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I don't know you, John Paczkowski.
But if I did, I'd do you the favor of saying, "John, dear sweet friend, please don't write any more jackassy headlines that involve hip-hop references, even if your blog post is about a rapper."
Then we'd man-hug, and you'd be like, "I was just trying to be funny."
But I wouldn't say anything, I'd just glare at you.
If you tried to talk again, I would subtly shake my head as if to say, "this is non-negotiable."
Then you might begin crying. It's OK.
Screenshot:
I secretly wish that FinallyFast.com was a site about mortally starving yourself, i.e. suicide by fasting.
Franz Ferdinand "Tonight" (Domino)
I'm suspicious of rockers in suits; maybe that's why I won't cut the Jonas Brothers any slack. At any other time in the economic cycle, those kids would seem merely precious -- and that's bad enough. But these days, the bespoke Jonases come off as blatantly aspirational, and that's only rock 'n' roll if you're starting with nothing. A Disney push is not nothing.
Economics aside, you could argue that Franz Ferdinand inoculates itself from the "suit-wearing rockers" critique* by embracing the skinny-tie/power-pop thing, not only in countenance but in musical product. That shit was mostly cool, even the Knack. Here's the paradox, though: A lot of those skinny-tie dudes were seriously ugly: The '70s were over, but there was still plenty of coke around, and the coke ate them up. But you don't have to be gay to see that the Franzmen are ridiculously pretty. For the sake of parallelism, let's call it their Disney push.
So I was ready to slam "Tonight," but I can't, because I finally see Alex Kapranos for what he really is: an agent of theater, somewhere down the line from Bowie and Ferry. If he were reared in the U.S.A., he might've turned out to be Adam Levine, who seems un-theatrical, but is actually the most subtle carny-barker in sex-pop history: CHECK OUT THIS AMAZING DICK is his meta-message, over and over again. (I think you need a vagina to hear the actual specific barkin' text.) Kapranos, meanwhile, is more sexually amorphous and needy, because he's British. Check out a tune like "Bite Hard," which owes a lot to Michael Hutchence, who was well-practiced at mixing droopy-eyed vulnerability with agitation (but had Australian hair). Kapranos is a natural.
And maybe INXS is the true reference point for "Tonight," which is firmer and funkier and much better than I would've expected. In the same way that Hutchence and his mates rarely bit off more than they could chew, funk-wise, the Franz guys show similar restraint and/or skill, even when a song veers heavily toward the bottom end ("Ulysses," "No You Girls," "What She Came For"). I can do without some of the melodrama ("Twilight Omens," "Live Alone"), and I'm ambivalent about the 8-minute disco epic ("Lucid Dreams"), but those annoyances are offset by inspired moments such as "Send Him Away," which deftly contrasts some sour-guy lyrics with ska accents. Kapranos might be acting when he sings about envy, but it suits him, and that's kinda the point here.
Previously: Zomby
Many more reviews available here
* For further study: Huey Lewis & The News and the "suit-wearing rocker" critique.
Arthur Magazine has shat on my money at least twice, because almost every time I've sent them a check, they've stopped publishing their punky-hippie rag soon after they got my cash. Good luck trying to squeeze a refund from those dudes, especially now that the print version has been killed dead. But enough sour grapes: They can keep the filthy lucre, because their new Web site is a little thin, and I'm a philanthropist at heart. For now, I'm finding the site more convenient than I ever expected. To wit: I routinely skipped the Bull Tongue column by Byron "I Will Always Be Cooler Than You" Coley and Thurston "I Will Always Be Cooler Than Byron Coley" Moore, because it was basically back-of-the-book fodder, even though both of those motherfuckers are seminal. But online, the reruns of that shit are short-attention-span gold, I tell ya.
Somebody in the product-design department had to know that this lil' nub is vaguely penile:
This not the first time that Tropicana has fucked with me.
Don't feel bad if you feed shit paste to your pet, because you're not alone, and the fate of the Internet depends on you, anyway: Almost exactly 99.7 percent of YouTube videos feature mutts snarfing peanut butter, and WE DON'T WANT YOUTUBE TO DIE FROM NEGLECT, BECAUSE AMERICA IS AWESOME.
SIDE NOTE: Dear Peanut Butter Wolf, you're kinda awesome, but it must suck to be you right now -- like when 9/11 happened and Burning Airlines was like, "sigh."
ADDENDUM: Mike is like, "leash 'em, you ingrate"
SANCHEZ! | QUEST! |
If you happen see these two men appearing in the same television news show, it is perfectly normal to have symptoms of elevated blood pressure, abdominal discomfort, hoof-n-mouth, swollen tongue, ass-ear, eye-fire, skin-crawl and/or scalp-drip.
NOTE: I like side-by-side mugshots to be editorially and visually balanced, but this set didn't quite work out that way. But the more I look at them, I kinda like the fact that Quest's skull is significantly larger than Sanchez's.
ADDENDUM: Yer Mom riffs on the softness of the 'Chez.
I try to muster a laugh, but as my abdominal muscles contract, I am overwhelmed with nothing but super-sadness, and I exhale, and I am so alone:
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