24 J Cole: KOD

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Jesus, this album. I could spend my time boring on about the sheer quality of the music here, of how it’s an album that deftly combines smooth hip-hop braggadocio with conscientious and thoughtful polemics, all backed with some of the slickest production of 2018. That’s not really my bag though, is it? Instead, the talking points and thought exercises thrown up by Jermaine Lamarr Cole’s fifth album KOD* are so numerous that I can only really take them on in bullet proof form. More after the jump! Click click click click! You’re all just cattle to me! Don’t forget to hit subscribe! Love you!

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(*standing for ‘Kids On Drugs’. Or maybe ‘King OverDosed’. Also ‘Kill Our Demons’. And potentially ‘Karate’s Over, Dingus’. Or ‘Kelly Osbourne’s Demise’. Maybe even ‘Kayaking Over Detroit’. ‘Kissing Older Dentists’? J Cole can’t seem to decide what it stands for himself, so that seems to suggest it can stand for whatever the fuck you want)

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25 Princess Nokia: A Girl Cried Red

~ Lex Leeson ~ 8 Comments

“It get lonely at the top and I do it by myself
I got everything I want without anybody help
Do you think I give a fuck? Only care about myself
I’m a stone-cold killer, couple notches on my belt”

How much do you think your life is governed by your own actions? How much do you believe it’s actually under the jurisdiction of outside forces that are not of your making, or even understanding? That’s right, it’s Boxing Day and, as Thomas scoffed at Jesus as he sceptically rolled his eyes, it’s time to talk about your locus of control.

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See that picture there? Yeah, that pretty much explains what a ‘locus of control’ is. I’m going to explain it again here though because, I dunno, you might have a very specific type of blindness, or maybe your version of Netscape doesn’t support pictures. It’s important for me to explain it myself, because I don’t like to feel that a blog this insightful, inspirational and- dare I say it?- woke, could just as easily be written by pasting appropriate pictures from Google images. Also, my sponsor pays me by the word, so this completely superfluous paragraph has already made me a very rich man. Anyway, locus of control:

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27 El Perro Del Mar: We Are History

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

We are all history now. Me writing this is creating an (unimaginably minuscule) part of history. When you read it and go on Twitter to gush to all your girl mates about how darn adorable I am, you’re creating history. Even when you hold your nightly WhatsApp reading group to debate the day’s findings on the Necessary Evil blog you are, in a small way, writing history. When Sarah Assbring (El Perro Del Mar’s guiding force) got tired of me direct messaging her with the latest “I’d like to bring your ass” play on words that I’d managed to think up, and successfully applied for a restraining order online, she became a part of history.

 

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This is a fact. It has many positive consequences- I like making history all up in that prick Jamie’s face whenever he’s such an indefensible noob at COD- and many negative ones. For an example, I had to cancel my planned Christmas trip to Scandinavia because it would bring me within twelve hundred miles of Sarah Assbring’s Gothenburg home. I have also thought of exactly twenty seven new plays on her name that she might never get to hear. Oh! Twenty eight!

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28 serpentwithfeet: soil

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

My mate Paul said he saw a serpent with feet one time. He says he saw it with his bare eyes, about thirteen foot long and around 350kg, dark olive brown with a white underside. I grew more sceptical as he sold me how this serpent with feet would feast on fish, gar and turtles, and was obviously cold-blooded judging by the amount of time this serpent with feet would spend lazing around in the sun. It was when Paul started excitedly pontificating to me of how this serpent with feet had incredibly strong muscles with which to snap shut its jaws, but relatively weak ones to open it, that I couldn’t help but intervene. Paul, I said, this ain’t no ‘serpent with feet’, you cretin, it’s a fucking crocodile. I’m not having you going around claiming to have seen a serpent with feet when all you’ve seen is some dumb crocodile.

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Paul dismissed me, saying this serpent with feet had a far wider, U-shaped snout than you’d expect with a crocodile. Also, this serpent with feet definitely inhabited a freshwater marsh, and he was a little offended that I didn’t know crocodiles tended to live in saltwater. Through gritted teeth, I said fine, but I wondered whether he’d considered that this serpent with feet might have been an alligator. He scoffed, asking me where alligator’s usually live. After a quick internet search, I replied North America and parts of China. Then how could I have seen one?? He laughed, I’ve never even been to North America or China!

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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 ~ 3 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: