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Music

The 50 Albums Everyone Needs to Own, 1963-2013

By Tom Hawking on

No one buys albums anymore, goes the music industry truism. And yet, for all that the format’s commercial viability may or may not be on the wane, sitting and listening to a great album from start to finish is one of the greatest pleasures that music can bring. Flavorwire recently got to thinking about how one might build a record collection if you really only did buy one record a year. So here’s the result of our thought exercise: 50 albums you really should own, one a year from 1963 until the present… Read More

Art

Missy Elliott Smith Meets Hillbilly Corgan: Hilarious Musician Mash-up Drawings

By Tom Hawking on

You may have seen an amusing drawing entitled “Beach Boyz N the Hood” doing the rounds of late. It’s the work of artist Justin Hager, who makes art depicting amusing imaginary pop cultural intersections. We came across a selection of his work at The Daily Dot, and giggled our way through the rest of Hager’s Tumblr in search of his best work. Check out a selection of our favorites after the jump — we may not know much about art, but we know what we like, and all that. (OK, we do actually know a bit about art, but the point is, these are hilarious.) … Read More

Music

20 Classic Female-Fronted Hip Hop Tracks

By Tom Hawking on

Oh, Rolling Stone. Sometimes you make it so easy. We try not to spend too much of our time nitpicking the amusingly out-of-touch pontifications of Jann Wenner’s empire, but occasionally something comes along that annoys us so much that it’s hard not to react. So it was recently, when the magazine’s editors came back from the mountain with stone tablets purporting to contain “The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time.” In fairness, reading RS for hip hop recommendations is like reading Trucking Monthly for advice on bicycles, but even so, if you’re going to claim to make a definitive list, you don’t relegate Nas’s “NY State of Mind” to #31 (11 places behind 50 Cent’s risible “In Da Club”) — and, more annoyingly, you don’t make the mistake of including only three songs featuring female vocalists. … Read More

Music

Hear Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s “Triple Threat” and “9th Inning”

By Judy Berman on

There’s one distinct advantage to making your audience wait seven years between albums: When you come back with new material, no one can deny you elderstateswoman status. So it’s good news for us that Missy Elliott, who has spent the last few years battling Graves disease, earns that designation in a pair of new songs she debuted on YouTube last night. The tracks both feature her longtime collaborator, Timbaland, and find Elliott making a strong case that her rhymes, sounds, and attitude are just as fresh as they were a decade ago.

“Guess who back, yup I’m the best / I’m that chick, ’cause I’m a triple threat / Two-fifty mil and who can top that / I slap whoever said I’m irrelevant,” Elliott tells us on “Triple Threat.” The song doubles as a celebration of the Missy/Timbaland team and a statement of purpose for an ambitious return, all over spacy beats and vocal distortions. “9th Inning” tackles similar themes — it is, of course, about coming back from behind and winning the whole thing — while managing to evoke the most intense moment in a film soundtrack over and over again. Like their previous collaborations, these are songs that sound a bit strange on first listen, but only because they’re not quite like anything else out there. Hear both tracks after the jump and let us know how thrilled you are to have Missy back in the comments. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. The shortlist for the 2012 Man Booker Prize has been named, with Hilary Mantel’s critical darling Bring up the Bodies and Jeet Thayil’s awesome debut Narcopolis both making the cut. The winner will be announced at a dinner on October 16th. [via Largehearted Boy]

2. Here’s a way too brief… Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. Not only is “Feel Inside (And Stuff Like That)” the first new song we’ve heard from Flight of the Conchords in years, it was written in collaboration with a bunch of schoolkids from Auckland to help raise money for medical research into life-threatening childhood diseases. So, exciting and adorable! (Note, if you’re pressed for… Read More

Music

Listen to a Remix of M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls,” Featuring Missy Elliott and Rye Rye

By Caroline Stanley on

We were big fans of “Bad Girls,” M.I.A.’s stomping anthem for the ladies, when the single surfaced back in January, but the addition of verses from Missy Elliott and Rye Rye in a new remix from Switch takes it to an entirely different level of awesome. It’s so good! Give the track a listen … Read More

Music

Rock the Bells 2012 Line-Up Features Missy Elliott, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony

By Judy Berman on

After a few months of interchangeable summer festival lineup announcements featuring ’90s alt-rock reunions and trendy indie acts, it’s always refreshing to hear what traveling hip-hop celebration Rock the Bells is planning — and this year’s just-released roster doesn’t disappoint. The biggest news, as far as we’re concerned, is the return of Missy Elliott, who will appear alongside longtime collaborator Timbaland as “very special guests.” Also on the agenda is Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s 20th anniversary reunion, for which they’ll play their classic 1995 album E. 1999 Eternal in its entirety. Other noteworthy bookings include Salt-N-Pepa, Kid Cudi, Nas, Wiz Khalifa, Ice Cube, A$AP Rocky, Deltron 3030, Slick Rick, Yelawolf, and just about as many Wu Tang members as you’ve come to expect from Rock the Bells. In 2012, the festival will visit three cities, hitting OS Events Center in San Bernardino, California on August 18th and 19th; Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California on August 25th and 26th, and PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey September 1st and 2nd. See the full lineup after the jump. … Read More

Music

10 of the Most Wonderfully Versatile Contemporary Musicians

By Tom Hawking on

As you’ll no doubt have gathered from our Geoff Barrow interview earlier today, the Portishead producer has a new record out this week. After a decade of near-silence, Barrow’s suddenly become hugely prolific over the last five years or so, and he’s also proven pleasantly versatile. With another similarly multi-talented musical polymath also releasing a record this week — Damon Albarn, whose soundtrack album for opera Dr Dee dropped on Monday — we thought we’d have a look at some of our other favorite similarly versatile composers (not, we hasten to add, classical composers, an area in which we don’t pretend to have any sort of knowledge). … Read More

Music

10 Albums We’ve Been Waiting Far Too Long For

By Tom Hawking on

This week saw the release of the new Santigold album, which has been four years in the making, although somehow it seems a lot longer. While we’re not entirely sold on Master of My Make-Believe, it did get us thinking about the fact that 2012 is shaping up as a good year for ticking off the list of long-awaited records that will (hopefully) be arriving at last. After the jump, we’ve pulled together a selection of 10 albums for which we’ve been waiting far too long — shit, some of them have been pending for longer than Chinese Democracy was! Did we miss anything? … Read More