Top twenty bitches! Ain’t no more fucking around now, we are – as a great poet once said – about to enter pound town, this list about to dick a bitch down. This list’s coochie pink but its bootyhole brown. And we enter the top twenty with another concept album!
“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!”
As concepts go, it’s definitely more apparent than Dua Saleh’s vague allusions, but a lot less more batshit insane that Lupe Fiasco’s Amy Winehouse fanfic, so I can’t really place it higher than second in the list of 2024’s best concept albums at time of writing. At time of writing because there’s a shitload more of these things to come further down the list. I might seriously be able to do a top ten, and that’s without including borderline examples like ‘Cowboy Carter’ (CONCEPT: Billionaire Celebrity Makes a Quasi-Country Album to Impress People Nobody Else Cares About’), Danny Brown (CONCEPT: ‘Rapper Gets Old’) or Hinds (CONCEPT: ‘WE’RE MOTHERFUCKING HINDS!!!!!’). Moor Mother though? Yeah, might count that if I’m desperate. Break instead of emergency.
USA is 911, I know that much – it’s the name of a TV show. Get up, get get get down, it’s a joke in your town, you know? What even is the number for the emergency services in China?? Will they even have an English translator. Hej was only recently boasting of her 100% perfect social credit score, was I about to sully that pristine record with a silly reprimand for drunken escapades??
But… what if she is dead? Or lying, incapacitated in a pool of her own blood? She barely knew that Lee guy, and he has now ensured that she has lost all of her mental capacities and suddenly has her all to himself. The powder is being sprinkled into her Hoegarden now, Lee’s eyes narrowing and his teeth bared in a mocking smile.
I never want to see her again. I never want to even consider her again. I no longer wish for her to be an entity that enacts molecular changes on the surrounding world. She doesn’t deserve to exist. But I don’t want her dead. Was I the last person recorded seeing her alive? Do I tell the police the full story of the night?? How many laws had I broken myself??
Ah, the Gods are cruel game players: they make you hate someone with every betrayed, disappointed sinew of your pulsing muscles, and yet they make sure that their death would be incredibly inconvenient. Is this irony? I feel like this might be irony. It’s one of those big A-Level English words, definitely.
We thought we’d done an amazing job, and the first contract was coming due. Steve was with him in Atlanta, and I said, ‘Tell Prince we’re going to organize a contract with him for another five years.’ And Steve (Farnoli, co-manager) calls me and says, ‘You’re not going to believe this. The kid says he’ll sign if you get him a major motion picture. It has to be not from a jeweller or drug dealer but has to be from a major studio, and he wants his name above the title.’ I can’t tell you what an impossible task that was.
Bob Cavallo, Prince co-manager 79-89
They really had done an amazing job with His first contract. Back in 1977, they’d somehow manage to successfully argue that one of the biggest production companies in the world bow to this snotty little, precocious 18 year old midget’s ridiculous demand that He be given complete creative and production control over His own music when signing His first ever record deal. Now He wanted a movie made. A major motion picture. And not one made by jewellers or drug dealers either. I imagine he initially demanded it not be made by cocaine addicts or rapists either, but this was Hollywood in the 1980s and some things are just literally impossible.
“Tell that little cunt to wipe that smirk off his face”
It can be easy to be fooled by retrospect nearly 40 years later. Of course Prince had a movie made about Him! He was one of the biggest stars of the 80s! That album sold twenty five freaking million copies! ‘Purple Rain’ was one of the highest grossing movies of the year! Motherfucker was a sure ticket! And, yeah, sure, now we know that, but remember that at the start of 1984 (omg this is literally 1984) Prince had released five albums: two commercial nonentities, followed by one of the most critically adored and influential albums of the decade... and hat trick of commercial nonentities, one decent seller and finally the breakthrough with ‘1999’, his first top ten album and first real suggestion of longterm commercial viability. He was hardly some unknown Minneapolis bum trying to convince bingo halls to give him fifteen minutes before the midnight game, but these five albums had spawned two top ten singles in total. Giving Prince a movie in 1984 wasn’t like giving Beyoncé a squillion dollars to race-wash Disney while she pretends her skin colour doesn’t make her a crucial part of the capitalist machine that’s exploiting Africa. It would almost be like if the success of Heatwaves lead to the next Glass Animals contract included a ten part HBO series starring the band playing themselves in a fictionalised biography of their upbringing in Oxford. It’s insane that this movie was made. It’s insane that one of the biggest companies in the world simply trusted in the intuition of one of their midlevel artists due to their simple trust in His artistic legitimacy. It’s insane how Prince just said “Trust me”. It’s insane that Warner Brothers just greenlit a seven million dollar movie. Its insane how right He was.
“If you make this movie, I’ll become the biggest star in the world and make you millions of dollars”. And he did. And they did.
I don’t talk about immigration law much on this blog. At all, actually. Firstly, it’s my day job, and jobs suck, right? I don’t want that shit leaking into my leisure time. It’s a freaking Saturday right now, and you vultures want me to talk about immigration law?? Can’t a playa like myself get days off occasionally?? And anyway, it’s pretty much never relevant: it’s rather difficult to respond to the latest Unknown Mortal Orchestra album while referencing the five stages approach set out in Razgar ([2004] UKHL 27).
Your first reaction might be “Hey, that’s pretty fucking shitty! And that Rwanda deal is some gross colonial bullshit!”. And that’s OK, it’s a free country (if you’re a white European) and I applaud your engagement. However, that is obviously an emotional reaction based on philosophically debatable matters such as ‘morality’, ‘decency’ and ‘human fucking rights, you bunch of fucking ghouls‘. That’s all well and good, but I don’t wish to debate this from ethical standpoint. Up yours, woke moralists. I’m just going to examine the bill, examine the implications, examine the logistics and examine the thinking from a purely unbiased and ideologically untarnished viewpoint. I would just like the calmly and inarguably point out how this is one of the dumbest fucking things ever, and evidence of such chronic smooth brain thinking that I am genuinely worried about the mental health of its adherents. Legally speaking, this bill is as thick as pig shit.
The bill is absolutely that potent mix of cruelty and stupidity. I’m just going to concentrate on the stupidity, that’s all. As I really don’t think enough people are aware of how stupid it is.
Remember how much I stanned the vertical bar inBIG|BRAVE‘s name at #71? Bro, I was super simping for that punctuation symbol, wasn’t I? It was totally… bussin’… and… PAWG…? Look at all these hip new words I’m using! As far as you know, I’m, like, 22 years old or something. Yeah, I’m a hip young gunslinger. Yes I am. Stop gaslighting me.
Hold on, slow down *grabs pen and paper* Laugh… out… loud… Go on.
Eeeeeeeeeeew, ‘PAWG’ stands for ‘Phat Ass White Girl’?? I honestly never knew that, it’s so gross! I will state at this point that I personally will not be referring to either Melanie James/melodus nor Elora Driver/metagirl as ‘PAWGs’, though they are of course free to refer to themselves as such and may well fit the description.
With no thought of the massive psychological damage it would cause to middle aged children and the dread it would impose on their already suffocating sense of mortality, with no consideration given to the fact that it was Christmas 2021, like, yesterday, 2022 is soon coming to an end. In previous years I have trailed the year’s Necessary Evil’s list of the year’s best music by naming the year’s best in comparatively unimportant sectors such as films and video games. 2022, however, saw an event so momentous that it renders all other debate on art or even the wider human condition comparatively meaningless, and so I owe it to my legions of fans, I owe it to the internet, I owe it to the culture itself to mention it. Not only that, but I’ll have to try and explain its importance to non wrestling fans, which might actually beyond my ability.
I’m not saying that this was the only thing that happened in 2022, just that all other stories pale somewhat in terms of significance and longterm repercussions. We all enjoyed the Conservative Party exposing the Capitalist lie that money indicates real value as some of the richest people in the country incompetently accused each other of being incompetent with such incompetence that it’s likely to freeze and/or starve a large section of their constituents. Lol! I am literally rolling on the floor laughing. I am a ROFLcopter. This isn’t new though, and of all the talk about opinion polls and potential general election losses, the ruling class fighting amongst themselves while the lower classes suffer is hardly new, will result in no revolution, and the best possible scenario in this country’s broken political system is the other party get in and basically continue the same shit. Sure, The Queen died, and in doing so revealed the longstanding lie that the UK is in some sense a developed country separated enough from its colonial history and repressed shame to be capable of rational thought. But will there really be any longterm ramifications of a gross head of a gross imperialistic state being replaced by a perhaps more gross son in a shamefully gross role? Come back to me when Charlie boy uses his accession press conference to bury the whole Royal Family and throw the whole system into doubt. In fact, have Charles Windsor come to me himself after that. I’d kiss his ugly face. Kings have press conferences, right? OK, we also had Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, after which Twitter had so much funthat Elon Musk decided he had to stop it. Because of… a weed meme or something…? Honestly, it’s hard to know with that nincompoop, he has the brain development of a thirteen year old Trust Fund kid, and so is extremely hard to understand as an adult. These things also happened, and I’m not ignoring them. The war in Ukraine also happened, which I am ignoring, because it’s difficult to make jokes over. Not necessarily for taste reasons – when has that ever stopped me before? – more that it’s a conflict with absolutely no good guys that any glib comment is likely to support fascism and imperialism in some form if just by association.
Hey! Speaking of ‘no good guys’! Speaking of… fascism…? No, I stretched the segue too far, should have stopped after the first one.
In a lot of way, it’s not your fault that you like shit stuff. A lot of the shit stuff you like you had no control over. Maybe the culture you were raised within normalised such abhorrence. Perhaps you just had really stupid friends growing up who liked really stupid things. I’m not going to blame you for that. You rarely get much choice who your friends are, they’re often just there because of some past and continued convenience. Maybe your friends from school are now registered sex offenders, maybe they’re big Fast and Furious fans, but either way it’s not your fault. Your parents could have maybe brought up in an environment where liking such absolute shite isn’t something to ashamed of. Is it your parents’ fault?? Am I saying that they’ve somehow failed at child rearing because of your shitty tastes??
Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. But it’s not your fault. Please don’t take any of this post as me mocking your artistic choices. You can’t help it, you’re just wired that way, and me making fun of it would be like you making fun of my cauda equina. Like, dude, come on, I can’t help it. Cryemojicryemojicryemoji. You know how it goes.
You might have seen this repugnant rabble advertised recently:
Every once in a while, I work it all out. I cure my depression. I look around at my life and concede that I have it made. I accept that I have nothing bad going on in my life. I happily celebrate the fact that I am now officially, medically, happy.
Necessary Evil 