Gloomy Retrospective

I think I'm too old for this. I think I'm too old for most things, really, like existing or being alive, but right now, I feel too old to understand and empathize with Kanye West's public persona. Let's go back to two years ago, when Kanye West brought back G.O.O.D. Fridays and became basically a mainstay at Twitter with his incoherent tweets like "Ima fix wolves" and his pissy fight with Taylor Swift that no one except the two parties cared about. Was the music we got from that worth it? There's a lot of argument that, for the most part, The Life of Pablo (TLOP) is an incoherent mess that still somehow shows the genius of Kanye West by acting like a snapshot of his thoughts and ambitions at the time; others, a very vocal minority, says that these people are just riding Kanye's dick too hard and TLOP is just a mess. Personally, I straddle the fence on this: yes, the album is pretty good at points, but the publicity for it is exhaust...

I. Taylor Swift doesn't improvise well. A lot of her public image is this precise, detailed, mass-marketable girl-next-door pop star whose existence is a testament to the juggling act of her and her PR team. And her success, from her days as a teenager singing wholesome truths to America's teens and too-old-to-be-teens, up to her sell-out to pop music and becoming a provocateur of the iconography of pop music in general, has been this tightly controlled ship that gave her success in spite of the music and the authenticity of the product that she was selling. And with all of this, Taylor Swift became a powerful figure, one who can wage war with companies like Spotify over petty things like money; one who could be deaf for most issues of feminism except for the ones that affected her (the case she made famous where she destroyed a DJ's career for a dollar is a satisfying, but ultimately petty, show of power that works regardless of what movement she was in); and one who...

“Closer” by the Chainsmokers is one heck of a memorable song. I hate it like Duterte hates respectability, but I’ll be damned if I call it forgettable and dull. In fact, despite its stupid f***ing lyrics, or that soulless bleepity-bloop drop that seems to come out straight from an EDM version of Puff Daddy, or the fact that the male singer sounds like he just came home from an all-night rave and was forced to sing the song because their label was trying to rush out the single before the end of the summer, it’s still quite an unique song, one that will probably live in the annals of 2010s nostalgia far off in the future. POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT THE SONG: The song is basically about an alcoholic asshole and a shallow lady meeting after four years and then having a one-night-stand in the back in his/her Land Rover. Before I get negative, let me just say that I really like the fact that they give us enough details about these two people that we can extrapolate their character base...