So I sat alone in the top row for the four and half hour long glow in the dark spectacular. Lupe Fiasco handled the stage well, his song intros were clunky at best, but once he got going he was pure, great energy. plus bonus points for coming out rapping over a justice beat to start the set! NERD, with a pissy pharrell complaining most of the time, rushing and forgetting the old songs and becoming distracted by every set of boobs in the crowd, in addition to their new stuff being a little questionable..i mean i'm still going to buy the new record and all. Rhianna nearly stole the show coming on before kanye. her soundsystem was thunderous, the bass was just disgusting and it was a revelation that she can actually sing! i'm a life long janet jackson fan, so my expectations of anything but adequate live singing are firmly in place. but rhianna is definitely ready for the big stage once she has a couple more hits. kanye's one man, lonely space boy show was an oddity to be for sure. i can't wait to watch a dvd of the set to soak it in. up above, you could see the sides of the stage, so any submersion in the show was kinda impossible. as always the joy of kanye is seeing his big ideas never quite working out as grand as he envisioned, but god bless him, god bless kanye west.

the album i anticipate most this calendar year is this one. i count the days.

its a nice filthy little robo jam i say, despite the critics saying its just a shot for some mainstream success. well whatever, it looks like its working on the itunes chart...

I don't know how much radio play its going to get though...

Don't forget about The Little Ones new EP available on itunes! And if you say, only have 99 cents to your name, my personal favorite is Unlock the Door...you can also buy it here..http://littleones.shop.musictoday.com/

is definitely worth checking out. Its a pretty great comedy in a very dry time for the genre, and I dare say superior to superbad and knocked up in regard to coming from the apatow camp.....

For me, Wong Kar Wai makes perfect movies. From the initial two minutes I was completely sucked in. I would have liked to watch Norah Jones travels across the country for hours and hours on end. Wong Kar Wai's movies exist in the dirtiest of night in cafes and bars and casinos and his style, the photography in his movies (usually by master Christopher Doyle, he's only given partial credit on this one though) is so underexposed and cranked up in post it creates eerie slo-mo shots the drift on, painting with the heavy grain. It's strange that a forty something man from Hong Kong so spot on sees the world the same way I do. He gives you dramatic nights, quiet mornings and intensely realistic romance that no one else's movies can touch. Music as always is heavily present. In this one, each segment has a theme song on loop. The first being Cat Power's 'The Greatest' and Chan Marshall herself even shows up in a very important cameo later. The risk of casting Norah Jones completely pays off as well, she is completely natural and devastatingly cute and honest. Something new for a Kar Wai movie, usually the women are dark, troubled, noirish figures or in Happy Together's case not present at all! The cast is stellar, being that he can pick and choose who he wants. Every performance wrapped in dense sadness. You must see this movie and every Wong Kar Wai movie. Watching this trailer makes me want to see the movie again right now!

I love how this song cranks up the melodrama and just keeps it going at that level till the bitter end.

David Wain, the King of Comedy, has his "must watch" show Wainy Days and now his associate AD Miles comes with Horrible People. Clearly Miles' show would define him as a Wain disciple...

wainy days episode 1

You have to be down on the floor feeling the bass surge through the foundation to ever truly know what its like.

my letter to bob about the show.

i saw justice and diplo last night and it was pretty much as close to heaven as you'll get for me. diplo was clearly only a couple drinks in so he was destructively tight. he's simply one of the best thats ever done it. i knew he was going to play a spectacular drunk set at the beauty bar in hollywood after the show but it was probably already packed out the door before justice was done. and justice. 18 marshall stack speakers, two french dudes, all mustaches and hair and leather jackets and thunderous floor rattling bass and constant strobe lights and smoke. if anyone asks what is jim stewart about. you can say thats what i'm about! the crowd was great, like a giant house, house party mosh pit. and the mayan had it set up well, so the upper area and the balcony was all 21 plus and the floor was all ages with security at all corners. it seemed to work out well. i went alone, couldn't get anybody to go with me, but i still enjoyed myself quite a bit. plus i got to sell my other ticket for 36 dollars (almost the 42 i paid), half in crumpled ones, clearly all the money she had in the world, to some teenage girl outside the club who was literally jumping for joy that she got a ticket. so its better she got my other ticket than any of my crappy friends anyway....

justice live in paris.......

Funny Games is not a pleasant movie. Its not even a "movie" per se. More of a comment on movies themselves. Of course this comment requires you to feel in the end that terrible rich people deserve the torture they get. But it doesn't even let you off that hook, because the family that we see get tortured in the innumerable "games" don't seem like that bad of people. Other vacationing assholes in the area seem to deserve Michael Pitt and his pals attacks, but this family, not really. Michael Pitt at one point turns to the camera and asks the audience their allegiance, mocking the audience for being on the side of the family. This, and some disturbing violence and awful tension and the periodic, abrasive screamo punk rock soundtrack maybe isn't what most people would call entertainment. But for me its done with such bravado, a certain French arrogance that its kind of irresistible to me....Michael Haneke remakes his own movie from ten years ago shot for shot in English (with Naomi Watts as executive producer). I haven't read any features with the two of them to explain why exactly...

Finally, Will Ferrell is putting this movie out in the theaters! With David Gordon Green taking a down turn with snow angels, who knew Bust Ass would come to save the day!

I like the scuzzier original version over the cleaned up newer recording, but this is one of the greatest chorus' ever....

black kids-i'm not gonna to teach your boyfriend how to dance with you

Gus Van Sants Portland skater dream, photographed by the one and only Christopher Doyle who shoots slick darkness like no one else. Gus Van Sant has come alive after filling his pockets in hollywood for two movies. and you think that i'd be tired of him using elliot smith songs in movies. i am absolutely not tired of him using elliot smith songs in his movies. whats really funny is he actually has dumb skater kids in it and of course they don't get it in any articles, or youtube comments you can read...

I really love Nelly and Fergies double time verses at the end of this song. its good to hear people still hungry after they've built up giant piles of money...Some fabulous noise from Polow Da Don in the background....

So one of the most important R&B writers of the past 15 years dies last week and I don't even hear about it till Tom Brehin's tribute today on the Village Voice Status Aint Hood blog! To al the media outlets that cover music in any way, this is a giant disrespect. This definatively proves how out of touch mainstream media is with urban/black music at this point. You can watch documentaries ad infitum regarding all the writers and musicians from the olden days of the 60s and 70s in black music, but somehow in the 80s, hip hop and music coming from the children of the civil rights movement, scared white people to death and they just simply checked out. They had to go to either cheesy metal or for the intellectuals the muted, castrated, swingless, grooveless sound of the new indie rock. I'm starting to see this turn around with the kids coming up now that define things a lot less by the old race and culture staples that we really still held onto in the 80s. Anyway, Static was the main in house writer for the initial Timbaland (and Jodeci before that camp). He wrote amazingly crass songs about sex and extremely passionate songs about love. He was the heart in Timbaland's machine that is often missing with his music today. Aaliyah's self titled record that came out right before she died (one of the best R&B albums ever made) was almost entirely written by Static. I have often thought with great interest about a man sitting down and writing ten love songs for one girl to sing, so here's some classics and cheers 2 U Static. I'm not going to forget.

the voices of two dead people

pony

so me's graphics bring great great joy to my life

ed banger records!

Not only do I love singing robots at all times, T Pain, at the age of only 22 at this point, has been massively influential as a producer and a personality. He's a dancing robot carnival barker, a clown, a showman and if the innumerable videos featuring him from the last couple years suggest, he makes life a whole lot more fun when he's around. People actually smiling and goofing around in rap and r&b videos, pretty much unheard of!

The latest from the Konvict music brothers...

This T Pain hat is bold! His synths and his break down at the half way point of the song and cameos from the cast of the Wire. man....

Vampire Weekend-Oxford, Comma...

the classiest lil jon referencing ever.

Kelly Rowland-Daylight

i like songs that apply to my life working the graveyard shift.....

Ludacris ft Bun B and Rick Ross-Down in the Durty

filthy.

I'm a pretty big david gordon green fan. i think all the real girls is a classic movie and i love george washington and undertow, but his latest snow angels, which i saw at the l.a. premiere no less was the first signs of a man slipping from his vision. the languid pace, rhythm and loose structure of his previous works was nearly gone and in their place was a traditional and predictable story line with moments, mere glimpses of the good director's personality shining through. hell in one moment with the sam rockwell character's mom literally yelling. what i thought when i heard that surprising yell late in the movie was david gordon green's cinematic personality trying so desperately to get out. sad really, my expectations for this seth rogan collaboration this summer are now low to the point i may not even bother to see it. and please, no more movies with shaggy haired "alternative" "cool" high school kids and the girls that love them, this girl played by juno's best friend no less. american "indie" movies are like most "indie" rock. vomitously cutesy, precious and weak.