CHVRCHES – Gun

Vampire Weekend’– “Diane Young”
Wild Nothing–”A Dancing Shell”
!!!–”One Girl One Boy”
Phoenix–”Entertainment”
Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams–”Get Lucky”
Janelle Monae feat. Erykah Badu–”Q.U.E.E.N.”

JAI PAUL – STR8 OUTTA MUMBAI

Anything on the Disclosure album…

Something out of this world from Yeezus no doubt.

Mikal Cronin – Change

Is “Ya Hey” too thematically dark for summer? If not, I’ll vote for it. If yes, I’ll nominate “Diane Young” in its stead.

Outside of VW, I think “Sea of Love” by The National might be my personal song of the summer

And I really like White Noise more than When A Fire Starts to Burn

Get Lucky. Is this really a competition?

Where I End and You Begin is minor league?! NO. STRIKE ONE, YOU’RE OUT.

One of my favorite songs of all time. As in, ever, of all of the bands.

Also I’ll always remember getting this album because I raced my friend to the record shop to get it. I was on my bike and he had a car, and I won. But really we both won because it is a fantastic record.

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/22787416.jpg

Nope, you got a few things wrong. All of us are special in their own way, so please don’t put anyone down by saying they don’t matter. And secondly, as a true music fan especially during the week that Nine Inch Nails returned with a new single and announced an entire tour, you should know threats to go away are idle, and things like “retiring,” “indefinite hiatuses,” and “having your account removed” are just politely worded ways of saying “brb.”

what’s Kurt Vile – Walkin’ on a Pretty Day?

yeah, let’s vote for this song! because we know it that well.

Plus, what’s your deal on here anyway? The only times I see your name pop up is to criticize me. Is that your redeeming value to this site? To push someone who is already down a little more? Seems pretty pointless.

It’s been an interesting experiment over the last couple of years or so. Faced with leaving the infrastructure of traditional comment sections and figuring out what the right thing to do is in this new world – I found myself realizing that for me to have any concept of how to interact with the community and know what they might want / what they find appropriate, I need to immerse myself in that world and live it for a while. The reason no comment section knows how to market anything to new media is they don’t live there. They don’t get it because they don’t use it. What you’ve seen happen with the marketing and presentation of _ over the last years is a direct result of living next to you, listening to you, consuming with you and interacting with you. Directly. There’s no handlers or PR people here, it’s me and my head – that’s it. There’s no real plan, even – it’s just trying to do the right thing that respects you the Stereogum reader, the music, and me the commenter. That’s the goal – a mutual and shared respect.

When Stereogum’s comment section made it’s way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I thought it through and in light of where I was / am in my career I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there’s a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I’m not what you projected on me. All expected. I’m not as concerned about “breaking” your idea of _ at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am. The relationship between commenter and fellow commenter is changing if you haven’t noticed, along with the way we consume and experience music site comment sections and even communicate since the internet arrived.

The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like Stereogum a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It’s tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time. Example: on Stereogum, there’s 3-4 different people that each reply between 5 – 10 messages per day of delusional, often threatening nonsense. I can ignore hem, but they just sign back in and start again. Yes, the site’s admins are implementing several changes to address this, but the point is it quickly gets very old weeding through that stuff.

I approached this as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and “human”. I was not expecting to broadcast details of my personal life there, but it happened because I’m in a transition stage and it’s all I think about and that’s that. If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you’ve projected on me, fair enough – it’s probably time for you to leave. You are right, I’m not the same person I was before 2009 (and I’m not happy about that). Are you?

Cutter’s tip for my friends there: remember to cut along the length of vein, not across. Bigger payoff.

So when you see these accounts that pop up daily on Stereogum spewing exactly the kind of thing I just discussed, usually from meme-spawned creatively named profiles, spewing hate at me, take a moment to visualize the sad couple people behind me. A few years ago some people tuned me in to that world and when I figured out who these people were, I was amazed that I’d been seeing them at my friend’s parties in Brooklyn and following me on Twitter. I really don’t understand what kind of “friend” spends that kind of time talking to a person, to then dedicate an incredible amount of time and energy into non-stop hate diatribes online. That one puzzles me a little.

Anyway, I’m bored on a Saturday night and there’s no real moral to the story here, just writing. I won’t be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day I’ve become desensitized to it, and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.

I had thought a while ago about attempting to start a mainstream public forum that required real verification of it’s participants for purposes of context. The idea was to have a place where you can actually discuss whatever and have some idea of who you’re conversing with. For example, if we were discussing drumming techniques and you can see that someone participating in the discussion is a drum instructor vs. a 13 year old kid Googling answers, you’d have the proper context in which to have a potentially valid discussion. If we were discussing EDLC’s heart condition and a real cardiologist speaks up, I’d value his opinion over, say FredFuckFaceWhateverHisLastFuckingNameIs’s “opinion”. Know what I mean? Anyway, we’re in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.

With all of that said, I have business in the real world to attend to including wrapping up a new season of Arrested Development, DOING some uncool new shit and spending as much time as possible with absolutely no one.

I find it very odd that Raptor Jesus has again seized the opportunity at my expense to work his way up the figurative ladder of Stereogum’s teachers’ pet. Let’s be honest: He rode my efforts on here to secure himself a guest post two years ago, and then when the writers here later turned against me and began to erase evidence of my existence, Raptor snuck back in full onand has basically done what I used to do but without having had to endure all the criticism and b.s. I did during my presence.

Raptor Jesus, only recently did I discover your apology to me (http://www.stereogum.com/1288471/diiv-fuck-sxsw/franchises/wheres-the-beef/comment-page-1/#comment-8061591) about how you felt bad that you had caused my eventual demise on here due to that whole guest post debacle. I’ve thought about that comment for quite some time from both a professional and personal perspective and I can’t accept your apology. It was a dirty move that hurt me in many ways, you stepped on my head in a really shitty way from a professional stance, and would I be writing this comment wondering if yet another IP of mine will join the others in being banned? Probably not. The day I see your real name on here in the by-lines (because it’s going to happen) is probably going to be the day I give up on life. I don’t know who you really are, but I just know that one bad thing you did to me.

It’s actually a pretty unguarded interview and a must read for those who love him as much as those who hate on him. He creative mind is as nuclear as it is polarizing. It’s easy to look at him like you’re in a car passing a wreck, but he continually speaks without a governor which, I guess is, um, admirable?

After reading it, I think people are going to be more frightened of Yeezus than originally suspected when it drops (it’s quoted as being the ‘Anti-Graduation’ album and based on this article get the sense its going to be very stripped down) He also could not have gotten away with this upcoming album without the explosive critical success of Dark Fantasy which will take on a whole new place in the Kanye timeline after it’ll now be seen as a wedge of sorts between albums. I bet Yeezus will be his In Utero of sorts, a creative glass ceiling he’s been given the ability to break because of the sorta talent success he received from ‘Fantasy.’ It’s also a realization that his personal privacy is all but gone in his life now. This is not to say he hasn’t been famous for some time no and knows this, its just that MBDTF was him ‘back on shelves’ and now it appears he’s about to graciously blow that all up with this release.

Either way, it will be a compelling listen. It’s pretty fascinating that an artist who has arguably created one of the greatest rap albums will now completely put on the brakes and redirect his route with what appears to be a ‘trap, drill, house’ attack. All I can say is….suhweeeet.