Elsewhere…
McDonald's packaging (detail). 1980s.
- From the New York Times: a conversation about the new William Kentridge production of Shostakovich’s The Nose, between their classical music critic Anthony Tommasinimm, art critic Roberta Smith, and book critic Dwight Garner. Shostakovich’s 1928 opera is loosely based on the early nineteenth century Nikolai Gogol story of the same name; Kentridge, a South African artist known for his prints and animation, also has a major show at the Museum of Modern Art.
- Robert Christgau on the genius of Lil Wayne — “[he] ends each of the 22 lines with a two-syllable short-u rhyme: stunner, stomach, rubbers, woman, dungeon, fun-ya (?), Bunyan, construction, seduction, discussion, trust ya, fuck ya, fuck ya (yup, twice), busta, touch ya, Usher, Russia, flush ya, crusher, gusher, production, abduction. You may think these aren’t all rhymes, but Wayne disagrees, and puts their music where his mouf is … Always there’s the sense that this is word play — that Wayne has diddled the ‘street’ ‘reality’ of hip-hop convention until a convention is all it remains.” [Barnes & Noble Review]
- Steve Albini and Patti Smith remember Mark Linkous, the musician behind Sparklehorse, who commited suicide last Saturday.
- The transcript of an interview by Andrew Nosnitzsky (Cocaine Blunts) with Pimp C from August 2007, four months before the rapper overdosed on codeine: “Juicy J and DJ Paul came to my house, that’s when we recorded Sippin’ On Some Sizzurp and a couple other songs the same night, and we was having an ice storm. They got to my house and they got iced in, they had to stay. The mutherfucka Paul say, god damn Pimp, what the fuck is you doing, man, with this house like this? I said, man, I’m rap hustlin’, I haven’t touched a piece of dope in years. Nigga looked at Juicy and said, we gotta get a new house.”
- On Mere Duchess, a cultural context for H-Town’s 1993 single “Knockin’ Da Boots.”
- The February/March issue of Perfect Sound Forever includes an interview with Richard X. Heyman, a Trouser Press-esque overview of The Verlaines, an analysis of the black avant-garde (or lack thereof), feminism and the Vivian Girls, an appreciation of Pylon’s Randy Bewley by his bandmates, round-ups of the late careers of Peter Tosh, Robert Pollard, and Serge Gainsbourg, plus other offbeat stuff.
New York—March 2010