"Accidental Racist" Is A Lovely Song About Clothes & Nothing Else

Right? Because there's literally no deeper it can go. This is, at its absolute best, a song about clothing confusion between a confederate flag t-shirt and a du-rag. And that's wonderful, in a "aren't they quaint" kind of way.

Racial politics is often an exhausting conversation. So many of us are invested in its direction, so many of us are convinced that we've got it figured out, and that imagined insight is often titilating to debate. The result is that it attracts a lot of novices, and sometimes these novices get so into their own ideas that they make a country-rap song about it.

In the stressful and infuriating world of race relations, there are so few moments of hilarity like this. It's wonderful. It's like a supermodel's daydream of joining the Peace Corps, or a middle schooler paying attention to politics for the first time. We rarely get to laugh like this, together.

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Dispatch From WonderCon

Warren Ellis described San Diego Comic Con as the only place that resembles SECOND LIFE, the mid-2000s virtual world video game that was limited only by your imagination/perversion. The same could be said for any major convention built on the values of chaos and costumes, or at least I had hoped that would be the case for WonderCon, my first non-San Diego convention adventure.

As we lurched and stopped in Anaheim traffic, smoke rose from the car's hood, first in a faint wisp, then in a full-bodied spill. In a video game world, this would mean the car was about to explode. In reality my friend's Scion XB was overheating, so we pulled into a lot to tend to the developing situation. It was maybe our third or fourth hang up in trying to get to WonderCon; there were lost tickets, brothers arguing and forgotten ID cards thus far. It seems that even at smaller conventions, there would always be trouble.

I went to WonderCon last week. In my imagined nerd ecosystem, the convention is the music festival. It represents a higher ranking level of cred and dedication to your hobby. It's the difference between a person that likes Radiohead and a person that likes Radiohead so much they camp out at Coachella to see them. In this system, SDCC is Coachella; it's a mainstream, 100,000 strong convention in the heart of San Diego, where comics, movies, television and general pop culture fandoms collide in one big fire hazard. WonderCon would be like Downtown LA's FYF Fest -- a smaller affair, but if you want a more manageable and intimate experience, it's a worthwhile alternative. This year I convinced myself that FYF was better than Coachella. I thought I could do the same with SDCC.

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Injustice: Gods Among Us Demo Is Stupid But Exciting?

There are two types of superhero comics fans: those who like them because they're action-packed power fantasies, and those who like them because they're vehicles for exploring metaphors and archetypes. The former are the people who get Superman tattoos on their bicep because they like him as a symbol of invincible power, not as a symbol of relentless optimism and compassion. They like the X-Men as Wolverine's gratuitous violence team, not as a metaphor for oppressed minorities in a superheroic context.

The game INJUSTICE: GODS AMONG US is clearly aimed at those types of fans. I'm really trying my best not to sound elitist, becaus I understand the art form thrives on both types of fans, but everything about the upcoming fighting game seems aimed at Not Me. Still, I downloaded the demo that came out today, and I couldn't help but observe a few things:  

  1. Fighting games are awful for stories. Not just the overarching plot that gives you reason for The Flash to punch Green Lantern, but the tropes of fighting games require some truly awful writing. For example: because it's a fighting game, everyone has to have a quick 3 second entrance and a one liner. From what I've seen in this demo, they are dumb nonsense. Batman appears from a cloud of bats (?), Doomsday breaks out of containment (??) and Wonder Woman is being blesse with her magic lasso from Athena (???). Before every fight. Because it's forced characterization.
  2. I don't know what it is with video game companies and shit costumes. Why is Batman covered in random plates armor plates? Why does someone think this is a good costume? Why does someone think this looks less ridiculous than underwear outside the pants?
  3. The whole game plays like they wanted to makea  Dragon Ball Z game but ended up with the DC license.
  4. I'm sure this is a great fighting game in terms of mechanics and gameplay because the people behind it aren't dumb. Approaching this as a non-fighting game fan, I just need to understand that this is not a game about DC Comics, it simply wears a DC skin.
  5. That split-second prediction rock-paper-scissors mechanic where they both say a one liner is pretty bomb.
  6. I said, "this is so fucking stupid" with a grin on my face three times: Batman hitting Lex Luthor with the Batmobile, Lex Luthor hitting Batman with a fucking satellite and Batman kick Luthor through a gas tanker, pinballing between buildings, and finally precision aimed through a water tower.
  7. This game is so dumb, a weird fit for DC, but at least it's exciting in its ridiculousness.

Songs | Lana Del Rey - Chelsea Hotel No. 2

After the American Idol appearances, countless magazine covers, and gigantic H&M billboards, it seems ridiculous that anyone ever had an argument about the indie cred of Lana Del Rey, or whether indie cred even mattered. Despite her Pitchfork-fueled rocket launch into the public eye, it's clear now that she's a much more natural fit in the gigantic mainstream overworld of pop music than some "authentic" singer-songwriter reimagined as a gangster Nancy Sinatra. We argued for so long about who she was and what was important, and the answer in hindsight was: none of it. The LDR machine would continue its upward inertia, regardless of the consensus of our thinkpieces, and become one of today's institutions in pop music. She is, pretty much, as close as we're going to get to Warren Ellis' horror vision of a pop icon virus in SUPERIDOL.

"Chelsea Hotel No. 2" is my favorite Leonard Cohen song. "Hallelujah" is a long thing to immerse yourself in, and as sacred as it can be, the intimacy of this secret ballad to a deceased love is more powerful to my tastes. When I heard Lana Del Rey dropped a cover on YouTube, my initial reaction was to cringe, but then I tried to suppress that reaction because I know that's just music snob bullshit.

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New Words For Old Desires

I don't know what happened, but for the last week all I've been listening to is The Weakerthans. Mostly from their first two albums: FALLOW (1999) and the essential LEFT AND LEAVING (2000). It's one of those moments where one of the needles in the haystack of your iTunes library gets pulled up on shuffle and you realize, hey, this was a pretty great song, I should put this album on my queue.

I was 13 years old when they came out, so I didn't get to examine them in their time. I can't even pinpoint when I did finally get into LEFT AND LEAVING. I know that "Watermark" was one of those songs my sister played and thus was part of this familiar background music. It would have been sometime in college that I found the whole album to be my shit, and I only picked up all of FALLOW during this most recent kick.

They're a little dated, definitely the kind of 90's power chord music that isn't really around anymore. Coupled with John Samson's timeless opie voice, it's music that would sound right at home as the intro music to a 90's teen romance flick - EMPIRE RECORDS or 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU. Something with Freddie Prinze Jr. I feel like this type of music became unfashionable after Blink-182 and their also-rans rushed through the scene. Today the style would be to let the guitars breathe a little more, with echo and space, a sound that is harder to pin down. But I can't imagine a romp like "Aside" with anything less than these driving guitars. It's become part of the charm, like 90's nostalgia or retro trappings.

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Norm MacDonald Brand Christianity

Earlier in the week, Norm MacDonald went on one of his familiar, lengthy Twitter sprees. These are binges of tweets and retweets — usually about golf, sometimes even attempts at literary fiction — and they're great. If you have any affection for his style of sincerity and unpredictability, this look at Norm amusing himself 140 characters at a time is a golden dream. Earlier this week was different. A golfer had mentioned scripture, someone reacted angrily, and Norm aired his concern about that reaction.

If you were online when it happened, you would have seen hundreds of retweets by Norm and his responses to them one by one. A lot of people don't know this, but Norm MacDonald is a pretty devoted to studying scripture. He spoke about it on his episode of WTF with Marc Maron (the only podcast episode I've gone back to relisten to):

I've been struggling with faith, I'll just throw myself into religion sometimes. The problem with that is you get into churches and stuff, and then you get into men and stuff like that. It's very easy to fall into the trap, "God's bad because this priest fucked a kid," which is retarded, why's that mean God's bad? If you go to any church, obviously it's led by fallible men,and you can't believe in them, so you've got to come to it yourself somehow. But I don't have the answer of how you do that or anything.

He seems to be religious in the way the great Russian authors were religious, and skeptical of people who have things figured out. The problem is, in the context of modern day America, and especially on Twitter, siding with religion is a highly loaded political position. The voice of religion has been co-opted by the loudest on the right, while the left's loudest have been very willing to cede that ground.

The outrage online was predictable. Many were disappointed at Norm, some were angry at him, several challenged him on the grounds of "what about dinosaurs??????" and other incisive gotchas. There were those who supported him, declaring that believers were oppressed in today's America. When it got to the more ethical criticisms, such as the church's association with pedophile priests or its stance on homosexuality, Norm's responses were pretty mainstream: pedophilia is a problem with man, not with scripture, and the stereotype to which we hold men of the cloth is unfair when most work very hard for little pay, and other professions are just as infected but not held to such judgment. On treatment of gays, Norm's response was along the lines of, "Says who?" and found it irrelevant to his understanding. In his response, the bible was a way to salvation, not a rulebook on how to live.

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The New Community

Like most fans, I tuned into season 4 of COMMUNITY with trepidation. The first line of the post-Dan Harmon season was appropriate: "Does something feel different?" It was important to me that they acknowledge Harmon's firing. The show had cultivated a relationship with its cult following, and if they wanted to put us at ease that the heart would be intact, they had to acknowledge it in even a brief, metatextual way.

But we're 5 episodes in now, and the feeling that this is not the same show, and never will be, is starting to creep over every laughless half hour. It's not that the show is bad, or even unfunny. It's just no longer a great show, one that I would be eager to show to strangers or recommend to my friends. In their right-headed move to retain their fanbase, they've simultaneously made it a show that's just for us.

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KROQ Whatever

There was a time when 106.7 KROQ was an important part of my self-image. I was 14 years old, and kids were not just forming cliques, but subcultural scenes. A big part of that was what radio station you chose: Power 106 (hip hop), KIIS FM (pop) and KROQ (alternative rock.) There was overlap in the audiences of Power 106 and KIIS FM, as hip hop had become an accepted part of pop culture, while guitar music seemed too niche and white. So while the average person would listen to both Power 106 and KIIS, the ones who listened to KROQ listened to it exclusively. It was a strong enough in its cultural identity - a mainstream, sanitized vision of "alternative" - that that it inspired loyalty from its listeners.

Today, the importance of radio and even just the music monoculture is beyond dead and buried, yet the thing still remains on the dial of my car's unused radio. The way stations have dealt with the splintering and liberation of music has been a bit like watching a fish flail in a boat. They've propped up apps like iHeartRadio to maintain their technological relevance, and I suspect the nostalgic resurgence of bands like Incubus and Linkin Park goes hand in hand with their aim of remaining cultural (and therefore economic) forces.

But whatever KROQ once was to me as a kid will probably never be again. Their playlist these days confirms it: It's a confused mash up of today's youth culture with one desperate, gnarled hand still clinging to the alt-rock it helped define a couple decades ago. They bet the whole game on that post-Nirvana "Alternative Rock" label, and they rode that wave high and well for many years until it crashed upon the shores of the internet. All stations had to deal with new competition in music availability, but only KROQ had to deal with their audience's tastes shifting with increased music access.

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Civilian Casualties In Satire

I don't like the term "outrage." I think it's a way of reducing a side to mere impulsive, emotional outburst. While there's certainly a segment of that in any controversial flare-up, it's not the main phalanx of the argument, and it's certainly not the part we should be addressing. The term I wish people would refer to more is "criticism" - because that's a word that's worth addressing. It's sensible to ignore outrage, but you're not a full-fledged artist if you don't at least consider with criticism.

(For the record, I personally didn't find The Onion's derogatory tweet to be worth the size of its controversy. It was certainly a misstep, probably shouldn't have been done, and poorly crafted - but not major to me personally. But also! I hate that we have to qualify these posts with a note about our moderate position, as if people with the strongest opinions are somehow less credible. That's a shame! But if it's what I have to do to get my imagined devil's advocate take this opinion seriously, then I will do it.)

I like to believe that any communication is usually a net positive, but it seems like a small positive when we're having a debate about the pros and cons of attacking children, with specificity, vulgarity and over mass media. This controversy has a lot of angles to it:

1. Shock Jocks Suck, Especially When The Power Is All Wrong
Here's The Onion's joke: Let's say something we aren't supposed to say. Or, in even more basic terms: Here's something naughty. That titillation you feel will often lead to laughter, even if it's just the incredulous kind that makes audiences go "Oooh!" I rarely get psyched up for it, but hundreds of comedians have made careers off of it, as they should! There is a demand for it. But doing that at the expense of a 9 year old girl, with vulgarity, over mass media - that's a steep ethical price just to get some retweets, don't you think? If not, if there is no such thing as an ethical price to you because all humor is fangless and has no effect on culture - that's swell too, but it's unreasonable to expect that of everyone else. It will come with backlash that you will just have to own, whether that results in losing sponsors, mainstream opportunities, or a bunch of angry @ replies.

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Review | Just Human Troubles In The Modern Times

In my broad swath of college activism, one of the most interesting — and divisive — causes I took part in was centered on prisons. Depending on your ability to stomach radical politics, that can mean anything from prison reform to anti-police brutality, to the more revolutionary ideas like prison abolition in favor of ground-up rebuilding. So when I heard Thao Nguyen had been using her off-tour time to volunteer on behalf of the welfare of those incarcerated at Valley State Prison for Women, I was intrigued. It's a subject with lots of potential for conflict and compassion, but can be hard to communicate; great qualities for folk songs. One of the most central and important ideas in the cause is recognizing the humanity in all people, even the incarcerated. It's more of a challenge than you expect — you can see it in the incredulous reaction to the idea that there might be alternatives to prison as we know it. We're brought up with a common sense that dehumanizes and reduces prisoners, and it's that challenge that makes it fertile soil for provocative art.

For this background, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down are aptly named. But their latest, WE THE COMMON, is far from a strict concept album. It's still anchored in Thao's jam-band dives into the slow burn of relationships, but the prison motif can be stretched to accomodate even this. In her songs of self-blame and guilt. she treats her baggage as a cell. The finger point inward, like magnetic north on a compass, and its results are seen in lines scattered all across the album: "If by a third degree / you feel a guilt for me / then I've been a villain all my life" or "I come from regret / have I moved you yet? / don't let me touch you none." Then there's one of the highlight songs, "Move," a loose full bodied basher, where it erupts toward the end like a geyser: "Oh to be free!" she yells, as all her woes are made primal and universal. In a broad sense, you feel that Thao sympathizes with regret over past actions, being villainized, or the weight of binding ties. This is not to say a parallel is drawn. It does not say, in any way, that love is just like prison. But there's a commonality in the language that makes for useful tools of sympathy, not empathy.

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Martin Starr, Alison Brie & Charlyne Yi at Central SAPC | 02.07.13

Every day when I get out of work, it feels like the scene at the start of a movie where the main character gets out of jail and has to figure out what's next. I'm usually wiped, a little bit out of my mind, and need to acclimate myself to the world that has changed since I've been inside. On Thursday night, my next moves were already set. There was a show at nearby Central SAPC, a bar and club in Santa Monica, with a weird and intriguing lineup. A lot of people were on the bill but the clear draw was a one-two-three punch of comedic actors: Martin Starr, Alison Brie and Charlyne Yi.

It wasn't a sketch show or anything. They all have musical side projects that they take seriously enough to book shows. I liked all these people as actors, and so I was curious to see what they do otherwise. Charlyne Yi was the only one I could imagine having musical chops. I didn't know what to expect from the other two. I meet up with my buddy Ray for some lamb shawerma before we go to the show.

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Long Live 30 Rock

Because you never really know what you've got until it's gone.

30 Rock never occupied a revered spot or iconic designation the way other major comedies like The Office or Seinfeld did. That may change now, as critics and the bloggers look back on its 7 seasons favorably and wonder why we didn't celebrate it more while it was still on-going. We all enjoyed it a lot, it definitely had its following, but we took its lunacy for granted. It was a such a circus of a show, tightly loaded from end to end with silliness, that we didn't see the serious worth in it. Neither did the show itself. It was always characterized as a good time, but rarely "important."

I'll miss it as a unique comedic vessel. Without any hint of overarching drama or emotional cores, it was often the home of television's purest absurdity. It was a playground where nothing could be so serious that it didn't warrant parody including, and this is important, itself. A lot of comedy has the mission of making fun of "everything," but that often comes off as an elitist condescension. 30 Rock never felt like it was above the things it was skewering. It was honest and self-deprecating, so that when it would make fun of outrage or controversy, it wasn't looking down on it with disgust. We were in this big stupid muck of life and the media together. It was "Look at us!" not "Look at them!"

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On Royce White, Tentative Rocket

Whatever ultimately happens to Royce White's career, he will remain a fascinating player in NBA history. Either as a landmark first, someone who changed how the league handles mental illness, or as weird trivia that will be the focus of a pretty good magazine article in 40 years. Until his recent interview on Grantland, there hasn't been a lot of clarity on what the Houston Rockets & Royce White were fighting about. There was heresay about the Rockets being generous to accomodate him, and then counterclaims that they weren't as compromising as their public face would seem. It was hard to really pick a side, although that didn't seem to stop the majority of sports fans. Now picture is a little clearer, with record of White's demands and, even more importantly, his reasons behind them. Yet somehow things aren't any easier.

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Album Release Wishlist for 2013

2013 still smells fresh and I'm getting impatient with the music industry's release schedule. There have been few drops in the periphery of my taste, but I could really use something big and powerful to punch me in the head right about now. I don't know what's coming this year, other than a new Thao and Youth Lagoon. Those are already on my List Of Big Deals. I have plenty of anticipatory excitement to spare, and it seems like in our day and age, the heads up & lead-in time is becoming shorter and shorter.

With that spontaneous nature of the industry in mind, this is what I'm hoping for in 2013. I'm hoping these bands will put out a press release over the coming 11 months with something to the effect of, "We're done with our new album, and it will be out as soon as I finish this sentence." Ever since IN RAINBOWS that seems to be a favorite buzz getter -- Death Grips did it most recently, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's how the new My Bloody Valentine comes out. With that in mind, these are bands that I miss and follow-ups I'm hungering for.

I would love to hear from you guys.

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Coachella 2013 Lineup Is Good Enough I Guess

  • The Stone Roses is one of those names that is always floating just outside my area of awareness. A headline spot though, so, good on those guys, whoever they are.
  • Grrfggh Red Hot Chili Peppers. I don't even dislike them, I think they're one of the more likable parts of KROQ canon, but giving them another headlining spot when AMAZING RACE wins Best Reality Show at the Emmys. Probably warranted, but hardly worth celebrating anymore.
  • As Coachella's popularity has skyrocketed as a thing that everyone in Southern California goes to, I can't help but feel like headlining RHCP again is throwing a bone to the party-goers that don't even like 90% of the performers at the fest. A big, unimaginative, arena rock bone.
  • Font size is, as always, confusing! Observe: Portugal, The Man is bigger than Pusha T, Kurt Vile and 2 Chainz. For all his buzz, Alt-J should at least be a size up. Surely Grimes
  • Then again, who cares about font size? Has it ever reflected actual billing or set times? Does it matter or make any difference other than a flier?
  • I'm imagining a one-two knock out punch of The XX followed by Sigur Ros. By knock out, I mean put to sleep knock out.
  • Although the strategy seems to spread acts of one particular taste across all three days, I always find that one day in particular pulls at my sensibilities far more than the others. In this case: Saturday.
  • Yet, even though Saturday is some kind of Indie Rock Parthenon, I can't help but feel a little indifferent to it. There are definitely a lot of great bands, but nothing that feels like a only-here-only-now event (save for The Postal Service.) I would like to see many of these bands, but I don't need to see them, certainly not all at once for three bills.
  • Let me put it this way: 90% of Saturday looks like a reasonable expectation for a 2nd tier festival like Sasquatch or Outside Lands.
  • Perhaps we've just been spoiled by the big bombs of Coachella's past. They've conditioned us to expect special appearance bookings, even in their second or third billings.
  • Imagine if they did group these things by genre. I know why they don't, but can you imagine if you could see Trash Talk, Cloud Nothings & Japandroids in one day? Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown, El-P & Wu-Tang consecutively? Stars & The Postal Service?
  • I don't know who or what Sam XL Pure Filth Sound is, but damn, that name has got to look good on a t-shirt.
  • Moby???
  • I feel like I've only been saying bad things. It's a perfectly acceptable festival, probably even a great one. But Coachella set its own bar so high in years past, it's hard to ignore.
  • Jurassic 5 is boring.
  • I liked Coachella before it was cool.
  • I roll with FYF Fest now.
  • Whatever, I'm already booked for 3 concerts in April anyway.

Some Dylan Days

As a matter of coincidence, I've been consuming a lot of Dylan or Dylan-adjacent media these past few days. So through no choice of my own, I've had him — or the myth he's become — on the mind. Three things I want to talk about: BLOOD ON THE TRACKS, Jakob Dylan on WTF with Marc Maron, and Joyce Carol Oates' WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

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Reading Bad

For the past couple of weeks, I've been reading the science fiction novel ESCAPE FROM HELL by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's pretty bad. (Sorry dudes.) The idea of a modern Dante's Inferno is cool and there are some decent moments, but on the whole, it's pretty bad. It reads like it wishes it was a movie script instead of literature. The craft of writing on display here is substandard with dry, meaningless prose. The characters are lifeless dialogue delivery vessels that, together, have all the expository context to point out every celebrity cameo in hell. There is no driving tension, it's more like standing on an airport moving walkway, except this one's in hell.

But I'm still reading it. I'm willing to chalk up my dislike of the book to taste. It may be that I was hoping for Douglas Adams for religion & history, and couldn't deal with what I got instead. The person who let me borrow it was pretty enthusiastic, and the book that preceded this one (which I have not read) seems to be pretty beloved in sci fi circles. So it's entirely reasonable to assume that this book is bad because it's not my style. It does not speak to my cultural field. I'm going to finish it.

As I write this, I am just past the halfway point of this miserable 324 page hardcover. I've had several people tell me that I ought to just quit, that my time is better spent on other things, and that if I haven't had fun at this point, it won't make an about face later on. I agree with them on all of that. But a few months ago, I read Carl Wilson's 33 1/3rd book LET'S TALK ABOUT LOVE: A JOURNEY TO THE END OF TASTE and that ruined how I go about these things. Now I'm convinced that even the things I don't like have some value to me. Maybe as a learning experience, or to better understand those who do love this stuff. The remaining half probably won't sell me, but I might learn something about my tastes in the process.

While exploring the adored/despised cultural standing of Celine Dion and attempting to give her an objective review, Carl Wilson wrote:

"A few people have asked me, isn't life too short to waste time on art you dislike? But lately I feel like life is too short not to. ... In retrospect, this experiment seems like a last effort to purge that insularity, so that my next phase might happen in a larger world, one beyond the horizon of my habits. For me, adulthood is turning out to be about becoming democratic. ... This is what I mean by democracy — not a limp open-mindedness, but actively grappling with people and things not like me, which brings with it the perilous question of what I am like. ... Through democracy, which demands we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less strangers to ourselves."

Now that book, I liked a lot. It's really the best 33 1/3rd book I've read and presents interesting challenges to criticism and fandom. I'm all-in. This enthusiasm only goes so far though, and it turns out it will always be tough to meet the vision of taste that this book advocates. 

If ESCAPE FROM HELL isn't my bag, I should be able to express why. My college indoctrination into "proper" literary fiction has something to do with it, I'm sure. Yet there are passages in this book that make me want to scribble, this is objectively bad all over it, because there is no way you can just copy & paste whole sections from your first book and call it a flashback. No way a published hardcover book, by TWO writers who seem to have a lauded pedigree, should read like really well-edited high school fiction. 

But this is what I've decided to do with myself. I don't have to like it, but I have to understand something about it.

New | Lovestreams & Youth Lagoon

Two artists dropped a song today, right in the middle of the work week. Conveniently, they're both named with bodies of water! Thanks for making this tie-in easy, you guys.

Lovestreams is the name of Will Sheff's new electronic side/solo project. I know, I'm surprised too. "I decided to do a project there I’d wanted to do for years and years, which is to make an album by myself and for myself, an album that doesn’t owe anything to music I made before," he writes on his website. That's no understatement. Other than the familiar voice, this is not Okkervil River at all; not in structure, flavor, style or in any of the other intangibles that makes that band great.

Usually I'm a little skeptical of the electro side project. It seems that when an indie artist needs a creative jolt, they either take left turn toward the synthesizer or a right turn toward the country slide guitar. I had my doubts, but Will Sheff manages to pull out a convincing song that's better than anything on the last Okkervil River album.

A big part of it is that he knows he's working with a different medium and adapts appropriately. A lot of other bands making the shift will write the song they normally would, but run their voice through a vocoder or something. "Shock Corridor" has no literary references, no fables about forgotten pop figures, no tour through the thesaurus. Sheff writes a barrage of laser-focused confessions as the song's fists clench tighter and tighter. He feels more personal here than I've heard him in a long while, and that's just as refreshing as the drum machine beat.

Check out that drop 3:25 in. More importantly, check out how his singing and writing turns into a stream of consciousness dropping of everything, like he's clearing everything out, or maybe it's all just falling through his fingers. Fantastic stuff.

On top of that, we have Youth Lagoon with the first single from their upcoming album, WONDROUS BUGHOUSE. "Dropla" is also a departure, but not as dramatic. THE YEAR OF HIBERNATION songs often went like this: a delicate soundscape, a fuzzy incoherent voice, then a cool beat kicks in and suddenly we're all bobbing our heads. "Dropla" foregoes the build up and kicks in from the first note. Any tenderness runs alongside the song's natural bounce.  Drums here sound more organic, without hand claps or crisp cuts, and Trevor Powers isn't obscuring his voice under nearly as much distortion. He wants to be heard, and the song is alive for it.

If you're familiar with Youth Lagoon, it might read like he's getting rid of everything that made him distinct. But the key is that it's not just change, it's growth. He's learned to sustain the climax of his old songs for 6 minutes, which is already his longest song yet. I don't expect every song on the upcoming album to sound like this, but it's nice to see him try some things out. Lyrically it's not a barn burner, but youthful idealism about mortality is always a powerful hook, especially if you make it sound like a plea from the bottom of the heart. It ends just as it began.

I'm really liking 2013 so far.

Trying To Figure Out My Favorite NBA Team

I've gotten into basketball again in the last couple of years, mostly thanks to a lot of great sports journalism on Grantland and elsewhere that captured my imagination. The problem is, the last time I was a huge NBA fan, Michael Jordan was the king of the world and Charles Barkley was not TNT comic relief, but a terrifying rebounding force that once took on Godzilla and told you to SHUT UP AND JAM.

My favorite team back then was the Orland Magic. They were new, had a cool brand, and were an exciting title contender. Shaquille O'Neal was the obvious hero of the team, but as I was the slightly counter cultural kid that always liked the secondary hero, I marked for Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway. It helped that he had kid friendly commercials: a hilarious puppet voiced by Chris Rock, dubbed Li'l Penny, sold his shoes and made him a constant All-Star Game presence even when he didn't deserve it. (The flip side of that is that now the guy behind the puppet is more famous that Penny Hardaway ever was.)

These days, all my heroes are gone (except for Grant Hill, what the hell?) and while the new cast of characters is great, I don't know how to pick a favorite team. Back in the day, teams had a long term identity and the way contracts worked allowed for a static cast of characters. Today, I don't know how to pick a team when they can be irrevocably changed every year. In today's NBA, picking a favorite team feels like having loyalty to a logo and a mascot; ultimately superfluous characteristics. I like players, not teams.

I've been told that it's not about repping a team, but a city. It's about hometown civic pride. While I love Los Angeles, I can't translate that into love for the Lakers. What does a recent transplant like Dwight Howard have to do with my love of LA culture? What does Steve Nash know about planning your life around freeway routes? Then there are old habits. Laker hating, even when I try and fight it, is something tucked into every corner of my mind. I came into basketball with the Showtime roster of Van Exel/Ceballos/Campbell. My entire family loved them, from my old grandmother to my young cousins, and so I decided to root against them. It made games more fun when there was competition in the living room.

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My 10 Favorite Albums, 2012

10. Tame Impala - Lonerism
When an album entitled LONERISM has song names like, "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards," "Why Won't They Talk To Me?" and "Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Can Control," there are certain expectations to its sound. I'm always down for the sadness — it is actually kind of obnoxious how down I am for the sadness. But separated from its words, LONERISM is a joyous album. Very few albums try to talk about these things like isolation and social anxiety in the framework of bass grooves and upbeat atmospheric melodies, and even fewer manage to be this infectious. Social anxiety you can dance to, it turns out, is a gleeful playground. LONERISM makes me wonder how I would've turned out if in my formative years I had found something like this album to express my teenage angst. I envy the theoretical High School sophomore that discovers this album, and learns to get pain off his chest with multicolored sunlight.

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