U BETTER BE STREET IF U LOOKIN AT ME

"the focal point of crunk is more often the beats and music than the lyrics therein"
--- wikipedia

my bff kt found DESTINY'S CHILD's CLASSIC, SOLDIER, to which i know about 95% of the words, on my ipod and was shocked and awed. now listen, i think the immediate characterization of me as hating rap and hip-hop is unfair. one of my strongest memories of myself as a pre-teen is (100% serious) doing that dance to LIL JON's GET LOW at a school dance. you know, the one where you throw your hands TO THE WINDOW, then TO THE WALL (this is coincidentally the same dance i would be doing to oxford comma to this day, but maybe there is some kind of transcendent connection here?)
i legitimately like JAY-Z especially when he is mashed up with ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI in this amazing thing i can't find an mp3 of but can if you really want it called 99 HEARTS. also i would be lying if i said i didn't really love THIS SONG and i didn't listen to it all the time. in fact i'm listening to MISSY right now because i've been really hankering for this song since homecoming friday night when i will admit i got down in the exact same way i get down to stuff like MGMT and elvis costello on my own time to a great deal of sucker-free-sunday fodder. but what is to be expected??

the other day i heard THE STROKES' CLASSIC 12:51 on the radio in the car with my mom. at first i was thinking "ugh, everything sounds like this" but then i realized that EVERYTHING DIDN'T SOUND LIKE THIS UNTIL THIS. love them or hate them (have you noticed this, that it is always the 'influential' bands that are so polarizing?) you have to admit that from IS THIS IT until VERY RECENTLY pretty much every indie band to achieve some kind of popularity sounded like the strokes? this is because, i think, there is SO RARELY any kind of freshness or newness in the indie-stry (i am a genius) that when something achieves popularity everyone begins to rip it off. so now we have all these bands capitalizing on that strokes thing - the fuzzy guitar, the big heavy bassline, that drunken wail/croon that julian casablancas made ridiculously, ridiculously sexy (i think he was the first dude in a band i had a crush on, but this was in eighth grade). the thing is, i have never heard anything maybe with the exception of architecture in helsinki's second album that i said to myself "this doesn't sound like anything i've ever heard." all the bands i like sound like the talking heads. the first time i heard the arcade fire i said to myself "was this on stop making sense?" THERE IS NOTHING NEW IN THIS INDUSTRY. EVERYTHING IS RECYCLED. some things are recycled so well - aih circa places like this, radiohead, vampire weekend, spoon, arcade fire, walkmen, belle and sebastian, etc. etc. etc. - and some things are recycled terribly.

i feel like for the most part hip-hop (not so much rap because i can't tell young jeezy from young joc... wait, is one of them lil?) is much more innovative than indie music. this is why i like missy so much. MISSY KNOWS WHAT SHE'S DOING, OKAY??

if you're an indie kid and you find yourself too cool to listen to mtv type hip-hop and rap let me suggest to you THE COOL KIDS, and of course you already know how i feel about DISCOVERY. because sometimes you need to get down, in that unashamed way. nothing is more liberating than just dancing, absolutely nothing. and it is so easy to do that when you have those insane little synth drizzles, that big bass thump, those verse rhythms. everybody here get it out of control. this brings me back to the epigraph of this post. you don't need to think. all you need to do is dance.

in case you hate me now and refuse to read this blog because of my questionable tastes, let me just tell you that missy just shuffled into NO AGE's "BOY VOID." let me remind you that i took a shoulder to the eye during this song this summer. I'VE GOT SOME INDIE CRED, OKAY?? what does this even mean? i could do a whole other post on this.