Baby Music Sucks

babyaerosmith.jpg
Any self-respecting parent who's gotten high and hooked up and read Camus and shit wants their offspring to grow up cool. And in today's ultra-competitive child-rearing environment, we all know that hipness starts at home.

So, the popularity of the Rockabye Baby series is understandable; it's a series of albums featuring "lullaby" versions of rock or rap artists' greatest hits, everyone from Blur and Nine Inch Nails to Jay-Z.

Put out by a label run by David Lee Roth's sister (seriously), they're instrumental and stripped of hard guitars and deep bass, while retaining the original songs' recognizable melodies. The main difference is that they're utterly, utterly unlistenable.

More »

Lil Poopy Is the Next Mozart

Youtube Screengrab
We seem to be awfully excessively protective of 9-year-olds recently. The Onion ate a shit ton of crow. And barely hours later another brilliant 9-year-old became the center of an unnecessary moral panic. We are, of course, talking about hip-hop phenomenon Lil Poopy.

The pint-sized rapper Luie Rivera, Jr., based in Brockton, Mass, has had a rough go of it lately. His videos were temporarily removed from YouTube and his dad has been put under investigation for child abuse, apparently because of Lil Poopy's videos showing him dancing with adult women and partying in clubs. (That the clique he reps is called the Coke Boys doesn't help either.) Even worse, his youth peers have been judging him, and everyone knows that only God can do that. But what about Lil Poop's music? Does it live up to the hype? Has he got the chops? Let's take a listen, shall we?


More »

How to Become a Music Geek In Four Simple Steps

petermurphy.jpg
Timothy Norris
Don't know who this guy is? Pretend you do.

I'm not going to begrudge anyone for not knowing who Coachella headliners The Stone Roses are. The simple fact is that their first album, (the only one that really matters), came out in 1989. If you're in college now, you most likely weren't even born then. Plus, The Stone Roses were a bigger deal in the U.K. than in the U.S.

Out in Los Angeles, if you were into the band, it's probably because you were the sort of weirdo who listened to KROQ and watched MTV's 120 Minutes. Even if you were a teenager in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, chances are good that you could have lived your life without ever hearing them. But, do you really have to tweet, "Who are The Stone Roses?" Come on, they're on Spotify.

Here's a little music geek advice that I tweeted when everyone was either boo-hooing The Stone Roses' headlining gig or ranting about how youth today has no idea who the band is.

More »

Cassette Tapes Are Awesome Until You Actually Have To Listen To Them

JeepEdit2.jpg
See also: Here Are the Songs They Play at a Middle School Dance

About a decade ago I crashed my car. Bad.

I still remember it pretty clearly. I had a bad haircut and was driving on the feeder next to a highway and listening to music (maybe Missy Elliott's "Work It" or maybe Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle" but probably Nelly's "Hot In Herre"). It was the beginning of the afternoon and it was not raining. I was driving and everything was great and then suddenly I was not driving and everything was not great.

I ran right through a red light doing about 50 miles per hour, crashing face first into a woman traveling in a new Ford Mustang left to right on the intersecting street. I hit her square in her passenger side door, T-Boning her car, crumpling it into two discernible sections. It was loud and fast and scary. And stupid. I'd like to say that it was an accident rooted in nobility, that I couldn't have afforded to stop at the light because I was in hot pursuit of a baby thief or a known Nazi. But it wasn't. It was the opposite. I ran the light because I was trying to fish a couple of Combos from up off the floor so I could eat them. (Note: In my defense, Combos are goddamn delicious.)


More »

You're a Kid Who Wants to Scratch? Hit Up Tina T's Camp Spinoff

03_campspinoff_29.jpg
DJ Tina T's motto is "Less skin, more skill."

"I never wanted people to say I got where I am because of who I was sleeping with," she says recently, sipping an iced green tea on the patio of Sunset Boulevard's Tender Greens.

After excelling in various L.A. DJ contests, she relocated to Las Vegas in 2009 and now spins a weekly residency at the Cosmopolitan Hotel's Marquee nightclub. Along the way she's released half a dozen mix CDs, but she's most psyched for her latest project: a DJ camp for kids, Camp Spinoff. She founded it in 2010, and it's held every summer in Ojai.

More »

Here Are the Songs They Play at a Middle School Dance

imgres.jpg
The Ten Best Latin Alternative Albums of 2012
Top 20 Worst Bands of All Time

1:04 pm: In about 25 minutes, I'm going to be chaperoning a middle school dance. The dance is for the school's graduating 8th graders, of which there are several hundred. I've probably chaperoned fifteen of these things already. It's like being a bouncer at a night club, except this party will take place in a cafeteria and nobody told me not to let in Black or Mexican people.

1:08: Oh shit. They're serving free cake at this dance. That's actually kind of great. There'd probably be less hostility at proper night clubs if they gave away cake, right? Once when I was in a club, I got into a bit of a tiff with a gentleman. Shortly thereafter I snuck up behind him on the dance floor and punched him in his ear as hard as I could. I'm almost certain that wouldn't have happened if I'd had a slice of Italian Cream Cake on a Styrofoam plate in my hands. Fuck your nightclub for not serving cake, yo.

More »

From the Vault

 

Loading...