I wanted to put up a Weird Al song, but I couldn’t really decide which one. Weird Al is unique amongst many artists in that his work has been consistently amazing; so it wasn’t as if I had to choose from a specific period. I eventually decided upon this song because it was really what got me into Weird Al and it remains one of my favorite of his songs.

I think the brilliance of this song is how it manages to stick to the material of the original song but not use it as a crutch. I’m pretty sure he used the same beat, which I really enjoyed. It seems that in satire the musical elements of the song wouldn’t hold up to its humorous elements. This isn’t true when it comes to this song and Weird Al’s repertoire in general. He is a talented musician who makes his songs satirical stabs at other songs. And if you’re high, you’d enjoy both how great of a song it is and also how preposterous the lyrics are. The thing is though: I think this song’s lyrics are better than the original, Gangsta Paradise.

One of the main aspects of this song that I find hilarious is the fact that the Amish communities in Pennsylvania are compared to the gangs that populate rural areas. At the end of the day, I guess both are gangs with their own rules, customs and modus operandi. This song applies the violent nature of gangs’ self portrayal to the peaceful, boring lifestyle of the Amish communities. Finally, the overall geekiness he employs adds charm to this already fantastically done and hilarious song.

The music video is amazing too.

One thing that I always loved about Pink Floyd is that they knew how to make an album. The Beatles seemed to grasp the concept at the end of their reign, with gems like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. Cohesive pieces of art that acts as a whole unit, even though each individual song can stand on its own merits. These are the types of albums you just smoke a blunt, sit back in silence, listen to and allow yourself to be bathed in a musical masterpiece. That is how I view Wish You Were Here, just one really song that, even though you could break it up into five parts, why would you?

It’s difficult to describe everything that’s amazing about this album, but I’ll try to touch upon a few subjects. First of all, the songs are superb, which I guess is really all there is to make a good album. The mood throughout this song is fairly consistent in some aspects, but is radically different in others as the style from song to song is distinguishably different enough to make it not seem redundant. Each song has its own, rather slow, crescendo that peaks within the context of the song, but also exists in a general crescendo that the album takes as a whole. Finally, they employ a large scope of instruments that give an eery but extremely cool sound to the album as you constantly encounter new sounds. You’re kept on your toes in some ways and mellowed out in others.

As I said before, when you listen to this song just smoke a blunt, sit back in silence and bask in its greatness.

The city of New Orleans is one of the cultural gems of the United States. If you want to listen to good jazz, you can go there, the town of Louis Armstrong with an airport named after him. It’s also the city of William S. Burroughs, a cultural revolutionary, if you want to minimize his impact. Also, the town where musicians go to rub off their rust or even reach their zenith (see Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Oh Mercy). That is why I was so surprised when I heard that an abomination named Lil Wayne calls this his hometown. A little bitch who hides behind perceived toughness (with two tear-drop tattoos when he never served a prison stint and a self-inflicted gun wound). He marshals himself as the spokesman of drug abuse and drug addiction, acting more like an ad-man for the companies that produce Xanex and Oxycontin than a Timothy Leary counterculterist. In essence: he is a fraud, a stain on our society and malfeasant that is willing to abuse the music of fighting the system in order to make money. He says as much, as his group is called Young Money and it’s a subsidiary of Cash Money. To make an analogy, if Gil Scott-Heron is Winston Smith in 1984, then he is the abomination who comes out of the Ministry of Love and proclaims his adoration of Big Brother.

This would be less of a problem if Lil Wayne had any music talent to speak of. Sadly, he doesn’t. He continually rhymes a word with itself, a practice that has become so endemic that it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. As a friend of mine who likes Lil Wayne said to me, “that’s just what rappers do nowadays.” Which is true… but it’s also bad. But he doesn’t do that in this song, and I guess I’m getting a little off-track, so let me get back to why this particular “song” sucks.

This song basically amounts to a beat (which isn’t THAT bad, and is the reason why this song got a 20 instead of a 19) with the chorus (if you can call it that), consisting solely of the phrase, “I feel like dying” looped over the beat. Then, from time to time, he tells us of different drugs that he does. I assume the connection to the song is that because he feels like dying he does all of these drugs. But then, wouldn’t the conclusion be that he doesn’t feel like dying, since he’s on all of those drugs? Or maybe their effect has worn off? But that then doesn’t really explain the first lines of the song, which are: “I am sittin on the clouds I got smoke coming from my seat I can play basketball with the moon I got the whole world at my feet Playin’ touch football on Marijuana Street Or in a marijuana field. You are so beneath my cleats Get high, so high that I feel like lying.” Doesn’t that mean he’s happy? I really don’t know, you can’t apply logic to any of Lil Wayne’s songs, which is what makes them bad. And then he goes on to say some shit like: “swimming laps around a bottle of Louis the 13^th” which fails to make any sort of sense. What does that mean? How are those two things related? What does it mean to swim laps around a bottle of Louis the 13^th? They have only an extremely tenuous connection, which is that swimming involves liquid and a bottle of Louis the 13^th contains liquid.

Moreover, on a meta-level this song is bad. It promotes the notion that we are dependent on these drugs for happiness. That means that the drugs are harmful. Why doesn’t he go out and do shit instead of just doing drugs all the time? Especially if doing all of those drugs make him miserable. Now, we don’t know if doing drugs makes him miserable, because he has such a dubious grasp on his figurative language. Maybe for him feeling like dying means he’s happy. We’ll never know.

I singled out this song because it is in a pantheon of his more “arthouse” songs. You know, the way “Here Comes the Sun” was on Abbey Road. All of his other songs are about how great he is, which leads into another fallacy he always commits, because in reality, he isn’t that great. To quote Oscar from the Office, “this is kitsch, it’s the opposite of art, it destroys art.” And yes, Lil Wayne is destroying rap music with this shit he puts out.

As the sun set on the sad afternoon of June 23, 1968 it was evident that all the social upheaval of the month before was for naught. Georges Pompidou and the UDR, representing the fascist interests of Charles De Gaulle would win; and the CGC, which held the students on a tight leash to leverage their anger into an electoral victory, would lose; thus making it evident that the true enemy of social progress is not the authoritarian or the conservative, but rather the liberal in the ranks who’s just not radical enough. This truth holds its weight with Mulan, a movie that should be about empowering women, but really just holds them down. While Mulan grants the notion that a woman can overpower a man; it holds fast to the militaristic system in which she had to join in order to achieve this feat. It excuses that system by saying that women can participate too, when really the odds are stacked against them. Moreover, it buys into the patriarchal notions that initially kept Mulan oppressed. Simply put, she had to become a man in order to achieve what she did. A true feminist movie would have her stay as a woman, even in man’s clothing.

However, while the social implications of this movie are suspect, the content in terms of form is exuberant. Try to watch this movie and not sing to yourself afterwards, “Mister, I’ll make a man out of you!” Even though the messages of these songs stomp on the feminist nature of any woman watching the film, they still leave you satisfied. The story arc is amazing, and while it may seem a tad formulaic, at no point in the movie does that fact induce the type of nausea as it would in other films. The Walt Disney animators make amazing images, both in their portrayal of people and the color schemes that they use to create and sustain whatever mood they are looking for you to feel. At times they juxtapose these images quite drastically; but these parts are my favorite. Because instead of leaving you disoriented, these drastic juxtapositions show the stark differences in the film. In conclusion: this is an amazing film with amazing form that is beautiful and amazing to watch when you’re high; just don’t think it’ll empower you if you’re a woman, because it won’t.

I was reading an article about Iranian film and saw this picture, and, well… it’s fucking fantastic. I haven’t seen it high yet, so tell me if it lives up. Whatever score I’ll give it will be an average of any comments left on this picture in the next couple of days. Here’s the article if you want to read it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/world/middleeast/04iranfilms.html?ref=movies

If there are no comments, I guess I’ll just give it a 71; but I like user feedback, so please, tell me what you think it should be.

I don’t know how I came across this gem; it was back in my old P2P, pre-BitTorrent downloading days, you remember those times, when it took forever to download one song, and we (or at least I) downloaded singles instead of albums? Anyway, those days are far gone but some relics remain, and this cover that I managed to stumble across is definitely one of the better relics from this era.

Now, there are many ways you can describe Johnny Rotten. Philanthropist, Jingoist, Asshole, Asian, Violent Revolutionary, Bassist, Payer of Alimony or Pat Buchanon; and most probably at least three of those are true. And one of those traits (guess which one?) comes out most saliently in this song. It starts off as a massively punk version of Johnny B Goode (what else would you expect?) and then he just stops mid song and changes it to Roadrunner. Which, I have to say, even if it’s not the best version I’ve ever heard, it’s definitely the most entertaining.

So… why is this great to listen to when you’re high? It’s very simple. It allows you to have a steady base of music to interact with quite mindlessly yet still enjoy, and on the foreground you have Johnny Rotten doing everything he can possibly do to ruin the song, but somehow not succeeding. And in the end, it turns out to be really entertaining to listen to and at the same time, very good.

Sublime is one of those bands with a truly unique sound, until everyone else ripped it off. They are unapologetic nihilists whose lives consist of music, drugs, happiness and, of course, Lou Dog. They are completely fine with killing cops, and definitely favor opposing their authority at every turn. They are those badasses you always wish you were; and fuck it if the lead singer’s name is Bradley. He died of a heroine overdose.

One thing I love about this band is that there is always some shit going on in their songs. They don’t just have lead vocals and a riff in the background. Nah, they do shit in their songs. This is one of the bands that you listen to while smoking a blunt, because it’s just so chill. The chillness comes through the lyrics (What I Got is a popular favorite), and the funky sounds that come out. But their songs aren’t only chill. They also write about the scummy shit that goes down in South Cal (like Date Rape) or about the political nature of music that they revere (KRS-One).

The first time I was introduced to this album I was at a debate tournament and this guy bought that album for a dollar in some bin at some record store located in the village. He then lent it to me so I could copy it to my computer (along with a Black Sabbath and a Black Flag album), and so I did and listened to it right away. It was then that I fell in love with the album and was consistently listening to it for a month or so. Since then I’ve gone through a couple of phases when I just put it on and vibed. It’s an amazing album…

here’s why. It’s a concept album dedicated to Peter Lorre (a famous Austrian actor that you might remember from M (a movie I’ll write a recommendation for later)). In fact (and I’m taking most of this from Wikipedia), most of the lyrics from the songs come from Peter Lorre quotes. In a New York Times interview, Jack Terricloth, the leader of this ensemble, said “’I find Peter Lorre a strangely charismatic, extremely creepy person, which I think most punk rockers can identify with… It’s the lure of the other. He’s the underdog, the outsider.’” And this album really plays to those sympathies.

The best way to describe this album is a punk cabaret epic ballad about Peter Lorre. It’s extremely weird, extremely fun and extremely different from anything you’ve really heard before. Which is really refreshing. Sometimes if you listen to a band like Vampire Weekend, you’ll think, “wait, this song sounds a lot like Barnacle Goose or Tokyo Police Club,” or if you’re listening to Tribe you might think, “Hmm, Souls of Mischief sounds good right now.” That never happens with this band (although I’ll admit, I’m not a savant when it comes to the punk cabaret genre, so they might just be mainstream shit, who knows?).

I feel like I’m being redundant, but this album really has an amazing sound, and even though each song can exist on its own, it really is an album in the finest sense of the word. It comes together in the same way that Dark Side of the Moon or Abbey Road do. And each song makes you want to rock, but also has those really unique and fun classical/cabaret aspects to them. Listen to this album, the whole thing. I initially gave this album a 68, but after writing this review and listening to it again, I’m giving it a 71.

I have been pretty much obsessed with this show for some time now. Well, I have been obsessed to the limited extent I’ve been allowed to be obsessed with it. Basically, there is very limited access on the web to this show’s episodes. I personally use Hulu, but as I said before, it only has a limited amount of episodes. If any reader finds more episodes on some site and wants to share it, please leave a comment.

So, I think the basic appeal of this show is that it follows a group of five absolutely horrible people. One of the more recent episodes (the D.E.N.N.I.S. System) shows how Dennis mentally manipulates girls and basically tortures them. In another episode, Dennis and Mac go to anti and pro abortion rallies to pick up chicks. In yet another episode, some environmentalist has a burn on Dennis, so what does Dennis do? Well, he infiltrates the group by smoking them up, then convinces the guy to chain himself to a tree in order to stop bulldozers during a thundery (and rainy) night, then trips acid with the guys girlfriend, fucks her, then the next day he lets the guy from the tree, allows the bulldozers to destroy the tree and then while they’re doing that, he tells the environmentalist that he slept with his girlfriend.

Also, one of them (Charlie) is illiterate, which leads to a lot of gags and shows another appealing aspect of the show: they usually fuck everything up. My favorite example of this is when Charlie (and Danny DeVito, did I mention Danny DeVito is on the show?) tries to get cats out of Dee’s wall. What do they do? They smash a giant hole in the wall and then put in about twenty more cats. And all of these ridiculous stunts are just hilarious when you’re high.