I am totally bummed out over some real life drama right now, BUT I wanted to say that if 1) you like the site and 2) are planning to shop at Amazon for Black Friday (or whenever) then you could do us a solid by clicking any of the links in this post before adding stuff to your cart. We get referral money if you buy something after visiting Amazon from one of our links. You don’t have to buy what we link, either, just visiting and buying your own ish after is enough.
So, on that note, here’s two thousand words on stuff that I like that’s probably worth buying if you like things like I like things:
–Do you want music? I’ve actually been striking out on music lately. People I like drop mediocre albums (Pusha T) or albums that don’t grab me (Yelawolf). That new Busta Rhymes & Chris Brown song starts off super tight before descending into garbage. (Andre 3000: “Took a shower, kinda sour ’cause my favorite group ain’t comin with it/ but I’m with ya ’cause you probably goin’ through it, anyway/ but anyhow, when in doubt, went on out and bought it/ ’cause I thought it would be jamming/ but examine all the flawsky-wasky”) But anyway: I just discovered Lianne La Havas thanks to a tip from a friend, and Lost & Found is pretty good. I like her video for “No Room For Doubt”. Here’s her website, which has a link to a free EP. Aesop Rock, DJ Big Wiz, and Rob Sonic are Hail Mary Mallon, and their Are You Gonna Eat That? is pretty good. It sounds like exactly what you’d expect them to produce, but in a good way. Aes has really grown as an emcee, too, from nice to even nicer. (I’ve been listening to these cats since high school. Cripes.) Special shoutout to “Grubstake” for being about an eatery that is basically a block and a half from my crib (if you’re in SF, hit it up. They’ve got meat for days) and also being an ill song. I love that trading verses thing pretty much every time I hear it. This bit especially: “Traded the jalopy for a nickel bag of fake bud/ Wait, what?/ Fake bud!/ Wait, fuck!/ Wake up!/ 9:30, back home, no chick, sober/ Sober?/ Sober./ No shirt?/ Stouffer’s.” Little Dragon’s Ritual Union is by Little Dragon, and therefore good. Here’s the title track, which sounds sort of like a sway looks when that rising… organ? Is that it? Whatever that instrument is. You’ll know it when you hear it. Another video: Brush the Heat.
I like Charlotte Gainsbourg a lot, and her Terrible Angels EP is pretty good. Dig the video for the title track. Have I written about this before? I have. “Terrible Angels” is the song that plays at the dance party just before the end of the world kicks off. When the timer hits 3:15, the bombs drop and the ether begins to release.
Tabi Bonney’s The Summer Years is a fun album produced entirely by Ski Beatz. There’s a few great features from Nicole Wray, too. Remember her? “All In My Grill”? “Make It Hot”? I’d buy a new Missy Elliott album, too. Rappers don’t dance enough any more. All they do is this. Anyway, here’s a video off that Summer Years that makes roller skates look real cool and features all my favorite lady hairstyles. This one features parachutes.
That video actually puts me in mind of Pac Div’s ill song “Fallin'” and their similarly-themed video. That takes me to “Anti-Freeze”, which has a real hard beat. “Peep a nigga’s footwear, now I’m all Italy/ Ricky D flashy nigga, on-point actually, nigga.” That takes me to “Posted”, which is like West Coast crunk, I don’t even know. It sounds like some ill lo-fi Lil Jon joint, really. It’s off The Div, which just dropped a couple weeks ago. It’s ill. Like that video, too. “Who the FUCK are you on the phone with?” That last chick is so bout it.
Finally, Danny Brown and Black Milk’s Black And Brown album (EP?) is pretty solid, but feels real short. I mean, it’s just over twenty minutes long. I dig it, though, and “LOL” goes super hard. “Niggas sent the text, said ‘it’s light on the scale’/ I text back, ‘LOL'”. “If it ain’t about money, TTYL.” Wild ignorant, foul, and funny. I guess that’s Danny in a nutshell, though. “LOL” is the “Bruiser Brigade” of Black and Brown, I figure. Super hot, but real ugly if you actually listen to the lyrics. The #1 rapper you could never play for your mother. (psyche, that’s DMX)
–Are you looking for book books? Or maybe Kindle books? I’m all Kindle at this point, personally. I bought what is now apparently called a Kindle Keyboard at the top of this year and I don’t regret it a bit. It’s light, like a wallet, and super-easy to use. It’s nice to have a dedicated ebook thing, instead of a multipurpose heavy device like an iPad (which I also enjoy, though for different reasons). Anyway, Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need Is Kill was a treat. It sort of spins a video game concept (what if you had infinite lives, like in a video game, but were conscious of that fact?) into a really interesting meditation on war and life and the best ways to kill aliens. The lives thing is executed much better than you’d expect just hearing a summary. Free excerpt over here. (Great title on that book, too.) I haven’t started it yet, but Ryu Mitsuse’s Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights is another book with a great title and hook. I liked the sample I read, I just need to wrap a couple books up first.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend Richard Stark’s stuff. You know the drill already probably, but I’ve read The Hunter probably half a dozen times, and The Outfit has my favorite scene or bit of writing or whatever in any book ever. Here:
The receptionist knew that no one was supposed to come behind the desk. If anyone tried to without permission, she was to push the button on the floor under her desk. But this time she didn’t even think of the button. She reached, instead, for the package. Suddenly, the mailman grabbed her wrist, yanked her from the chair, and hurled her into a corner. She landed heavily on her side, knocking her head against the wall. When she looked up dazed, the mailman had an automatic trained on her. “Can you scream louder than this gun?” he said in a low voice.
She stared at the gun. She couldn’t have screamed if she’d wanted to. She couldn’t even breathe.
The outer door opened and the four men came in, two carrying shotguns, and two machine guns. The girl couldn’t believe it, it was like something in the movies. Gangsters carried machine guns back in 1930. There was no such thing as a machine gun in real life. Machine guns and Walt Disney mice, all make-believe.
The mailman put his gun away under his coat, and removed the mailbag from his shoulder. He took cord from the mail sack and tied the receptionist’s hands and feet. She gaped at him unbelievingly as he tightened the knots. They were in the wrong office, she thought. It might be a television show shooting scenes on location, they must have wanted the office next door and these men had come into the wrong place. It must be a mistake.
The mailman gagged her with a spare handkerchief as one of the other men brought the two musical instrument cases and two briefcases in from the outside hall. The mailman took the briefcases. The men with the machine guns led the way. They all walked down the inner hall and stopped at the door next to the book-keeping room. The mailman opened the door, and all five of them boiled into the room.
This was the room where the alarm buzzer would have rung if the receptionist had remembered to ring it. Four men in brown uniforms wearing pistols and Sam Browne belts, were sitting at a table playing poker. They jumped up when the door burst open, then they all froze. They believed in machine guns.
“They believed in machine guns.” If I could be half as good as that at some point, I could die happy. “Machine guns and Walt Disney mice, all make-believe.”
Colson Whitehead’s Zone One: A Novel is pretty good, though a slow burner. He spends a lot of time building up the world, but that time is split with origin stories (for lack of a better phrase), anecdotes, and some really great imagery. I’m a third into it, I think? And thus far the main line in the book has all taken place in one scene. Very interesting way of writing, but I’m digging it. Last one is David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero, which Tucker Stone recommended to me. I read the first couple chapters in an airport, and they about knocked me off my feet. It’s very lyrical in style, and puts me in mind of my time in high school studying Everyone’s Favorite Fascist Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, though much less opaque than that work. It’s sort of hard to explain, but it struck me as being very good and extremely enthralling. Hypnosis in text form. Snake-charming from a typewriter.
Oh yeah, speaking of Tucker– his review of Richard Stark’s Butcher’s Moon made me want to read that book even more. I read the first thirteen Parker novels over the course of a few months and then took a break. Butcher’s Moon sounds like a good comeback novel.
–Thinking about buying video games? The story in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is dumb as rocks, but the Spec Ops and multiplayer is just as fun as ever. People like that Batman: Arkham City. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception was a pretty fun ride, with some pretty impressive visuals and action set-pieces. I’ve been thinking a lot about moments in gameplay, those scenes where you aren’t in full control but still a part of the action? Uncharted may well be the best in the business at those. More on that later, maybe. I’m still digesting.
I play an absurd amount of NBA 2K12. I usually play a certain friend online after work each day. I’m up 41 to his 39, but he’s beating me on points, 4774 to 4711. If you figure each game takes 25 minutes (including time-outs, delays, free throws, etc), then… what is that, like thirty-three hours of that game? At the least? That isn’t including my time on MyPlayer and all that. I’m a fan. I worked on an early rev of Saint’s Row: The Third, but I’d love to play the full game. Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 is a worthy update to a solid game. I like it a lot better, actually. Being able to spectate online adds a lot. Metal Gear Solid HD Collection is a must-have, as far as I’m concerned. Metal Gear is the best franchise.
said the shotgun to the head
-Maybe this is unfair (it isn’t), but if you only ever talk about what’s wrong with race in comics, and never what’s good, I don’t care about anything you have to say. It’s like–congrats, man, you can recognize something so obvious that children can see it. I’m not gonna congratulate you for doing something you should be doing anyway. I’m tired of reading or being linked to know-nothing junior varsity scrubs armed with an at best theoretical understanding of racial politics that they got from some college or the rest of the internet. Real talk beats jargon any day. Do better.
-Brian Michael Bendis was talking greasy about comics journalism last week. I felt some kind of way about it and responded on Twitter more than I should have, when what I really should have said was this:
Twinkletoes, you’re breaking my heart!
-Did you guys see that X-Men: Curse of the Mutants Saga came out on ComiXology’s digital comics service this week? For two bucks? That comic was free in stores. C’mon, son. That’s just clown shoes.
-Greg Burgas reviewed Top Cow’s First Look over at Comics Should Be Good!. I liked the Genius story in there and honestly have yet to read the rest. That’s beside the point, though. Burgas makes a reference to Top Cow’s checkered past (specifically: “Mysterious Ways is the third story in the collection, and it’s really what you think of when you think of a stereotypical “Top Cow” comic.”) and manages to piss off both Ron Marz and Atom!, who is Top Cow’s new “Direct Market Liason” guy.
They pop up to explain that, hey, that isn’t Top Cow, you’re working from old data, and things just devolve from there. I figured I’d do us all the favor of pulling some covers from the recent past, including Artifacts, one of the books that Marz and Atom! are telling us we shouldn’t be judging.
I’m not even being disingenuous and cherrypicking here–these are the covers to some fairly high profile series starring Boobs Goesfast, Razor Cleavage, Nightgown Lass, Thinly Disguised Alien Guy, and… I don’t have any dismissive and/or clever supranyms ((c) Adam Warren) for Aphrodite IX and the angel chick with the massive wings (Sexy Seraphim?) but they look like the same old Top Cow crap we used to eat up back before the internet existed.
Look–Top Cow is better than it was ten years ago. That’s obvious. Witchblade wears more clothes, for one thing, and what I’ve read of Phil Hester’s The Darkness was pretty swift. But- Witchblade Takeru still exists and this sort of thing still happens:
It’s cool you changed or whatever, but if you’re the guy who gets blackout drunk and turns into a douchebag every time he goes out, and you’re that guy for years, don’t be surprised if people go “Whoa whoa whoa, did that guy just behave himself?” when you go out, behave yourself, cover the tip, and bid a nice lady a chaste goodnight. That’s your bad. You earned that rep.
If Top Cow spent the past decade and a half pumping out critically acclaimed books, and then suddenly started producing crap, the response would be equally as confused. If Donna Troy suddenly magically lost her ability to put me right to sleep, I’d react with surprise, just like Burgas did.
-In the interest of semi-fairness, this cover for the aborted Joe Casey/Chriscross Velocity is super dope.
The last album from The Roots was Rising Down. It was the release valve of living under eight years of Bush and the information overload and depression that came from suddenly having all the news you care to read at your beck and call. It was harsh music, with the closest thing to a round edge coming in the form of the Wale and Jill Scott-featured “Rising Down.” The standout track was “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction),” which featured Black Thought going in for three minutes straight on a spare ?uestlove drum track and a low, groaning musical accompaniment.
I’m not sure which bars are my favorite. “I’m in the field with a shield and a spear, nigga/ I’m in your girl with her heels in the air, nigga” is incredible, but Thought drops ten about three-fourths of the way through the song that pretty near knocked my socks off. “What’s your networking plan? You better look alive/ ’cause them niggas outside looking desperate again, nigga/ And the blunts and liquor killing our lungs and liver/ The asthmatic drug addict, I function with it/ I put a rapper in a hole where the dust will sit/ for spitting played out patterns that once was hitting/ I got news for you all, let me show you how to ball/ See the legendary fall? I ain’t heard of that/ Y’all niggas is off the wall like Aresnio Hall/ I’ma put you right back where the dirt is at.”
Their new joint is How I Got Over. The title really says it all: it’s about triumph over adversity. I’m on listen three or four at this point, and listen sixty or seventy of the lead single “How I Got Over,” and it’s a great record. The sequencing, the music, all of it sounds on point. Each song flows into the next, and they work together to build an album about getting over when times are hard, whether through hustling, prayer, or just living. It’s a strong album.
The guest appearances come from all-stars, too. Blu is a dope producer and artist out of Los Angeles, one of those guys who releases tunes so rarely that you get mad and think he disappeared, and then he comes back with something that goes hard and all is forgiven. Down to earth, interesting production, straightforward lyrics, Blu is basically that dude. Phonte from Little Brother is on a couple tracks, too, and he’s always entertaining. STS, aka Sugar Tongue Slim, and the always dope Peedi Crakk (Peedi Peedi so he can get on TV) make strong guest appearances, too. Roots staple Dice Raw has several verses, which is always nice to see. John Legend and Joanna Newsom are on the album for all you people who don’t like rappers but loooooove sangas.
Cop it. How I Got Over is pretty good. It’s down tempo, a little more laid back than Rising Down, and a little more, what, mature? Is it grown folks’ music? I’m not sure, but it’s good.
Hit your local comic shop on Saturday to pick up some free books.
If you don’t have one nearby, check out Heavy Ink. They’re running a special FCBD promotion where you can get the free comics online, instead of in-store. Click the link, read up.
B.o.B./Bobby Ray is pretty great. I’ve been following his career since… 2008? He’s dropped a few mixtapes I really dug, had some 5-star guest appearances, and I basically told myself I’d buy his album after hearing his “Who The Fuck Is B.o.B.?” mixtape for the first time. His new album, B.o.B. Presents The Adventures of Bobby Ray is out, and I just copped it. Eight bucks on Amazon? Not even a question.
Bobby Ray is a child of the Dungeon Family, just like most of the better artists out of Georgia. Goodie MOb and OutKast are in his DNA, but not in a copycatting sort of way. There’s just a clear influence there, but he is clearly his own artist. He has the ability to put a deeply weird song next to some old school funk next to some skinny jeans rap next to something pimp tight and not have it clash.
(That’s another post-Dungeon thing. Andre 3000 has a rep for being the conscious poet, the weird half of OutKast, but he’s still the dude who spit “I got up in them hoes and I told ’em “Bye bye!”/ About two weeks later, she called me with some bullshit/ Talkin’ ’bout her period late… Guess what I did:/ *Click*.” It’s not cognitive dissonance so much as recognizing and embracing the fact that people go deeper than one word labels. It’s the same thing that puts Talib Kweli on a handful of songs with Pimp C. Put differently: “Is every nigga with dreads for the cause? Is every nigga with golds for the fall?”)
What I like about Bobby Ray is how he walks that fine line. He’s open about how he used to try to rap in a more radio-friendly style on “Generation Lost,” a track from The Adventures of B.o.B. He has talked about playing B.o.B. like its a role, and how he eventually had to learn to be comfortable being Bobby Ray and be okay with playing guitars or pianos on a track. He had to learn how to be him, and being him sometimes involves a song like “Grip Ur Body” or “Nigger” or “Haterz Everywhere.” There’s a spectrum of experience there.
It’s a lot there that I can personally relate to, is what I’m saying.
Him, Killer Mike, Pill, Jay Electronica, Yelawolf- they’re keeping southern rap interesting. I love Jeezy, but he doesn’t have the same range these cats do. Maybe it’s because they aren’t fully mainstreamed, I don’t know, but Yelawolf’s Trunk Muzik is crazy good, Pill spits fire on every verse, Jay ElecHanukkah is dope, if a bit MIA currently, and Bobby Ray and Killer Mike are the two finest heirs to OutKast’s legacy I can imagine.
Youtubes below. Listen to them, and if you dig it, pick up the record. “Nothin On You” is on the album, the rest are older tracks of varying ages. It’s black future music, baby.
(The “I’ll Be In the Sky” video vaguely suggests continuity between Bobby Ray and OutKast. Consider the video for “Elevators (Me & You)” from forever ago. You can even draw a line from the content of “I’ll Be In the Sky” to “Elevators.” Pay attention.)
Amazon’s running a 71% off deal for the Realm of Kings hardcover that drops later this year. Summary: Collecting three Realm of Kings series in one power-packed hardcover. In Imperial Guard, one hazardous mission may be the solution that everyone is praying for, but are the opinionated and fractured Guard tough enough – and united enough – to accomplish it? And in Inhumans, now led by Queen Medusa, the battered and bruised royal family struggles to maintain their grip on the reigns of power. Courtly intrigues and external threats are beginning to erode their rule, but the biggest threat may lurk within the family itself! Then in Son of Hulk, meet a new monster for a new age, and a challenger to the warring Kings of the Cosmos…he is Hiro-Kala, Son of Hulk, and this young apocalyptic visionary has a destructive destiny: obliterate the Universe! Collects Realm of Kings: Inhumans #1-5, Realm of Kings: Son of Hulk #1-4, and Realm of Kings: Imperial Guard #1-5.
These were all pretty good, and eleven bucks for 330+ pages? That’s a great deal. Preorder it if you like.
Okay. You ordered a bunch of Marvel Omnibus titles from Amazon as part of The $14.99 Glitch and they’ve been cancelled. You probably knew they would do. But you may have received a previous e-mail saying that you would get at least one at the magic price. Or maybe Amazon never got round to emailing you at all, they just deleted the order from your account. And you’re feeling a bit miffed.
I’m geting reports that people who have complained, even using the Amazon Call Me Back feature on the website, have been getting recompense from the multinational online retailer.
[…]
Me, I’m not complaining. I don’t think Amazon owe me anything. I understand however, that you may feel differently.
“I’m going to file a class action lawsuit” – some random infant, repeated exponentially
That’s the kind of response that would make George Washington weep. A class action lawsuit? Really? That’s the legacy you want written across your face, attached forever to your name?
Crime is a holy profession, and to join its brotherhood is to put oneself alongside this country’s greatest heroes. After oil and weapons production, it’s the most successful industry on the planet, with a storied history that stretches further than any religion. Getting caught out in it–even if all you did was take advantage of a gigantic corporation’s obvious pricing error–is something that should be handled with nothing short of the pride of a Dwayne Michael Carter. Playing the hurt consumer in this situation is the equivalent of standing in the door of the bank after the ATM accidently farts out an extra 20 and refusing to hand it over. It’s spitting on the flag, it’s saying that you’re only willing to play the game if everybody agrees to do it by your rules, and your rules are these: you can’t have done anything wrong, because it’s somebody else’s fault.
Amazon doesn’t owe you a single solitary thing. They’d be well within their rights to cancel every order and not lose a few thousand bucks. There’s even a note in their TOS that sometimes, on occasion, books are mispriced, and sucks to be you if they charge you the full price. Until the book ships, they do not charge your card, meaning that there is no sale. That means they owe you nothing until the book leaves their warehouse.
So to call them up and ask for a refund for time wasted ordering obviously mistakenly marked down books makes you something like a jerk. They don’t owe you anything. If anything, you owe them whatever the actual price of the book you ordered was. It’s a blessing that they honored any of the orders, considering it was such an obvious cheat that we were all taking advantage of. I got a few Ultimate Spidey HCs and I’m pretty happy about that. I didn’t get a Tomb of Dracula, but so what? I don’t expect Wal-mart to let me buy eighteen computers that got marked down to 50 bucks because somebody dropped a decimal point, and they’re under no obligation to let me do that.
Basically, don’t be the old lady at Kroger with a fistful of coupons, trying to game the system and score a dozen eggs for free and getting pissed off and demanding recompense when the manager is like “Sorry, we’re all out.” You played the game with a few aces hidden up your sleeve. If you lost, so what? You lost what, ten minutes of your time? A couple megabytes off your bandwidth for the month?
I ordered six. A couple preorders, Tomb of Dracula v1, The Death of Captain America, and then the last two Ultimate Spider-Man joints. Cheap hardcovers make me stupid, apparently. But whatever, I’m getting cheap comics. Also we get a small cut if you buy through that link, so you know, there’s that.
Shill over! I’ve got a to-read stack to demolish before all these books get here.
Pardon the crass commercialism, but if you’ve been thinking about picking up Matt Fraction’s run on Invincible Iron Man, Amazon’s got a surprise deal for you. Marvel’s releasing an Invincible Iron Man Omnibus collecting the first 19 issues of Matt Fraction’s run. While it was originally supposed to come out in early April, it looks like it’s gonna ship early next week. They tell me mine’ll arrive 03/10/10.
This is a good deal because a) it’s 40 bucks retail, b) 26 bucks on Amazon, and c) a steal at that price. This will also get you more or less caught up to Fraction’s run on Invincible Iron Man, too. There is one arc between the omnibus and being caught up: the five issue “Stark Disassembled.”
So, yeah, if you’re addicted to hardcovers (holla) or you’ve been wanting to see what’s up with Iron Man before the movie drops– it’s a good deal.
is two bucks.
(for Khari Evans), 
because everyone says it’s the best, and 
because if you don’t like Bruce Willis, you’re no friend of mine.
. It was the release valve of living under eight years of Bush and the information overload and depression that came from suddenly having all the news you care to read at your beck and call. It was harsh music, with the closest thing to a round edge coming in the form of the Wale and Jill Scott-featured “Rising Down.” The standout track was “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction),” which featured Black Thought going in for three minutes straight on a spare ?uestlove drum track and a low, groaning musical accompaniment.
. The title really says it all: it’s about triumph over adversity. I’m on listen three or four at this point, and listen sixty or seventy of the lead single “How I Got Over,” and it’s a great record. The sequencing, the music, all of it sounds on point. Each song flows into the next, and they work together to build an album about getting over when times are hard, whether through hustling, prayer, or just living. It’s a strong album.
.
on Amazon, 
is eight, 
is ten bucks. It’s been a good year for music.