- The 2007 album I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is one of my favorite albums ever. For real; no hyperbole. So when I saw El-P talking about putting the finishing touches on his next studio LP on the net — tentatively titled, but the title would remain, Cancer For Cure – I knew 2012 would be a good year for me musically. Then I bought the thing and it started with an ominous William S. Burroughs — my favorite writer ever; for real, no hyperbole — reading from his Nova Trilogy, I knew the album would be one of my favorites before barely a shred of material even hit my earholes. Let me back up though.
A great friend of mine heard the album before I did. No, not cause he torrented that low-quality, shit leak weeks in advance; because he pre-ordered the album and it came to his place a week beforehand. I didn’t because I miss buying albums the old fashioned way: waiting with anticipation for the release date (typically a Tuesday), then going to the record store and buying a copy without previously hearing any of it. His initial impression was that I might not like it as much as ISWYD because it lacked the progressive conceptualization of that album, and to a lesser extent El’s first solo-trek Fantastic Damage. He also said the features weren’t quite as jaw-dropping as ISWYD (Mars Volta blow me away every time). These things are true, but Cancer For Cure is still a hell of a victory in its own right.
The album is as cohesive — and definitely flows as well — as El’s previous albums, even if it is not as conceptual. Not a bad thing at all. And as much as I’d like to have seen C4C come across as the final piece in a trilogy of 2000′s albums for El, it’s refreshing to see him step so boldly into the post-DefJux, post-2000′s, latter-half, of his career. Lots of the reviews have been calling this “future music”. Though I would not argue with that description, El’s been banging out that brand of dystopian rap since Fantastic Damage. The obsession with paranoia, the nature of reality, and future landscapes has been there since he went a go at it himself; these themes, and many more science fiction based themes, appear vehemently on both his previous albums. This is not why C4C is “future music”, at least not for El. It’s future music because of what it represents to his already impressive catalog.
Easily and without question, this is El’s most accessible solo record. Accessible does not equal bad, accessible does not equal good. Accessible is a descriptive term on the nature of the sound, not of the artistic merit itself. You can very easily bang this album in your vehicle, with all the windows down, annoying someone next to you at a stop light who’s trying to carry on a cell phone convo. You can walk to it. Run to it. Shit, you might even be able to work out to it if you were inclined. Generally speaking, it is nod-your-head heavy shit: incredibly hard to play quietly, or dislike.
But not always. Flashes of that signature El-P break/coda/dreamscape production step in front of the rattle your teeth beats from time to time, always a welcome site. In fact, the end of the record might be my favorite third: a sort-of “cool down” period (maybe the work out thing is legit?) where C4C gets introspective and more complex musically. Feels good after being blasted to the ground and kicked in the ribs for 9 tracks or so. But before that we do get a little relief in short phrases and pieces throughout the disc.
That seems to me is the difference between C4C and ISWYD: the melodic breaks are still there, just not nearly as long (or, in some cases, repeated). This could be a lesson El learned on his last Megamix album: beats/phrases are presented to the listener, run through a single cycle, then shoved aside for the next thing in line. Probably what makes it so accessible. “You don’t like a certain section? Give me 30 seconds, you’ll have something else”.
C4C might not be the complex urban masterpiece of paranoia that ISWYD is, or the raw and unsettling post-9/11 triumph that FanDam is… but it certainly is it’s own complete and very well produced album, and probably as good as either of the other two. A very welcome addition to his impressive, if short, catalog. Here’s to hoping it isn’t another 5 year wait until El’s next solo adventure.
- New teaser trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson‘s next movie, “The Master”. It’s a bizarre looking film that looks to be chronicling the rise of L. Ron Hubbard and his church of Scientology in America. A fictional version of that, of course. But all I’ve got to say about this footage is HOLY SHIT JOAQUIN PHOENIX. Why did you ever stop acting and do that weird modern-art I’m-a-rapper thingy?? You’re too good.
Among the good economic institutions that motivate people to become productive are the protection of their private property rights, predictable enforcement of their contracts, opportunities to invest and retain control of their money, control of inflation, and open exchange of currency. For instance, people are motivated to work hard if they have opportunities to invest their earnings profitably, but not if they have few such opportunities or if their earnings or profits are likely to be confiscated.
- THOUGHT OF THE WEEK: If we look back at history, we see that previous versions of ourselves were ignorant on a whole plethora of topics. Nobody would dispute that we were wrong about all sorts of shit in the Middle Ages. So, why then does every single generation, decade, people think it knows everything? Every single one thinks it’s got it all figured out, from Science to Economics. Is it not extremely fucking naive to think we know anything?
More important than any of these preceding aspects, though, is the fact that Pynchon is a politically engaged, ethical writer. Gravity’s Rainbow is not just a dense, postmodern sprawl, but instead makes one of its central observations on the fact that the evil of mankind, parallel to nature, “does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation”, a spatio-temporal transposition to a new setting, persisting Beyond the Zero of any Pavlovian deconditioning, and always collecting around centres of power, embodied by the novel’s final, America-bound, transatlantic V-2/ICBM. Through this impossible moment, Pynchon highlights that behind twentieth-century America’s technological and economic supremacy lies the dark negotiations of Operation Paperclip and a re-embodiment of the right-wing politics supposedly vanquished in the Second World War.
- The BBC should be switching the word “wimps” for “addicts” when discussing the abuse of prescription pain killers in the United States, the “Nation of Wimps”. The USA consumes 80% of the world’s pain killers. And maybe we are complete pussies, but I personally know several people who have been, or are, addicted to pain killers (one being a former employer). It’s a big problem. We don’t think twice about it because, hey… ya know, a doctor told me to take these so it’s okay right? Getting prescribed something from a doctor certainly makes it more acceptable, but not necessarily more safe. As the BBC video and accompanying article explain:
“Prescription drug abuse is the fastest growing drug abuse in the USA with more overdose deaths than heroin and cocaine combined.”
- Currently going through a huge Buck 65 kick. This song is awesome:
- Updates on Ridley Scott’s upcoming projects. Including a sequel to Blade Runner (or… “spin-off”), a Prometheus sequel, and some sort of thriller with a script written by Cormac McCarthy. I’m so glad he got all that epic, historical war shit out of his system.
“Because you see, there are two worlds out there. There’s your world, which is all about you and the people you know and everything else that’s going on in your life. And then there’s the actual world, which doesn’t give two shits about your problems and is ALWAYS GOING ON. Even when you think there’s nothing happening out there in the rest of the world, like on a slow news day, there are trillions of things happening—people being born and people dying and people fucking. It doesn’t stop just because you had a bad day. It doesn’t even know you had a bad day. You are barely a hair on its balls, and that’s a good thing. Because it’s always there for you when you need it. I needed it that night because I needed a distraction from all the fear and worrying. I needed to know that there was someplace else for me to go for a second to get away from myself, to pull myself out of that blackness and be part of something that was still alive, still fucking massive.“
- The Immortal, life support machines keeping each other alive.
- Though I do appreciate Jaime Dimon going on Meet The Press and admitting that he and his company made mistakes, I don’t appreciate that he acted like $2 billion vanishing into thin air is not a big deal. It was never my money, of course. But $2 billion dollars could do a whole lot of good in the world. I’ve heard investors say, “well, the entire investment was estimated around $100 billion, so 2% out of that is not a very big loss”. This is the attitude that people don’t like, this is precisely it. This idea that they play in the sandbox with millions more toys than the rest of us, yet they act like our sandboxes are one in the same. No one can relate to it. No one sees these guys as regular people. But, I suppose this is just the nature of capitalism. No matter how much bigger and better toys you have in your sandbox, I’m supposed to relate to you, cause it’s all for the greater good.
“While the behavioural sciences are of limited help on the ethics involved, the claim that multi-million pound pay packages boost performance is a separate and testable assertion. Performance-related pay has become so deeply ingrained that few question it. Most of us assume that offering people bigger financial rewards means people try harder. However a growing body of research in the fields of psychology and economics, and more recently neuroscience, paints a more complex picture of the relationship between money, motivation and performance.”
The policy options to address today’s money-in-politics problems have been curtailed by five Supreme Court Justices, but there are still constitutional actions state legislators, federal regulators, Congress and the President can undertake to address the issue. This is not the time for a do-nothing government to sit by as elections go dark, and Super PACs become the new normal. Democracy has a right to defend itself from corruption, both the venal quid pro quo variety and the equally insidious strain of expenditures for access.
- Interview with Robert Kirkman at CBR. In it he discusses the upcoming 100th issue milestone of Walking Dead, why he thinks the series is so popular, and how he legitimately thinks issue #100 features the most gruesome scene of the series’ long history. If you’ve read even 50% of the book, you know how stirring of a statement that actually is.
As the film progresses, action and suspense are chased and harried with mounting moments of levity, monologues, and convenient conflict resolutions. Those convenient conflict resolutions showed themselves again and again in how superhero fights were ended in the film. Most of the fight scenes had no pay off because of the state of the people fighting, a situation completely absent in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. During the diverse fist-a-cuffs between members of the eventual The Avengers team, nothing is really at stake, except in one of the fights (Hulk vs. Black Widow) and that fight, theoretically, should have had a different conclusion. With everyone’s super powers, no one can be hurt or killed so there is nothing at risk (except property damage) and nothing to lose. The viewer seats and watches colorful crash dummies throw each other through walls or into inanimate objects.
But… it goes on to say:
If The Avengers is an exercise in escapism like most “tentpole”, “popcorn” films and how could it not be deemed as such, these quips and qualms are irrelevant.
Exactly. My thoughts exactly. I went into the movie with the expectation of watching a super awesome nerd-gasm inducing action flick (featuring some of the biggest names in comics), and that’s what I got. However, that does not mean that I still was a little disappointed with aspects of the film. The world never actually feels that threatened. Neither the heroes. It’s something easily forgivable considering this is the first go of it. But if Joss Whedon is going to do 3 of these things, it would do him (and whoever else scripts) a whole lotta good to up the tension a bit. I mean, the middle segment on the Hellicarier was more tense than the final scene. Much more. That’s the vibe ALL of the 2nd one should have.
The facility was large enough for one Star Destroyer analog or several smaller capitalships. The station had the capacity to host many crew and technicians, but only 50 were permanently stationed there. When more were required, they were shuttled up from the surface of the planet, where many smaller repair jobs were also carried out.[1]
Doesn’t the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost productivity of an entire planet? They were presumably paying taxes and providing resources to the rest of the Empire. Presumably the loss of that planet’s output would have to be made up by increased output from other planets that were either slacking in productivity due to rebellion or threatening to rebel and withdraw from the Empire altogether. It doesn’t seem to make good economic sense.
- Information Is Beautiful is an excellent website, if you’ve never heard of it. They pledge to give readers “ideas, issues, knowledge, and date – visualized”. And they do. They compiled a comprehensive list of Logical Fallacies recently and it’s something everyone should look at to be sure you’re not using any of these in your daily conversations, writing, or thoughts. Here’s an example, but they have so many more (such as appeals to the mind and appeals to emotion):
CUM HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC – Claiming two events that occur together must have a cause-and-effect relationship (correlation = cause). “Teenagers in gangs listen to rap music with violent themes. Therefor, rap music inspires violence in teenagers.“
Or, “… Therefor, all rap music has violent themes.“ This fallacy falls under the sub-genre “Garbled Cause & Effect”.
Neither. Messy, unexpected, and increasingly complex.
In the past few years, we’ve explored a range of possible futures, from the dystopian business model of ARK-Inc to the hopeful, humane crowdsourced futures of the Power of 8.
Positioned as a radical and alternative investment company, ARK-Inc by Jon Ardern was a superfiction, envisaging products and services for a post-crash civilisation. ARK-Inc’s stable of products included a short-wave radio that, in event of a disaster, enabled encrypted transmission and two-way communication between other ARK members, a series of books that help mediate one’s response to disaster, and disaster tourism services that helped users adjust to the idea of a looming collapse.”
- John Peel’s record collection. And it isn’t even done being archived yet. Damn. Apparently he had around 25 thousand LP’s 40-some thousand singles, and “several thousand” CD’s. Plus the site itself is really well designed, like being transported to the place he broadcasted and listened to all that music over the years. “The Space”.
I know there’s a whole shitload of record collections out there. And especially amongst the DJ’ing type, where they’ve got a basement full of shelving up to the ceiling. But I thought this was a cool picture. Apparently it’s Madlib’s collection, and it weighs 4 tons:
Madlib’s 2010 idea of releasing an album every month — the project was dubbed “The Medicine Show” — was clever. From what I took away from it, he essentially dug through his record collection by genre, then made break-beat type records zeroing in on one particular style. So he’s got an album that’s all Brazilian music, one that’s African music, there’s even one that’s “psychedelic, progressive and hard rock & funk circa 1968–1976″. It’s a great idea. And something more DJs with assloads of records should look into.
- So I’m absolutely going to go see theAvengers, no question. And I’m sure with Joss Whedon at the helm quite a bit of focus will be put on character, importantly. But I don’t know why everyone’s making such a big deal about it “outdoing” Dark Knight Rises, especially before either has even come out. I’ve heard and read so many people lately talking about how they’re doing such a better job promoting it, and how the trailers are soooo much better and all this. Dude, it’s a movie… like, can’t we judge what’s “better” based on what’s the better movie. Wait a second, it isn’t even about “better”. These are two completely different things. Avengers is your razzle-dazzle ZOMGIronManvsThor?!!!? action flick and Batman is… well, more of a film’s film. Cause seriously, in the end, I would be shocked if TDKR wasn’t the better movie on the whole. And maybe everyone is off the C. Nolan bandwagon, I dunno. I’d be fine with that. Maybe even a little bit happy.
- Yesterday between working on my shit I made a quick remix for Texture’s next release, a trilogy of EP’s as one and a slew of remixes and rarities. Which will be a treat, seeing all three of those together. I was telling him that I wanted it to come across as a little more haunting than it does, but I think it still gets the job done. Had a lot of fun tweaking with his line “nothing is sacred” by adding a whole ass load of modulation, pitch shift, and delay to provide some nice backing vocals for the refrain. The guitar could be tweaked a bit more, but I kinda like keeping guitars (for the most part) effect free. Really liking the tone of the new telecaster on this one. Check it out:
Be sure to look out for NEUROLEPTICA. I’ll likely be posting here as well.
- This is old. BUT, if Game Of Thrones was a 2-D fighting game (probably made by Capcom):
