{"id":5403,"date":"2011-02-13T11:13:07","date_gmt":"2011-02-13T11:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/02\/13\/a-not-entirely-original-observ\/"},"modified":"2011-02-13T11:13:07","modified_gmt":"2011-02-13T11:13:07","slug":"a-not-entirely-original-observ","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/02\/13\/a-not-entirely-original-observ\/","title":{"rendered":"A Not Entirely Original Observation About Popular Music"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I picked up a few albums off &#8220;Best of 2010&#8221; list a few weeks ago, and have been listening to them on shuffle play a lot. These included Kanye West&#8217;s <cite>My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy<\/cite>. Which is kind of a rough one for shuffle play with SteelyKid in the house&#8211; I keep having to skip tracks when she comes into the room. And I eventually deleted whatever the track is with the interminable Chris Rock bit at the end, because, really, I don&#8217;t need that.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the observation promised in the title is this: Kanye West is a really good producer. As music, most of these tracks are really impressive&#8211; clever use of samples (or possibly people hired to sing small bits of something), good beats, very distinctive overall sound.<\/p>\n<p>As a rapper\/lyricist, though? Enh. The songs work best as background noise, because whenever I pay any attention to what he&#8217;s saying and how he&#8217;s saying it, my reaction is &#8220;Wow, what a douchebag.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>He does at least appear to be aware of his douchebaggery (it&#8217;d be hard not to, given how many people have remarked upon it, but other celebrities have reality distortion fields of the necessary power, so who knows&#8230;), and I enjoy bits and pieces of the words (the chorus to &#8220;Runaway&#8221; is great, and the rhyme &#8220;Praise be to the most high, Allah\/ Praise be to the most fly, Prada&#8221; is clever if juvenile), but I keep thinking, &#8220;Boy, if only you could put that production ability behind somebody who had something interesting to say&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The other purchases, for those who care:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Roots, <cite>How I Got Over<\/cite>: hip-hop with something more interesting to say<\/li>\n<li>The Black Keys, <cite>Brothers<\/cite>: warped blues-rock. An excellent record.<\/li>\n<li>Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, <cite>The Brutalist Bricks<\/cite>: Angry folk-rock.<\/li>\n<li>Best Coast, <cite>Crazy for You<\/cite>: Distortion-laden power pop.<\/li>\n<li>Neon Trees, <cite>Habits<\/cite>: Retro-pop, could almost be an unjustly overlooked brilliant 80&#8217;s band.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I also picked up a John Lennon best-of, because I didn&#8217;t have most of those songs in electronic format. And let me tell you, going from &#8220;Imagine&#8221; into &#8220;Monster&#8221; will give you some serious shuffle-play whiplash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I picked up a few albums off &#8220;Best of 2010&#8221; list a few weeks ago, and have been listening to them on shuffle play a lot. These included Kanye West&#8217;s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Which is kind of a rough one for shuffle play with SteelyKid in the house&#8211; I keep having to skip&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/02\/13\/a-not-entirely-original-observ\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">A Not Entirely Original Observation About Popular Music<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}