On, yeah that ;)

Well, I genuinely think there are some moments that are custom made for louder on that album. Really, part of what's so surprising about your disapproval of the record is that when I hear it I think, "man, Louder's gonna dislocate a shoulder throwing his hands up to this shit!"

I'm going to go back to only paying attention to Kanye as an artist. I'm dropping his Twitter feed (I've already thrown some well intentioned but still somewhat scathing remarks at him in the past 24 hours), because I think paying attention to the non-musical elements of his crazy nature makes it harder to like him. Even for me. So I'm issuing an era of Kanye radio silence. I will reconsider if he Fucking allows me to buy the album that I've worn my thumbs out promoting, praising and defending over the last five days (goddamnit Kanye!!) For now though, I'm going back to where it all started. The media coverage and the constant tweets and new/rehashed articles do impact people's opinions.

I think Rolling Stone is partly to blame for the album being so polarizing. They wrote that article saying, essentially, that he was done, that he was ripping off Max B, that this album would disappoint... Kanye certainly read that, and what do you know? A few days later he's changing the title and switching the album around and trying to avoid the fate that RS had predicted. He got all nervous about his legacy and sales and being labeled "done" that he's now too afraid to release the album, fearing, most likely, that it will be his first non #1 record or undersell Yeezus (which statistically speaking, it probably will do... ESPECIALY if he *only releases it on fucking TIDAL so that he has no chance of getting high sales.)

I just watched that Taylor Swift video that won the "best music video" award. I didn't even realize Kendrick dropped a verse on Bad Blood!

It is a strong song. So is "Out of the woods." She's got a booming voice. I hate the way she always pouts for the camera. It's disgusting and absurd. I also hate how people freak the fuck out when she strums a few guitar chords. "Oh my god, she is so much better than Beyoncé because she does it all herself! Go feminism!!!" Yeah, well, perhaps she shouldn't... Perhaps she should consider hiring The-Dream or John Legend to write some more interesting lyrics for her.

I've never seen the video, but "Bad Blood" is awesome. I loved 1989 honestly.

I sat through the mindnumbing SUCK that was the Grammys last night.

So much suck.


What I HATED,
-Taylor Swift sucked shit, and was boring as fuck with her stupid "music."

-Fuck the Eagles, fuck Glenn Frey, let dad-rock die. James Taylor lost his voice years ago.

-While I admire the man, Kendrick Lamar's "performance" sucked. It was supposed to be transgressive but instead was muddled. I feel there is a very fine line between rap and spoken word shit, and I FUCKING HATE SPOKEN WORD SHIT "poetry". Besides, how transgressive and militant and "real" can you be when the entire thing is vetted and approved by the oligarchs at CBS and the Recording Musicians Academy? Fake.

-What was up with Ice Cube's fat son flashing a handful of rings like he was selling for TV Johnny Jewelry? That shit was stupid. Were they Super Bowl rings?

-Lady Gaga and her goddamn "tribute" to David Bowie had too many songs, and it LOOKED stupid once the camera pulled back. I would have loved her to pick two songs, an early one and a late one, and then SING THE SHIT OUT OF THEM. Besides, it goes to prove my long-standing contention that David Bowie's music is boring, vanilla, standard 4/4 basic chord progression CRAP, and that without the facade of his image, style, and showmanship, the music does NOT HOLD UP.

-The Weeknd, who was supposed to perform a duet with Lauryn Hill, had to instead do a very slow and dull rendition of Feel My Face, slow and dull ON PURPOSE because otherwise the stupid ballad he sung right afterwards would have seemed even more boring and turgid and deflating. Fuck Lauyryn Hill too. Her music sucks and the Fugees suck.

-The "tribute" to Lionel Richie started off great and sank into massive suck, kind of like Lionel Richie's career....

Things I found funny

-Drunk ass Selena Gomez, drunk AF before the show even began, looked a hot mess next to T Swift, and introduced the Weekend horribly.

-The camera angles on Taylor Swift, used to hide the fact that she is a terrible live performer, cannot dance, and has the gangly uncoordinated limbs of a statuesque lesbian basketball player.

-The geriatric "Hollywood Vampires", who performed a boring ass song of their own, then jumped right into Ace of Spades and only played like 1/3 of it, leaving out the most iconic Lemmy line, "I know I'm going to lose / Cuz gambling's for fools / but that's the way I like it baby / I don;t want to live forever." Pathetic. So much pyro and FAKE pyro on screens behind them....trying to hide their old-folks home postures

-My wife asking me if the singer for Alabama Shakes is encephalitic.


This I did Like

-I have heard the Alabama Shakes perform Dont wanna fight no more before, and I always dig it.

-Chris Stapleton played a great tune and made me wish they played country music like that on the radio, instead of that horrendous shit that Carrie Underwood and her husband play.

-I am not a fan of a cappela anything, but I enjoyed the simple tribute by Pentatonix and Stevie Wonder, done at the last second, and they showed that a good song carried itself, especially if you have a musician as talented as Mr. Wonder doing it justice.

all in all it was a goddamn nightmare.....

now that's the Rob I know.

My homegirl said Gaga was a personification of a bad coke binge.. i said more like an incarnation of that sticky yellow hood cavie!

Gaga's whole Bowie schtik was hurried, disjointed, and thematically horrible, and if you paid attention to the "commercials" you saw that Intel and Gaga have a tie-in where you can watch a "documentary" of the process to making this horrendous David Bowie tribute. That commercial and the images in it were better than the performance.

More Grammy shit I hated

- LL Cool J and the grammy producers insisting on introducing each new performer as "about to create a grammy moment" and introducing the whole show with endless hyperbole such as "the world's musical heroes are gathered here tonight". Fucking loser fuck. Go back to goddamn NCIS LOs Angeles....

-Three and a half hours and they gave away 6 awards.

-Having those two douchbags get up and rant for 5 minutes about how streaming sites are hurting musicians and that musicians need to make a living irritated me, and then they just jumped right in to the dead-musicians/music biz people tribute

Now that my hype has died down a bit, I think Kendrick's previous performances (of Untitled 1 and 2) were better than the Grammys one (Untitled 3).

the Grammy's barely even approaches the world of hard trap beats I have been existing in thanks to this thread....

Why the hell did you sit there and subject yourself to this for three and a half fucking hours man? What the hell? I haven't actually watched the Grammys since I was boy, and was all, "oh please let NIN win another best alternative rock performance Grammy! Oh please let them beat Tori Amos!"

Actually probably earlier than that. I'd rather watch Friends for fuck's sake. Friends!!

Hell yeah, bro.

Hey man... Do you think you're ready for another book recommendation from your boy me?
I have a title in mind. I think I may have mentioned it in passing before, but it's dark ass existential science-fantasy/horror that read like Dickens, so right up your alley. It's also notoriously difficult, and I know you live for "difficult" reading.
I really hope you take me up on this.

Friends!! hahaha! I think I was too lit on Colorado loud to change the channel...

it was brutal though.....

I got Shadow & Claw, the first half of the Book of the New Sun tetralogy... main character is named Severian.......

You do listen!!!!

Read that shit my friend. You'll thank me. If it feels like it doesn't make sense from time to time, you're doing everything right. Just keep moving.

Can't wait to hear what you think. If you finish it you will be only the second person I've ever known to do so.

that sounds daunting..... ;)

Well, ok... So I went balls out on the book, changed my life. Recommended the Book of the New Sun to every avid reader I knew. Especially folks that have an interest in psychology, philosophy, theology and dark ass shit. I managed to spark the interest of many people, but nobody except for my girlfriend actually finished the BOtNS, and not even she read the coda fifth book that came out like 20 years later, nor did she read the overlapping series (Book of the Long Sun, Book of the Short Sun). But just by reading Shadow of the Torturer - Citadel of the Autarch, she made it three and half novels farther than a former professor of mine who taught classes on Campbell and Jung, and had two doctorates.

Not saying it's only for smart people, because if that were the case, she would have made it through. But it's not for pussy ass casual readers. That's for damn sure. You've got to have the brain for navigating prose that doesn't give you the luxury of setting up everything for you. You kind of just have to follow the story as it unfolds, and not get discouraged when you run into things that don't add up (one person I gave it to- a hardcore Lovecraft fan- abandoned it after 30 pages and said it was "just fantasy" ... All I'll say is that he couldn't have been more wrong. He wanted more hard-fi shit, or something more epic, and he would have been blown away if he hadn't pussed out.)

Reading it is like solving a mystery, really. But the main character is so well constructed that he burrows down into your soul. He's the Holden Caulfield of dark theological science fiction. Also, he's a professional torturer who has a perfect and limitless memory! As long as you're able to let your imagination fill in a lot of blanks, and your comfortable with not knowing what time, place, setting, or environment the characters you're reading about are actually in, then it's a goddamn blast. Witty and horrifying and ingenius.

NPR ranked it as the #4 greatest sci-fi/fantasy book of all time several years ago. Oddly, it's prequel/sequel Book of the Long Sun took the #1 spot. This shit beat Tolkien, Lewis, Lovecraft, Bradbury... Gene Wolfe is one of the most underrated American authors in history.

Anyway .... anyone listen to the new Knxwledge album yet?

Man I need to check myself more often. This isn't an appropriate thread for treatises on literary science fiction. I should probably delete that, but I am desperate for someone to talk to about the book; so desperate that ima go head and leave that ^ shit there on the off chance that someone reads it and gets interested. I've given this book to so many people, and my girlfriend is sick of talking about it with me, the poor dear.

... Anyway, I really trust your literary instincts so I think pushing it on you is a pretty good move. Thank you for picking up the first volume of the tetralogy. F thanks for reading AREA X too, by the way.

Maybe you should recommend something to me. If you read ... New Sun, I'll read *anything* you ask me to.

let me see what happens...... ha!

You know what's really weird? Even though Future has been the object of a great deal of smack talking on my part, and I've said several times that he's gone to shit since Honest (except for those hot tapes), I out DS2 on the other day and it didn't eat nearly as much shit as I thought it did.

Now I'm playing Evol just to give myself a breather from Pablo, and ... you know, there's plenty of crap on here, but there's some fire too. "Lie to Me" is a legitimately good song. And "Seven rings" is just dumb fat beat fun. I don't hate it! I REALY wish he'd give actual rapping a shot for once, but whatever.

"Photo copied" has a really good sample, reminds me a bit of Timbaland.

Of course all of it is redundant as hell. Makes me thankful for that everything-and-the-kitchen-sink quality that TLOP has, because if you get sick of one Future song, there's no real skipping forward to something different. Sick of a song means sick of the album and probably sick of Future for a while.

But this is WAY better than Wiz's new album. Which is an absolute stinker and actually makes me a little sad.

questions, with no answers....

Kendrick Lamar is the James Joyce of Hip Hop

Are you trolling or do you really feel that way?

Because NR and I had a conversation a while ago about To Pimp A Butterfly where we said the exact same thing. That and that TPAB was the Ulysses of hip-hop albums.

:confused: Serious question:

Does anybody listen to "indie" hip-hop at all anymore?

There was a time when I felt like the underground was the only place where substance could be found in the genre. The alt-rap dudes. The Dels and Clouddeads and the Soles and Blackaliciouses of the world. Anticon. Atmosphere. Blu-blah blah.

I haven't listened to anything like that in ages and ages. I still throw on Blazing Arrow every once in a while, but it's been a bit since I've had any desire to listen to that uber serious Selling Live Water crunchy roll crap.

With artists like Kendrick in the mainstream, who the hell needs a bunch of guilty white guys rapping about their guilt over what sounds like 764-hero music?

:confused:

Severian.. in your bitching and moaning about Taylor Swift you conveniently forgot to mention that Kendrick won FIVE other Grammys... so..............

although if memory serves, we were comparing it rather unfavorably to Ulysses haha. Like "yeah I recognize it's a masterpiece... but it feels like work rather than fun."

is Run The Jewels considered indie? I'm not even sure.

"when they say I don't respect the culture
truth is I only rap cuz I'm not smart enough to write a book"

for me, I was all about indie rap (and Ghostface) until I got bit by the Southern hip hop bug via Dedication 2/Carter II.

oh shit you got me on this Sole track man

"Always wanted to be a rapper
But when I finally made it there, no one wanted me
Since no one wants me here
In the immortal words of Ice-T:
"You should have killed me last year."

anyway, I was a huge indie hip hop obsesso back in college man. Anticon, Def Jux, Mush, Rhymesayers, all that.

Jay Electronica is going at Kendrick now and threatening to destroy TDE..

Ugh. Must say I'm very disappointed in this guy who once had the potential to be the greatest rapper of our times.

What's TDE?

Yeah, that's true. And hey, it's fine! Yay. Good. But that's doesn't change the fact he should have won the only Grammy anyone ever talks about after the fact.

I'm not bitching about Taylor Swift, btw. I'm bitching about the people who pick the winners. Taylor didn't do anything wrong.

Top Dawg Entertainment: Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, Isaiah Rashad..

Me too man. Me too. Why? Themselves. Sole. Even J5. I was all about the backpacks.

And Can Ox (still love), and Comoany Flow, MF DOOM (who I still fucking LOVE, but where has he been? Is he ever coming back?!)

I still played Jay and Wu and Big all the time, but I really went through a phase there where I thought those three were the only popular rap artists worth listening to.

Ghost posted this on his FB page a few days ago:



Must mean DOOMSTARKS is coming soon, right? RIGHT??

Why is Jay electronica threatening to destroy a record label?

More importantly, why does a rapper who doesn't currently have a record label think that he *can* take down a record label?

I read about JE shit talking Kendrick. Didn't read about why, because it's another one of those candle wick trying to talk shit about the sun situations. But ... Why? I thought they were bros?

I like Jay Rock :)

I'm lost on Doomstarks. I have a Doomstarks mixtape that I've never really laid much attention to, and I have the Victory Lap EP. Why do I keep hearing that it "might happen" when my iTunes library says it already has happened? Is it just that a formal Lp was in the works and never came to fruition?

Love GFK and Doom, but this and NehruvianDoom both just kinda make me go "meh." I'd love for doom to do an actual follow up lp with Madlib. Or I dunno... Make another doom album. Collabs are great, but Doom used to be my favorite emcee and one of my favorite producers. I just want him to make a Born like This follow up.

LOL. Apparently he thinks Kendrick is overrated and doesn't mess with him musically. He said that no one knows what Kendrick is talking about on his songs and that he's begging for awards, both of those claims are false and misinformed but ah well.

Jay E is still signed to Roc Nation by the way, he's just forgotten because he doesn't release music besides the annual really damn good song. Hov loves him that much.

I think he's jealous of Kendrick because he could've been in his position but he messed up, and now he's about as significant as Canibus or Papoose. It's a damn shame. Hopefully he still releases his album this year though. I don't like him as a person anymore but I can't deny his talent.