Iain Mew. I am from the UK. I write for The Singles Jukebox. I did One Week One Band Coldplay. The url comes from this song. See here if you want to see photos of stuff I ate.
Oh look, the last sentence of the What Will The Neighbours Say? sleeve notes in the new Girls Aloud box set references William Swygart’s Stylus review!
The quote I would have chosen from the review is “The Greatest Pop Group In The Entire F’ing World”, but still.
do you ever hear the intro theme to a video game and you get really emotional and your heart feels really weak like it’s coming back home and it’s basically like that whole world you love so much summed up into one epic song and you just want to fucking cry a lot because this is the video game for you and nothing else ever can even compare to the feeling you get when you hear that one fucking bit of music
sam i fucking swear to god
Source: ferelden
In 2012 Kanye West introduced most of the world to Chief Keef, via the G.O.O.D. Music remix of Keef’s local hit “I Don’t Like.” (I know, I know, you knew about Keef before Kanye, but most of America can’t touch your impeccable blog game.) This was something of a confusing move at the time, at least for me; the remix wasn’t an improvement by any means, and it had been a while since Kanye had shown significant interest in preserving his Chicago affiliations, but there he was, shouting out all the local rappers, putting on a 17-year-old kid from one of the most fucked up neighborhoods in the country. But I know why Kanye did the remix now (and I think he knows he didn’t improve upon the original either). He needed to confront white America with what they presumed at the time was their worst nightmare: a young black male who grew up in hell and no longer gave a single fuck, who used unfamiliar words and rapped about guns and money and drugs. You know, rapper stuff. (NOTE: When I say “white America” please know I am not being all-inclusive. Like, fuck, I’m white, I get that there are many white people who fully support and understand the racial and socio-political issues at hand here, and that I am being reductive by dichotomizing it into simply “black” vs “white” to begin with. Consider it shorthand for the type of non-black American unconcerned by or complicit in the perpetuation of these issues.)In reality though, Chief Keef isn’t white America’s worst nightmare. Because while he scares the living shit out of them in person, he fits neatly into the trope that many racist white Americans need young black men to fit into: violent, uneducated, aimless. They expect this kind of character, and in turn know how to strip him of his humanity, dismiss him, and avoid him. Kanye West is white America’s worst nightmare. Because as much as one may attempt to dismiss him—by calling him an asshole or classless or deranged or various other adjectives that fill the comment sections of literally every article about him—you still have to turn on your regularly scheduled late night comedy program and stare him in the face. You can’t avoid Kanye. He’s made very sure of that.
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This is excellent, read it in full. On the Kardashian bit in particular:
* Yes, I know Patterson has institutional immunity, and that women also read him. I know because patterson, Sue Grafton and Patricia Cornwell make up about 60% of my mother’s reading habits, to the point where it’s a family joke that she won’t buy a book if there’s no murder in the title. This may explain a lot about me and my family.
** Kim codes white in relation to Kanye, but it’s kind of like how Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is either called white or not depending on who wants to make which point.
*** There was HWFO, but butthurt Louis Tomlinson stans are different than yuppies tsk-tsking about Kanye’s artistry being tainted.
(via katherinestasaph)
Original piece and commentary both well worth reading.
(via katherinestasaph)
Source: 3lc3lc3lc
MARIA MAGDALENA - CADA VEZ MAS CERCA
[7.57]
A sensation if we have our way (and we will!).Iain Mew: The weighty chunks of synth bear a resemblance to Austra’s “Beat and the Pulse” and set “Cada Vez Mas Cerca” up like it’s going to be something similarly dark. In fact, the rest of the song skates over that darkness barely touching it, pirouetting and pausing occasionally to fire off some lasers and a fragment of “Radio Gaga.” Yeah, it’s silly, but why question moves that come off as joyfully as these?
[8]Alfred Soto: The chilly sequencers melt the second Magdalena and a synthesizer squabble over which high notes they should harmonize with. Unlike many electronic anthems which emphasize the narrator’s physical and emotional distance, this one wants to wetly sing in your ear.
[7]Edward Okulicz: I’ve never met a “Fade to Grey” cousin I didn’t like, and Maria Magdalena sings this like she’s not sure if it’s symphonic disco or someone playing around with settings on a cheap electric piano. The mismatch works, though, with her voice high and ethereal and the bass earthy and warm.
[8]Brad Shoup: There’s a carnivalesque melodic bent to the opening line, something Gwen Stefani might tend toward. MM is in the same range, but without the… let’s say individuation. There’s a max poignance beyond which repeating the title doesn’t add, but she’s going there anyway. It’s those chill synthsheets she hangs at the end that truly transport.
[6]Anthony Easton: The intro, which is just nostalgic enough to remind one of the disco, and refute the cult of the new, transitions into a vocal that rides above it. It’s like a glittery dolphin on an ocean of molten cheddar. The use of disco lasers, perhaps the subtlest in history, suggests the dolphin is bringing sailors back to the land.
[8]Jonathan Bogart: Even five years ago those percussive strikes would have dredged up the word “electroclash,” but if anything the newest Chilean indie-electro sensation is going back to mutant-disco roots, if not to the roots of all electronic pop; those high tones are unmistakably Summery.
[8]Katherine St Asaph: This is what I wish Kate Boy sounded like.
[8]
I love this song and I’m happy everyone pretty much agreed and in such great ways
Source: thesinglesjukebox
Wonder Girls - K-Food Party
The most amusing thing I came across today! So this song was used to promote Korean agricultural food export a couple years ago. Oh yeah, I’ll be k-swagging it LOL!
MAKE THE SMART CHOICE
Source: fundamentallyexcellent
It’s been a couple of years since their last EP but Blessing Force tentpoles Trophy Wife have returned with a Sony TV advert’s worth of colour video for the subtly pulsing, propulsive beat-laden Glue, from an album available for pay what you want from today. Oh, and they’re also splitting up after some final shows next month. I dunno, these bands just come and go as they please…
I loved “Microlite”, was impressed when I saw them a couple of years ago and was kind of wondering where they’d got to. As such, this is a whole lot of good and bad news to process in one go. Like this new single, too.
Source: sweeping-the-nation
Just heard on Channel 4 News that:
1) Tumblr allows its users to upload amateur pornography
2) Users have come up with a plan to flood the site with porn in a last minute attempt to scare off Yahoo
Did I miss a memo? I don’t want to be the only one doing this
Something that the interview I just reblogged on Japanese vs Western video game design didn’t address is that Western and American are not interchangeable, and localising like they are causes its own issues. The rest of the world, or even just the English-speaking bits of it, is a pretty big audience!
One of the more immersion-shattering localisation things I have come across in a Japanese game was in Ace Attorney, a series that generally gets praised for a good localisation that finds alternatives for a lot of Japanese cultural references and humour that wouldn’t have been widely understood.
Problem is, the games carefully never actually state where they are meant to be set, and still have plenty in them which gives away their Japanese origin. At one point in one of the games there is a puzzle based around a car, and in the version I played you find that that car was imported from the UK. The point is meant to be that the car has the driver sitting on the opposite side to other cars.
Up to that point, I’d been playing with a fuzzy but unquestioned assumption that the game was still meant to be set in Japan; in Japan, cars are driven on the left, the same as the UK. To solve the puzzle, I had to work through a thought process that while I was playing a British version of a clearly Japanese game, it was nonetheless intended that I should assume, unprompted, that the game was set in the US. It made my head hurt a bit.
I was going to talk a bit about an interview I had found about 3 years ago, with Keiji Inafune (illustrator/co-designer of the Mega Man series) and Hiroyuki Kobayashi (producer of the Resident Evil series), regarding the culture-clash in game design between American and Japanese gamers. The interview went over how, as a result of the contrast in cultures and history, western gamers prefer a different style of gameplay, a different art style or colour pallet, a different learning curve, and even different savegame and death elements than eastern gamers.
This contrast obviously becomes a critical consideration when marketing and designing a successful game, not only because a well-received game by American players may be received very poorly among Japanese gamers (and vice versa), but also that America-intended games are often designed by Japanese production companies, and their own cultural bias must be overcome when designing games that need to appeal to an international market.
Buuut I did a little digging to see if I could find a transcript of the interview, just to make sure I wasn’t getting any of the quotes wrong, and I found it. So instead of any personal analysis (which is clearly bias, as I’m already using western gamers as the pivot point in all my examples), I’m just going to clean it up a bit and paste it here for you to read. […]
This interview has some ridiculous evo-psych stuff that’s hopefully completely tongue in cheek (“For instance, as a hunting and trapping society, an American may go deer hunting and encounter a bear. Japanese would be scared by this encounter, whereas the American will probably shoot the bear and go back excited that he got a bear instead of a deer”!) but also some very interesting thoughts about the differences between Japanese and Western game design. In particular the broad question of how much the player’s experience is controlled by the developers and the different ways in which that manifests, and the idea that higher difficulty might be a method to try to discourage rentals.
Source: fetchquests
to all you americans out there
this is eurovision
This almost made me emotional with the sheer beauty of it- it was like Freddie Mercury had lived to make an EDM album, I am literally buying it right now.
Source: truckzilla
