May 2013
2 posts
5 tags
sometimes I would like to have a face attached to...
There’s a nice little running gag in Stewart Lee and Richard Herring’s surreal late-nineties chat show This Morning With Richard Not Judy, which I’ve been watching lately because a significant part of my brain hasn’t yet entered the current millennium. It goes like this: The show starts. Lee introduces himself: “Hi, I’m Stewart Lee,” and Herring follows up...
6 tags
Baths' New Album is More Potent a Political...
One of the fascinating things about pop music, one of the things that makes it so essential and so addictive to me, is the way a song or a certain lyric can at once feel incredibly personal and completely universal. The example that always springs to mind, blows my mind with its perfection every time I hear it, is Jawbreaker’s ‘Chesterfield King’ - nothing, ever, in any medium,...
April 2013
3 posts
4 tags
Watchpart two of the mixtape set, this one’s supposed to have more of a cool watery summer’s day by a lake sort of feel and as a result is probably more accessible (not everyone’s really up for sci-fi deserts eh). it’s less predictable shit/my summer playlist standbys than i thought it was at first though.
5 tags
Watchnot writing but i made a pair of twin (they’re both 15 tracks and around an hour) hot weather mixtapes for very different types of hot weather. this is the specifically hot, dry and vaguely sci-fi one, and i’m really proud of it. not gonna ruin the tracklisting because there’s FUN SURPRISES but I guess I used the deserts in Earthbound and The Great American Desert movement in Dan...
8 tags
A Belated Eulogy for Das Racist
When I heard that Das Racist had officially called it a day, I wasn’t too bothered. I’d seen it coming, or at least suspected it; it wasn’t like Heems or Kool AD were retiring from music or anything, and I always say more artists should know when to stop, rather than continuing to work in a style that no longer enthuses them with people they no longer have a spark with. Indeed,...
March 2013
1 post
10 tags
Sex and Drugs and Rap and Growing Up and...
[thoughts on dark’n’edgy hip-hop for grown ups, probably for a ghost review although I’ll be submitting a refined/edited version.]
So after a few weeks of having it downloaded and knocking about on my desktop, I finally got around to listening to Antwon’s debut release, In Dark Denim. I’d been curious to hear more from the Greedhead label than the non-Das Racist work of...
February 2013
2 posts
3 tags
literally the first poem i've written in years
worth considering:
- the way you,
on long afternoons at the grand-parents’
would kill time catching frogs
- and never attempt to harm -
but always feel a pang
when the next day would find
a soft frog body
floating milky-eyed, lifeless
in green water.
- and the way you
still sense a little piece
of lead in your heart
when, walking home in the dark
you feel the...
9 tags
In Defense of No Love Deep Web
First off, this isn’t about the music itself - although I do think that No Love Deep Web was the stronger of Death Grips’ two 2012 releases, what I really want to talk about here is the first thing that ‘No Love Deep Web’ puts in the head of, well, anyone savvy to recent music: that album cover.
Pitchfork think that it was one of the worst album covers of last year, (NSFW...
November 2012
1 post
5 tags
really super-belated thoughts on...
The whole “Chick-Fil-A hates the gays” debacle earlier this year was one that being on the wrong side of the Atlantic, it was mercifully easy for me to keep a silence throughout. A thought that sat really awkwardly and(certainly on tumblr!) silently in my head was that if the CEOs of Chick-Fil-A are bigoted rightwing Christians and want to donate the money that they have legitimately...
October 2012
1 post
7 tags
Haruki Murakami's Underground: Why good people...
just under 1000 words, nominally a review of Murakami’s Underground but also general commentary on the ‘true crime’ and ‘non-fiction novel’ genres. Written for Joanna Graham’s Ghost Review.
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Haruki Murakami’s Underground, a collection of interviews with those affected by 1995’s sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, was one of the books on my birthday...
August 2012
1 post
6 tags
ok desu ka? Earthbound's narrative nuance and...
Roughly 1400 words on how Shigesato Itoi’s Earthbound uses the player’s expectations of gaming and video game narrative to create an emotionally devastating experience that simply wouldn’t be possible in any other medium, and how miserable it is that so few games in the intervening eighteen years have realized the medium’s storytelling potential to the same extent. A lot...
June 2012
1 post
4 tags
Ygritte is the worst character in A Song of Ice...
Words of warning: this is about the books, and it’s written under the assumption that the reader has finished A Storm of Swords. It was sort of tempting to reference events from A Feast For Crows, but I’d rather keep it more accessible and in any case, it’s long enough as it is. It’s also written in the hope that you’ll either be familiar with and open to basic...
