ringleader man:

so I’m killing time online during my lunch break at work a couple of days ago and I clickity click my way over to metacritic, which informs me that today marks the release of the new T-Pain album wait wait wait what the hell is this? T-Pain has an album? T-Pain has three albums? T-Pain is actually a real person? I thought he was Pestilence incarnate, given flesh to roam the world and unleash the AutoTune plague upon us to herald the end times. oh no, gentle readers. he is a real live producer slash rapper slash crooner of many hooks slash generally drunken shaker of dreads.

and I felt a certain obligation to listen to the album, which is titled Thr33 Ringz. that is ‘three’ with two threes where the ‘e’s should go and a ‘z’ at the end of ‘rings’ where the ‘s’ would traditionally be.


yes, I felt that I needed this in my life.



first, I would like to say that there is one thing about this album that is pristine in its perfection, and that thing is “Superstar Lady”. it is three minutes and seventeen seconds of trumpeting synths and canyon-deep bass and super future 21st-century sheen just dripping off of everyfuckthing while T-Pain singsong-raps his way through the anatomy of some phantom hottie and actually makes the AutoTune sound like a neat idea for once in his life. if this is not the single, surely I do not know why, and if you cannot dig this track, then motherfucker, you ain’t got no shovel.

as for the rest of the album…I don’t know what to make of it, honestly. it falls far enough outside of my realm of experience that I’m not really sure how to evaluate it. T-Pain tries for the rapper/singer/producer hat trick, and dude can put together a bangin’ single, which is what I was expecting from Ringz - too many skits, some super weak filler and seven or eight Singles. but that is not what he did - for better or for worse, I think he actually tried to make an album out of it. there’s some halfass cohesion to it in the production and that bizarre sung rap halfway hook style that really only Cee-Lo is allowed to do.


if it wasn’t for the AutoTune all over everything, as much as I hate it, it’d be possible to forget that this was (in theory) a T-Pain solo album. there are approximately three tracks that do not feature a guest; the guest in question is almost always the focal point of the track - T-Pain’s lyrics, if we must call them that, always come off as a chorus that’s gone on far too long. some things stand out, but not always for the right reasons. “It Ain’t Me” is another potential Single, if only for the T.I. verse (because there is no such thing as a bad T.I. verse. don’t question it; only haters or lames would question it. ask T.I. he’ll tell you.) and then there is “Karaoke”, where T-Pain is dissing somebody, I think, and generally losing the beat while Khaled yells some of his usual unspecific shit. the beat sounds like a G-Unit B-stringer should be using it to talk about his sneakers and maybe call Game a faggot. where the hell is the sparkle and the synth, T-Pain?

altogether too many "Karaoke"ish tracks and not near enough "Superstar Lady" from a guy who's made his name with single after single. maybe this is an average to good R&B album; I wouldn’t know and I can’t say either way. what I can say is that T-Pain is spreading himself pretty thin a la Lil’ Wayne in 2008 without any of the skill Weezy has behind the mic to carry him in his many weaker moments. there’s two certifiable Singles and little else that stands out, even on the production side of things. while I’m impressed that he tried to make an album at all (and has apparently made two previous - when the hell did that happen?) dude definitely sounds like he belongs behind the boards and maybe on the hook from time to time. slow it the hell down, double back to “Bartender”, and get your shit together, b.




(ice out all yo’ fingers, take you out and make you famous:)

flash point:

today's blog is a challenge. my day has been filled by work and insurance and apartment hunting and all sorts of bureaucratic unpleasantness and I really do not have much to say other than 'my eyes hurt and I would like to go to bed now'. I have half a review of the new T-Pain album and it is both insightful and entertaining, but it is only halfway done and you, gentle reader, deserve better, so it will have to hold until tomorrow.

which does not leave me with a whole hell of a lot to say just now, and thinking is becoming more painful by the moment. what I need now is a blog that is long on substance to assauge my guilt and short on effort to allow me to sleep. it is a delicate balance I am attempting to strike here, but I am a professional driver on a closed circut course, and it is part of my god-damn job to excel under pressure.

and so, with this in mind, I give you Zeitgeist. sometimes totally awesome, sometimes totally didactic, talking for two solid hours without getting tired of itself: it's almost like I'm in the room with you! and it hates banks as much as I do! and unlike yours truly, it has both a 'pause' and a 'stop'. it is the best of all possible blogs I could have posted today, so if you need more than that from me tonight, America, you are fresh out of fucking luck and I am sorry about it.


andIcollapsenow.



(she's addicted to the flashin' lights, camera, action:)

ra pa pum pum on my shaolin drum:

…doesn’t ‘elite’ mean ‘good’?

- Jon Stewart.

writing a blog a day sounds like a really fantastic decision for the first twenty minutes after you come up with it. but on the second day, when you haven’t really slept well and there’s no food in the house and you’re mad at your job and you haven’t had a proper deserving target for your unspecified anger all god-damned day, you do not really feel like writing much of anything about anything. you would like to finish your beer and then maybe watch Donnie Yen beat the living bejesus out of six dozen people for no good reason at all over the next ninety minutes and probably have another beer. but I am going to try very hard, for at least a couple of minutes, to keep my word - and only for you do I do this, gentle readers. unfortunately, I am still in a bit of a bad mood, so I will commence to complain for a minute or six about how hard it is to be me. (cliff notes version: it’s hard. compared to what you think is hard, it’s really hard.)

see what I mean? that’s just how it’s going to be today.

the illustrious Moira Phillips recently blogged about the various difficulties of dating people that don’t suck (which you should go read here, because she wrote it and I read it and you can only hope and pray that you might actually become a little cooler via osmosis. you’re welcome, gentle readers.) after reading this fine piece of literature, I thought to myself, ‘son of a bitch, it really is difficult to have standards. perhaps she and I should flee into the countryside only to return with a telekinetic brood that will dominate the planet in our names in theatres this Christmas. she can even name the first one Huckleberry if she’s really set on that, because fuck it, he’s telekinetic. if you mock him on the playground, he can explode your head. in theatres, this Christmas, so give us ten bucks to watch it.’

…but I digress again.

the point I was originally intending to make was that I do empathize with her and with anyone that has ever looked at a member of the opposite sex and thought to themselves very quietly, “I guess this is going to have to do.” it dawned on me some time ago that every relationship I have ever been involved in - anything that was even vaguely relationship-like, in fact - required me to compromise things that really, really should have been held inviolate no matter what (any of my exes that read that sentence will probably take offense to the suggestion that I even understand the meaning of the word ‘compromise’, but they’re always wrong about everything, so I don’t suppose it matters much.) the premise of said compromises has traditionally been that my standards are impossibly high and that there is no way they are ever getting met and I probably will not find any joy in other humans unless I can bring myself to lower the bar.

in retrospect, I am comfortable saying that this was a fucking terrible idea on my part.

I can’t really lower my standards because I want what I damn well want; all I can really do is neglect to mention the majority of them. lowering my standards in pursuit of some nebulous ideal happiness really means that I am still unhappy, but now I am engaged in a variety of conversations slash arguments that are truly madly deeply boring and occasionally having what rapidly degrades into incredibly mediocre sex. at which point I appear to get very angry with the woman in question, but I am actually very angry at myself for attempting yet again to date my preferred version of a girl I had no business being with in the first place.

(unfortunately for said girls, I never seem to remember to mention that last part when all the shouting starts. imagine that!)

so, having tired of this cycle of utter failure, I have taken the past couple of years off from relationships that start with a capital ‘r’ to enjoy the sky blue sky that is my single life and to reaffirm the ultimate value of my god-damn standards. unlike the illustrious Moira Phillips, however, I do not have a psychologically satisfying way to tie off the internal standards debate. I have also tried the waiting without waiting approach and it does not seem to work so well for a dude - yet another ugly act in the farce that is feminism, I think (which will have to wait for its own entry for me to yell at it properly. it may even necessitate a two-parter, because boy does it annoy the hell out of me all the time. goddamn crazy feminists!) by my line of reasoning, if a woman cannot overcome the relatively mild social convention of being the asked instead of the asker in these oh so fucking enlightened times we live in, I would doubt that she is capable of understanding, much less agreeing, with any thoughts I have about pretty much anything important.

but then again, this could (hypothetically, now) produce a situation in which my standards are actually mostly totally met, but said woman is not being as forward as she could possibly be, and maybe I’ve decided to be obstinate about that beyond all reason or sense - nevermind the numerous other objections I can think of that are infinitely more practical and probably very valid. I’ll work all that out later, fuck that. the real trouble is that a girl who meets my impossibly high standards is not falling all over herself to grab my attention.


…that would sound ridiculous if I didn’t already know that I’m right all the time.


so, yes.


in conclusion, being me is really hard.

(nobody go ‘till the god say so:)

I ain't dead, I ain't done:

when this semester ends, I will never have to go back to St. Mary's.


oh, man, that feels so good to say.


there have been a great many happenings in my life as of late, gentle readers, and I know that you're curious about them because I've been terribly negligent in my blogging yet again. I would apologize, but it would be fairly insincere and you probably know that, so let's just skip that part of the proceedings and see if I can't stick to this once a day idea that I had a month ago. deal?



I thought you'd like that.


so, yes, I am done with St. Mary's. as of December I am officially withdrawing, never to return (fo'eva eva? fo'eva eva.) I'm moving into a new place that month and hopefully going full time at my current job, which is boring production round peg in the round hole sort of nonsense, but with time I will be working my way into the field of technical writing, which is equally boring but will pay me great big piles of cash American. after the first year I'll qualify for tuition reimbursement, which means I can finish my bachelor's online (likely through College Park.) my car is paid off in March, my loans won't come due until July and I'm consolidating them later this week, and I am more or less marking days off the calendar as I count down to wonderful, glorious freedom from stuffy, stiffling, time-consuming all-hateful pain in the ass academia. if I were not in a very public place as I write this, I would probably get out the Katt Williams Sportscenteresque victory dance. in fact, I can't guarantee that I won't feel compelled to do so before I finish writing this.

in other news, I have managed to write maybe eighty percent of a rap album only to find that 1) lo and behold, I have decided I can write better shit and b) I do not have the time nor the funds to actually make my own beats. the writing is actually a fun thing to play with; I've spent the last several years constantly attempting to one up myself in that regard and not having twenty credits' worth of blah blah etc. to read for a year makes reworking the bulk of it less daunting. the latter is a far more substantial problem than the former - though come December, maybe I will make another go of it. I have become fond of telling people that tracktion, protools, etc. are not the magical musical super computer clickity clickity boxes that I previously thought they were. you actually do sort of need to know what the hell it is that you're doing in order to get non-shit non-MIDI sounds out of them. it seems you also need to spend a fair amount of non-monopoly dollars, which I do not really have on tap just now. maybe Black Milk could get some dope shit out of tracktion and a usb mic, but I am not him. yet.


it is starting to seem like some degree of networking is in order to make any real progress with this, which is upsetting, since my original impetus for learning to make my own beats was that I am deeply averse to playing well with others at this point in my life. explaining to other people that I want to make an album that condenses eighteen hours of my particular personal hyperintense trippery into forty-fiveish minutes of dystopian hip hop is tricky business, especially when I have no musical vocabulary to express such with other than 'no, not that, not that, and not that, start over, do it again'. maybe this is why so many MCs end up rapping about empty trap shit. maybe I should do that too. I'd look gangster as fuck with some tattoos and a Gucci rag.


wait, no. it's not time for a tangent yet. run that back.


so, to summarize: I am alive, gentle readers. I am working, I am writing, I am still sorely lacking patience and still unlikely to listen to reason. there have been many changes but they are more or less superficial; I still think I'm right about everything and I will still be telling you all about it from time to time and you will still be interested despite yourself. there will be album excerpts, there will be occasional venomous social commentary complete with suspect leaps in logic, there will be a top twenty list for 2008 that will probably not include your favorite band(s), there will be a variety of things that make no sense or are not wise to write about on the internet or are otherwise full of moderately questionable content.

but that is what I do, and that is why you like me. and if you've been really good this year, gentle readers, and I'm not saying for certain that you have, there might even be Team Hate guest appearances in the foreseeable future. granted, I haven't told them that yet, but I'm sure they don't mind me committing their time unawares to my various shortsighted ideas. they mostly ignore me anyway, really, so no harm done. probably.


so tune in tomorrow. same bat time. same bat channel.


rep yo' set in the meantime.




(wonder how he facin' years and he still chillin'?)