"…modern jazz, when you know the musicians are having a better time than the people listening to the music."

Have you read Decoded? In one of the book's rare half-attempts at self-analysis, Jay talks about how he was criticized back in the early 2000s for wearing a Che Guevara medallion covered in diamonds. (Che being, you know, a communist and all.) After what was surely at least 10 minutes of soul-searching, he decided…

I have several thoughts on this.

I was actually really impressed with the lead in Pitchfork's Coachella review, which spelled out exactly why, after a decade of regular attendance, I've sort of given up on it:

Ah, who am I kidding…

"The way she moved reminded me of a brown stallion horse with skates on, you know?"

It took me roughly 10 years to figure out exactly what he was saying in that line, and what it was a reference to.

Exactly. You kind of have to be a musical genius to make all the disparate elements in a song like B.O.B. work.

Especially the way it follows Big Boi's funny yet pretty by-the-numbers first verse. You're all set up to hear just some other sex rap and then it's like "…wait…what?…oh man."

I remember once saying out loud, "I don't want to call 'Aquemini' my favorite hip-hop album of all time, but…I don't know how else to finish this sentence."

It should lay the groundwork perfectly for my Fox pilot: "36 and Employed, Moderate Social Drinker with a Manageable Student Loan Debt."

(Addendum: Rereading that last comment, I almost sound like a shill, so let me clarify that I am not, nor have I ever been affiliated with Glassnote in any personal, professional or artistic way. I do have friends in the indie biz though, and I do think that CG is a terrible rapper, so those sales figures are kinda…

He's the only one they've ever had. When Glassnote started, it was a pretty small indie label with a pretty genre-specific roster that really only started becoming a kinda big indie label when Phoenix and (later) Mumford and Sons took off. The dude had to know going in that they had a 0 for 0 record breaking rappers.

I'll admit to a bit of a bias here because I find the appeal of Childish Gambino's music utterly inexplicable. But for an artist like this (who has never had a hit song, and appeals to a rather narrow audience of primarily white college kids), in a record sales climate like this one, signed to a label like Glassnote…

Totally. Twilight made almost as much on first-year DVD sales as it did during its entire domestic theatrical run. Which is crazy. The year the first movie came out, four of the top ten bestselling books of the year were written by Stephanie Meyer. Which is even crazier. Much as it still irritates me to think about,…

Indeed. Granted, it's still in theaters, and I imagine there are probably more territories for it to spread to (I'm too lazy to actually check, but probably), but that doesn't exactly scream "box office sensation that will definitely support three more sequels." I mean, the first Hunger Games grossed $400 million on…

The new one's actually really good! Which is all the more impressive considering AC 3 was so broken, boring and bad that it actually inspired a sort of philosophical crisis for me, wherein I started to wonder why I even bothered playing video games anymore.

I saw No Doubt a couple times riiiiiight before they blew up, when they were still playing the Southern California skatepark-and-high-school-rec-center circuit. (I certainly never approached Gwen, 'cause I was 12 and still scared shitless of hot chicks my own age.) But it was kind of surreal to watch them get as big…

"Why can't I make rapper-hands in the car while listening to Cam'ron without people laughing at me at the intersection?" Reasonable, very rare, white person complaint.

Regarding Kylie sounding like a supporting character on her songs, I dunno, I kinda feel like that's always been one of her strengths. In contrast to the Madonnas and Gagas of the world who can't stop screaming "look at me, and acknowledge me as an artist!" Kylie always seemed like a throwback to the kinds of disco…