Grown Up Gossip & Internet Villainy
Snoop Dogg likes to smoke a little of that sticky icky icky. We know this because he talks about almost nothing else. Remarkably, he hasn’t proclaimed a fondness for reggae yet, so the rapper has decided to create yet another ode to weed by announcing that he’s making a reggae LP with?Diplo.
Yes, really.
It’ll be all blunts-this, chong-that… light-’em-up and gorging on as many packets of 10p crisps at the 24 hour garage as he can.
On this week in 2000, Yusuf Islam (previously known as Cat Stevens) joined the campaign to fight the government?s repeal of Section 28.?Section 28 was the ban on homosexuality being ?promoted? in schools. By ?promoted?, what it really meant was ?being told that it existed?.
Those that sought to keep Section 28 thought that it was an essential piece of legislation that was all that stood between the bottoms of our innocent schoolchildren and a queue of 2000 predatory gays with unquenchable erections, such is the uniquely paranoid perspective of the bigoted mind.
Luckily the Section 28 thing has been forgotten and despite his high-profile religious conversion he is still mainly famous for writing some pretty ditties. Other tunesmiths have not been so lucky though and have become better known for other, similarly embarrassing behaviour.*
Musicians think about sex a lot.?They must do, it's almost the only thing they write about. Popstars live to defile their young screaming fans. Rockers know they've made it when there are aspiring muses knocking on the dressing room door.
Hip-hop has a frankly terrifying capacity for the horn.
Frankly it's a miracle they get any work done at all with heads overflowing with images of baps, flaps and todgers. In fact such is the unstoppable high-pressure filth fawcet in their addled brains that doing it with others doesn't fill their schedules and sometimes they combine their libidinous obsessions with their other favourite pastime- loving themselves.
On Monday, in an interview with Guardian Music, The Shamen?s Mr C revealed that their 1992 hit single Ebeneezer Goode was about ecstasy. Who would have thought it?
To celebrate this revelation, we were going to have a list of our favourite songs that seem to be about one thing, but are actually about another. We soon realised that almost all pop music is actually about sex whilst pretending to be about ding-a-lings, lollipops, divine hammers, relaxing, and the banging of gongs.
So we thought it would be easier to list our favourite songs about drugs.
Bless the dung-minded simpletons who look at hip hop and think, “Ah! That looks easy! Its just talking over a hip hop beat! What idiot couldn’t do that? I talk all the time! I was pretty good at thinking of words that rhyme too!”
Some of these people often take this very silly notion and apply it to learning. “Kids love rap! I need them to learn! Rapping? Learning? INSTRUCTIONAL RAP! It’s a schooling miracle!”
And so, throughout the 80s (and regrettably beyond), there has been a spate of instructional rap videos, designed to be ‘educational’ and ‘fun’, usually falling way short of both marks. Sadly for them, they didn’t realise that rapping is one of the most insanely difficult things to do. Mercifully for this post, this didn’t stop them. So welcome to a world of rap-audits, fried chicken flexidiscs and martial arts rhymes (and not in a Wu Tang way).
Musicals suck. That’s because, apropos of nothing, people start yelling, singing, shrieking and dancing for absolutely no reason at all. Or, indeed, rapping thanks to the news that there’s going to be a musical based on Tupac Shakur.
Hilarious. Awful. Tasteless. Downright odd.
And so, the Broadway musical about ‘Pac has just been given the nod by his mother who apparently loves the show. A show, which presumably, features more than one incident of her beloved son getting shot. While singing.
Making a good first impression is important. In books it sets the tone, in social surroundings it allows busy idiots the chance to judge us, and in job interviews it provides a useful opportunity to explain that whilst, yes, you are technically on the sex offenders? register it was all a terrible mix-up and could have happened to anyone.
In music, the first line is underrated. We barely even notice them unless they're clunky or funny.
The best first lines can, like the opening of Kafka?s Metamorphosis, throw you right into the action or they can, like A Tale of Two Cities, set a vivid scene. They can provide an aggressive statement of intent or they can be just plain funny.
In the late eighties, the UK was home to the most exciting music culture movement since punk as a mutation of house music,? born in Chicago but exported to the warehouses and fields of Britain, re-wrote the relationship between artist and audience.
With Acid House, the crowd and the DJs were a partnership, both there to make equal contribution to the euphoria of the rave. As BPMs got faster in the nineties acid house begat rave which in turn begat jungle.
With the help of pirate radio, jungle (which was starting to be known by the less exciting but seemingly more popular name of ?drum and bass?) became a dominant underground force. The importance of the crowd wasn?t the only way in which dance music challenged a comfortable and complacent music industry. The music may have been disparagingly called ?faceless? but rock?s cult of personality was a tired hangover from its heyday and certainly nothing to aspire to for a generation who had found a genuine alternative.
World events they're fun aren't they??Well no, not really, but hey at least you can now use IfIDie.net to record an ?in-case of my accidentally on purpose death please avenge me to the bitter end? video. Yes that a real thing now. Yes, it does seem like one of those fake adverts from Six Feet Under and yes it is the greatest use of video technology ever created.
We don't know why bands even try anymore. They can't even beat an advert for your own death. The 80?s, that's what the music video was for, signifying an overabundance of crass ideologies, big hair, glittery outfits and the subjugation of women to the simple age when they were just ?things?.
Did we mention the hair because that's a pretty important part? Anyway, shall we look at the new releases?
Are you familiar with?Drake? If not, then all you need to know is that he’s the lamest, softest, wimpiest milktoast of a rapper who ever lived. Seriously. Your little sister could easily take him. Your dead nana could beat him up AND out-rap him.
And so, with that, does it surprise you that the weather made him cry?
Over the weekend, he played at the?Sundance Film Festival and it snowed a bit. Instead of making a snow-sculpture shaped like a ho with a gun, he preferred to bite his nails and worry about the whole thing, cowering under his Power Rangers blankie, fearing for his life.
