-
Continue reading →: Singles 7/29
A Jay Z protege won the highest score, despite having little to say (life needs to catch up to his technique). I did laugh through Liz Phair’s very amusing joke, but like most jokes I don’t need to hear it twice. J Cole – Who Dat (7) Laura Marling –…
-
Continue reading →: Rumpled and worn: The Kids Are All Right
Paul Mazursky’s woolly, tumultuous comedies from the seventies (think Blume in Love and Harry & Tonto) have never been duplicated. The Kids Are All Right comes close. Although the movie shows no real visual flair — HBO could have aired this kind of medium shot pan-and-scan — I don’t see…
-
Continue reading →: Thursday — I don’t care about you
A track from one of the lesser albums by the premier album artist of the last ten years.
-
Continue reading →: Shabazz Palaces: A new refutation of time and space
I’m not the only one who wondered what happened to Digable Planets. Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) and Blowout Comb are still highly regarded, but as the jazz-inflected hip-hop scene out of which they arose ossified into nostalgia – I’m also not the only one whose first…
-
Continue reading →: I love you, but…
James Franco, smarter than he looks, cooler than he needs to be. I support his decision not to cooperate with this article.
-
Continue reading →: Just a thought
Replicas is stupid-cool (evocations of “dehumanized” sex and machine metaphors have never, ahem, started me up), and The Pleasure Principle is even shinier and better, but is that all there is to Gary Numan?
-
Continue reading →: C-90 Go!
Dumpster diving through my cassette collection yesterday afternoon, I found a ton of mixed tapes, recorded between 1987 and 1999. I always kept a blank C-90 by the stereo to record stuff from the college, Top 40, adult contemporary, and dance stations. Some of the recorded stuff — often in…
-
Continue reading →: Singles 7/22
The bottom three are so bad you really need to hear them once. As for The Arcade Fire, the leaked album has got me upset enough to tempt me into knocking “We Used to Wait” down a few pegs. Singles ranked from one to ten. Click on song title for…
-
Continue reading →: A boy’s best friend: Mother
A few years ago Korean director Bong Joon-Ho released The Host, about a sea creature who takes out his aggression, as the phrase goes, on a little girl and her family. Mother, his latest, is about the most frightening creature of all: a boy’s mother. When this mother (played by…
-
Continue reading →: Weather Report jazz guitars and Jadakiss!
My favorite review of the week: Jayson Greene’s take on the new Rick Ross album, the latter of which has the good fortune of including one of my summer jams, “Super High,” Ross’ collaboration with Ne-Yo.
-
Continue reading →: The politics of dancing: M.I.A.’s M^Y^
I’m going to act as if The New York Times Magazine story and Ann Powers‘ and Christgau’s reviews didn’t exist. Impossible to review M.I.A.’s MAYA in a vacuum, though. For one, vacuums trap light and emit no sound, and MAYA does no such thing. Her loudest, splashiest album, M.I.A. absents…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Humanizing The Vacuum 