OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

it was days after I had first seen the “Dark Knight” music video, and as I expressed in my lede, I was shocked no one was talking about the work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgKKY8bg3N8

this is some clown shit

What is good about that? It has almost no musical content (the backing track); his rapping is fast and slightly more complex than other rappers his age, but he's still not saying anything worth hearing; the video just looks like a bunch of kids hanging out on a school night...this is literally worthless as art. The only thing worse than the song/video is the fact that someone somewhere thinks it's good.

what's good about that is that she found it first

this is literally worthless as art

Someone please deconstruct this statement before ILM self-destructs.

this is some clown shit

sometimes you have an entire career of making that clown shit before you're gonna get the fire

375,215,674 WHATS POPPIN Fans Can’t Be Wrong

okay I read that whole thing and that is a lot of purple prose to drop about your crush from trigonometry

waist like a cosine

imagine if karmin had come to prominence in the substack era

you guys realize of course that this kid is gonna be doing his OG hologram tour in 2035 and we're gonna have to put up with crustbabies talking about where they were when they heard his first tik tok

it was all a dream
I used to read Details magazine

i've only heard "whats poppin" but it's like a v normal run-of-the-mill song? not sure what's so earth-shatteringly terrible about it

it was posted in the rolling worst of 2020 thread basically immediately upon existing so perhaps i'm oblivious (yes i do realize he is a person of pallor getting played mostly at black radio, i mean other than that)

Try the lyrics

yes when i described the song as very average/typical i was clearly not including the lyrics in my assessment

https://www.vox.com/2020/8/14/21368137/wap-meaning-megan-thee-stallion-cardi-b

But Shakespeare, while he had an unending pandemic to create King Lear, never came close to creating this rhythmic flow of genius from Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”:

Put him on his knees, give him somethin’ to believe in
Never lost a fight, but I’m lookin’ for a beating
In the food chain, I’m the one that eat ya
If he ate my ass, he’s a bottom feeder

In four lines, Megan Thee Stallion exalts the privilege of performing cunnilingus on her, before issuing a taunt, a guarantee of endurance from her vagina. Megan is a religious experience, a powerhouse, an apex predator, and a provider.

In the same way Shakespeare used monarchy, kings, and two awful daughters in King Lear to talk about family, mental illness, and fear of old age, Cardi and Megan use hyperbolic, fantastic imagery — even herpetology, the harmless garter snake versus the king cobra — to tell a story about the basic, absolutely human feelings of desire and arousal.

“It’s pretty simple,” Bianca Burke, a porn actress, told me. “When anything sexy is happening — like making out with a cute guy or when you replay last night’s hookup in your head during your 15-minute break at work, your pussy may get aroused, which can lead to it getting wet.”

vox is so terrible

lol

My husband read the first line to me last night and I was like 'please stop it hurts'

so someone expanded the "goop on ya grinch" tweet into a whole article?

I mean, Marc Lamont Hill did a whole video about 'why WAP isn't problematic.' His intended audience was primarily more concervative Black people, from what I could tell, but the whole thing was really bizarre.

https://imgur.com/a/qRejK2Q

defending the song is fine. saying you like it because it affirms female desire is a sound argument. so too is the counter that it does so in a way that still panders to the male gaze. this vox article with the king lear angle, however, is wildly stupid.

imagine shoehorning Lear into this dreck and not even quoting this part:

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

lmao

i take it back -- this piece is worthwhile, after all, as a set up for that post

Haha

One could see Shapiro’s comments as genuine concern; maybe he truly believes there’s a Sorcerer’s Apprentice situation going on with genitalia.

okay lol, article redeemed

The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to 't
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above

the vox piece is clearly a stunt, probably because of a dare, probably the result of a bored digression in a slack channel

"hey bro, dare you to write a comparative analysis of king lear and wap, but like with the kind of shoddy reasoning and inflated claims you would see in a high school paper"

namechecking "King Lear" once is not a comparative analysis

what this piece presupposes is, what if it is?

king lear is discussed throughout the article

at least throughout the first couple paragraphs, which is all i read

CORDELIA: I cannot heave my heart into my mouth

Cordi B

but Regan Thee Stallion

Omg y'all I'm dyyyyin over here lol

thou borest thy ass on thy back o'er
the dirt

shall I compare Thee to a Hot Girl Summer's day?

i thought you meant country matters

once a week is ample

i looked up the author and slack-dare pieces like this are his wheelhouse

“Megan Thee Stallion” sounds like a Billy Childish project

If, like me, you spent an unfortunate amount of your young adult life digging through the record stacks at thrift stores, you probably realized it at some point: Nobody actually listened to Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s. Setting a period picture montage of Vietnam protests and assassination to footage to "All Along the Watchtower" is Boomer Whig history. The crates don't lie: Most people were listening to Andy Williams and Herb Alpert, not whatever San Francisco Blueshammer crap you just bought in a deluxe vinyl reissue.

Until very recently the ghost of easy listening still haunted FM radio. But Train and Savage Garden were just neutered and spayed version of the same adolescent product you could hear on the top 40 station in the late '90s, not an attempt to do something radically different, much less "adult." The good news, though, is that nothing really stands in the way of an easy listening revival. (The only reason Cheek to Cheek didn't work is that Tony Bennett no longer has the pipes and Lady Gaga never will.)

Spend a month alternating between old Angel pressings of Beethoven symphonies and Perry Como. I bet you will never want to hear an overdriven guitar again.

https://theweek.com/articles/827454/strange-death-easy-listening

Someone needs to tell this guy about the Easy Listening revival that happened around twenty-five years ago, it'd blow his mind.

That was more of a hipster thing, though, right? In the 80s, we still had radio stations that played this stuff. Sitcom themes were sung by Johnny Mathis instead of Barenaked Ladies. "Feelings" was a song that everyone knew. Someone who wants that world back is still waiting. Even the adult contemporary chart is now topped by people like Maroon 5 and Post Malone; there's not even a Celine Dion. (Maybe Adele??)

That said, I have a bunch of these records and I still prefer Hendrix (who I don't think was ever sold to me as 'what everyone listened to in the 60s').

That opening is stupid though. Obviously "nobody listened to Hendrix" is hyperbole, which fine I'm not that pedantic, but then saying it's anachronistic to play it over footage of protestors, presumably among the small minority of people who maybe actually did listen to Jimi (unless dude has never seen Woodstock?), makes you seem like a bullshitter in the Frankfurt sense.

Oh yeah, not saying the article is any good. Do non-Nrx people talk about 'Whig history' btw?

I've never heard that phrase.