Review

Seven years since Blueprint 2: The Gift & The Curse and six years after his final, last ever retirement album, Jay -Z drops Blueprint 3, the final part of the Blueprint Trilogy (Always intended it to be a trilogy, did you, Hov? Or are you just stuck for ideas for album titles?).

Shoes based on a guest vocalist, yesterday

So what’s here? All the usual rap staples? Guest artists? Check: a bewildering array of guest artists ranging from a born-again Christian once famous for singing the line “If I was a girl I’d wear a mini-skirt into town.”, to a Brummie universally derided by the UK music press.
Disses? Check: The Game, taken care of in Thank You, Joe Budden in Reminder, see also Dame Dash, Rush Limaugh, Jaz-O and assorted others.
Grandiose statements? Check, check and double check: Every track on this album deals with how pant wettingly awesome the Jigga man is. And it’s a fair boast. Eleven studio albums in and he shows no sign of flagging, going from strength to strength and other cliches.

As Hova obviously knows where it’s at, one can only refer to this as his “Birmingham” album. Although it would probably fairer not to. Perhaps you could refer to it as his “Kanye” album, taking production credits on roughly half the tracks. But does it sound like a Kanye West album? No, it doesn’t. The Neptunes track obviously sounds like The Neptunes, because it seems to be the only style they are capable of, The Timbaland tracks sound like Timbaland, the Swizz Beatz track sounds like Swizz Beatz but Kanye has really stepped up his game (which he does consistently) and lays down some really interesting, diverse sounds.

Whilst there is not a bad track on the album, one track is a little bit awkward; Young Forever with the aforementioned Birmingham connection, Mr Hudson (ostensibly an utterly baffling choice of vocalist, was Beyonce shopping? Only when you realise that Kanye West has taken him under his wing and he also features on his new joint does it fall into place. Still a bit weird. I just can’t imagine how they met.). Whereas other singers on the album, Rihanna and Alicia Keys add a vast scope and depth to the tracks they contribute to, Mr Hudson makes it sound a bit like 10CC. The track is built around Forever Young by Alphaville. I know what you’re thinking - Amazing. Well yeah, it works, but only just. The irritating thing is that it’s the last track, so despite hearing tracks the quality of D.O.A, Run This Town, Empire State Of Mind and Hate, it’s the comedy track at the end that sticks in your head.

Hip-hop

Basically, this album is fucking ace. Any other review of it that disagrees with this one is wrong, but we don’t give a fidduk, we off that.

Of late, wherefore I know not, I have not been using my time productively enough. As such I have decided to punish myself. I have committed myself to listening, from start to finish, to the new Kasabian album, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. I chose this as it is the worst possible thing I can think of to do to myself.

Kasabian, yesterday

Kasabian, for those of you lucky enough to have escaped their wrath are a pop group whom I singularly despise, from their self-cuntiosly dark, edgy name (a reference to Linda Kasabian, a member of the Manson Family), through their claims of being northerners (they are from Leicester) to their shameless aping of other “hard lads” bands like Oasis and Happy Mondays.

It’s halfway through track two now and I have to take a breather. This album is fucking rubbish. I will approach the rest of it with an open mind after having a quick listen to The Minstrel Show by Little Brother.

Back to the grind. To give them a fair crack of the whip (an expression I first heard from Rory McGrath when he was a campsite entertainer/ magician at Woodlands Adventure Park. TRUFAX) I’d better start track two again. I’ll just have a fag first… Ok I’m back, bad, black and mad, let’s go.

Still rubbish. Sounds sort of like a cross between early Status Quo (Status Quo fact; Pictures Of Matchstick Men was actually quite good. If you imagine that you have never heard any other psychedelic music before) and Northside. I have always equated this shower of shit with Northside, a bunch of also-rans that they think they are much more important than they actually are.

Track three is the very definition of filler. A two and a half minute (although it seems much, much, much longer) cyclical wank-jam.

Track three, yesterday

Now Tom is squealing on about being born and music fans the world over unite in wishing that he hadn’t been. It’s the mock-zany psychedelia that pisses me off, they speak of “Blue lightning” like they are the first people to try and subvert things.

I’m going to have to stop it in a minute. I’m getting upset. I can feel myself growing earbrainheadrotcancer. Kasabian are, if you can imagine such a thing, the opposite of music. So bad are this band, and this album, it will be some time before the individual notes used in the songs have been rehabilitated enough to allow their release back into society and longer still before they can be used in other songs.

Jesus wept, are we really only six tracks in? In press they have been saying that they have been listening to lots of Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd (seemingly the only era of Pink Floyd that anyone cares about) which is all well and good but I can’t see what they took from it. Did they take inspiration from Pink Floyd’s exciting and new way of looking at music? Were they empowered to think of new ways to approach song-writing? Have they structured childlike, yet somehow profound lyrics? Have they fuck, they seem to be content with saying “This sound a bit like something off of The Madcap Laughs - that’ll do.”

I’ve had to turn it off again, I’ve started crying. I don’t know if I can face the rest of this, it’s too horrible, like having to identify the raped and mutilated corpse of your only child, knowing that the killer will gloat and walk free. I tend not to use expressions like “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy” as I think it exposes a paucity of ambition, but in this case I will make an exception. Okay then, before I go back to it, like bobbing for turds in a septic tank. In the interests of full disclosure I will admit that once I admitted that a twenty second section of one of the track from the first album was “alright, like”. But at the time I was so fucking wrecked I didn’t have a clue what was going on, or even what planet I was on.

And so, once more, unto the breach, dear friends… There are certain bands that I like that no one else does, and with most of them I can understand why no one else likes them. There are certain bands that I don’t like, but loads of other people do and I can sort of see what other people see in them. But this band is the aural equivalent of ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag, vileness spilling out everywhere, music perhaps, only for date-rapists. People who swagger around like those two arch-cunts, Tom Munguhungahan and Sergio Pissandurine. Good looking, apparently. Well one looks like the crack fox from Mighty Boosh (you might not have seen that, it was long after the show stopped being funny) and the other sort of looks like a condom full of vaseline with a frown.

Sergio Pissandurine, yesterday

Look, I skipped the last thirty seconds of Vlad The Impaler because it was fucking interminable nonsense. And now we have a ballad. Hurrah. Only three songs left, though. I got this promo copy a while ago and have put off listening to it until I did something really bad. I was going to give it away but I’ll tell you this much, it’s going straight in the fucking bin. Right now in fact, I’ll listen to it from iTunes (my favourite piece of sinister proprietary software. You mean you’ve got an mp3 player that’s not an iPod? What are you, some sort of cunt? An iPod must be the best because it’s made by Apple, a tiny little workers co-op, not evil Microsoft who only want to make money. Boo Hiss. What’s that? You bought an iPhone? You fucking mug! I’ve got some magic beans here, if yr interested…). That made a satisfying snap.

Secret Alphabets contains an instrument that wasn’t plugged in. I’m getting a vibe of “will this do” from the whole album. It just seems insulting, more so even than Relapse, the latest Eminem heap of shit. There is very little difference between each track, the ideas (and there are some, I expect. Well someone must have had the idea to make the album somewhere along the line) seem barely thought through, thrown together and slapdash. If I listen to half of each song, that will do, won’t it? Actually, I think I’ve heard this one somewhere else… skip.

Last song, just grant me the strength to get through this one. It’s called Happiness which is somewhat ironic as my state of mind reflects it’s diametric opposite. It’s horrible, so, so, horrible. I do these things so that you don’t have to.

Then I felt a massive disturbance in the force, like millions of people crying out in agony were suddenly silenced… That’ll be the end of the album then. If I had to use two words to describe this album, I would use the word “Shit” twice.

In all seriousness, DO NOT BUY THIS ALBUM.

So I watched that film everyone was banging on about. The one that will “change your life”, you know the one; Zeitgeist.
…
What a heap of shit. If you watched it, and took on board everything that they said, the mass of supposition, poor conclusions, hackneyed-disproved conspiracy-theories, misinformation and out and out lies, then you truly are a massive fucking idiot. I have neither the time nor the inclination to post a hundred page dissection of why it was wrong on almost every single detail but I will give you a brief review, if you are interested: a dangerous and uninspired piece of rumour-starting.

Zeitgeist The Movie, yesterday

Although perhaps I am wrong.
Perhaps it isn’t meant to work like that, perhaps it was a trick. Perhaps it was merely illustrating the point it was making, that people are willingly spoonfed lies and, if they are presented well enough then people will greedily swallow them down and come back begging for more. Perhaps by filling it with nonsense and presenting it as the truth they were seeing how far people would be prepared to go to believe things that are blatantly not true: footage to show that cutting tools were used on the steel joists in the world trade centre towers. I don’t dispute that. Especially as the footage was from some days after the event when cutting tools would have been used to try to make the area as safe as possible for people working there; the plumes of dust and debris coming from the twin towers as proof of a chemical burning agent. Not from two collapsing skyscrapers, then?; eyewitness reports presented as irrefutable fact. Ridiculous. Most people (myself included) probably don’t pay adequate attention to what is going on around them at the best of times, and when they are under massive amounts of stress and pressure? There is a Russian saying that translates roughly to: No one lies like an eyewitness, that we would do good to remember here; and of course the breath taking ability to get details about the lives of Gods plain wrong. A simple check on Wikipedia would have ironed out some of these problems but what is unforgivable lies not with the film maker, but with the viewers. The film’s website and fansites contain countless testimonials from people claiming “this film changed my life”, or “I did the research and it checks out, man!”. Well, you didn’t do the research unless you got it all from anti-Jewish sites and conspiracy sites. I did the research and I know it is wrong.

Some parts of the film are less wrong than others, parts about the lack of evidence for Jesus Christ’s historical existence, for example, but it is shrouded in such utter bullshit as to devalue anything it attempts, comparing Christianity to sun worshiping cults has some veracity, but by focusing on the similarities of the words ‘Sun’ and ‘Son’ as evidence for this is ridiculous as it only works in English. Which didn’t exist as we know it two-thousand years ago.

The final third of the film, the part that deals with money, and therefore the world, being controlled by a secret cabal of bankers is the most insidious section. Replace the word ‘Banker’ with the word ‘Jew’ and you have an exact replica of baseless conspiracy theories  that have been around for hundreds of years. This part of the film is the most right-wing (which is strange for such an apparently egalitarian film) demanding the tightening of borders, devolution, dismissing any idea of single currency as dangerous and anti-immigration. After the meaningless fluff of the rest of the movie, this seems incongruous.

I have not heard a single negative statement about this film, probably because if you want to watch it, you have to seek it out and if you are not interested in what this film presents, you won’t seek it out. The people who watch this film believe in this film and will be prepared to swipe out at people who disagree, but hey guys, I’m not right-wing, I’m not a Christian or religious in any way (an atheist, in fact) and I’m not a part of the new world order. This is a terrible film. Poorly researched, poorly edited, poorly executed and the worst kind of fear-mongering.

Unless it is a satire…
Be seeing you…

I watched this film on ITV2 (Which should have set alarm bells ringing) last night, in search of some slightly ridiculous easy to watch fluff and I haven’t been more disappointed since I watched Girl Next Door thinking it would be a light-hearted knock about comedy, rather than a horrific vision of porn actresses and abuse. This film, Bottoms Up, is shit. There is no escaping the fact but it does have one redeeming feature, it is so shit, it’s actually quite good. Not in an ironic way, but in the way you would watch someone be slowly impaled on a spike up the anus. Not a pleasurable experience, but one you couldn’t stop watching.

Bottoms Up, yesterday

It’s an appalling film, unsure if it wants to be a comedy, drama, romance or what. The plot, such as it is, runs that Jason Mewes (playing Jason Mewes) goes to LA in order to write an expose on a movie star so he can save his dads steakhouse. Yeah, I know, it’s a tired plot that we’ve seen a thousand times but there’s more. In LA he meets Paris Hilton (playing a retarded Paris Hilton) and blackmails her over some car-park attendant she slept with into introducing him to said film star, her boyfriend.

Strap yrselves in, here comes the twist. After being introduced to the movie star, Mewes finds him to be a nice, personable gent and they get on and bond well. At least Hilton plays to type as a stereotypical, vapid, do-nothing socialite, eh? But hark! What’s all this? It transpires that Hilton has actually set up and runs a hostel for homeless people called Wishing Well which she pays for entirely with her own money that she should be spending on diamond encrusted fanny wipers or whatever.

This is a dreadful exercise in film-making. No one can act, it’s completely unbelievable in it’s own universe and I fear that a lot of it (specifically the plot) ended up on the cutting room floor. Testament to the poor acting is that Mewes, a former drug addict cannot even play stoned. Ridiculous.

What we learn from this (apart from realising that The Simple Life is actually real and unscripted because Paris is infinitely more naturalistic in that than this where here clipped, staccato pronunciation makes me murder children) is that you should never believe anything you read in the papers or on the scurrilous internet about slebs, because they are better than you and jealous journalists make shit up.

This film also contains a secretly-gay, comedy-marine-uncle for some unexplored reason.

So in summary I would recommend this film to everyone. It is a rare treat in that it is so shit, it’s good. This is said of many things, most of which turn out to be so shit, they are shit, but not this. It is worth a look. Don’t buy it, though, I’m sure it’s on the worldwide internet somewhere, but remember, only download it if you own the copyright and if whoever is hosting it owns a distribution license.

Be seeing you…

In case you missed the second episode of Skins, series 3, just watch this:

And this at the same time:

And that is essentially what you missed out on. Bit busy, wasn’t it?

Not sure how scared I’d be by Gareth from the office…

A dead hard drug dealer, yesterday

So series three is attempting to hit it’s stride, slightly clumsily, perhaps. This episode was dominated by Cook, played by the singer from Mirror!Mirror!, or Youves,  or whatever they are calling themselves this week. Cook takes over and monopolises the show completely which at first seems like a poorly scripted and contrived effort to get you to know him. It’s not. It’s seeing the party from the gang’s point of view, it’s getting you right in there, feeling slightly smothered, slightly intimidated and asking yrself, how much would I get on with this lad? Once you realise that this is the view, other things fall into place. Why are Effy and Pandora friends if Effy is so effortlessly cool? Why do the twins dress similarly and fade into the background (where the fuck did Emily [the secret lesbian] go after the row with Naomi?)? How are Cook, JJ, and Freddie (So far, so pointless, but I imagine he will develop later) friends when they all clash so violently? I think it is a little more complicated. I think every character is being viewed as the rest of the clique sees them. In their wee gang, Effy is so cool, but only to them. To others in the college she is just another girl. Pandora is a buffoon because she says simple things, if these filters we view them through weren’t there, they would most probably be more similar. It’s an exciting way of watching people and does it’s job of putting you in there with them.

So yeah. The first episode had an obvious homage to Back To The Future at the beginning and this one is, to my mind, a direct homage to Star Wars Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back. Don’t believe me? Then you are a dickhead. Look at the structure and the denouement. Father figures letting them down, fragmenting of the group, poorly advised quests that the protagonist is unready for, the curses of being headstrong, and a downbeat ending (speaking of which, on Lowculture some one pointed out that the trailers for the first series were like the best party ever, and for the second, like the worst orgy ever. This time we already have extreme violence and degradation and we are only on episode two. Series four is going to be like a journey through hell and I for one can’t wait.), thusly, I rest my case.

When watching shows like this I always try and find which person I am most like. Initially I thought perhaps Cook or Freddie, but now I have realised that it is probably JJ. I have few people skills and am essentially just along for the ride. Cook reminds me scarily of an old housemate, as it goes…

It’s disappointing to think that as him, I will have my first kiss from a whore and probably never get to fuck Emily.

Be seeing you…