Getting the "new" Sa-Ra full-length was probably the event of my week. Heard the whole thing on audioditions.com yesterday morning, and sure enough, the good folks of UPS showed up that afternoon with the copy I ordered from Amazon.
(Became impatient with the local record shop, which was slipping and sliding on whether they had it or not.)
I'd been listening to tracks from this group for the last two or three years. Of course, if you have a good number of songs floating out there for a while, the chances for heartbreak tend to increase. Too much expectation, especially if Talib Kweli, Bilal, Erykah Badu, Pharoahe Monche and the late J. Dilla are all showing up.
Overall, I would tend to agree with the assessment by Stone of Couch Sessions, which I would sum up by saying that the futuristic soul funk collective from both coasts may have tried to put on too many hats to please everyone, perhaps leaving everyone a bit dissatisfied. (At least those who have been following them for a minute.)
Another achilles heel might have been the group's possible inability to wrangle some quality tracks (heard here on http://www.myspace.com/saramusic) from other labels on which they've done singles. I liked the group's cover of its own song, "Hollywood", but I like the first one better. Unfortunately, that’s the way it goes.
But their little lacrosse team wouldn't be a bad place to look to as an example of why one shouldn't draw hasty conclusions.
That said, snark and beer are disguising my anger at those who decided that one or two murders at Virginia Tech weren't enough to merit a stoppage of classes at the school in Blacksburg, Va.
"A campus police force that Dubya could be proud of," I remarked to a friend after probably making him sick of hearing me say, "what in the hell were they thinking". "So much for 'Let's roll'", was another quip.
Granted, the decision to continue classes at Virginia Tech came well above the cops. I'm just flailing at this point.
The precious little that I know is that when you're a college student and someone in your dorm bites the dust, I'm not sure that you're not going to be the best student that day. Yes, you're in a campus with an enrollment of nearly 30,000. But you've seen the faces within a dorm, and when one of those faces goes away, I think it does make an emotional impact.
So really, that's what I'm thinking when I hear of the total of 33 killed -- 31 of them killed after those shots at the dorm. I think that someone screwed up badly. At the same time, I'm taking a breath, and am trying to look at this as something where you just can't start pointing fingers to make yourself feel better.
That's what the Boddington's is for.
Pairing "whore" with something you enjoy is probably passe by now -- as in crack whore or an "Ice-T whore".
Well, I'll add to the overuse, because I've been a mail-order whore for the last two months -- purchasing every thing from records and books, to a garment bag, to a chef's knife and and the frigging Chop Wizard. (Look it up, then avoid the impulse leading you to shoot me.)
As I write, I'm watching "The Other Side: Los Angeles", a DVD and CD set comissioned by Time Out magazine and put together by Madlib and Peanut Butter Wolf of the Stones Throw crew. It just came in the mail this afternoon, at the same time as the garment bag and one day after the Fat Freddy's Drop CD came into my mailbox.
Making a rundown of everything that's mailed to my apartment is not depressing, but it's telling me that I should make better use of the phone number I got at Sotto Sopra this week than I did the one I got at Club One a few months ago.
Pairing "whore" with something you enjoy is probably passe by now -- as in crack whore or an "Ice-T whore".
Well, I'll add to the overuse, because I've been a mail-order whore for the last two months -- purchasing every thing from records and books, to a garment bag, to a chef's knife and and the frigging Chop Wizard. (Look it up, then avoid the impulse leading you to shoot me.)
As I write, I'm watching "The Other Side: Los Angeles", a DVD and CD set comissioned by Time Out magazine and put together by Madlib and Peanut Butter Wolf of the Stones Throw crew. It just came in the mail this afternoon, at the same time as the garment bag and one day after the Fat Freddy's Drop CD came into my mailbox.
Making a rundown of everything that's mailed to my apartment is not depressing, but it's telling me that I should make better use of the phone number I got at Sotto Sopra this week than I did the one I got at Club One a few months ago.
By now, I'd like to think that most people are privy to the the latest set of insensitive words of shock-jock Don Imus, who characterized members of the Rutgers women's basketball team as "Nappy-headed hos". Today, he was suspended for a couple of weeks as a punishment for those remarks.
Needless to say, Imus is getting off light. Rush Limbaugh, someone I find far less entertaining than I ever found Imus, got fired "with the quickness" by ESPN's pre-game football show for comments that seem mild compared to the romper-room banter in Imus' studio last week. Yet, I have mixed feelings about firing Imus.
Really, I'm wondering if it even a requires "reason" to fire Imus after those comments. At the same time, I'm not sure that this is the solution to this particular problem. My objection to firing him is two fold. First, I think Imus would have another show somewhere before the end of 2007. Secondly, I think it takes CBS and MSNBC off the hook -- they'd end up hiring someone similar, with less of the stink.
I think that a 30-60 day suspension seems about right, definitely sticking to the wallets of Imus and his bosses, but it would also keep some pressure on.
Oh, I'm forgetting that keeping pressure on yourself isn't exactly the way it works.
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
However, as much of a sour-puss I seem, I wouldn’t equate "letdown" with "suckage" -- more quality than pap on the CD, definitely. It's just good to see them put the album out there and continue the momentum of the boundary-breaking soul music embodied by mainstream acts and producers like Gnarls Barkley, Outkast, Pharrell, and Timbaland, as well as some less-known entities like Madlib, PPP, Spacek, J-Davey, Nicolay, Viktor Duplaix and many others that probably deserve mention and are escaping my mind.