This Guy Lives In My City

I've never heard someone with absolutely no skills at all. When people say this or that rapper is boring/crap/the worst evah, they usually mean he's substandard compared to Ghostface or Q-Tip. At a local battle or spitting over a borrowed beat, he'd probably do just fine. This guy, however, has a flow like none I've ever heard before. He doesn't really observe the traditional rules of rhyme or even rhythm - that's how far past your petty notions of good taste and convention he is. He's out there. He doesn't even have to make sense. He's walking into a crowd and firing a gun. Or posting a video of the same act on youtube, which is much the same thing in our age of remove.

In fact, I'm going to come right out and say I've never seen anything like this before. Ever. I've seen hip-hop clips bogged down by too much inadvertent self-parody to stand up straight. I've seen some truly odious local hip-hop. I've seen youtube would-be fame before. But nothing even close to this. It's like a fever dream of power and talent, stripped of pretense and drowning in a sea of rock bottom production values and delusion. I can't stop watching. I think it's a work of genius.

Rae To The Motherfucken D Y'all...

P.S. If you fail to find this is rib-tickling as I do, I sincerely apologize for wasting just under seven minutes of your time.

Larry David Reviews The New Wilco Record‏

Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty boring, he thinks.

I couldn't help but agree with him. We were both fans of the much-derided Sky Blue Sky, which Larry in particular felt was unfairly labelled a middle of the road record. That was all bullshit, he figured. It was OK that Tweedy and co. were cooling down a little, and it was better than a feigned attempt at regaining summerteeth's ebullience, or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's anguish and noise. You've gotta be honest to yourself, he said. But then Larry always said that. He told me this was what had gotten him into trouble so often, and with so many people. Still, he said, I never compromised, not once. But now that I'm hearing this rather-too-cutely-titled Wilco (The Album), he says, I'm thinking there is such a thing as a middle of the road, and I don't doubt Jeff is plonked right down in the middle of it. If this is them being honest, do they mind if I go and buy that new Dirty Projectors record I've been hearing so much about? Once more I concured, and not just because Larry had repped for me when it came time for my panel interview at the Ocean Way Golf Club, whose back nine we currently found ourselves negotiating. I concured because I too never compromised and I too thought the new one sucked a little. How weak and polite, I thought. How unexuberant and dull. A Feist collaboration? Sure, the opener "Wilco (The Song)" was catchy in its own way, but in that jingly-jangly inane way the Macarena and Agadoo were. We sure as hell weren't talking about the stirring melodicism of "Pot Kettle Black" or "Misunderstood". I pitched that idea at Larry after he'd skied a Titleist deep into the rough. Damn Fucking Straight, he cursed. This new one's vanilla through and fucking through, he said. I frankly can't even bring myself to play it again, and you know what a fan of those bastards I was in my younger years. And having said that, off he marched down the fairway in search of his Titleist.

(something from the very recent vaults - apologies to the friend who's already suffered through it once...the review, that is, not the record...)