Monday 30 March 2009

skipping my downfall, planning my ascension

tnjx is back and so so lovely



i love this song so much, and when the sun starts shining i'll love it a hundred times more still.

Saturday 21 March 2009

added a lot to the links section, check em out!

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Pachelbel's canon in d is one of those perfect pieces of music. this version (<<<<<<) in particular is superb. It a living, breathing piece of music of music, slowing coming into bloom over the course of several minutes.

jay-z's december 4th is a seasick, swerving song. it's from the black album, jay-z's last album before his retirement, which is his most frantic and urgent album ever. 'my 1st song', which is the last song on the album, is unbelievably intense and fast, almost childlike in its insistent pleas. jay-z often starts albums with quiet introductions, and with december 4th was a beautiful one. a gentle, morose cartwheel through and out of his life to match biggie's classic album opener 'things done changed', it is superb. and look what someone's done:



it just works. amateur jay-z remixes are often of a high quality cos jay-z does so much to actively encourage remixers, and this is how it should work it. the little story in the video is quite sweet too. the whole song's a monument to effort.


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a similar fruit of effort to tie in with the above is this:



i'm not being facetious or ironic at all, honestly. look at this boy! he's made something so intensely brilliant, sitting in his room. even though i dont like the music (though i sort of start to when i think of how much he cares), i always love watching this. he just takes it SO seriously when it's pretty ridiculous thing to do, and i really like it when that happens. taking the serious lightly is easy to do, but taking the ridiculous seriously? commendable.

Tuesday 17 March 2009

Loz

thats ok

you always used to put so much effort into my presents....

so why not :p:p

12:11amJames

did i? or is that a sarcastic joke?

either way i cant remember

12:11am Loz

you gave me a tissue one year

and another you wrote an offensive joke on a scrap of paper

Sunday 15 March 2009

Just barely enough to believe in

Unintentionally amusing sentence about bertrand russell i read today:

"Without doubt, Russell was one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers."


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Go here for ludicrous magical beautiful silliness.

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Lyrics-i've-misheard-which-are-better-than-actual-lyrics part the deux:

From alexis taylor's solo album:

Actual lyric: You're one collectors item
As misheard by me: We're one collective item.

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Episode 2 of series 2 of on the hour is probably the best half hour of comedy ever created. Pure and perfect without the overly surreal aspect of the day today that crept in later.

It's on youtube somewhere. But just this time I'm not gonna bother looking it up, to teach you all a big fucking lesson.

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Let's finish this post with gimmie the loot, shall we? Ok lets.



BIG UP BIG UP IT'S A STICK UP STICK UP

ANYONE tell me that at 2:49 it doesn't take your breath away.


Biggie smalls' voice always makes me think of grand pianos. I know that sounds insane but somehow it makes perfect sense to me. His voice shares a lot of qualities with grand pianos and what they mean to me. It's a very soft, beautiful, classy sound, biggie's voice, perfectly formed and fine-tuned. Just like a shiny clavier.



One day soon I will write an article about why it's important and acceptable for white middle class teens to like hip hop, send it in to my student newspaper, have it rejected, and copy and paste it onto here.

Saturday 14 March 2009

THE SUN CAME IN LIKE A PACK OF ORANGE SPANIELS



wave pictures have given this blog a raison d'etre, i think. my blog is the LEAST current thing possible. i'm really quite a poor blogger to be honest. i have no connections or anything with other blogs and i write about songs that were released about three years ago, at the very least. but wave pictures have provided me with something in the here and now that i feel the need to campaign for. they really are wonderful, and give this blog a structure and point (but thank god not a 'theme', ack) which i think spreads into other aspects of it. they got the ball rolling, at long last.


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some people talk about how youtube has revived the diy spirit and i think that's not only complete shit but also the standard journalist's trick of claiming that one thing is a 'revival' of something that has always been around and never went away (also ridiculously used for pop, 'vintage', rave, antisocial behaviour, heavy metal etc) as a way to make an article seem more interesting than it ever could be. it's true that people do use youtube as a way to get their views out but they all seem to think it's the only way to do so. where once you might have someone making a fanzine or even doing a pirate radio show you now have boring voiced people giving reviews of new albums and films into a webcam. a lot of people now seem to think youtube is a way to do EVERYthing, even things which clearly work best in print. and that's a shame. but a few people use it as what it is; a tool to get videos seen that could be seen no where else. this is all youtube is and really all it should be. this idea is beautifully harnessed in this superb video of bonnie prince billy's i see a darkness that someone has made for their friend.



THIS is what the youtube DIY ethic should be, not people making poor gervais-inspired sketches and giving irate monologues. it's just so simplistically wonderful, isn't it. youtube is garish and horrible at the best of times and all we have here is relentlessly flowing water settling into an infinite, hellish red lake. i love thinking about a person making this and thinking that it's fine as it is (it is) and adding absolutely nothing to it. who else would be able to leave it naked and bare like this? certainly no 'vlogger' that's for sure. diy's all about minimal effort for maximum effect, and i've never seen a better demonstration of that than this.

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incidentally i found out about the above song and bonnie prince billy through johnny cash's superb cover version of it which is on the equally superb but bizarrely under-rated album american III, which as an album is the sound of a lion dying.


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ah spring.

every day a little brighter.

Monday 9 March 2009

had an ok journey back to aberdeen, the tay was rippled silk with dundee a fire on the horizon. i bloody love that bridge.

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too tired to write tonight but this is better than anything i could ever write:

Monday 2 March 2009

what does it sound like to be on top of the world?

Sunday 1 March 2009

just realised how well grime could accompany debating. maybe next week i'll take some mixtapes along...


anyway this is a sort of return to form. so many people hate wiley nowadays, you sometimes get the impression he hates himself. i like this though.