You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2008.
I hadn’t even heard about Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher’s dis of Jay-Z until I heard about the beginning of Jay-Z’s performance, which you can watch here if you didn’t see it. (If you also didn’t hear, Noel Gallagher said that “I’m not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It’s wrong” because the festival was “built on a tradition of guitar music.” No word yet on how Gallagher feels about interracial marriage.)
After a rather ominous “greatest hits” post on Friday, Tom Breihan has officially announced the end of his blog, Status Ain’t Hood. Obviously, this isn’t the end of Tom Breihan’s music criticism, so there’s no need to get too upset, not that such an event should be too upsetting anyway, but I do want to stop for a moment and pay a little tribute to one of my favorite music blogs.
Tom Breihan is not always the best critic. He is pretty self-absorbed, and he ranked “Party Like A Rockstar” as one of his favorite tracks from last year, despite the fact that it is pretty much the worst song ever made. In fact, he routinely stakes out praiseworthy stances of trashy, overproduced commercialized rap tracks. However, I like reading Tom Breihan’s blog because at heart, he’s pretty similar to me. That is, he’s an indie kid who fell in love with the world of hip hop, even though he is perennially forced to observe it as an outsider. This presents problems, since he often seems condescendingly amused by rapper antics, but I can forgive him because rappers do a lot of ridiculous things. Also, he’s just about the only voice in the mainstream music criticism establishment who sincerely likes Southern rap. As a fellow lover of the genre, I can’t help but be drawn to him.
(From HipHopDX)
BET suffered another setback this week when several advertisers pulled spots from popular network programs due to images of violence and profanity.
According to Paul Porter of media watchdog group, Industry Ears and CNN, Proctor and Gamble, Pepsi and General Motors pulled their ads from Rap City and 106 & Park after the companies viewed “The Rap on Rap,” a content analysis of BET and MTV programming.
The study found that children were exposed to violence, profanity or obscenity once every 38 seconds.
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Notice Anthony’s Justice shirt.
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Lupe Fiasco — Mass Appeal Freestyle
He does a better job than Guru, but in all fairness that’s not really that hard. Yeah, I said it.
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According to Ye, I’m right and you’re wrong.
I will say Kanye fucked up by not just briefly apologizing to the crowd before he started his set, maybe explaining himself. But man, how much more did Bonnaroo fuck this up, and not even bother to mention that it was their fault, not Kanye’s. Very classy.
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Sup y’all (the large, extended readership of this blog). This is Kyle, and I’ll be contributing posts to this blog now every once in a while. You probably saw me as a rapper a while back. As it turns out, I am also a distinguished music critic and cultural commentator. For now, though, my hard drive is broken and I’m not listening to much music. But you will hear from me in the future. For now, check out these pictures of Mario cakes. Because these are awesome:
Entertain yourselves for a couple days, ingrates.
This is a really awesome live video of Lil’ Wayne performing “A Milli” on some MTV thing yesterday.
