can we say that on the radio?

Influenced by my favorite emerging bondage art blogger, I checked out Paul Ford’s six word reviews of 763 mp3s from South-by. Sadly, Fucked Up appears not to have provided a track.

Ford says,

I wanted to like more of the rap here, but I became very tired. Everything was either about acquiring material goods (which includes women), or, alternately, about how all other rap is about acquiring material goods.

Wow, I thought, the rap he sampled is navel-gazing recursiveness like so much of blogging. I read on:

On hearing my nth predictable song about how hip-hop is predictable, it struck me that I was witnessing individuals engaged in a formalist exercise where the form itself is the only appropriate lyrical subject; thus rap is, in some ways, the blogging of music. (This is happening to “indie rock” in the Strokes/Killers/Libertines mold, as well.)

The best of it all is Akala, a grime artist from Britain, particularly when he delivers the line in his song “Electro Livin” (not included here, but from the same album) “We are sad for things we cannot have/But we are not sad for Baghdad.” It reads as political naivete but he performs it with redeeming authority.