After oodles of anticipatory action, the full Daft Punk x Pharrell single is finally here, and so now the Internet can start arguing about it (vis-à-vis the correctness of the hype cycle, over/underratedness, classic dance music vs. neo-EDM, etc. etc.). Don't fall into the trap! Just put this on blast, on repeat, find a friend, and do something along the lines of this here for a while:
Bronson Pinchot (a.k.a. Balki from Perfect Strangers) took over a Fox weathercast after making professional weather person Jeff Jumper self-conscious about his "grown-up haircut" and then jumping into frame to wreak havoc on a live feed of Harrisburg ("There's a woman in this building right now, she's on a little squeaky bed and she's got her underwear around her neck"). Having alienated some of his former co-stars, Pinchot has now focused his career on restoring houses, because a house feels no pain, and the weather never cries.
The beginning of the end for Lil Wayne came on July 23, 2007. We didn't know it at the time. But you usually don't.
That night Wayne played the Beacon Theatre, his first solo show in New York City. He was just under a year away from the release of Tha Carter III, the album that would officially cement his improbable transformation from afterthought into megastar, and still cresting upward. His stuff-of-legend mixtape run — a roughly two-year span, between Tha Carter II and Tha Carter III, during which Wayne vomited out (what we thought was) an endless torrent of manic, tossed-off brilliance — had most recently produced Da Drought 3, a double disc of beautiful spazzing. On that mixtape’s best track, "Dough Is What I Got," Wayne ripped the very breath out of Jay-Z’s undercooked comeback single, "Show Me What You Got." "This is a public service announcement," Wayne croaked over the iconic horns from Lafayette Afro Rock Band's "Darkest Light." "Lil Wayne, Weezy F. Baby issss … the best rapper alive." And, at the peak of one breathless string, with one couplet, he proved it: "I have no brain, I'm retarded / we are not the same, I’m a Martian.”
Ah yes, the slideshow countdown list. The best thing the Internet has ever done for humanity. How groundbreaking of Complex magazine to list the 40 Hottest Women in tech with a cleavage-riddled parade of images accompanied by an intro blurb shaming "the patriarchy." The author, Luke Winkie, responded to the predictable objections to his piece by blaming Complex for doctoring his list and descriptions: "I pretty much only included normal looking women, who were involved in something really crucial or exciting in the tech space. I made no allusions to their looks in the blurbs, and ended up with simply a long list of very exciting women. Of course when the piece actually ran, I discovered that over half of the women I had included were replaced with people like Morgan Webb, complete with the usual lascivious dialogue. Sigh. It's hard to win when you're writing for Complex, but please know that I tried."
First things first: In a new video released to TMZ, Lil Wayne shows himself for the first time since his terrible seizure scare, says he's "more than good," and actually seems like he is. I mean this is a person we all thought might actually die a week ago, and now he's eating lollipops and announcing tours and palling around with T.I.? He's also totally indifferent about his new record I Am Not a Human Being 2 coming out ("my bum-ass album coming out March 26 ... it's 26? You're gonna get that shit or you won't. If not, it's whatever"). Is it because it's secretly a contractually mandated, mailed-in release? Is it because, as is necessitated by any brush with death, he's had all his priorities radically transformed and now just wants to live and think and appreciate ladybugs? Or is it because he knows his last album, Tha Carter IV, sold nearly a million copies its first week despite not being very good, meaning our dude is at a point of lifelong, tween-based fame where he could release the pencil-scratch noises from the latest Trukfit zebra-print-hoodie design session and still move major units? Oh, also: above, his new, surprisingly kind of dope new single.
What an awful weekend it was for Lil Wayne fans. On Friday night, TMZ began reporting that the rapper had suffered a seizure earlier in the week and was rushed to the hospital. He was released the next day, but quickly suffered another seizure — his bodyguard found him unconscious, on the floor — and was then admitted to the ICU at L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The reports seemed truly grim: Wayne was "placed in restraints because he was shaking uncontrollably" and was in "an induced coma … breathing through tubes"; Wayne had supposedly gone on a "Sizzurp binge" and his stomach had been pumped three times. And then the worst of it came, when TMZ reported that Wayne was given last rites.
What's the old saying? "You can take the Kanye West out of the hood, but you can't prevent the Kanye West from bitterly calling up a radio station and behaving perfectly"?
We were reminded of this old soothsayer fable yesterday, as Mr. West called up New York's Hot 97 radio station and on-air personality DJ Enuff to discuss a list that perturbed him: MTV's annual "Hottest MCs in the Game." This list, like so many things that exist, simultaneously is taken seriously and couldn't matter any less.
Congrats, reader, on having a productive, successful 2012. I am very proud of you. In honor of all of your accomplishments, here is rapper 2 Chainz's calendar year, just to bring you back down to earth and remind you that you're a lazy slacker that probably doesn't have curly-fry braids, can't dance, and hasn't the first notion of what it means to have the busiest, most productive year ever.
Ninety-eight documented singles. That's incredible. Sure, there was a time period (still happening) when he would work with anyone (Lil Chuckee, Booba, Teairra Mari), but it's kind of endearing. 2 Chainz doesn't think he's too good for anyone, me and you potentially included. The ferocious clip at which Lil Wayne made music in 2007 is well documented, but not even that can touch Tity 2 Necklace in 2012, especially when you couple it all with the fact that this time last year, he was barely on anyone's radar.
Just to make this point explicitly and aggressively clear, here is a sampling of 2 Chainz's 2012.
1.Paris, Paris Hilton's 2006 debut, and, to date, sole album, is a piece of music that people love to tell you is "not as bad as you think." (The truly bold go so far as to say it's "actually pretty good.") Supporting evidence generally pointed to the finely pedigreed songwriting talent Hilton was able to assemble, namely Dr. Luke, JR Rotem, and executive producer Scott Storch, then at the precipice (but not yet over the cliff) of cocaine-induced financial ruin and cultural irrelevancy. Storch wasn't exactly picky with his projects at the time; that same year, he also did the majority of Brooke Hogan's Undiscovered. But seeing as Paris and Storch dated — in later years, after the Piano Man blew $30 million, Scott's mom would make the fair point that "maybe you should make sure your mother has her retirement taken care of before you buy another $2 million necklace for some hotel heiress" — he might have been feeling particularly invested in Paris. The most effective weapon in the pro-Paris camp's arsenal, though, isn't Storch, but "Stars Are Blind." It was the lead single, it's probably the only song anyone actually remembers from the album, and it happened to be written by a couple of lesser-known names: Sheppard Solomon, Ralph McCarthy, and Fernando Garibay, who in recent years has become a close collaborator of Lady Gaga's.
In 2009, The Carter was released, a documentary about Lil Wayne and the creation and lead-up to his highly anticipated Tha Carter III. Even though the film (a must-see, if I may add) was put out at the height of Lil Wayne's critical acclaim and "best rapper alive-dom," and showed how truly dedicated he was toward his craft of being a rapper, Wayne attempted (and failed) to block the film from ever being released, presumably because of the high level of recreational drug use on display from start to finish. (You wouldn't want this released, either — he's doing pretty much everything except taking Tussin bubble baths.)
Welcome to the Overplayed Song of the Week. Every week, Hollywood Prospectus editor and masochistically devoted mainstream radio listener Emily Yoshida will pick an aging Top 40 hit that she has heard enough times to render the song meaningless, and thus likely to inspire otherwise inaccessible epiphanies.
Do NOT let that seemingly tepid chart performance fool you — this song is inescapable, at least in Los Angeles, right now. Hence its inclusion in this column.
TYGA is an acronym for Thank You God Always. This is hilarious, for several reasons.
Miguel Ray Nguyen-Stevenson is a 22-year-old rapper from Los Angeles who has been a part of Lil' Wayne's Cash Money label since he was 17 years old, and is perhaps best known for his ubiquitous "Rack City," but I didn't feel like talking about that song today. "Rack City" is ancient, anyway; it was originally released in 2010, so next time you're at a cool party and they start playing it you can tell that hot piece tending bar that all these sheeple who are "just discovering" Tyga now are are totally lamestream. Yeah, I'd say that is definitely a good way to find a life partner.
You're rapping over that Mims song?! Mims??!!! It's been, like, six years! He was famous for like 45 seconds! Die Antwoord — just when I thought you couldn't have gotten any less one-note, you go and do something like this ... and totally redeem yourselves!
To complete the implicit analogy between this new track from Ross's God Forgives, I Don't and David O. Russell's early classic Three Kings: Jay-Z is obviously George Clooney, Dr. Dre is probably Ice Cube, and so Ross is Mark Wahlberg? And Gunplay can be Spike Jonze?
Within the niche of hip-hop ad libs — those trademark phrases tossed out by your favorite rappers as delicious garnish to the surf and turf they're serving you — there is an even smaller categorization: the rap laugh. For reasons we can certainly guess at (their wealth, their power, their ability to rhyme words very well), rappers love breaking out in spontaneous, if often ominous, laughter. And while, like the mysteries of the Higgs boson, the question as to which MC laughs best might never be satisfactorily answered over the span of our lifetimes, that doesn't mean we can't talk it out. So now, as merely a humble, small addition to the fiery debate, we here at Grantland pay tribute to four rap-laugh titans: Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, and Jadakiss. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Young Jeezy
With all due respect to cackle pioneer Jadakiss, I strongly believe he was knocked off his throne when Young Jeezy officially burst onto the scene in 2005 with Thug Motivation 101: Let's Get It. Jeezy's simple but triumphant "ha-ha" giggle is great because it's often an agent of happiness within lyrics that are anything but happy. This might just be me, but every time he does it, I imagine Jeezy throwing a pile of money in the air, à la LeBron and the pregame chalk, with the biggest smile on his round face.
Usher works his falsetto as he teams up with Diplo, who outfits this post-grown and sexy jam with sad electronic growls. Taking cues from minimal techno and The Weeknd's dark down-tempo R&B, "Climax" is a quiet storm that is less about climaxing, more about edgeplay on a late-night express train to nowhere. Grade: A Best YouTube Comment: "whenever I hear this song I look to the nearest person to me and look them in the eyes and whisper 'body roll,' then I body roll like nobody's business." — jmkeo44
