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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

Music

10 Albums Made for Incredibly Strange (And Sometimes Hilarious) Reasons

By Tom Hawking on

As you’ve probably heard, there’s a new Lauryn Hill song. It sounds… well, it sounds like it was recorded in a hurry to pay off a tax bill, which is apparently exactly the case (unfortunately, the quickie release didn’t save Hill from a three-month jail sentence). The vocals and lyrics are decent enough, but the beat sounds like it was slapped together in GarageBand with deadlines in mind. Of course, Hill’s not exactly the first artist to have to make a record under duress; here’s a selection of records made for weird reasons over the years, some hilarious, some sadly rather less so. … Read More

Art

Awesome Street Signs Commemorating Iconic Rap Lyrics

By Tom Hawking on

The little plaques you see all over cities like NYC that commemorate where famous people used to live… well, they tend to be rather biased in favor of long-dead white guys, don’t they? This is why we’re rather enamored of these hip hop-centric street signs, which commemorate a whole heap of New York locations mentioned in iconic rap lyrics, encompassing Jay-Z’s early days in the Marcy projects, the corner where Redman’s associates used to “sling rocks,” and a Smooth B lyric referencing “125 and St. Nick” (where your correspondent used to live!), amongst many others. They’re the work of artist Jay Shells, who posted over 30 of the signs all over the city — our friends at ANIMAL went and photographed them all in situ. We’ve chosen some of our favorites after the jump, and you can see the rest right here. … Read More

Music

The Most Gloriously Absurd Lyrics in Hip Hop History

By Tom Hawking on

Juggalos rejoice! The new Insane Clown Posse album is finally out this week — it was due earlier this year, but record company wrangling resulted in its release date being pushed until the end of summer. Of course, beyond their selective appeal to Faygo devotees, ICP are largely known to the general public because of the immortal couplets from their 2009 single “Miracles,” which will go down in history as one of the most ridiculous and somehow awesome songs ever made. In celebration of their new record, then, here’s a selection of the most gloriously awesome lyrics that hip hop has given the world. Your suggestions are of course welcome. (And just to pre-empt any of the accusations that have a magical way of appearing in our comments section every time we say anything remotely negative about hip hop: we’ve done this before for ’80s pop songs and we’ll most likely do it for other genres in due course. So there.) … Read More

Music

10 MP3s You Need to Download for Free This Week: Nas feat Amy Winehouse, Azealia Banks

By Tom Hawking on

It’s Friday, and we’re back with another installment of our regular roundup of downloadable MP3 goodness from around the web. This week, there’s a new Nas track, which features an appearance by the late and lamented Amy Winehouse. There’s also new Azealia Banks, a killer Coil remix, new tracks from Mi Ami and Tacocat, what… Read More

Music

10 Albums You Need To Hear in July

By Tom Hawking on

Summer is in full swing, and if you haven’t melted yet, you’re probably looking forward to getting hold of some of the surfeit of new music that’s being released over the next month. In all honesty, July is shaping up as something of a strange month for music — lots of album releases, but not a whole heap of really, really exciting ones. But happily, we’re here to help — we’ve sorted the wheat from the chaff, the diamonds from the rough, the sheep from the goats, and all that. And so after the jump we’ve selected what we reckon are the 10 compulsory releases to hear this month, along with a suitably pithy roundup of everything else out there. Let us know what you love/hate/reckon we missed. … Read More

Music

Who Wants to Edit Chris Brown Out of Nicki Minaj’s New Video?

By Judy Berman on

It is so difficult to ignore Chris Brown, who everyone besides teenage girls and other pop artists seems to be completely disgusted with, when folks like Nicki Minaj keep insisting on collaborating with him. So we kind of expected to see Brown taking up space in her video for “Right by My Side,” although we couldn’t predict that he and Nas — who doesn’t appear on the track — would be dividing Minaj’s affections in it. She makes the right choice in the end, and the scenes between her and Nas are just as sweet as the syrupy song requires. The only problem is that their romance has to share the stage with Brown’s overtures to Minaj — which has us thinking that we’d like to see a fan edit of “Right by My Side” that cuts him out and replaces him with pictures of cats, stills from Kitty Pryde’s “Okay Cupid” video, or even just TV’s classic color-bar test pattern. Seriously, if there is a reader out there ambitious enough to do this, we would be thrilled to post your video. … 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

The 10 Best 21st-Century Stoner Anthems

By Tom Hawking on

As stoners around the country are no doubt only too aware, it’s 4/20 today, which means it’s time to smoke yourself into a coma in solidarity with fellow ganja-lovers around the world. For the last couple of years we’ve amused ourselves composing 4/20 mixtapes to soundtrack your smoking efforts, but this year we thought we’d do something different. We came across High Times‘ “Best 25 Pot Songs of All Time” recently, and we couldn’t help but notice they were all from before the turn of the millennium — mostly from the ’60s, predictably enough. We don’t buy stoner conservatism any more than any other sort of conservatism, so we thought we’d put together a list of 21st-century stoner anthems. Did we miss anything? Let us know before you descend into oblivion. … Read More

Music

5 Potentially Amazing Records the World Will Probably Never Hear

By Tom Hawking on

This week saw the release of Bat Chain Puller, the “lost” Captain Beefheart album. Although its songs have been available on various bootlegs, the album — recorded with Frank Zappa in 1976 — has never officially been released until now. In the intervening years, it’s become something of a legend — not quite on the level of Smile or the lost David Bowie album, but still, a sought-after relic of a bygone era. And while it’s finally getting an official release, there are still other similarly shelved records we’d love to hear but probably never will (we imagine them stuck in a vault somewhere, like the one the Cigarette Smoking Man tends in The X-Files). Here are a few we’d love to get our hands on. … Read More