Category: 2018NE

29 The Age: House Become Tombstones, Cities Become Graveyards

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

“Everyone is artificial/But that doesn’t mean they’re fake“

I’ve mentioned ‘kayfabe’ an ungodly amount of times on this blog for the last few years, despite the fact that I know extremely few of the people reading will know what it means and my writing becomes borderline unreadable as a result. Well, because it’s Christmas Eve as I write this I thought I’d actually go to the trouble of explaining what it actually is. Don’t let me hear you say I never get you any presents.

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Kayfabe is ‘reality’ that professional wrestling creates. In WWE’s kayfabe, Dean Ambrose hates Seth Rollins because he feels that Seth’s partnership prevented him from truly reaching his potential as a wrestler, and anyway Dean still holds unresolved kayfabe issues with Seth because of him breaking up their amazingly successful tag-team The Shield in 2014. In the kayfabe, we can only possibly put an end to this bad blood if the two were to have a fight. A wrestling fight.

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30 Jherek Biscoff: Quartet for Delores +

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

The internet’s given us tons of cool shit. Now, for the first time since I spent musch of my young life scrawling obscene graffiti onto the wings of backpoll warblers before they migrated across the Atlantic I can quite casually call a 12 year old in Arkansas a ‘faggot’ to wonderfully exorcise my dangerously incompetent belief in what freedom of speech is. Jamie in Arkansas can even call me a ‘faggot’ back, if he could catch a backpoll warbler to save his life and I was doing something as irredemably faggy as attempting to capture the flag in Call of Duty 6 armed with only a M1903. What the fuck are you doing, Jamie?! Quit being such a faggot!

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It’s also given every person on Earth ability to hear from a previously unimaginable variety of voices and perspectives. If you ever hear somebody say that ‘people are offended too much these days’, what they actually mean is that their killer joke about a black lesbian picking the seeds out of her watermelon used to do gangbusters when the only people who ever heard them tell it were horrible white men. Now, women, gay people and other ethnicities are hearing it. They don’t like it. Because it’s offensive. And they’re the people being offended. Don’t blame the internet because suddenly people can hear how gross you are.

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31 Robyn: Honey

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

I freaking love ‘Honey’. I just thought it important to let you know before I complain about it for 693 words.

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(*I intentionally left that number blank until I’d written the piece. 552 words: boom! Unfortunately, I then had to write this completely superfluous parenthesised section here, so I had to then check the new word count and log that in. 590. However, I then chose to write this little extra bit on the end, which further enlarged the word count. I just wanted you to let you in on the artistic process. It’s fucking exhausting, isn’t it? Then I remembered I wanted to write a ‘past glories’ bit. Then I had to write about that bit here. Had to)

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32 Saba: Care for Me

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

When I was ‘reviewing’ the extremely impressive and undeniable Noname album a few dozen entries back, her close musical conspirator Saba guesting on one track gave me an uncomfortable feeling all of a sudden. I had placed her compatriot’s album a full thirty five places higher on the list. Was it really that different and that much superior? Was I guilty of the ‘male glance’??

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I’m sure I’ve talked about the ‘male glance’ on numerous occasions before, because it is something that I wholeheartedly believe exists and am extremely wary of being guilty of it myself. I’ll explain it again, because I can’t remember if I have before, and anyway this is the first post of this blog you’ve ever read, isn’t it? You’re only here because I added ‘keira knightley rim job’ as a tag. Not what you expected, I know, but still awesome, yeah?? Don’t forget to hit subscribe. I will explain what the ‘male gaze’ is after the jump, because bah gahd I need dem clicks:

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Going Up, Up, Up, Up, Up

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

OK, we now cross an important threshold in 2018’s albums. The 50 (!) records up to now have ranged from bonkers experimental curiosities, noble failures, excellent efforts, to just plain brilliance. From this point though, we are not fucking around. Everyone reading this needs to at least give the record a couple of plays on Spotify (you lazy, entitled cunts. Love you!), but really these artists all deserve a donation of your real money to reward them for creating such majestic pieces of art.

Let’s go:

33 tUnE-yArDs: I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Do we even have private lives anymore? In the crusty old days of the early 21st century, we were given the choice of whether we wanted to share all of our personal details and cherished moments. It used to be that it was only if you chose to download Facebook or Myspace or Friendster or Habbo or Flickr or Ribblegrink or ConsciousCoupling or SideGrindr that you consented to sharing your details online. Sure, many people would object to having to livestream ‘OMG! Toughest Poo EVER!!’, but the fact is it was my choice and I completely understood what I was signing up for.

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Now though, the very act if existing in 2018 is only made possible by the existence and authority of so many digital companies- some social networks, some good old fashioned squillion dollar multinationals- that we can’t do anything without passing over at least a little bit of personal information about ourselves. My alarm clock today only agreed to shut itself off after I told it what my make of television was, my toothbrush refused to uncoil its stubble until I spent four minutes telling it what credit card companies I’d heard of, I wasn’t allowed to boil my kettle until I confessed what income bracket I was in, my left shoe wouldn’t tie until I linked the right one to at least four social media accounts, and my door would only open if I connected to it on LinkedIn. And this has all in the last hour since I got out of bed at 2:30! I managed to avoid signing up to Facebook until 2015, but after seeing so many ‘sign in with Facebook’ buttons on every site I tried to access I just got lazy and decided to let Facebook tell every site imaginable my details instead of me spending a whole 24 seconds entering them myself.

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34 Santigold: I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

I went to Marrakesh last Christmas. Don’t believe me?? Then what do you call this??

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Yeah, that’s actually just a photo of my brother Johnny talking to a suirrel. I really thought I’d be able to find photos he took last Christmas, but I couldn’t. Admittedly, it’s getting late so I quit the search relatively quickly, but the chances are this photo is far better than any shit he took in Morocco. You’ll just have to take my word for it, OK? Or don’t believe me, who cares? We live in the post-truth era and this post is still going to exist whatever you believe.

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35 Camp Cope: How To Socialise & Make Friends

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

“And I said that I was sorry about that line
I only wrote it cause it rhymed”

‘Last year’ I wrote for the first time in detail about my last suicide attempt. ‘Last’ as in ‘previous’, it takes a mighty pair of brass balls to confidently predict you’ll never attempt suicide in the future, no matter who you are. I wrote it because I was in a good place mentally and didn’t like feeling that it was this uncomfortable skeleton hanging in my closet, awkwardly swinging after a laughably failed attempt at hanging itself. Remember, I’m allowed to make those jokes, not you. Maybe you’ve read it, because it was the most viewed post ever on this blog, because you’re all sickos. Honestly, I really do hope another post overtakes it soon, as currently the example of what musters the absolute most traffic to my website is failed suicide bids. What if I felt I needed to repeat its success?? How do you even plan a failed suicide bid? I can’t very well jump off the bottom step of the stairs and then claim I’ve survived another suicide bid, can I? Well, maybe I could once, but after the fourth or fifth time I’d likely start losing the trust of readers. And that’s what’s most important to me, dear readers, your trust. Or just another random person visiting the site to assure me the clicks, I really couldn’t give a fuck. You’re all cattle to me.

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36 Laura Jane: Devotion

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

When I first heard ‘Devotion’ I was blown away by it. I had never previously heard of her, and only bonked into her album during one of my financially and mentally draining BandCamp trawls. She didn’t exist. I had read no reviews or even mentions of her in the world of online music journalism. Yet here she was. And she was perfect. I got very excited. I had discovered her and would now be the spark that lit the wider press adoration that fired her to the very top. She would be my artist.

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‘Devotion’ is a pretty spectacular album, and I was looking forward our trip to the top together. I pictured her mentioning my name in her acceptance speech after winning her first Brit/VMA/Emmy/Oscar/Mercury/Nobel prize in 2025, as someone who had ‘always been there’ for her. She’d even invite me to sing backing vocals on Dismal Affordable Beams, track seven off her 2023 album ‘Pigs! Pigs! Fucking PIGS, Motherfucker!‘, as being a longtime devotee of my art* naturally meant she was well-aware of my exceptional singing ability. I mean, the track isn’t very well received (like, at all), but it means that I can now boast of appearing on a platinum record. And, yes, some deeper feelings are quite obviously always going to blossom between two people who work so closely and are so deeply in awe of each others art*. Laura would even proposition me one night, but I’d say I could never take advantage of a woman who’d been drinking gin and snorting ketamine for the last six hours straight, and I wouldn’t want to jeopardise what had by that point grown into one of the most artistically and financially successful partnerships in all of music. This honesty, and my sheer integrity, would cause Ms Jane to burst into tears, and she’d apologise for even putting me in that position as she falls into my embrace. I pat the back of her head, and say that I still love her, and that I would help her beat the debilitating drug addiction that I’ve just decided she has. I mean… I’d probably say no… depends how lonely I was feeling…

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