hustlin' hard as fuck

if there's one thing I've learned in my 21 years of life, it's that any song sounds wayyy better chopped and screwed. not that UGK's International Players Anthem wasn't good before.

completely obsessed

aaliyah is fucking great

best coast

Best Coast is my new favorite artist. Real talk.

Best Coast is a band led by Bethany Constentino? Constantino? Cosentino? Every blog misspells her last name and I don't wanna write her last name wrong so I'm gonna just omit it for the time being.

She was a former drone contributor to NY group Pocahaunted. Then she moved out to the west coast to do some straight-up hustling and chillin.

It was there that she started making surf-rockish pop w/ major love-based songwriting.

This blog isn't really about how much I love her music, because, honestly, her music is amazing and doesn't really need any extra praise from some blog nobody reads.

This blog is essentially a love-letter to her. I follow you on Twitter and you sound pretty much like me except punkier. We should be friends and maybe date, depending on how we hit it off.

I like Beyonce and Jay-Z. Pimp Chronicles is pretty awesome. Sun is High and so am I! I also say totes all the time.
But anyway, you seem like a normal person and it'd be cool to chill, yknow?

Hope you make it out to Miami for Art Basel, for we will definitely chill if you come.

p.s. i'm not a serial killer.

Peace
-Ryan

lightning bolt - earthly delights

Noise-rock and metal are two genres that, for some odd reason, have a blurry, grey distinction. The two are abrasive, experimental, and angry. Classifications between the two strands of rock deal mostly with aesthetic. Noise-rock bands usually affiliate themselves with a broad D.I.Y. mentality arguably introduced and influenced by 80's hardcore punk. It's a more humble approach to playing shows than your glossy arena-rock concerts. Metal, however, has always carried a type of grandiose, almost biblical vision of popularity where small clubs aren't big enough to house such walls of dark sound.

But if the line between noise-rock and metal are already cloudy, then Lightning Bolt's new album Earthly Delights does not help the cause. The pummel-throbbing Providence, Rhode Island noise giants released their 5th album; an album so rough and droney, it can easily be passed off as some kind of post-metal oddity.

Lightning Bolt comprise Brian Chippendale on drums/vocals and Brian Gibson on bass guitar, sorta. See, Gibson modifies his bass guitar to hold both guitar and bass strings, then passing that sound through pedals and effects. The work of one guitar player now sounds like eight. Not to mention Chippendale's unreal, power-drumming and voice effects give the band a collective sound. The product is rough, fast, and really noisy.

Earthly Delights begins with the suitably titled "Sound Guardians". The song is Lightning Bolt in a nut-shell: stony, violent, and harsh. It's the tone LB play with since their beginnings in the late 90s.

The beginning of "Colossus", clocking in at seven minutes, can be confused with an Electric Wizard or Melvins song, but as soon as Chippendale starts his parade of hell-drums, it becomes pretty distinct as LB fodder. The song does sound a bit restricted. Lightning Bolt is supposed to sound like a full-fledged band, but the presence of only two members can easily be heard.

They experiment with proggy-country riffs ("Funny Farm"), and wreak total chaos with unconventional song structures and call-and-response vocals (S.O.S).

Yet, I've always thought of Lightning Bolt as a "metal band". Song-titles like "Dracula Mountain", "Ride The Sky", and "Riffwraiths", border on exaggeration and epic fantasy. There's something to be admired about that. A band working on a consistent grass-roots aesthetic confused with delusions of Melville-like epics.

The album's sound is pretty consistent. But consistency might not be Lightning Bolt's most flattering characteristic. Though, it's this kind of anarchic consistency that makes Earthly Delights one of the best rock albums of the year. Just don't call it an earthly delight.

liberty city liberator

so next semester i'm taking "Print News Reporting", a course into my journalism major. it's hella interesting and not like your average reporting class, but then again I really don't know what an "average" reporting class is. but the professor is taking on a new, experimental curriculum. the goal for the class is to create an online newspaper where students will report and write stories for the publication. what will we be covering exactly?

Liberty City, Miami.

it's kind of a dangerous area in the city, but it's ignored by major newspapers and television news stations. the only kinda of newsworthy headlines that come out of the area are shootings or corruption.
so my professor feels that someone should give voice to Liberty City. a voice that isn't completely interested in crime and shady business. i mean he's right. Americans live in this impoverished little community and they've got a story.

but FUCK.

it's exciting but terrifying. i don't like to talk to strangers and i'm gonna be forced to do just that. especially in a city that's predominantly black... i just wonder how people will react to me. a hipster talking with impoverished citizens. i don't know what to expect.

i mean look at me!



i can't show my whole face now! cmon!

at the same time, how awesome is it gonna be to hang out in a really poor part of town?! i'm gonna feel like the journalist in the fifth season of The Wire who writes a feature story on Bubbles, the crackhead. maybe i'll make friends with people like Omar and Bodie?!!

i've already thought of some awesome scenarios that could happen. i'm probably gonna make friends with a crackhead and he's gonna want help at like unreasonable hours. he's gonna call me at 2 a.m., because i had told him that if he ever needs anything to gimme a call! he's my tip so he scratches my back and i scratch his. while i'm sleeping he calls and asks me a huge favor. so i agree and drive all the way to liberty city (a 45 min. drive). it turns out he wants money, because he got robbed and needs the cash to buy meth. i'm gonna give him a talk and stuff... and i'm probably gonna give him the money. i'm gonna have a face of disappointment while he walks away into an alley, and I'll leave.

yknow stuff like that! real-world stuff, people!

i'm scared of talking to these people, though... so i can't imagine doing that and having to gather information from them. i feel like i'm fooling them. should i talk to them about rap music? that's racist, but i do know a lot about hip-hop and rap. maybe that can be some kind of social lubricant? i don't think our professor will have us going to the city at dark, since it can get real ugly at that time. surely in broad daylight.

all of this is terrifying, but my friend told me to look at the grander scheme of it. think of the possibilities that can come from starting a student-run online newspaper that covers an impoverished, forgotten area of Miami. we can go on to win awards, and it can probably give me some kind of edge when applying to grad schools. like, "hey, this guy was music director at a radio station, staff writer for the school newspaper, journalism grad w/ an english minor, and he worked on an award-winning student newspaper that covered Liberty City. and he's a totes cutie!!!" IMPRESSIVE. probably not, but you never know. i'm an idiot :)

hipsters have a family

miami's got a home-grown local music scene and within the scene comprises a broad group of local hipsters. a lot of them went to either your high-school, middle school, or your friend's high-school, etc.

im not too involved in the scene down here, but i would say i contribute what i can to it. and if i have any idea what the scene is, or who participates in it, it would only be a view from afar. what i'm trying to say here is that i use the internet to gaze at the scene and i hardly actually hang out with any of the people in it.

i lurk on facebook or myspace or blogger or tumblr or flckr and look at amateur photography, bedroom blog-diary entries, and miscellaneous links posted on facebook. these are the things that paint the identity of miami hipsterdom, at least for me. i can't speak for everyone.

so it's very strange for me when i see photos of local hearthrobs or well-known scenesters back in their middle-school/early high-school haydays looking not so alt (as hipster runoff would call it) as they do now.
i would glorify these local hipster images and make these people untouchable in my eyes.

i would follow the goings-on of a punk-hipster who dresses really grimey and dirty; she pretty much looks like a homeless girl. she has photos of her travels (she's gone all over the world, seriously). then i find out she's actually really rich. and her parents are really nice people.

it was all a facade. and that disappoints me a bit.
all these "cool" people have a history and are actually pretty normal when it comes down to it.

i can't wait for some of them to grow out of the whole hipster thing so we can be friends. i feel like we're not at the same level.

maybe i've grown out of trying to be cool.
i guess im trying to say that i'm pretty touchable ;)

im bored

im in class and i saw this taylor swift picture and thought i should share it with you.

farts.