Sugar thugs

Or Chris Brown, Sean Kingston, Jay Sean, Jason Derulo or even Lil' Wayne who is getting in on the act. There's a distinct effort to sell old fashioned R 'n B love songs to teenagers with some fresh, poppy production and bright colourful videos. Non-threatening, sensitive leading men are the bread and butter of such an effort, so Brown and currently incarcerated Lil' Wayne are struggling to be believable. There's no reason they can't graduate to lyrics about sex and drugs for a more adult market later. It's really a genius idea, marrying current production techniques and styles more often used for female artists to syrupy sweet content primed for teenage girls and gay men. Next, a racially diverse boyband with easily identifiable stock chararcters on the range between sweet kid and bad boy. It's the wave of the future.

Rappers need more Movie scores

I usually don't write about rap because most of it doesn't do anything for me. But since there's a full-on rap assault on mainstream pop going on, there's been some cool pop songs coming out and you find yourself looking up some songs. But this guy isn't really in that group, on the same label though. There's subtle auto-tuning for once and I like the way the rap is missing the beat until the syncopation sets in. But what I love is the orchestra sample, giving the whole thing a wonderful patina of early sixties movie cocktail parties. So many rappers are content to loop an abstract beat pattern and a minimalist sample and try to put all the expressive content in the lyrics, which stretches a lot of these guys' singing abilities past the breaking point. Auto-tune is a decent fix for this problem, but a richer, more layered sample gets the point across much better.

The Cult of Originality

That video was pretty original, wouldn't you say? But it's still self-consciously aping another type of show, even parodying it, and it's certainly not the first to do that. This is the problem with originality, truly totally original works are completely impossible to understand or relate to, there really is no appreciable difference between it and a complete non-sequitur. When talking about originality, you're really taking as a given that's still recognisable as being part of a genre, or an established body of work. We live in more reflective times than in the last century, there seems to be more nostalgia, more influence, more references than ever before. Unfortunately forthose enamoured with the new, this is what it's usually like. The last century saw some entirely new media coming to dominate, and because of that, originality was the in plentiful supply. Those days are over now, we've returned to the status quo of reference in art. But the sustained burst of originality has left us a little different. Reference, homage, parody, when recognised as such, is now less, not more. We're more like late-renaissance artists, in that there is a large past of original geniuses behind us, but we have superior tools and knowledge. In their case it was Christianity that made them superior to the heathens, in our case it's freely available knowledge and technology. But they were relatively humble, seeking to emulate, adding only Christian moral philosophy and emulating in every other aspect, we are still chasing that elusive phantom, the completely original work that everyone regognises as a masterpiece.

Are your kids old enough to learn about Cthulhu?

This just about takes the cake. H.P. Lovecraft's fantastic stories, though usually racist and unwieldy, almost always feature people going mad with the knowledge of older, as he would say eldritch, horrible creatures, to whom human beings are food. There's an endless parade of these creatures, but Cthulu is the famous one, even popping up in stories by Robert Howard and Clark Ashton, contemporary pulp-writers. This video blends the nauseating trend of 'baby' versions of known characters with it in a fantastic way. Hitting all the high points of the Ctulhu mythos and referencing the rest of Lovecraft's diverse collection of supernatural beings. The only one missing I'd still like to see is my favourite Shub-Niggurath, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. Anyway, this would make an awesomely subversive Saturday morning cartoon, kids need to know this stuff if they're ever going to summon a being from the beyond.

Why I hate Indie Music

That sketch is the reason in a nutshell. Supposedly music for white, middle class teenagers craving rebellion, most music that is described as 'indie' tends way more to soporific love songs or embarrassingly twee bullshit. This last decade the names have gone this route as well, so if you intend to listen to a single by The Disappointed Unicorns or Puppies and kittens fighting for candy, prepare to have all the enamel blasted off your teeth while a twenty-something hello-kitty enthusiast laments the bittersweet ending of a relationship with an emotionally unavailable woman in a nasal whine. Shouldn't music for people under thirty mostly be loud, stupid and appropriately horrifying to their parents? If this stuff becomes the music of the next generation, than it's finally happened to me, I will be a 28-year old man who despises youth culture and wishes kids would grow up and stop listening to that garbage. I'ts so terrible it's made me hate myself.

Beautiful Info

No video, but this website is amazing: Beautifulinformation.net. It's all about visualising all those numbers and statistics you hear into something where you can see what it means a bit better. This one in particular is astounding. Who knew saving the rain forest would only cost half of Bill Gates' money? Or that the global illegal drug market is comparable in size to the advertising industry? But there's more whimsical stuff too. Here's a timetravel guideline for a broad selection of popular culture. These are the kind of things that make you want to make piecharts of your daily activities.

Cover me with chocolate

A lot of music fans despise covers. They can ruin a good song, but so can the artist, really. The video above is an example of a great cover, in my opinion. A weird re-imagining of a terrible, but unforgettably catchy tune. It's the whole reason I love covers. No matter what you think of a song, a lot of them will get stuck in your head and never really leave. I remember a ton of cheesy 80's hits, because the music shows always started after the cartoons. But everybody remembers a lot of terrible stuff. Essentially that's all you really want out of music in everyday life, something recognisable. And the great thing about the cover is that it also gives you something new, not always good, but often.





In case you have no idea what this is covering:

What fresh hell is this?

A couple of years ago, I was sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'd seen or heard of any possible perversion the internet could produce. I was of course, wrong. I hadn't even scratched the surface. But this link at least covers hundreds of things I'm just not creative enough for. I think I can safely say I'd never considered romantic/sexual pairings between continents and elements from the periodic table. Or this:
"Summary: Neptune comforts Pluto when he is rejected as a planet. NeptunexPluto. Mild planet!slash.
Warnings: Personification of planets, planet!kissing, etc. Just...really, really out there."

I aim to proven wrong again this year...

Heaven knows I'm miserable now.

This is the first thing I play whenever I'm depressed, and it always cheers me up. I know I'm not exactly unique in this regard, and I hate most Smiths/Morissey fans on the Internet at least. For that matter, what I know about Morissey, I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire... unless he promised to get back together with Johnny Marr, that is. I think it's exactly that quality of self-serious, but clever goth poetry set to relatively happy, complex music that Makes snap out of any funk. At no point can you take your own problems seriously when you listen to someone describing the teenage woes of artistic souls this sarcastically. I love it so much, I can't even articulate it as well as someone whose music I unreservedly hate: