The kids are off at Grandma and Grandpa’s, so Kate and I went out for a nice dinner Thursday night, and I found myself with a bit of time to blog… but no particular substantive ideas. The whole “publishers behaving badly” theme of last week seems to have run its course, between Random House re-thinking its awful ebook contracts and the whole wrestling-with-pigs argument over paying people to write stuff for the web has kind of exhausted itself. And I don’t have the time or energy to write up serious science in detail (it’s the last week of classes, and between grading and end-of-term administrative nonsense, I’m wiped out). so I’ll witter about pop music for a while (it’s in the tagline for the blog, after all, but I’ve been short on pop culture content lately).<\/p>\n
I usually have music playing in the background while I’m doing whatever I’m doing, particularly if I’m at the computer, and I try to keep up with what’s big in music to some degree. I’m not a big dance music guy, so there’s a lot of current pop that just doesn’t work for me, but I try to give highly critically praised stuff a chance, even when it’s outside my usual comfort zone, musically. And I keep running into the same basic problem.<\/p>\n
One of the albums topping everybody’s “Best of 2012” lists was Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange<\/cite> (see, for example, the AV Club review<\/a>), so I picked that up and listened to it for a while. And it’s… fine.<\/p>\n