#cole is the dumbest for the record

[parachutingkitten]

Jay = High Intelligence, Low Wisdom

Kai = Low Intelligence, High Wisdom

Essay about this concept below the cut

Now these are all just my interpretations of the characters, I don't necessarily have hard evidence on hand to back all this up, but here we go:

I've been trying to put my finger on the Kai smart/dumb duality, and I think I can finally somewhat make out my thoughts. Kai is not smart. Book smarts don't come easily to him, he's not great at math, he's not great at overly complex stratagizing- but he's got a LOT of great knowledge in him.

Take the dragon healing in DR. He might not intuitively know how different medicines work or why, but he's got injured enough that he knows that type of information is important to know, and so he's forced it into his head. He couldn't tell you why the blue goop helpped the dragon, but he knew that it would, and that it would be important to remember that it would.

He's pretty good at navigating complex social situations, because he's good at reading people. Having had a history with extreme emotions, he knows how to take them into account, and knows how important it is to do so, even if it's not necessarily logical. I hate to say this, but he's very emotionally intelligent, which sounds kinda like an insult but is actually insanely valuable, because humans are inherently emotional creatures.

He's got a solid basis of common sense, and is constantly looking at the bigger picture. That's why he can come up with the best outline for a plan, because he can not think through the details. Now, if he tries to implement a plan of his without consulting others, he's probably going to miss some very important details, and screw himself over. But, he's most likely to have the best basic premise for an effective plan. This is why his intuition is usually correct. He's not logically thinking through the most likely scenario given all available factors, he's looking at every problem from the birds eye view, and is easily able to fill in the blanks, because he sees the whole picture. You can not tell me this kid knew Lloyd was the Green Ninja because he used logical deduction to eliminate all other possibilities, he had a gut feeling based on realizing the value of human life.

Now, sometimes you need details. And Kai is not good at those. He sucks at those. Big time. But he's self aware enough to know when those times are (most of the time, sometimes he wastes all his lives in a video game before talking to anyone else).

The thing all of these points have in common is that he's lived a very full life while making very many mistakes, and he's learned from all of them. He learns from his dumb mistakes, and is wise enough to know which lessons are worth holding on to.

Jay on the other hand... does not learn from his mistakes. He's got a real thick skull.

Inside that skull is a really smart guy who intuitively latches on to engineering and science concepts. He's got a whole heck of a lot of information that his brain is holding onto simply because it can. This man is all about the details. He gets hyperfixated on details to the point where it's a problem. He's the most likely to solve the intricate problem facing the team, forget that they need to stay hidden, and yell "I did it!". Good at details, bad at big picture. This is also why he usually gives up hope so easily compared to the rest of the team. He can not think long term, he can not see the bigger picture like Kai can, so road blocks in the current plan seem insurmountable.

Sure, he might have rigged an old sailing ship with rocket boosters, but he couldn't unscramble "darnagom" his logical problem solving skills are not what's carrying him.

My standby for the Jay dumb/smart duality is that he should have a significant amount of William Osman energy to him. He's very smart, and can work out how to solve intricate problems and make insane builds, but if making said things is a dangerous or dumb idea has never once crossed his mind, and if it has, he has actively chosen to ignore it. Jay's intelligence is much more creativity based than I think a lot of people like to think. Engineering is about slapping crazy ideas together which barely hold together at first- and that's Jay's brand of smarts.

If you compare this to Zane, that's the vital component that his intelligence is missing- the creativity. He is VERY good at assessing options, but not so great at coming up with new solutions himself. He's running on pure logic and tested successes. He's also missing that social intelligence that Kai has. I'd venture to say that Zane is, by far the most gullible member of the team. If there is not a solid logical reason to doubt something, he is absolutely going to take it at face value. Point being, all the ninja have different smarts, and stupidities, let's not try to conflate them too much.

[fratttymatty]

A few shorts

1

The second David put on the grey sweatpants his bulge significantly grew as well as his muscles. Shit he smelt like musk too. He was now Davis, the dumbest guy in college, the guy who only thought with his dick. He was also a massive dick, and he knew it. Oh and the girls loved it!

2

Flick was a 79 year old man going on holiday to Ibiza. He booked into his hotel called "La Joven Transformación" not knowing that anything would happen. 4 boys, Alejandro, Harry, Nicholas and Josh dragged Flick to their room and injected him with something. Flick began to decrease in age by 60 years until he was 19. It also made him extremely hot. His muscles grew and his shirt disappeared. His mind changed and remembered he was in Ibiza to party with the boys. He forgot his name was ever Flick and he believed it was Clint since forever.

"Bros! I'm so pumped for this vacay man! Gonna get some hot Spanish chicas!" He said cockily.

3

The second Craig stepped into the gym, he was sprayed with some sort of liquid which made him look like an absolute gym bro. His biceps were now huge and so was basically everything else about him, especially his ego. He was now Kyle and he took a picture of himself and uploaded it onto Instagram.

4

Thanks to Jake's help, Greg had become yet another baseball bro in the school. He ditched the name Greg and became Grayson. He turned the blue baseball hat backwards and put on the white shorts. It made his muscles grow and his sport ability increase. It also made him grow to 6 foot 4. He took a picture and sent it to his girlfriend Libby.

5

Joel was a nerdy guy in school. That was until one of the school's bad boy heartthrobs, Freddy, stuck a cigarette into Joel's mouth. Joel inhaled the smoke by accident, the smoke from the magical cigarette ran through his body. It pumped up his muscles, deepened his voice, made his hair more messy and disheveled, made him taller, made him gain a more bad boy brain. Before he knew it, he believed his name was Cole. Cole was the definition of a Tiktok bad boy. He picked up his phone and pulled out a cigarette before taking a picture and sending it to his girlfriend, Julia, captioning it with.

"You know youre rly cute right"

6

Ian was a gay guy who was also a twink. He was walking around his university until a clearly conservative guy came up to him with another man who was recording him. The conservative gay was a gay called Jackson. Jackson was an "interviewer" on Tiktok, and Ian was his next victim.

"Trump or Kamala?" Jackson asked.

"Kamala duh." Ian replied which Jackson wasn't happy about and the cameraman stopped recording.

The phone flashed in Ian's face and changed him. Ian's muscles grew, his hair grew into a mullet-ish hairstyle, his voice deepened, he grew to well over 6 foot. As well as the physical changes his mind changed too.

He gained a very VERY conservative mindset, he straightened out, and he gained lots of new opinions that his old self would find offensive and controversial. He forgot his name was Ian and now his name was Evan. Jackson looked at him and re-recorded his part.

"Trump or Kamala bro?" Jackson asked again.

"Trump dude. I ain't no sissy!" Evan replied.

7

Lila was a nerdy girl with one boy best friend, Martin, who was gay. She was at school and was studying alone in the library, then the cheerleaders came in. Polly, Viola, Hayley and Roxana were the most popular girls in school. They approached Lila and stuck a hairband on her head causing her transformation to begin. Her hair got long and blonder causing her to become ditzier. She gained an hourglass figure and developed a valley girl accent. Her face got more pretty and her lips plumped up. Her makeup became extremely sexy, as well as other parts of her body. Once it was over the cheerleaders took off the headband and then Lila gained a new name, Mia. She threw her books away and ran to the field with the other girls. She couldn't wait for Martin to change.

"Eeeekk! I'm like, totes excited to be a cheerleader. Can we like, change Martin too hehe?!" Mia says in a valley accent using her newly gained valley slang.

8

Martin and Lila were best friends, until one day. That day was the day Lila, or Mia as she was now called, became a cheerleader. Martin was confused what happened. He was sitting in the art classroom and then Mia came up to him and placed a football helmet on his head. He instantly started to transform. His hair shortened and darkened to a dark brown and it gained a messy Tiktok boy style. He got more muscular and taller, and developed a deep voice. His face got more rugged and angular and his eyes darkened in colour. His personality got more confident and popular boy-like. He became straight and started to mainly think with his dick. Once it was over Mia took off the helmet and then Martin gained a new name, Matt. He threw away the art supplied and kissed Mia passionately. He was glad he was now a football player and that Mia was his cheerleader girlfriend.

"Yo babe. I love you, you're so sexy huhu!" He said in his new dumb voice

(Decided to do a few of these for being gone for so long. Also short 7 and 8 are connected. And as always, all characters are 18 or over.)

[colesluvr]

It's me again here to request some more platonic ninja 🤭

Can I request ninja and male best friend reader headcanons

Pretty please with cherries on top ( I'm so sorry for that ) 💖

Hope you day it amazing as always

Best Friends | All Ninja x Male Reader (Platonic)

hello!! tysm for this request, i would die to be best friends with them !! really hope you enjoy this, sorry if it seems short 💔

KAI ★

dumbass duo

both of you pull all-nighters

they can either end of successful, or a certain master wu doubling your training times because you decided to stay up late, telling him you weren't tired.

you steal his hair gel, and he beats your ass if he catches you in the process of taking it.

when you do take it without him noticing, he just always glares at you because he knows you stole it.

he never understood why?

was it just to piss him off?

cuz what type of friend doesn't piss their other friend off for fun?

karoke nights>>

you and kai verese everyone else.

you decides who solo's that :)

kai starts food fights, but you finish them.

when you both were younger, every thing was a challenge between you both.

guess some people never change

COLE ★

you tried to teach the poor man how to bake :(

ended with you both getting a scolding by zane.

worth it, you were able to have a food fight.

although you lost because cole is basically a master at dodging, it was still fun.

you both go on walks to pastery shops and see who will pay for what.

rock, paper, sisscors, SHOOT ,, cole's paying today.

he helps you train, alothough it ends with you slamming your face into the ground most of the time he tries to help where he can.

sleepovers at your place>> sharing a room with the guys

you and him put on face masks bc cole wanted to.

surpirsinly it helped you both relax :)

tried to cook you lunch bc he was sick and tired of you making fun of him not being able to cook, and the next minute later firefighters were knocking at your front doors bc your nieghbor's could smell the smoke.

you never allow him in the kitchen alone anymore.

gives the best hugs.

it's like hugging a teddy bear, only it's cole.

JAY ★

i see the both of you doing the dumbest of tiktok trends together.

your dating kai, right,, and you snuck into the bathroom durning his shower with a bucket of cold water and poured it over the curtains.

jay was outside the room recording the noise, quickly running away with you hearing your boyfriend's (kai's) girly scream.

you both get scary durning video games.

you both could just be cussing at each other while the others are in the back with zane covering lloyd's ears, and cole covering zane's ears. both kai abd nya don't care, just don't rip each other's throats out.

he likes to go outside with you and chat about your day. it ends with you both laughing because while talking jay ran into a tree and fell onto you, both of you hitting the floor.

ypu both have blackmail photo's of each other you both just like to show the others.

you both go down for midnight snacks, running into lloyd who is just sitting at the kitchen table with a stash of candy. you all have a routine now.

cole sometimes comes down, but kai neevr does because he's not dealing you you four at 12 at night, that's not what he signed up for.

you both like arts and crafts, but jay is always the one to drag you into them.

ZANE ★

you: run's into the road without looking

zane: grabs your collor and pulls you back

thats how all great friendshios start (i should know, ahem)

you both like to take walks,, anywhere! you don't need to be going anywhere you can literally just walk in a straight line and you'll both be lost in conversation.

always asks if you'd eaten, drank water, and got a good nights rest.

he does this for everyone, actually.

you introduced him to ':)' '<3' :0' ':l" texting, and he now does it on a daily basis.

you both cook together, and you start food fights with him.

makes you laugh without even trying <33

you take snapchat photos because he loves them. you snapped a picture of him, and showed him his filtered picture.

makes you go to sleep and wake up at proper times.

loves dancing with you, just dance is something he may be bad at but he loves the time with you.

once you danced straight into a wall, and you both kinda stopped because he's gotten worried about you.

LLOYD ★

you both share a snack stash with your favorite chocolates and candies.

you both stay up late.

plays video games 24/7.

you and him go on midnight runs because you both love the aesthetic of the night.

you both train together, and make bets.

you steal eahc others candies.

sleepovers>>

movie nights>>

you comfort him when he's upset about his father, and he returns the same comfort to you when you need it.

loves you like a brother.

gets angry when you get hurt in battle

single pringles

y/n: he asked for no pickles!

lloyd: y/n...

you both don't really like parties, so you stay home together and have sleepovers.

a/n: guys, i want to start posting my ninjago headcanons ,, do you guys even want to see them?

[smokeybrandreviews]

Rap God

It’s wild watching cats besmirch Eminem’s name, like he’s just some modern day Vanilla Ice or some sh*t. Marshall Mathers might not be the GOAT, my personal number one is Biggie, but he’s damn close. Easily top ten, arguably top five, based strictly on his skill as a rapper. Em has it all; Wordplay, cadence, breath control, flow, and bars. This cat can spit that hot fire. Seriously, Eminem is that dude when it comes to clever lyrical content. Put him up against your favorite rapper and he will eat them alive. He’s done it to Jay-Z, Drake, and Kanye West; Cats considered to be the top of their respective eras. Hell, Eminem’s verse on Forever is the best on that record, by far, and it has every artists I listed just now, on it. The only cat who can claim to have shared a song with Eminem and not get absolutely embarrassed is Lil Wayne. I’m not even a fan of that dude but I understand how talented he is and, for him to make it a point to just pull even with Em, is saying a whole hell of a lot about Marhsall. It says even more that Wayne, himself, has pure respect for Eminem and isn’t shy to say speak to that sh*t out loud.

Indeed, most serious Rappers will sing Em’s praises because they know. I’m talking Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Tony Yayo, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Cardi B, T.I., Big Sean, Busta Rhymes, Redman, Nas, and the list goes on. These are greats of the genre, speaking on their admiration of, and for some, direct influence from, Slim Shady. Admittedly, he’s not as big as he was when I was young and a lot of what Rap has become seems more Pop than anything nowadays, but that’s all the more reasons to give Marshall his flowers. In a world where Lil Xan, Post Malone, and the Kid Laroi are topping the charts and strangling the airwaves, having a track like Rap God grace my ears is like getting a tall glass of ice cold water after struggling in that Arizona summer heat. And don’t let the fact that the three Rappers I chose for this example are whit, go over your head because Eminem allowed that to happen. Rap, and Hip Hop as a whole, is black people music. We made it. We proliferated it. We were very protective of it. White kids didn’t have a chance. You had to be on point to even be taken seriously in the rap game and Eminem was definitely that. Mans single-handedly shattered the color barrier and paved the way for other white boys to even spit raps on wax. Before him, it was the Beastie Boys and Vanilla f*cking Ice. After him, you get MGK, Lil Peep, Asher Roth, and Mac Miller. Eminem did that by being a straight up dog on the mic and downplaying that because “his records don’t play in the club” or “because he’s white” is the dumbest sh*t I have ever heard in my entire goddamn life.

[smokeybrand]

Rap God

It’s wild watching cats besmirch Eminem’s name, like he’s just some modern day Vanilla Ice or some sh*t. Marshall Mathers might not be the GOAT, my personal number one is Biggie, but he’s damn close. Easily top ten, arguably top five, based strictly on his skill as a rapper. Em has it all; Wordplay, cadence, breath control, flow, and bars. This cat can spit that hot fire. Seriously, Eminem is that dude when it comes to clever lyrical content. Put him up against your favorite rapper and he will eat them alive. He’s done it to Jay-Z, Drake, and Kanye West; Cats considered to be the top of their respective eras. Hell, Eminem’s verse on Forever is the best on that record, by far, and it has every artists I listed just now, on it. The only cat who can claim to have shared a song with Eminem and not get absolutely embarrassed is Lil Wayne. I’m not even a fan of that dude but I understand how talented he is and, for him to make it a point to just pull even with Em, is saying a whole hell of a lot about Marhsall. It says even more that Wayne, himself, has pure respect for Eminem and isn’t shy to say speak to that sh*t out loud.

Indeed, most serious Rappers will sing Em’s praises because they know. I’m talking Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Tony Yayo, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Cardi B, T.I., Big Sean, Busta Rhymes, Redman, Nas, and the list goes on. These are greats of the genre, speaking on their admiration of, and for some, direct influence from, Slim Shady. Admittedly, he’s not as big as he was when I was young and a lot of what Rap has become seems more Pop than anything nowadays, but that’s all the more reasons to give Marshall his flowers. In a world where Lil Xan, Post Malone, and the Kid Laroi are topping the charts and strangling the airwaves, having a track like Rap God grace my ears is like getting a tall glass of ice cold water after struggling in that Arizona summer heat. And don’t let the fact that the three Rappers I chose for this example are whit, go over your head because Eminem allowed that to happen. Rap, and Hip Hop as a whole, is black people music. We made it. We proliferated it. We were very protective of it. White kids didn’t have a chance. You had to be on point to even be taken seriously in the rap game and Eminem was definitely that. Mans single-handedly shattered the color barrier and paved the way for other white boys to even spit raps on wax. Before him, it was the Beastie Boys and Vanilla f*cking Ice. After him, you get MGK, Lil Peep, Asher Roth, and Mac Miller. Eminem did that by being a straight up dog on the mic and downplaying that because “his records don’t play in the club” or “because he’s white” is the dumbest sh*t I have ever heard in my entire goddamn life.

[workingforitallthetime]

oh no oh no oh no it’s happening again

with each Special Hockey Boy who has stolen my heart, i can point to one pivotal moment when i knew This Is My Guy. there’s one image or piece of footage that absolutely clotheslined me, and when i emerged from the delirious fog of rewatching/staring/sending gasping texts/reblogging with incoherent tags, i felt myself Changed.

and i would like the record to reflect that i had perfectly understandable and acceptable triggers for succumbing to cole and trevor and svechy baby.

but this? this is the dumbest possible way for kent johnson and owen power to trip over the picket fence of my heart and crash-land in my azaleas. i am better than this, goddammit. but i have been unable to look away from this photo for 15 hours straight and i must accept the inevitable.

it’s something about how they’re the only two people looking directly at the camera, the only two people displaying any sort of self-awareness in this disgraceful pile of half-naked boys. it’s the smug matching expressions that say “if we hide in the back row, nobody’s going to notice that we’re in our underwear.” it’s their snapbacks. it’s owen power’s fucking GLASSES. how very fucking dare they. i am enraged. i am furious. i will burn down this entire city. i hate everything and i hate the university of michigan ice hockey team most specifically but i unfortunately and inexorably love kent johnson and owen power forever.

[zumpietoo]

At the top of the heap of people whose names shall live in infamy are GOP Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who led the coup in the Senate to overturn the will of the people. After the fires started burning, Ted Cruz very poorly paid lip service to trying to cool things down, after he had helped commit the arson. Hawley could hardly be bothered to do that. Those two garbage fascists were joined in objections to Arizona and/or Pennsylvania by Tommy Tuberville, Roger Marshall, John Kennedy, Rick Scott, brand new Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, and Cindy Hyde-Smith. Let the record show that these people went ahead and kept up their objections even after the US Capitol building was attacked by domestic terrorists they and their shithole Dear Leader had incited. In the Senate, it was only those assholes. In the House, though? Holy shit. They objected to Arizona and somehow even more of them voted to sustain the objection to Pennsylvania in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, as if yesterday's terrorism put a spring in their step, as if the blood in the hallways of the Capitol gave them sustenance. Again, all of this was after the terrorist attack. And in the House it wasn't just Arizona and Pennsylvania either. Reps like Louie Gohmert stood up to object to other states too, even though the GOP senators who had originally planned to support those challenges had put down their guns and agreed to end the standoff peacefully. (It was particularly pleasing to watch Vice President Mike Pence glare at Gohmert, who just got finished unsuccessfully suing Pence to make him overturn the election, and tell him his objection to the electors in Wisconsin "MAY NOT BE ENTERTAINED," since he couldn't get even the Senate's dumbest Republican Ron Johnson to sign his treason permission slip anymore.) Overall, 139 House GOP members voted to object to the electors from Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. These are their names. They should not be allowed around your children, you should kick them out of your chicken restaurant, and they should always and forevermore be referred to as seditious traitors to democracy in the United States of America. They really should be expelled from Congress. They're listed by state, to make it helpful for people to know which chicken restaurants to ban them from, specifically. Alabama 1. Robert Aderholt 2. Mo Brooks 3. Jerry Carl 4. Barry Moore 5. Gary Palmer 6. Mike Rogers Arizona 7. Andy Biggs 8. Paul Gosar 9. Debbie Lesko 10. David Schweikert Arkansas 11. Rick Crawford California 12. Ken Calvert 13. Mike Garcia 14. Darrell Issa 15. Doug LaMalfa 16. Kevin McCarthy 17. Devin Nunes 18. Jay Obernolte Colorado 19. Lauren Boebert 20. Doug Lamborn Florida 21. Kat Cammack 22. Mario Diaz-Balart 23. Byron Donalds 24. Neal Dunn 25. Scott Franklin 26. Matt Gaetz 27. Carlos Jimenez 28. Brian Mast 29. Bill Posey 30. John Rutherford 31. Greg Steube 32. Daniel Webster Georgia 33. Rick Allen 34. Earl "Buddy" Carter 35. Andrew Clyde 36. Marjorie Taylor Greene 37. Jody Hice 38. Barry Loudermilik Idaho 39. Russ Fulcher Illinois 40. Mike Bost 41. Mary Miller Indiana 42. Jim Baird 43. Jim Banks 44. Greg Pence 45. Jackie Walorski Kansas 46. Ron Estes 47. Jacob LaTurner 48. Tracey Mann Kentucky 49. Harold Rogers Louisiana 50. Garret Graves 51. Clay Higgins 52. Mike Johnson 53. Steve Scalise Maryland 54. Andy Harris Michigan 55. Jack Bergman 56. Lisa McClain 57. Tim Walberg Minnesota 58. Michelle Fischbach 59. Jim Hagedorn Mississippi 60. Michael Guest 61. Trent Kelly 62. Steven Palazzo Missouri 63. Sam Graves 64. Vicky Hartzler 65. Billy Long 66. Blaine Luetkemeyer 67. Jason Smith Montana 68. Matt Rosendale North Carolina 69. Dan Bishop 70. Ted Budd 71. Madison Cawthorn 72. Virginia Foxx 73. Richard Hudson 74. Gregory Murphy 75. David Rouzer New Jersey 76. Jeff Van Drew New Mexico 77. Yvette Harrell New York 78. Chris Jacobs 79. Nicole Malliotakis 80. Elise Stefanik 81. Lee Zeldin Nebraska 82. Adrian Smith Ohio 83. Steve Chabot 84. Warren Davidson 85. Bob Gibbs 86. Bill Johnson 87. Jim Jordan Oklahoma 88. Stephanie Hice 89. Tom Cole 90. Kevin Hern 91. Frank Lucas 92. Markwayne Mullin Oregon 93. Cliff Bentz Pennsylvania 94. John Joyce 95. Fred Keller 96. Mike Kelly 97. Daniel Meuser 98. Scott Perry 99. Guy Reschenthaler 100. Lloyd Smucker 101. Glenn Thompson South Carolina 102. Jeff Duncan 103. Ralph Norman 104. Tom Rice 105. William Timmons 106. Joe Wilson Tennessee 107. Tim Burchett 108. Scott DesJarlais 109. Chuck Fleischmann 110. Mark Green 111. Diana Harshbarger 112. David Kustoff 113. John Rose Texas 114. Jodey Arrington 115. Brian Babin 116. Michael Burgess 117. John Carter 118. Michael Cloud 119. Pat Fallon 120. Louie Gohmert 121. Lance Gooden 122. Ronny Jackson 123. Troy Nehls 124. August Pfluger 125. Pete Sessions 126. Beth Van Duyne 127. Randy Weber 128. Roger Williams 129. Ron Wright Utah 130. Burgess Owens 131. Chris Stewart Virginia 132. Ben Cline 133. Bob Good 134. Morgan Griffith 135. Robert Wittman West Virginia 136. Carol Miller 137. Alexander Mooney Wisconsin 138. Scott Fitzgerald 139. Tom Tiffany These are the people who either incited yesterday's attackers, gave them aid and comfort as terrorist sympathizers, or both.

https://www.wonkette.com/here-are-all-147-members-of-the-terrorist-inciting-gop-sedition-caucus-may-their-names-forever-be-stained

[thesinglesjukebox]

KATY PERRY - HARLEYS IN HAWAII

[4.00]

Just because it's hula, doesn't mean it's really hula...

Josh Buck: What if the only female artist to have five #1s on the same album dropped four solid bops in a year and no one noticed? Can't-buy-a-hit Katy Perry sounds like indie pop given a giant budget. She's the weird, bad and wonderful pop elder statesman we need right now. [6]

Katherine St Asaph: Katy Perry was, for years, the leading primary-colors-and-pasties representative of peppy all-American pop, which perhaps explains why she's had a particularly hard time adjusting to doomer 2019. There's a wistful late-summer pop waft in "Harleys in Hawaii," maybe, but selling it requires nonchalant chill, a quality Katy Perry has never possessed as a vocalist or a performer. Also, the thing has words. I originally misheard the chorus as "you and Daddy riding Harleys in Hawaii," which still wouldn't even be the fifth-worst line. [4]

Will Rivitz: Latter-career Katy Perry is, if not particularly good, per se, usually at least interesting; her songs tend to either trainwreck in bizarrely compelling ways or quietly go toe-to-toe with the best in her discography. This is neither; it's budget Ariana Grande on just enough Xanax to make everything torpid but not enough to make it worthwhile. [3]

Natasha Genet Avery: In another life, the lush and sexy "Harleys in Hawaii" could have been my favorite thank u, next album track. Instead, Katy Perry's clumsy lyrics ("go ahead, explore the island ~vibes~!") make it feel more like a travel ad than a bedroom jam. [6]

Hazel Southwell: A geographically confused Cafe Del Mar compilation track that forgot to put the hook in, with the lyrical copy from a tourist information SEO exercise. [3]

Alfred Soto: The title should come with its own illustrative video: "Jenny on the Block," say, with jump cuts of Katy Perry and her boyfriend sipping fizzy cocktails out of coconuts on a black sand beach. To honor this vibe, she adopts an approach to the beat that Mariah Carey might've recognized. It's one of her better performances. But she offers nothing but Instagram shots. [4]

Stephen Eisermann: I mean, I finally get it. Charlie Puth's songs aren't well-written, he just sells the hell out of them. In his hands, this song might've been sexier and more playful, but in Katy's? It reeks of desperation, like a cougar fighting the mid-life crisis off by any means necessary. Or, I guess, like a singer trying with all her might, to remain relevant. In both cases, the inevitable wins. [3]

Alex Clifton: Well, it's definitely a Katy Perry song because it sounds good if you hear it in the background but its lyrics are a bit lacking. "When I hula-hula, hula, so good you'll take me to the jeweler-jeweler, jeweler" in particular mystifies me. You dance so well specifically in Hawaii that this dude's going to marry you? Are you angling for a diamond-encrusted hula-hoop? Is "hula" a sex euphemism that I'm just not getting? If you ignore the nonsense coming out of Perry's mouth, it comes across as a decent slow jam. But Perry's not made much music for toned-down vocals; any time she's singing, her voice is centre-stage and distracting. At this point I would love to see her turn into a behind-the-scenes songwriter, as I think she can make real pop magic happen. Sadly some of that sparkle fades when she's fully at the helm. [4]

Isabel Cole: I've personally found it like really psychologically destabilizing to watch Katy Perry inexplicably decide more than a decade into her recording year to finally use her passable voice to make normal human singing noises, so I guess it's kind of nice that these lyrics testify so strongly to her unchallenged ten-year reign as the absolute dumbest person in pop. [3]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[rgr-pop]

circuitbird replied to your post :let me say that i actually kinda liked this piece,...

When you say “narrower” do you mean, like, songwriter-as-analogous-to-auteur? One of the interesting things to me about pop punk (related to your other post) is that there seems to be comparatively less handwringing among rock critics about the multitudes of songwriters that are often involved, e.g. P!ATD or Fall Out Boy and what implications that may have regarding “”“authenticity”“”

hm, I think I kind of know what you mean in that first question but I’m not totally sure, but yes, I think so. what I actually meant was maybe even simpler than that: when we say “songwriting” when it comes to women we have a hard time meaning anything other than...lyrics. (there are exceptions, of course, for example all that talk put me in a fiona apple mood and now I am listening to fiona apple; and of course my favorite woman songwriter is probably the most obvious great woman songwriter, joanna, so.)

now, with your last comment... omg. I know exactly what you are talking about but I don’t think I ever would have thought to draw this comparison. I’m laughing about it because, I dunno if I have posted this here, but I am OBSESSED with that panic single that is out right now which I swear to you is a literal actual big time rush song. I’m OBSESSED with rush bag disco!! (in making this post I finally decided to look into who wrote and produced that song to figure out why it sounds like btr, and I couldn’t believe, speaking of purchase grads, jenny owen youngs is a credited writer, didn’t think I’d see her name again!) 

what I meant re: pop punk was really more about pop punk in the pure sense, I think when you bring emo into it there’s a lot more to it. (or, actually, I might argued, a lot less to it, lol.) it’s an obvious thing: we don’t describe what’s going on in a, let’s say nofx album, as “songwriting,” more or less because it is structured to read as “simple” (but also because of genre conventions that usually oppose “songwriting” as an act, anyway, stylistically); at the same time, turns out, the forms of this genre (especially in production) are incredibly hard to replicate, right. (nofx is maybe the best example of this because they are the “dumbest” while also being like, probably the most technically trained proficient band in...america, to say nothing of the conceptual work and volume.) (big token exception goes to doctor frank, ~~~cole porter of punk, who gets called a Songwriter because he’s a PARTICULARLY stylized smartass) (no offense, I love him)

so one thing I was kind of alluding to there is that I sort of thing pop punk, actual pop punk not just “has a melody and electric guitar” christ almighty, I sort of think in this moment, for me, pop punk is the only project worth pursuing, because it is the most difficult project, because no one anywhere in indie music is any good at it right now, and because the way that the “writing” of pop punk has been made more opaque makes it more fun to...write! and hard. and an assured failure (at least until I get the money to record with mass giorgini :))

[badgersmash9-blog]

Private Equity Expert Dr. Ashby Monk Repudiates CalPERS CEO Marcie Frost’s Private Equity Scheme During and Immediately After Presentation at CalPERS

CalPERS is having trouble getting anyone reputable to endorse its unorthodox, risky private equity scheme. the centerpiece of which is to create and fund two new large fund managers that would be completely unaccountable to CalPERS.

The idea should have died a long time ago, but CEO Marcie Frost is still desperate to get it done, despite staff members admitting in a November board meeting that CalPERS’ newfangled companies would have higher costs in the early years and would also generate lower returns than conventional private equity funds. This is tantamount to an admission that CalPERS board members, executives, and consultants would be violating their fiduciary duty to CalPERS if they were to let this plan go forward.

As we’ll show below, one of the experts that CalPERS has now had in twice, with the apparent aim of helping to persuade the board to approve this obviously bad idea, has taken the unusual step of publishing a long tweetstorm shortly after a presentation at CalPERS last week that makes clear that he is opposed to CalPERS’ plans. Mind you, Dr. Ashby Monk is too polite to say, “CalPERS needs its head examined,” but if you look at his forceful and clear recommendation, it is the polar opposite of Marcie Frost’s private equity plans.

Even though Dr. Monk has made clear his general position on private equity for a long time, it seems noteworthy that he felt compelled to give a one-stop-shopping version on Twitter later in the very same week that he spoke at CalPERS. Recall that this was the second time Dr. Monk has spoken to CalPERS board. We pointed out that CalPERS had snookered Dr. Monk the first time he presented:

CalPERS has even gone so far as to mislead its own cheerleaders. The pension fund invited Dr. Ashby Monk of Stanford to speak at a public board meeting in August, and Frost quotes Dr. Monk in her promotional article. Dr. Monk took a generally positive tone but pointed out that what CalPERS was planning to do was not direct investing, which means having CalPERS staff make private equity investments itself, but was forming its own general partners. Dr. Monk then described how some large investors had used “pick the pickers” methods to assure that the board was loyal to the organization that provided the money.

I spoke with Dr. Monk for a half-hour after his CalPERS presentation. He acknowledged in our conversation that CalPERS had not disclosed to him that the board of the new entity would be chosen by its management and CalPERS would have no say in the board’s selection. Thus he cannot be deemed to have approved what CalPERS is doing, since he was misinformed.

We pointed out in this same October post that CalPERS has featured Dr. Monk prominently in a brochure to CalPERS beneficiaries as if he were supportive of CalPERS’ plans. Reader Brooklyn Bridge pointed out that even with CalPERS’ cherry-picking, Dr. Monk’s support had actually been so heavily qualified as to be empty:

“But as Dr. Monk said, “I’m encouraged that if you can get the governance right, if you can evolve this into a platform that can recruit the right talent, you can succeed.”

Even as a total know nothing, I would see pure bunk in this line alone (never mind, “We’ve listened to our Stakeholders”… and they want dumb, dumber and dumbest). It might as well read, “I’m encouraged that if you succeed, and succeed well, you are well on your way to success!”

The title should be, “Taking aim. Exploring a new Private Equity Mark“

Below is Dr. Monk laying out his recommended private equity to public pension funds…and this recommendation is the polar opposite of what CalPERS has been trying to get its board to approve. It’s unlikely to be a coincidence that he posted this tweetstorm within days of visiting CalPERS:

This is a recommendation to bring private equity in house, period. As we have said repeatedly, that is the polar opposite to what CalPERS is trying to do, CalPeRS wants to create new investment vehicles which will be even riskier and less accountable than inventing through private equity fund managers.

Dr. Monk also points out that if your are serious about ESG (emphasizing environmental, social, and governance investing), you need to run your private equity investing in-house. Recall that CalSTRS had a long and uphill to get fund manager Cerberus to sell its stake in a firearms maker. That’s only one holding. Consider this part of a clearly unhappy 2015 press release:

Although Cerberus committed to sell its holdings in Remington Outdoor, thus far that pledge has not been fulfilled. As we continue to push them on this front, we have also worked to exercise patience and give them time to execute what is a complicated transaction.

But we understand the patience of our membership wears thin. Unfortunately, as a limited partner in a private equity investment pool controlled by Cerberus, CalSTRS has very limited rights. Contractual obligations and legal constraints severely limit our options to exit this investment.

More importantly, we cannot take unilateral action, in this case, to remove a specific company from an investment pool. Nor can we expose the fund by prematurely or imprudently selling about $375 million worth of holdings at a loss without thoroughly exhausting all other options first. While we cannot share the details, we want to make it clear that all potential options are being fully considered and have been for some time.

Even though we don’t have the same level of enthusiasm for ESG investing that CalPERS does, the point is that CalPERS pretends to be serious about it, and it can’t be if it is investing through third-party managers. It can only have very limited firm prohibitions; otherwise, it constrains the investment universe and becomes an unattractive funds source.1

Dr. Monk’s tweetstorm came after he repudiated another central element of CalPERS’ scheme, that of its lack of transparency. Recall that CalPERS now provides limited information about all of its private equity investments every quarter, such at the commitment amount, the total funds invested, and the returns, expressed as IRR and investment multiple. That disclosure came about as the result of a settlement with the Mercury News in 2002. Many other public pension funds now provide similar fund-by-fund information. One of the important aims of Marcie Frost’s private equity plans are to end this and other disclosures.

Recall that at last December’s board meeting, General Counsel Matt Jacobs stated that the purpose of the new private equity scheme was secrecy (see 3:36:58):

Board Member Margaret Brown: Mr. Cole, you know that this Board has a fiduciary responsibility to 1.9 million members and thousands of employers. And so with that in mind, I wanted to let you know that I have a lot of concerns that we are putting this program together, I think, in part to avoid transparency, Bagley-Keene, the 700s, and the Public Records Act request.

And so what I’m wondering is since CalPERS is drafting the agreements we could, in fact, make them — at least due to a Public Records Act we request, we could, in fact, require that of our partners in these companies could we not, since we’re drafting that agreement? Oh, good. Mr. Jacobs, we’ll have him come up and answer.

Investment Director John Cole: That’s a legal question.

Board Member Brown: Yeah.

Investment Director Cole: I don’t want to get out of my lane

General Counsel Matt Jacobs: Well, at a high level, I suppose we could. I think that would defeat the entire purpose of the endeavor that the Investment Office is undertaking, which is that these are private investments, and they’re private for a reason, which is that the — the financial information needs to be private. And the people running them have these types of preferences.

A little more than a month later, at the board’s offsite meeting on January 22, one of the private equity experts invited to speak, Dr. Ashby Monk, blew up the CalPERS’ claim that secrecy is necessary and desirable at 1:31:10: “I’ll offer some bit of extreme views. I think there is no balance. 100% should have ESG and transparency.”

And CalPERS has also used as a defense that private equity funds don’t like transparency. Mind you, we’ve had the limited partnership agreements of many of the biggest fund managers posted on our site for years and none of them appear to have suffered as a result of these supposed trade secrets getting out in the wild.

One of the amusing spectacles at the offsite was Jonathan Coslet of TPG trying to pretend that the over-the-top secrecy requirements for private equity limited partnership agreements was somehow the doing of investors and TPG was perfectly fine with everything being out in the open. Starting at 1:06:30:

Board Member Margaret Brown:: As you may know, we have been having open discussions about the secrecy of private equity agreements. And I understand that the Pennsylvania state legislature has recommended substantial narrowing of the laws that exempt from FOIA the entire contracts between private equity funds and investors like public pension funds. I am curious in TPG’s case investors or TPG was harmed by the release of what I understand was one of your agreements by the Pennsylvania state Treasurer. Just wondering. Several years ago that happened, it was out in the public domain and I’m just wondering if there was any harm to investors or to TPG when that happened.

TPG Chief Investment Officer Jonathan Coslet: I can’t really comment specifically, but my sense is that our perspective would be that we want to respect the confidentiality that you would like and if you our clients would like confidentiality, confidentiality with what is essentially a private contract, we would like to respect that. Different organizations have different feelings about that. We have sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, endowments, pension funds, individuals. So we just want to respect the confidentiality our clients would like.

As Dr. Monk said to an audience member later, this claim was completely false. Private equity fund managers have fought fiercely to keep their limited partnership agreements secret, absurdly claiming the entire agreement to be a trade secret. This systematic shielding of these agreements started, ironically, in the wake of the 2002 Mercury News settlement with CalPERS that we mentioned earlier. Private equity firms went to every state and got either legislation or state attorney general opinions shielding private equity agreements in full from disclosure. Even now, these alternative investment agreements are the only contracts that state and city governments enter into that are secret.

We gave a long-form debunking of the idea that anything in private equity agreements could be considered a trade secret in 2014, when we published a set of private equity agreements that the Pennsylvania Treasurer had on its website with no password protection. That includes the TPG contract that Margaret Brown mentioned. A key section of that post:

For decades, private equity (PE) firms have asserted that limited partnership agreements (LPAs), the contracts between themselves and investors, should be treated in their entirety as trade secrets, and therefore not subject to disclosure under Freedom of Information Act laws in any jurisdiction. These private equity general partners argued that the information in their contracts was so sensitive that it needed to be shielded from competitors’ eyes, otherwise their unique, critically important know-how would be appropriated and used against them. In particular, PE firms have made frequent, forceful claims that their limited partnership agreements provide valuable insight into their investment strategies. The industry took the position that these documents were as valuable to them as the formula for Coca-Cola or the schematics for Intel’s next microprocessor chip.

You can see why Dr. Monk was unable to contain himself when Coslet served up such nonsense with a straight face. But the flip side is that this revisionist history is the new party line in private equity, that the general partners know they don’t have a leg to stand on in trying to continue the pretense that they have a legitimate business need for their secrecy regime. It may be that general partners recognize that the Pennsylvania disclosure recommendations have breached the levee, and there’s no standing against the wave of changes that will follow.2

So if CalPERS can’t even get supposedly supportive experts to back its plan, pray tell how can its board go forward without putting a huge “Sue me” target on their backs? I bet Bill Lerach is quietly hoping they don’t figure that one out.

______

1 As much as we applaud some of what Dr. Monk says, we also have to note that he goes to considerable lengths to cater to the needs of investors that are his prospective clients, unlike academics who focus on private equity like Oxford’s Ludovic Phalippou, or Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt.

Specifically, Dr. Monk notably sidesteps the real reason for bringing private equity in house. It isn’t that public pensions funds all over America have suddenly become camp followers of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and have decided to get out of the billionaire-creation business. No, it is that private equity net returns are falling and investing via private equity funds no longer earning enough on a risk-adjusted basis to justify investing in the strategy. It’s truly disturbing to see Dr. Monk effectively support the public pensions funds’ “absolute return” fallacy, when no intellectually honest finance professional would indulge it. The only way to have private equity deliver adequate net returns is to considerably reduce the fees and costs of private equity investing by doing it in house. And those charges are so ginormous that doing it yourself, even though it will take time to get there, ought to be seen as a no-brainer.

It is also bogus to depict equities of any sort a long-term investments that better fit the long-term liabilities of pension funds. In the hoary days of my childhood, equities were recognized as highly speculative. Bonds were the preferred investments for pension funds because bonds, with their fixed payments of interest and principal, could be laddered to meet the projected liabilities of pension funds.

The reason for higher equity allocations has nada to do with them not having fixed maturities. Equities were added because they have higher returns and provide diversification by asset class, which before risky assets became so highly correlated, also offered some additional downside protection.

Moreover, had Dr. Monk familiarized himself with public markets investing, he would know that one of the reasons academic studies back index investing is that the rebalancing to replicate the index forces selling of winners, as in realization of gains. Similarly, the reason private equity as currently practiced has provided high returns is the discipline of requiring realization of profit. While there are cases where PE funds buy a “growth-y” company and wind up selling it to another private equity fund who is also able to get good returns (meaning the sale from one fund to the second just resulted in paying extra transaction fees, if you look at total returns from owning that company), CalPERS has effectively admitted that this isn’t a widespread phenomenon, and that longer holding periods = lower returns. Why engage in this long-dated fund fad at all if it undermines the whole rationale for private equity, higher returns?

2 Key section from the executive summary:

This entry was posted in CalPERS, Dubious statistics, Investment management, Private equity on January 28, 2019 by Yves Smith.

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Source: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/01/private-equity-expert-dr-ashby-monk-repudiates-calpers-ceo-marcie-frosts-private-equity-scheme-immediately-presentation-calpers.html

[thewritinglist]

Albums of the “Year”

It’s very limiting to list my favourite albums released in the last twelve months, because years are an arbitrary concept, invented by humanity, and I also struggle to get away from my comfort zone of a few bands I’ve obsessively listened to and mentally catalogued. So, here is my top ten albums of 2018. They’re not necessarily from 2018, but they defined my year.

10. After Laughter by Paramore

For a long while, Paramore existed in my cultural awareness as one song, and a post on this very site about how Hayley Williams once caused a tour to be cancelled by getting her teenage self grounded.

That’s an unfair assessment.

The one song was Still Into You, passed on as part of a mixtape made by a dear friend to celebrate my first anniversary with my girlfriend. But after hearing Fake Happy on the radio at my former place of work (I didn’t love The Co-Op, but I have to hand it to their DJs and their fine taste), I had to google some lyrics to find it. The twelve songs tell an often deceptively sad story underneath the jangling guitars and synths that throw you and Paramore back together to the eighties. I listen to the music for the lyrics, and Williams really excels in adding sadness in the tone and not as something yelled. 

Best song - Hard Times.

2017 - Fuelled by Ramen - Pop rock

9. Silver Dollar Moment by The Orielles

I discovered the next two bands by a moment of delightful chance, when indie band Little Comets opened their twitter account to female fans on International Women’s Day, and one recommended these two.

Opening track Mango really nicely sets the scene for forty-five minutes of dreamily delivered indie rock, especially in Esmé Dee Hand-Halford’s vocals and bass. It’s the sort of music that makes me want to close my eyes and gently drift my head from side to side, which is why I have a soft rule to listen to it mostly in the comfort of a closed bedroom. Labelling anything indie gives an impression of competent but basic guitar/bass/drums, but The Orielles do much more than that, there’s an injection of funk and weirdness that occasionally brings to mind Talking Heads, if you played them at half speed, and replaced Byrne’s sudden manic energy with languid relaxation.

Best song: Mango

2018 - Heavenly Records - Indie rock

8. Love in the 4th Dimension by The Big Moon

The second chance discovery, The Big Moon are definitely more conventionally indie than their precedents in this list, but I like the simplicity of not adding too much to a song. This album blasts, first track Sucker building quickly and simply to a massive chorus, which is easy to imagine reverberating around Rescue Rooms or Rock City to a highly appreciative crowd. 

But it slows, too. Formidable’s verses have a solemn quality, with imagery of a capsizing boat and vague references to “did she make you swallow all your pride?” changing the atmosphere to something more confrontational, before the chorus rugby tackles the subject, with still soft vocals.

Best song: Silent Movie Susie

2017 - Columbia & Fiction Records - Indie rock

7. Harry Styles by Harry Styles

“Have you listened to Harry Styles’ album?”

The same friend that brought me the Paramore song asked me this on a Texas road trip with my girlfriend, having grown understandably tired of my musical choices. I said no, with an implication of “of course not”, because he was a he One Direction guy, and I hated them and all they stood for.

That is a poor assessment of Harry Styles’ abilities as a songwriter and musician. His self-titled debut, such a classic going solo move, is a mature change-up from the former One Direction star. An aeon away from upbeat teen-pop, now Styles is singing maturely and softly about sex, not explicitly but provocatively in Carolina. The use of “Good Girl, she makes me feel so good” is not at all subtle, and the album often feels like these are ideas and feelings that Styles wanted to get off his chest. These are not One Direction songs, and much as the Harry Potter series mature as the books passed and readers aged, Harry Styles feels like an album aimed at One Direction fans who are growing less interested in the innocent, good boy image they’d cultivated.

The music is clean and engaging, but more complex than those previous recordings. In all, the album manages something tough: It reveals a former teen star’s true maturity without the need to scream it explicitly. It feels confident in its identity, which is an achievement in itself.

Best song: Two Ghosts

2017 - Columbia - Indie pop/soft rock

6. Mean Girls - Original Cast Recording

Mean Girls, the film, holds up. Comedy, as I’ve learned just across my time at university, is the first genre to age badly. Punchlines need a target, and our understanding and acceptance of who and what is allowed as a target is ever shifting. So for Tina Fey to ingeniously target not the cattiness of teenage girls, which is a cheap stereotype that the mainstream media still loves to find and blow up (see: the majority of Taylor Swift coverage), but rather the expectation that they’ll do that, and the mentalities of teenager in general, savvily keeps it fresh.

Mean Girls, the musical, opened in 2017 and moved to Broadway in 2018. Music is written by Jeff Richmond, Fey’s husband and collaborator on both the seminal 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Nell Benajmin provided lyrics whilst Fey wrote the book, and together they brilliantly recreated the quotable magic of the original. Fey’s credit is limited to the book but at times her voice is loud and clear in the lyrics. The dumbest plastic, Karen Smith, sings an ode to Halloween, which begins with her muddling over putting it before world peace as a priority, and builds to her love of costumes: “I’m sexy Eleanor Roosevelt or sexy Rosa Parks” is such a Fey joke, fitting of the film. It’s also delightful to hear some extra input on protagonist Cady’s initial best friend Janis (Barrett Wilbert Weed, the best performance), a wonderful character who has the backstory most ripe for exploration in any future works.

Hey, I managed not to say fetch. 

Wait.

Damn.

Best song: World Burn

2018 - Atlantic - Broadway

5. Be More Chill - Original Cast Recording

Be More Chill is an honest story of teenagers and mental health. Adapted mostly faithfully from a 2004 novel by young adult author Ned Vizzini, the story is of Jeremy Heere, a high school loser whose initial goal is charmingly low-key. He just wants to be a bit less awkward and able to survive high school, but quickly decides to sign up for a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, following in the steps of his crush Christine Canigula, a theatre lover with, in her words, “A touch of ADD”.

It’s this detail that sets the musical’s story apart from the book. Mental health is a subtextual theme of the book, but Christine and her love of performing as someone else and occasional scatterbrain, makes it explicit. The main thrust comes when a jock named Rich offers Jeremy a Squip, AKA a supercomputer, taken as a pill, that invades your brain and tells you how to act and speak. It helps Jeremy enter the cool kids’ circle, but at the expense of his friendship with the proudly dorky Michael, who is delighted that humanity has stopped evolving because, in his words, “there’s never been a better time in history to be a looooooooooooooooser!”

In the final song, Voices in My Head, Christine and Jeremy finally bond properly over the voices they’ve both heard, and it completes a surprisingly moving story of mental health in a musical that is often bombastically big and ridiculous - the Squip is supposed to have Keanu Reeves’ voice. Joe Iconis’ music and lyrics are witty and engaging, perfectly fitting the clever and original novel, and the sadly departed Vizzini.

Best song: Michael in the Bathroom (George Salazar)

2015 - Ghostlight Records - Broadway

4. Worhead by Little Comets

Little Comets are the most exciting band in current music.

This is a bold claim, but I like to be bold. Little Comets, who hail from Jarrow in Tyne and Wear, write the most incredibly moving, lyrically dense and thoughtful songs you can find today. Every song on Worhead is affecting.

If you listen to their first album, In Search of Elusive Little Comets, the musical and lyrical progression in six years is astounding. The fun early indie rock has complicated and deepened, like a lake dug out from beneath its surface. By 2017, lead singer and writer Rob Coles’ grasp on lyrics had become masterful, and he uses images to  generate feeling so well. The title and opening tack immediately point to a specific image: “Standing in a field of grass, looking for a blade of grass”. Coles is upfront about his political beliefs - a 2014 song titled “The Blur, the Line and the Thickest of Onions” explicitly denies and attacks the language of Blurred Lines, and their music is often loudly feminist. Worhead asks us “My sweetheart, can we lean more, to the left side, to the left side of everything”. À Bientôt angrily speaks to anti-migrant rhetoric from their perspective, even including the temporary sympathy caused by the image of the dead boy washed up on the beach, whilst Hunting is written from the smug, entitled view of Tory ministers, cutting, unafraid of retribution, safe from the consequences.

Density of ideas is a Little Comets staple, and the unapologetic thickness of the accents often need a trip to their website or Genius for understanding, but Coles also writes poetically when he pares his words down for romance. “Common Things” describes globetrotting, but in the context of not wanting it, because of the joys of being home, only needing an atlas under the mattress. Elegant domesticity is the only kind of love song that continually appeals to me. They are a continually astounding and unique band.

Best song: 

2017 - The Smallest Label - Indie rock

3. Illinois by Sufjan Stevens

I hardly ever enjoy music purely for the feeling that the music imparts on me. Before I was listening to music critically, I saw an episode of Charlie Brooker’s excellent series Screenwipe, which discussed and took the piss out of all elements of television. In an advertising special, he mentioned that advertisers love music as it bypasses the logical part of your mind and is processed emotionally. There’s something romantic about that, but at the same time sometimes I wonder if that subconsciously put up mental guards, and I have to understand lyrics to understand the emotions.

Illinois is a rare exception.

Sufjan Stevens relased Illinois in 2005 and it serves as a sort of concept album about the American state. It covers points from its history: “Come on! Feel the Illinoise!” covers the historic World’s Columbian Exposition, and “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” is about the infamous serial killer and affords him almost shocking levels of empathy. Stevens later said that we’re all capable of what Gacy did, which is debatable.

But we’re all capable of the grief woven into Caismir Pulaski Day, which tragically tells the story of losing someone who died on the state holiday celebrating their Polish revolutionary war hero.

An independent singer songwriter with track titles as terribly long as “The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'” seems like someone addicted to acoustic guitar, but Stevens utilises piano, strings and horns, especially effective in the aforementioned ‘Come on’. The album is vivid and alive, and is really a practical tie for second.

2005 - Asthmatic Kitty/Secretly Canadian and Rough Trade - Indie rock/folk

2. Masseduction by St. Vincent

This year, I made a real effort, admittedly only in September, to get into new music. Reading an interview with David Byrne, I was intrigued by his mention of St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark. Anyone who can engage David Byrne is worthy of attention.

Inside the striking image and colouring of the artwork, Masseduction was first introduced to me in the opening scene of Bojack Horseman’s fifth season, replacing the standard use of Back in the 90′s by Grouplove with Los Ageless. The song, Clark’s depiction of Los Angeles, feels bleak and distant, the electronic music giving an disconnected vibe. It’s her relationship to the city, and the album as a whole is a series of looks at relationships. Pills is about a relationship with drugs, the title track and Savior are about sex. Happy Birthday Johnny, both slower and acoustic, feel related, as though they’re both about the same person, Clark coming to terms with the sadness of that loss.

Masseduction is endlessly listenable. It spans various pop genres, with enough variety to reward many listens and picking on many of its songs to focus on individually. Pills really does feel like withdrawal, with pumped up verses, an almost manic chorus, and a suddenly balladish final section, where the tone becomes surprisingly sombre. It works, powerfully so.

Best song: Pills

2017 - Loma Vista Recordings - Electropop/Glam Rock

1. The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (50th Anniversary Edition)

The Kinks released Village Green Preservation Society on the 22nd of November, 1968, which sounds fine until you learn that The Beatles released The White Album on the same day, spelling inevitable and crushing doom, and the permanent departure of founding bassist Pete Quaife from the band. Quaife, who had grown tired of the industry and the Davies’ brothers warring ways, scrawled ‘daze’ on a tape recording of Days. But he left on perhaps the band’s highest note. 

I don’t know what else can be said about this album. Even if every song isn’t a standalone masterpiece, with the strange fairy tale of Phenomenal Cat and the childlike Mr. Songbird only working in context of stories of the past, but they form a collective that is masterful in painting a rich story. It has the delicacy of a great painting, something that former art student Ray Davies must appreciate. And it is so distinctly Ray Davies in its voice, something only he alone could have written. It was their first album after a still somewhat mysterious five year ban from American touring, then the only real form of promotion, but it dismisses the cultural shift towards psychedelia with an almost passive-aggressive tone. 

The weighty re-release is fitted out with sixty tracks, but they’re largely alternative versions of songs from the original album and the recording sessions, many unreleased, including the finished Time Song, and a lovely demo of Days, that proves that Davies was always a better writer than singer, bless him. Harmonies with his brother Dave always lifted the words, but they stand alone, as short stories, brilliantly formed.

VGPS contributes to their stereotypical image of proud Britishness, but there’s a look to the future and underlying sadness that add depth to the album. The original final track’s closing lyirc?

Don’t show me no more, please.

1968/2018 - Pye Records - Folk Rock

[americasweek-blog]

Kevin's Heart - J. Cole | The song comes from his latest album, KOD, which broke streaming records this weekend upon its release.

Though that documentary never came out, it lead to Lazer directing Forest Hills Drive: Homecoming, which aired on HBO in 2015. Now, the 29-year-old works as Dreamville’s in-house filmmaker, where he produces and directs. Increasingly, though, he’s sharing the director’s chair with Cole himself. They collaborated on the 4 Your Eyez Only companion documentary (which also aired on HBO), a handful of music videos (including Royce Da 5’9’s “Boblo Boat”) — plus Cole’s videos for “A.T.M.” and “Kevin’s Heart” (starring Kevin Hart), from Cole’s new record, KOD. Much like the public’s reaction to news of Kevin Hart’s infidelity, all eyes are on the comedian in J. Cole’s latest video, partly named after the Philadelphia native. As the song tells the tale of fighting off the urge to cheat, the video for “Kevin’s Heart” does the same and its impact is felt that much more since Hart decided to serve as the reel’s star. Featured on J. Cole's latest album, KOD, the "Kevin's Heart" visuals are just the latest video from the rapper who recently released a video for the song "ATM." Cole also makes a brief appearance in his new video, struggling with a stroller while Hart deals with an overzealous fan. "I'm guilty, regardless of how it happened and what was involved. That's Kevin Hart in his dumbest moment. That's not the finest hour of my life. With that being said, you make your bed, you lay in it. I'm hoping that she has a heart to where she can forgive me and understand that this is not going to be a reoccurring thing and allow me to recover from my f***ing massive mistake,” he said. She my number one, I don't need nothing on the side Said that I was done for good and don't want no more lies But my phone be blowing up, temptations on my line I stare at the screen a while before I press decline But she plants a seed and it still lingers in my mind Told myself I'm strong enough to shake it and I'm trying But I'm only human, I know loving you's a crime If I take this cookie now one day I'll do the time Slip me a xanny at once (somebody) I got the earth in a blunt (smoke) I get the skirt when I want (skrrt!) I get to skrrt when I want (skrrt!) Due to the money aroma (somebody) My girl she got a diploma (smoke) She got wife written all over She got wife written all over J.Cole All a nigga know is how to fuck a good thing up Run from the pain, sip lean, smoke tree up When I'm in your town press pound hit me up When I'm in your town press pound hit me up Only if you down and you slurp good D up If the work good I'll be back for the re-up Hate when I creep and the phone wake me up Fake like I'm sleep knowing damn well I be up Monkey on my back and I walk a hundred miles Guilt make a nigga feel fake when he smile Love get confused in the mind of a child 'Cause love wouldn't lie like I lie and it's wild Wanna have my cake and another cake too Even if the baker don't bake like you Even when the flavor don't taste like you So I'm back mobbing with the late night crew All in your mind with fears that would come true The back of my mind, the back of my mind was you Wishing that I could blind myself from view And only have eyes, and only have eyes for you Slip me a xanny at once (somebody) I got the earth in a blunt (smoke) I get the skirt when I want (skrrt!) I get the skirt when I want (skrrt!) Due to the money aroma (somebody) My girl she got a diploma (smoke) She got wife written all over She got wife written all over I'm a fake nigga and it's never been clearer Can't see myself when I look in the mirror Can't see myself when I look in the mirror Can't see myself when I look in the mirror I'm a fake nigga and it's never been clearer Can't see myself when I look in the mirror Can't see myself when I look in the mirror Can't see myself when I look in the mirror She my number one I don't need nothing on the side Said that I was done for good and don't want no more lies But my phone be blowing up, temptations on my line I stare at the screen a while before I press decline But she plants a seed and it still lingers in my mind Told myself I'm strong enough to shake it and I'm trying But I'm only human, I know loving you's a crime If I take this cookie now one day I'll do the time I love her, I don't want to lose her I'm selfish, I know that I use her My ego get stroked and I bruise her My ego get stroked and I bruise her My actions I know they confusin' At home I look happy as usual On the road I'm a mack, I'm a chooser I'm a addict, I'm maskin' that Kevin's Heart They tell me "What's done in the dark Will find a way to shine" I done did so much that when you see you might go blind What's done in the dark will always find a way to shine I done did so much that when you see you might go blind Music video by J. Cole performing Kevin's Heart. © 2018 Dreamville, Inc., Under exclusive license to Roc Nation Records Tweets by JColeNC Read the full article

[edibleflowerseu]

SOUNDS

DIIV / Oshin (2012) [Captured Tracks]

“And at its best, Oshin can feel like an ingenious distillation of the sonorous instrumental passages that took Disintegration’s “Fascination Street” and “Pictures of You” toward arena-rock grandeur. The album is mostly parceled out in lines of three-to-five descending notes that become self-descriptive adjectives: “(Druun)” wordlessly projects resolution, confidence; “Past Lives”, wistful acceptance; “Oshin (Subsume)”, a kind of dead-eyed stoicism; “Doused”, white-knuckle tension. Oshin gives you hints and direction, but never tells you exactly how to feel” (—)

…

Diiv is a band that is so ~in~ it literally hurts. Or maybe, that’s how things felt from 2012 to 2016. I’ve attended a handful of parties and house shows sponsored by one particular pocket of artists here in Providence that is high-key obsessed with Diiv. I have a distinct memory of one of the dudes insisting I look exactly like the frontman (Zachary Cole Smith), and then we proceeded to drunkenly dance, arms locked and substituting gibberish fake guitar noises for the actual music of the band. Damn those dudes love Diiv.

And I think unless you are a self-styled hater, what’s not to love? What’s not fun about jumping around a room, pretending to be a guitar? Waving ur arms around? Is this album fun or is it transcendental? I hear the lead singer is a piece of shit. He’s as if not more famous than his music. Google image him and try not to smirk at his fashion sense. But all that really doesn’t deter me from music lately. Lead singers and their band being overhyped and shitty people is kinda what music is about. It comes with the territory, at least.

I have a good time listening to this and sometimes u can feel urself floating pleasantly downstream, or on top of air, or within the ocean. But only if u let urself feel that way.

Not sure what the consensus is on the new album, Is The Is Are. Pitchfork dude Ian Cohen digs it but thinks its a hair too self-indulgent and into its own sound and vibe, while Sam Goldner writes for Tiny Mix Tapes that the album:

“…is hopelessness disguised as chilling out, self-defeat disguised as complex darkness. I tried to find poetry in its sounds and found myself just wanting a way out. Even now as I write this, I feel stalled in my tracks, attempting to make sense of my malaise. Though it may promise comfort, Is the Is Are is a false sanctuary. For my own sake, I need to move on.” (—)

The same can be said about the band, if u choose to feel that way. Is being a slacker cool af or the dumbest shit ever? Diiv is def fake-deep but does everything u consume and feel some type of way about gotta be real-deep? deep diiv, vibes vibes.

Preoccupations / Viet Cong (2015) [Jagjaguwar]

“Viet Cong are just a band that’s unusually obsessed with the mechanics and process of their given trade. While their ashen sonics and rigid demeanor is liable to have them labeled as post-punk, they’re also industrial in a literal sense. Flegel’s vocals are those of a foreman, authoritative, commanding and prodding. Guitars often sound dissolved in caustic chemicals; instruments contort themselves and interlock to achieve forward momentum. It’s music that works very, very hard to express a perverse hometown pride you often see used to sell spring water or thermal outerwear —you might not want to brave Calgary’s bleak winters, but the way Viet Cong captures its forbidding chill and placid, sprawling beauty sure make it seem like a good place to be a post-punk band.” (—)

___

“This is also a record of conflict and contrast, in particular, a winter war. The sensations of Viet Cong are specific to being bundled up in the arctic, where one’s body feels suffocating warmth and blistering cold all at once.” (—)

…

Another blog-hype band, but I think I like em more than Diiv. Blog hype ain’t the art-killer everyone hypes it up to be. I think shit I’m being told is good is good, and who gives a flying ole flip.

The difference between the band-formerly-known-as-Viet-Cong is they had bad hype that in many ways eclipsed the previous good hype with which they were showered.

Let’s talk music first tho. Sonically, I’m very into what this band is doing. Its intentional, textured, carefully positioned. It just sounds good. Anything remotely post-punk gets me going, and the quotes above that frame the band and their music in terms of the environment they come from gets me even more going. I love when art is described as a reflection of the land its made on. Calgary winters.

Politically might be where the band, as most post-punk bands, kinda weakens. The mood on the album is cold, paranoia, vaguely political. I’m into that. But, think its a bad place to mine for meaning as a listener. All bands and artists engage in some form of world-building: sonically, lyrically, emotionally, other-shit-ly. I think if u probe a band too forcefully on that level, ur bound to be disappointed. Like, this is a fun album to listen to but I’m not sure how much you can consistently get out of it in terms of your own life, if u get me.

But to the shit everyone talks about: the name. Naming ur band Viet Cong in what was then 2015 is a red flag of a bad idea for anyone with internet connection. After a shit ton of pressure from the alt music community, the band apologized changed their name from Viet Cong to Preoccupations. Whether or not the Vietnamese community as a whole felt personally disgusted or it was mostly white college kids, the point remains that it was the morally right move. But in a review of the first album released under the new Preoccupations name that I just found out existed like ten minutes ago, and in one of the most succinct call-outs I’ve read in a long ass while, Simon Chandler here points out, it was also in many ways an existentially dumb move:

“It’s bad because, with this apparent confirmation, the new album can’t help but appear within a frame of interpretation that casts it as shallow. It’s bad because, having let go of a name that self-avowedly meant very little to them, the Lovely Boys can’t help but come across as a band that means very little. It’s bad because, in bowing to umbrage and displeasure, they have effectively repositioned themselves less as an artistic enterprise and more as a commercial one. They strive to keep potential and actual customers happy, rather than striving to provoke them.

“This isn’t to say that the band were wrong to apologize for the hurt they caused and to change their name as part of their apology. Rather, it’s simply to say that the switch confirmed the original name’s emptiness and thereby highlighted the possibility that, contrary to appearances, their whole shtick was nothing more than an “edgy” posture. Given that this shtick involved evoking the kind of political paranoia and cynicism mined by no less a band than This Heat, it was therefore a bit of a letdown to learn that, in actual fact, the band weren’t trying to say anything important about today’s unstable world with their name (and perhaps also their music).

“It’s because they didn’t mean anything by their much-maligned former name that its replacement wasn’t actually a defeat for artistic expression, since there was no expression whatsoever that ended up being effaced in honor of offended parties (or the thought police, depending on your perspective). However, it nonetheless leaves us at a dead-end when it comes to unpacking the Lovely Boys’ sophomore record, in that it suggests that there isn’t all that much to unpack. Yes, there’s that familiarly vague sense of unease and disquiet, those serrated guitars, and those industrial-tinged synths and beats, yet everything seems less urgent and consequential, much to the album’s detriment.” (—)

Still like the band, tho.

Joni Mitchell / Blue (1971) [Reprise]

“Joni Mitchell once called fame “a glamorous misunderstanding.” As America’s finest living Canadian songwriter (tied with Neil Young), few musicians have understood its nature so well. In the 1960s and 70s, Mitchell was Mary Magdalene to Dylan’s folk-rock messiah, making music that was bittersweet and relatable, carrying what Dylan begat even further. Her work helped birth a new idiom that was personal and poetic, creating a new space for songs that made artistic statements, unbound by cliché and tradition. Such was the strength of her music that Mitchell’s lyrics didn’t have to make sense. But they did, particularly to women.” (—)

___

“1971’s Blue is possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made. After Mitchell’s relationship with Nash dissolved, she headed to Europe to lose the tether of her fame, eventually taking exile in a cave on the Greek island Crete. The trip would inspire the how-Joni-got-her-groove-back ditties “Carey” and “California”. The album is suffused with melancholy for all that is missing: her daughter (“Little Green”), innocence (“The Last Time I Saw Richard”), and connection (“All I Want”). Mitchell bleeds diffidence and highlights it with spare notes plucked out on her Appalachian dulcimer. While her pals Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Laura Nyro were also pushing the singer-songwriter genre forward, none of them managed to stride the distance that Mitchell did here in a single album.” (—)

…

Anyway, exiting the blogosphere, let’s talk about how Joni Mitchell is the single best singer-songwriter of the 1960s and 1970s. Period.

Yes, I love Neil Young. I love Leonard Cohen. I love Bob Dylan. But, likely because she’s a woman and woman are never allowed to stop thinking about how they will age, she has kept consistently growing and pushing herself personally and stylistically in ways none of her male contemporaries can match. Neil Young made a bunch of shitty genre albums, Bob Dylan got fucking ridiculous sounding, and Leonard Cohen actually aged hella well but he sorta has his own thing he rarely detours from so he DOESN’T COUNT.

And while she’s by no means perfect (we’ll do our best to ignore her brief infatuation with blackface), I don’t think anyone conveys the entire emotional landscape of relationships, from love to heartbreak to emptiness to smirking worthlessness as well as Mitchell. And what’s more, she doesn’t let herself dwell only in the genre of love and heartbreak, and some of her best songwriting comes later as she explores jazz and womanly life-after-30. An artists stubbornly following their muse can be frustrating for fans, and I’m sure those who fell in love with the Big Yellow Taxi hippie soft folk of early Mitchell have less-than-kind words to say about her sonic experiments with Brazilian music and songs about French people. But fuck it, if u want the same old shit over and over again then u a dang dumb chump.

As for Blue itself, the album fucking rules, is the exact right length, and brings you through all the steps, missteps, ups, downs, and emotional turns to make a satisfying journey. And the guitars sounds sick af.

I feel there are hella dudes who can’t relate to Joni Mitchell’s songs since they are so distinctly about the experiences of women. But fuck those dudes. Like, how can u not be touched by this? This is the realest shit and all u Mitchell-hating dudes are fake deep babies.

James Cleveland w/ the Angelic Choir / I Stood on the Banks of the Jordan (1964) [Savoy]

And when I saw it, I said, Lord I got my ticket, please don’t leave me down here

You took my Father You came back and got my Mother, You took everything to me that was so dear

And all I can do, is stand there on the banks of Jordan. Mother was going home ‘to see the ship go sailing over.’”

…

Fell into a Youtube rabbit hole and ended up watching hella What’s In Your Bag clips. Found the one with James Blake (who I have barely listened to full disclosure) and he name-dropped James Cleveland as some good shit so I checked it out.

It is good shit. Like really good shit. I wanna listen to more gospel cause its one of those genres I never took seriously growing up, far removed was I a white child in New Hampshire. But dang can u feel the emotion running through this. And the dude has more albums! This is what I want, what I need.

Nguzunguzu / Perfect Lullaby Mix (2011) [no label]

“To say that they are “party-starters” is both clichéd and not quite right—because the best time to hear Nguzu DJ is in the middle of the party, when their thick and luscious mixes add a level of sinuous intensity to the club.” (—)

…

I know Nguzunguzu primarily as producers, or remixers. They mix pop songs from the now and 90s with vaguely tropical sounds. Hang drums, African and Latin beats, “juicy synths”. It’s a lot of fun. I think this might be the first in a series of like 3 mixes? They also release other shit. Their sound when they first came out was super influential on outsider club and R&B, and like it might still be? I don’t really follow this shit tbh.

I thought it was one dude but its actually a dude and a woman.

Skepta / Konnichiwa (2016) [Boy Better Know]

“Skepta’s flow and vocal delivery are a lot easier on the ears than most of his peers, rapping with a brash Brit urgency and chanting in a singsongy, catchy Jamaican patois reminiscent of dancehall greats. … Skepta’s groovy 10-ton bass lines, eerie open-ended synth lines, and hard-hitting snares crush anything Metro Boomin could come up with on FL Studio. This is grime suitable for both late night hooliganism with the gang and drunkenly stomping it out in the club.” (—)

___

“Skepta’s album arrives as a breath of fresh air in the scene, finding the perfect balance in retaining the trademark grime sound and seemingly higher marketability across the Atlantic and elsewhere. Like the best, most colorful rappers in the States, Konnichiwa confidently struts and showcases the emcee’s vibrant, exciting personality traits perhaps more than pretty much anyone else in Britain, grime or otherwise.” (—)

…

I don’t know shit about grime. Its the UK answer to rap that’s been poised to blow up for like 13 years now? It’s a history and culture I’m trying to familiarize myself with more, and the journey is a quite a treat.

Ok so as far as I understand it, grime was a big underground thing that had the potential the blow up following Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner in 2003. It fuses the electronic music of UK garage and drum n’ bass with rowdy Brit-dialect rap. Dizzee made some noise across the pond but with the exception of maybe like Lady Sovereign and The Streets and Jamie T (who are all white and all are more coy British hip hop than grime proper), shit just didn’t stick. Meanwhile, names like Skepta and Wiley and a host of others kept on keeping on. And while it didn’t pick up as globally as it should have, that didn’t stop corporations in the UK from pushing it into the mainstream.

I dunno how effective the push was, but it seems to have become a watered down and sold out version of itself. Huge but not that huge? Skepta and others were groomed for mainstream success and sold the soul of grime. Now every grime MC is in their like early 30s and fed up with what they had to endure. As such, Skepta’s Konnichiwa is anti-corporate and anti-fake grime. He’s angry but he’s charming bout it.

There’s also stylistic differences between South London grime and East London grime. Tho Skepta is from North London and fuses both styles together. Also, it’s not an album-based genre, but one defined by “singles, loosies, hotly pressed riddims, and pirate radio broadcasts.”

Also Drake loves grime and Kanye’s into it to. Why it hasn’t blown up despite 10+ years of glorious existence is due in part to racism, I’m sure. Ya, the beats are abrasive and bassy, and the club culture in the US is nowhere near as intricate as that of the UK, but bros still loved dubstep for a long minute. Also, people love Doctor fucking Who and Sherlock. People love pip pip cheerio and hot British dudes and tea and the queen in the US. Anglophilia runs amok on Tumblr. So why can’t white people in the US fucking listen to grime? What’s wrong with u uncultured fucks?

Other shit:

Everly Brothers / Walk Right Back

Brood Ma / Daze

Kelela / CUT 4 ME

Max Richter / 24 Postcards in Full Colour

Beastie Boys / Paul’s Boutique (this might become one of my fav album)

Yasutaka Nakata / “Crazy Crazy” (ft. Charli XCX & Kyary Pamyu Pamyu)