liberation”. How an artist grew up should never be a factor in your opinion on their work, hence The Strokes could be on the indiest of indie labels (Yes, I’m looking at you Matador Records), slowly yet steadily killing off said label with the most abysmal records sales in history and I would still loathe them with a burning passion. We cool?

Now, in the music business there’s a lovely term called genres. We use them as a tool for indexing and color-coding every piece of music and above all, we use them to seem cool and contemporary when namedropping a genre so obscure, even Ariel Pink would shiver. Most genres will, at some point, have outstayed their lifetime and be put to rest and remembered with fondness, for ages to come. One of those genres are Rock N’ Roll, yet the lovely lads in The Strokes decided to dig up and mutilate the carcass of R’n’R, indulging in what is probably the most atrocious example of necrophilia since Queen’s renewed activity sans Freddie Mercury. You see, there’s a very fine line between revival of a genre and shamelessly ripping it off. Gaslight Anthem are channeling the working class charm of early Bruce Springsteen, The Tallest Man On Earth, whilst shamefully dubbed “the Swedish Bob Dylan” is an immense fan and very sincere tribute to the king of folk. Hell, Mayer Hawthorne and Aloe Blacc are probably living in the 60’s, when they’re not on tour and are still sounding extraordinarily original. And That is why I dislike The Strokes.

Wait, not true. My animosity towards Julian Casablancas & band stems from their insistence on taking everything stereotypical and bland about Garage & Indie rock like a cheap drug pre-necrophilia, resulting in a giant grey mass of inconsistent sewage leftovers.

Maybe I’m being unfair; many a fan will quickly counter that The Strokes pulled an Arctic Monkeys and set the standard too high on their first record. But to do that you have to release a great record and Is This It just isn’t. With guitarists sounding like they’re bored shitless, a drummer apparently unable to incorporate anything but the first five pages of a basic rudiment handbook and a bassist only distinguishable in promotion pictures, I’m hard pressed to call it anything but very standard rock. And the word standard is to musical reviews, what apartheid is to South Africa’s global recognition.

I’m not claiming that every artist should create an entire new genre or sound in order to be acceptable, homages and reinterpretations are an immense part of most of my favorite artists and their music. If something is broke, don’t fix it. However, simply riding the wave can’t be allowed by society if we want our culture to keep evolving, thus my recommendation for an immediate public execution of The Strokes should not be seen as disproportionate punishment, rather than social darwinism.

Vibrations - James Blake

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 23:06:00 +0200

Another zero to hero, emerging from the murky depths of british music with a surprisingly unusual take on the current mass frenzy for everything bass. The uncrowned king of pianos, minimalistic sound and inhuman vocal ranges. James Blake.

Now since there’s no possible way to avoid reading the name J’aime Blaque a gazillion times within the first second of loading any music webzine, we’ll play a fun game called reverse-this-shit, which I imagine is what teachers do to make life worth living.
Blake, James is the estranged white, non-rapping, half-cousins son to my previous reviewees. How so? Well, he’s just as hyped, and by hyped I mean that no one has bothered to attend to a critical view, as it would get them nothing but a swift tour of Guantanamo Bay’s greatest interrogation hits. At least the tiny idealist wants me to believe so, yet I’m strangely compelled to believe contemporary music critics to be as afraid of peer pressure as any teenager with acne and a hunchback. So let’s oppose the established media …. Okay, let’s prostitute ourselves to gain followers, in the most pitiful of ways, that doesn’t include .gifs and/or boobs.

In the glorious year of 2k11, the blogosphere managed to get a collective, hence massive boner for the words bass. But what does that mean, you ask, you feebleminded subhuman? Groovy slap bass? Upright jazz bass? Monstrous techno bass?! No, you fool, it’s simply bass. Adjective-less. Fucking. Bass. Which is a fitting if not very explanatory description of the auditive manifestation of bellyfat wobbling like 2 minutes post christmas dinner. It’s as if someone decided to record themselves vomiting on one of the aforementioned delicious and time tested bass’. Or maybe even shoving one of said bass’ up a pregnant woman’s arse and nailing a microphone to her belly. It’s just not that fucking great, blogosphere, you malevolent twat.

Well, since he’s not a DJ and therefore indie and shit, Blake, James has become God, Jesus, Pope and Arch-bishop of the church of unholy wobble, thus if you want any of that delicious music-cred the established critics, har har, are constantly hogging up, you better start praising the lord. Mind you, it’d be rather unfair to claim that Blake, James is the only artist engaging in horrible wobble coitus, rather there’s a quite large scene of dubstepping people out there, and if you haven’t already noticed, I hate them with a white hot and incredibly persistent passion. Just because you managed to call originality on your project or distinctive sound, har de har fucking har, does not give you free reins from the quality control, people!

Right, right, getting off topic; a less critical voice than I, would tell you to embrace Blake, James for seamlessly mixing dubby-bass, haunting vocals and minimalistic sound. But you’re reading my blog so you’ll get my thoughts, señor obvious.

Well Blake, James did indeed record his debut and a shitloads of mixtapes in his bedroom, which in itself would be impressive a few years ago, except everyone and their surprisingly high tech grandparents can now record, remix, master and distribute a record off their MacBook Pro these days, so once again you may color me a heavy case of unimpressed. It might also be true that he has an unnatural vocal range that, at various points of my first encounters with the debut, made me ponder just how much progress the sex-change procedural has made these last few years and/or if it could be performed exclusively on the vocal cords. Then I began wondering who’d want that and ran screaming back to my dark lair. I’ll even go as far as to acknowledge the technical provess of the instrumentation performed on the record, but this is 2011 and you don’t score points for knowing how to play, not with the aforementioned MacBook Pro paradox and mindscrewing increase of sampling, which is not as much original re-envisioning of a bygone era, as it is being an utterly lazy bastard.

To sum up, I’ve grown to like Jacque Blaque quite a lot and as of this writing he’s got 166 plays in my iTunes, making this entire ranting one big piece of hypocrisy, which I guess is quite fitting as the divided parts of my mind are currently re-enacting the battle of Gettysburg in the name of Bames Jlake.

Ps. I’d love to tell you how the above picture of Blake and Tyler didn’t fuel my rage with enough metaphors to power & feed a substantial third world country for the next century or so, but that’d be a lie, and as the good little atheist I am, such is not really allowed.

Scribbles - Chew

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:32:00 +0200

“Meet Tony Chu. Tony Chu is almost always hungry, and almost never eats. Here’s why: Tony Chu is cibopathic. That means he can take a bite of an apple, and get a feeling in his head about what tree it grew from, what pesticides were used on the crop, and when it was harvested. Or he could eat a hamburger, and flash onto something else entirely. Strangely enough, the only food Tony Chu can eat and not get a psychic sensation from is beets. Consquently, Tony Chu eats a lot of beets.”

Yeah, I can’t sum it up better and if you aren’t running for the hills to get your greasy hands on Chew as of this moment, I’m quite sure you’ve followed my advice from the OFWGKTA review and gotten that frontal lobotomy. Good for you.

Chew is an indie comic, and whilst that might not make that fancy monocle of yours drop, you’ll quickly notice that this is an indie comic that is not falling over itself and the corpse of every other failed indie comic, to point a finger at all that is wrong in mainstream comics. That dastardly business of superheroes and such, which is apparently pure satanic evil printed on parchment made of the skins of african children and panda bears. No, Chew is quite too busy being quirky, and by quirky I mean on steroids, acid and whatever they feed David Lynch. Chew also has a fondness for teasing you, for issues on end, about some sort of important plot development that’ll have far-reaching consequences. Whereupon you’ll receive a solid sucker punch, with an electric knuckleduster for being stupid enough to think you’d get any. No really, this is a plot twisting and turning like a king cobra attempting electric boogie in the confined space of writer John Layman’s remaining sanity.

I’m not in the business of wholestory recaps, so here’s a quick primer, adding to the one you were handed at the start; The US has outlawed any and all kinds of aviary consumption, since a mysterious event somehow related to aforementioned avians killed a lot of people. Tony Chu is a gifted, not retarded, gifted, individual known as a cibopath, one of the many kinds of quasi-mutant powers encountered throughout the series, and is working for the FDA - a government body created entirely to enforce the ban, on supposed-to-be-avians-yet-only-chicken. When he’s not out being a superhuman Bond-ish agent, okay he’s actually rather unfortunate in the field compared to some of the supporting characters… he also has a personal life, though it rarely takes the wheel for more than a page or so.

Akin Animal Man, the art is essentially the estranged twin of the plot; quirky yet grim, detailed yet barren and above all indie like you wouldn’t know. With that said, Mr. Guillory, once you used the same page layout or pop-art background for every page, in every issue, in every storyline, it’s not so much consistency as it’s blatant jackassery. It’s like making a blog, intentionally to cover all kinds of pop culture and ending up as a generic, yet cynical, comic book worshipper’s… let’s move on…

As of this writing, Chew is 21 issues through, and is a prime example of the principle of inertia. The book works mostly on it’s solid and original characters, as well as it’s teasing bitch of a myth arc. I love the inherent insanity and depravity of the title, and the second I stop being relevant as a blogger and have to make a living off something else, it’d be prostituting my rectum to the entire team behind this book, indie or not. Just kidding, I don’t make any money off of this garbage.

Scribbles - Animal Man v1 #1-26.

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:29:00 +0200

Grant. Effing. Morrison. At his creative zenith; ripping apart genres, annihilating the fourth wall and screwing with his readers like nobody’s business.

Back in the mid- to late 80’s, DC had just rebooted their main universe with Crisis On Infinite Earths, and decided to recruit an army of british writers from the legendary british Sci-fi magazine 2000AD and give them their own imprint, from which they’d bring that zany british writing to american minds. It was an impressive gamble, trying to break the american comicbook industry’s collective writers block. One of these writers were Grant Morrison; proud glaswegian, madman extraordinaire and highlord of fourth wall deconstruction. He set his eyes on a fairly boring and unimportant character with the power of lending abilities from animals in near vicinity named, you guessed it, Animal Man. And to nerds such as myself, his run is like sex… well, actually it’s a lot better than sex, seeing how it doesn’t include performance-related embarrassment. To me personally, it’s the reason I’m a vegetarian and I consider it a huge influence on my critical approach to any media or artist. So let’s have a look.

(There will be spoilers left, right & jumping for their lifes from this point on, so if you’d prefer to have your mind violated by someone, other than yours truly, you have been warned.)

Buddy Baker is the titular Animal Man, and more than anything about the character, Morrison gets that he is not a world-saving, face-melting, anti-emotional übermensch, un-relatable in every way imaginable. He is an average guy with some semi-spectacular powers, who has a loving wife and two children, and that’s what makes him so likeable. He experiences, reflects, contrasts and interprets the events of his superheroing in the same way any man would, were he to have superpowers thrust upon him. Well, most, if not all, of aforementioned events are related to animal rights and the ethics concerning them, and whilst Morrison isn’t exactly known for his objective and unbiased reasoning, it never gets preachy. As of the first reading, the book will feel like a series of problem of the week until it diverges halfway through and heads for an overarching plot. On closer inspection, however, it becomes quite clear that Morrison always knew where he was headed. The halfway mark occurs once the book becomes meta-textual, and minds will be screwed. In the end, this is an emotional and resonating book, it takes your attention hostage and is likely to return it in less than decent shape, once it’s finished playing rugby with your emotional spectrum and using your established values as the piece of cheap toilet paper it rightfully is.

Meticulously going through all 26 issues would take a minor civil war, with half of it being spent on sitting catatonic in front of my screen, so I’ll be running through some, of the many highlights:

If the first four issues, establishing the basis of the series’ themes moving forward, didn’t give you a clue, issue five is more than happy to; this book is meta. So very meta. And in this issue we get to meet Wile E. Coyote ! … who, you ask? Yeah, why bother googling it… It’s the coyote, constantly trying to kill/catch/cook the roadrunner, in classic Looney Tunes stories. In this instance, though, he’s apparently the devil. Or so, the random crazy guy, employing Wile’s own methods against him, would have us think. To be honest, you’ll have to be a bloody art-, literature- & psychology major in order to have the slighest clue as to what’s going on in this issue. Not to mention cooked up on drugs and highly delusional from hiding in your parents basement for all those years…. Right, getting off track… it’s an early taste of the pure insanity that is Grant Morrison, and it’s awesome, even if you don’t get it. Here’s the last page:

Moving on to issue 7, we get one of the few, if not the only emotional depiction of a supervillain, ever. Animal Man encounters Red Mask; an average fellow who touched a fallen meteor, in hope of getting superpowers and become a hero. Instead he got a death touch, a horrible ability that’s pretty much ruined his life, and now he’s contemplating suicide after having unleashed a horde of killer robots he won in a game of supervillain poker. Instead of merely kicking his ass and throw him in jail, Buddy attempts to talk the poor man out of suicide, promising to use his contacts in the media to help get Red Mask on television - his fondest wish. Unfortunately Buddy has to leave after he’s made his promise; after all, those killer robots are butchering civilians by hundreds. The ending, which I wont spoil here, is very emotional and any writer in the business should read it or face a firing squad.

Recapping issues from this point on would be a sin, so immense, that even I can’t commit it, hence I’ll do a brief roundup, and once I’m finished you have better be searching the internet for this masterpiece.

….Wait, what ? You want to know about the art? Urgh. Listen, fella, I’m not really an expert on art - I can tell you what I like and what I don’t like, but that is it. This art is good; realistic, yet still cartoony. Which is exactly alike the writing, so hey there you go. Now stop buggering me, and go find that one art student we both know you shamefully consider part of your inner-circle.

Among the list of things previously thought, and proven, impossible to do with comic book plots, this run manages to do succesfull, you’ll find an enjoyable tie-in issue, a haunting guest appearance from a major heroes’ rogues gallery (pictured above) and an engaging plot for the supporting gallery. Now, Previously I described Grant Morrison as being the “highlord of fourth wall deconstruction”, which I realise now, was an immense mistake on my behalf… as is usually the case. You see, Grant Morrsion doesn’t deconstruct. No, sir, that kind of approach is for the riff raff writing indie comics and/or trying to force individual opinion upon the zombified readers of mainstream comics. And you better believe Mr. Morrison doesn’t belong with them. Instead, he prefers to pull a Hiroshima (what do you mean that’s an inappropriate reference?!), and nuke the fourth wall to Kingdom Come, har de harr harr pun intended, and back. And while it’ll probably take some time to understand just what the hell is going on, you’ll be left with a valuable lesson in terms of approaching the medium moving forward.

Above every other piece of brilliance the mad glaswegian has conjured, this is the work any will refer you to, and rightfully so. It’s an emotional rollercoaster. It’s an extensive headscratcher. It’s a thought provoker of proportions. It’s one of those rare arguments, we comic nerds will pull out when discussing the medium’s validity in context to others, such as films or novels.

Vibrations - M.I.A.

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:26:00 +0200

Somehow, if an artist has enough shock value, he/she/it will blow the ever loving crap out of the musical tastemakers and acquire a massive following of teens trapped in adult bodies, alike charismatic politicians or Jason Cameron post-Avatar. In case you haven’t read the title, since you’re obviously too busy with your important and exciting life and just happened upon this post on your way to the military state of internet-importance, today we’re talking about the demigod of hype and double standards; M.I.A.

Now, if you’ve read my thoughts on OFWGKTA, you’ll have learned the hard way that I live and breathe cynicism like there’s no tomorrow. Still, I’m normally all for changing the world to a better place, especially as I can’t see it getting much worse, but once you jump off the SS Idealist, for the sake of swimming in the endless seas of major label cash it traverses, you might as well have just painted a giant bullseye on your forehead for all the despicable beings such as myself to aim at.

Madame Controversy herself seems to have noticed that no single aspect of her musical style has enough format or depth to carry anything with a mass exceeding a feather in zero gravity. Hence she will clusterfuck you with “experimental” instruments, political them-…. unresolved childhood issues, disguised as politically charged lyrics, in a veil so thin that even a professional runway model would consider it ghastly, and a voice, remastered to the point that it somehow caused my ears to exhume anatomically impossible amounts of pure, undistilled diarea, first time I heard that one hit sampling automated rifles. The visual representation of the sonic nightmare, pictured above, is likely to give any concertgoer eleven kinds of epilepsy, before the first chorus has violated your ears, and it’s more than certain, that the aforementioned masochist of a concertgoer will be able to play a succesfull game of political-imagery-cliché-bingo, using nothing but her various outfits. But, if you trust music critics, she’s the patron saint of world peace through music and her message is as pure and divine as it’s controversial and trendsetting, which is essentially Not. One. Fucking. Bit.

As is usually the trend with internet sensations, she’s been hailed as one of the most influential and important musicians of her decade, thus supposedly M.I.A. owns the 00’s, which, if true, has killed my faith in humanity’s cultural development. Thankfully, the blogosphere somehow collectively revised it’s position on Maya, when she went too far with her “creative direction” on her latest album, aptly titled MAYA, which has had the same effect on her career as heavy artillery bombardement on a kindergarten during naptime. She also has an immense fondness for bashing other artist. I’m guessing it’s a trick to achieve more underground cred, with her sticking it to the man and all, but it all gets a little confusing once you take her own lifestyle and image into account. Mind you, she is the proud owner of a fanbase, so rampant that it’s the only one I can imagine, that could ever rival that of Jensen Ackles. Hence I will be camping out in my local nuclear shelter for the coming weeks.

Vibrations - OFWGKTA

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:57:00 +0200

There’s no better way to gather an enormous, albeit intellectually challenged, following than embracing the hypest of hypes with your own not-quite-original angle. So, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All Don’t Give A Fuck Litter Life Bacon Boys Loiter Squad Butt Fuck Bitch Niggas, henceforth referred to as OF, let’s dance.

I’ll be brutally honest, and admit that even I, gloriously nihilistic though I might be, was on the bandwagon at first too. This gang encapsulates and/or generates every aspect of the blogospheres’ current assessment of a contemporary lifestyle. So what is OF? Well, besides being a great measurer of the amount of time a given person spends on the internet, it’s a skateboarding and hip-hop (we’re using that term very loosely, mind you) collective, emulating everything Wu-Tang did for hip-hop some 20 years ago. The list of things I wrote with secondary and even tertiary problems I have with OF is too long, and will discourage those few crazies still reading, from finishing off or recommending this post to any of his or her equally crazy pals in crazy town, so let’s go for the primary. TRYING TOO HARD.

You see, Tyler, The Fanbase Masturbator and his merry band of brothers are, whilst poignant and attempting originality, but a bunch of immature kids, trying their best to invoke the expression Refuge In Audacity, to its fullest. Their base must be made up of those despicable teens that used to organize, attend and enjoy the living fuck out of the unholy marriage of Shonen Manga and Nu-metal dubbed AMVs. And you better believe I hate that kind of human garbage with a passion. Most, if not all lyrical motivation on any given OF record or mixtape can be summed up as doing it for the sake of being evil. Not that your average fanboy will notice that, seeing as he’s probably too busy hyping the group on a social network or screaming swag, hard enough to propel his own lungs through his throat. Moving on, Homophobia isn’t the tastiest of materials, especially not when you portray your own avatar as being a staunch homophobe with about as much respect for women as Jack The Ripper, with equally homicidal tendencies, turned up to eleven, as if it wouldn’t be swag enough without a dash of grim and gritty 21^st century-feel. Trying to glue your immature slurs together with a thinly veiled concept-arc of self-exploration should carry a death sentence for so many reasons, and yet, it moved something in my rotten core, that can only be described as sympathy for Tyler, The Meme Generator, as I’m guessing he’s rapidly running out of creative shortcuts. Speaking of which, I’m quite sure the dramatic effect of Niggah, Fuck & Bitch has started to experience heavy inflation, and that’s leaving the constant daddy-issues out of the equation.

All right, all right, I can’t trick you, you gloriously intellectual you, who’ve noticed how I’ve dedicated all my time to Tyler, The Oedipus Complex, as opposed to my title clearly stating that these are my thoughts on the collective. Well, my dear reader, who’s affection I do so crave, that’s simply because the rest of them are, to be kind, a bunch of drooling puppies following King Tyler, The This-Shtick-Has-Lost-Its-Charm, to the end of the galaxy, were he to take them, the gloriously self-proclaimed unicorn. So let’s sum them up quickly and be done with this:

· Earl Sweatshirt: by far the strongest lyricist, yet unfortunately caught in the maelstrom that is his elder brothers’ creative vision.

· Hodgy Beats: Mediocre at best, a promoted hypeman at worst.

· Frank Ocean: Likeable, if only for the fact that he’s Leonard Cohen with a dirty, dirty mind and a penchant for drugs.

· Mellowhype, The Jet Age Of Tomorrow, Domo Genesis & Mike G: I would tell you that these are reserved for the hardcore fans, but if you are indeed one of those, then I guess the only advise I can give to you is a frontal lobotomy.

If you want original, thought provoking and/or plain nice and catchy hip-hop or rap, there are mountains of artists out there, ready to blow that incredible mind of yours. OFWGKTA just isn’t one them. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go Free Wi-.. I mean Earl.