SOUNDTRACK: ROCKWELL KNUCKLES-“Silly Human” (2011).
This song was NPR’s song of the day on July 7th. I’d never heard of Rockwell Knuckles before. He’s a rapper from St. Louis and has at least one other album out as far as I can tell. I was rather fond of this song for, as the NPR page says, he often prefers to be absurd.
This song has fast, manic music–jittery and confusing and the rap over the top of that music, especially the chorus, is equally frenetic and hard to fathom on one listen. But the chorus has a interesting twisty melody and the lyrics (the ones that I can follow) are bizarre and thoughtful and not typical “street life” lyrics.
I listened to this sevral times in a row, and will defitely check out his full length (which you can stream here, and the songs I listened to are equally weird and catchy).
[READ: July 6, 2011] Lucky Peach Issue 1
McSweeney’s has yet another new periodical to occupy my ever diminishing reading time. This one is a food magazine which, as the cover states is “the new food quarterly from Momofuku’s David Chang.” I don’t especially like food magazines (Sarah subscribes to several, but I just can’t get into them–reading recipes to me is the equivalent of looking at XHTML code for most people). I mean, I like to cook sometimes, but I don’t look for new recipes or anything like that. So, I am probably the least likely recipient of this magazine. Not to mention I’ve never heard of David Chang and only know about Momofuku because of the Elvis Costello album.
And then geez, the first issue is about Ramen? Who gives a fuck about Ramen? It’s that crappy stuff you buy 10 for $1 at the supermarket. And you’re really going to devote 174 ad-free (except, obviously lots of mentions of Momofuku) pages to ramen?
Well, yes they are. And holy shit if it wasn’t amazing. David Chang is a really funny guy and co-editor Peter Meehan is a great foul-mouthed humorist. [I have never seen so many “fucking”s in a cooking magazine before–in fact I suspect I’ve never seen any in a cooking magazine before]. The articles were funny and a little low brow (I doubt most cooking magazines mention people throwing up either), but they were engaging and interesting too. (more…)
SOUNDTRACK: THE REPLACEMENTS-Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981).
Since I’ve been talking about The Replacements so much, it made me want to go back and listen to their stuff. The Replacements are the quintessential band that “grew up” or “matured” and for better or worse sounds utterly different from their first album to their last (a span of only nine years!). In fact, I don’t imagine that there are too many people who would enjoy all seven of their discs. One suspects that if the band themselves were given a copy of their All Shook Down disc in 1981, they would have smashed it.
I Just Read About That... 