Tag: beyonce

2025’s New Gold Star Artists (and a couple of RIPs)

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

Sigh, I guess I should explain the rules again? To be honest, if this is one of your first times reading The Most Trusted Voice in Music then you really should start with the first post from December 1st 2014 and then read through the next 791 entries (or “chapters”, as I like to think of them) until you’re ready to read this post. Necessary Evil might be oversimply referred to as a ‘Blog’, but it’s actually more of an epic tale – a poem, really – that only sampling parts of risks lessoning its artistic impact. What’s happened to this generation’s attention spans?

OK, the criteria for qualifying for the Necessary Hall of Fame as a Gold Star Artist:

  • At least three albums
  • All albums featured on the Necessary Evil best of year countdown since 2007

There were three new Legit Bosses crowned on the the 2024 list, and here’s my ranking of their three albums so far, which will soon be added to the ongoing Hall of Fame.

And, excitingly, for the first time this year we have two artists that have brought great shame on their careers, their legacies, and their entire families by dropping out of the Gold Star Artist Hall of Fame. Both (predictably) Soccer Mommy and (perhaps surprisingly) Illuminati Hotties released records in 2024 that weren’t considered good enough for the end of year lists, so they are forever banished to the dreaded Ex-Gold Star Graveyard. There, they are both feted to rot for eternity. A ridiculously harsh ‘punishment’ for the supposed crime of releasing a record that I didn’t think was quite as good as their previous three+? Especially tough considering Soccer Mommy’s previous three albums were all released before the list shortened to 40 albums and all finished outside the top 40, so could arguably be being punished for remaining as good as they ever were?

Yes.

Sorry, SJW cuck snowflakes, take your woke ideas of fairness and ‘not treating people like shit’ back to Libtardia. This is Necessary Evil. We hit harder here.

KAPOW! CRRAACK! ZGRUPPP!

#21 Tierra Whack: WORLD WIDE WHACK

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

I can’t sleep, I can’t eat
I feel small, so petite
I act strong, but I’m weak
Ha, ha, ha, ha (livin’ is difficult)
I was born to survive
See the pain in my eyes
I been stressed and deprived
Ha, ha, ha, ha (livin’ is difficult)

DIFFICULT

So, imagine you’re Generation Z. You’re a Zoomer. You were born between 1995 and 2012, because the dividing lines of these ‘generations’ are fucking ridiculous. I’m a Millennial because I was born between 1980 and 1994. I’m the same generation as Rishi Sunak (1980) and Justin Bieber (1994), which explains the similarities between the three of us.

that’s me that is

But not you though! You’re Gen Z, you’re in the same pool as Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy (2012), Millie Bobby Brown (2004) and Tierra Whack (1995). You likely won’t remember a time before the world was fucked:. You were four years old at most when NATO bombed Yugoslavia and announced the new laws of violent neoliberalism dominance, where peace would now only be reached with bombs. You don’t remember a time before 9/11, the War On Terror is your life. You’ve never caught a plane without first taking your shoes off. All your life everyone has known that the world is fucking burning up and going to die pretty fucking soon. Your whole life, the entire human race has known that it’s killing itself, and has done nothing to prevent this spectacular suicide. I mean, the old fucks like me and KSI (1993) have had time to ponder accept this death cult, but imagine being born into it!!

Hour Osama Suleiman Abu-Sanima

Legit Bosses – The 160 Best Songs of 2023

~ Lex Leeson ~ 30 Comments

In their 1972 book ‘Psychology of the Arts‘, Hans and Shulamith Kreitler tried to explain the reasoning behind why certain people react in certain ways to certain pieces of art. However, they deemed that to fully explain it, your knowledge of each person would need to “extend over an immeasurably large range of variables, which would include not only perceptive, cognitive, emotional and other personality characteristics, but also biographical data, specific personal experiences, past encounters with art, and individual memories and associations”. Sounds like a lot of work, right? Well, luckily, I’m here to just tell you what the best music of 2023 was, so all that effort behind your own personal psychosis can be sidestepped altogether. Think of it as my new year’s present.

no spoilers on what number this particular classic finished

And there’s one hundred and sixty this year. Maybe one hundred and sixty one. Because there was a lot of great tunes released in 2023. While limiting the Necessary Evil list to just 40 albums still meant there was space for at least one ‘meh’ album and one absolute stinker, over the past week I’ve actually had to really edit this list down to prevent it being ridiculous. And yet here we are: 160. Maybe 161.

I’m also going to be giving shout outs to particular golden moments in certain songs – similar to what I did in 2018 – and for each of those I’m going to be using a picture of one of the greatest moments in the short history of All Elite Wrestling, because… well… I get the horrible feeling that company is cooked and I hope to look back on this list in five years time and laugh at how pessimistic I was.

Can I finish this before 2024 and maybe have some days off before I go back to work?? Let’s seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

[Edit: No. No I cannot. Not even close.

You’ve got some playlists though, will that make you happy?? Here’s the countdown on Spotify and on YouTube, minus the unavailable songs on whatever platform]

I REMEMBER NOTHING, SO THERE’S NOTHING TO REGRET

6 Noname: Sundial

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth

proverb of unknown origins, likely African

We could scapegoat everything
We could penny-pinch the homie for defendin’ the dream
A simpler thing, by any mean
Niggas will kill they team
Say the gun did it, run with it
White man or frontman, a whole vision

We just see self in his image
Won’t be a self-critic, burn up our whole village
That wasn’t us, that was colonialism
We keep our babies fed, we don’t beat and rape on our women, we good
We is Wakanda, we Queen Rwanda
First black president and he the one who bombed us, yeah

hold me down
AND I’M ALREADY ACTIN’ LIKE A DICK, KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

The Best Film of 2023: Purple Rain

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

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.

“Oh, and make sure there are loads of tits”

HONEY, I KNOW TIMES ARE CHANGING

2022’s Statictus the Fitness: The Numbers Behind the Year’s Greatest Albums

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Remember when I used to do these posts right after I did the albums of the year? So it’d be the Necessary Evil albums of the year, the scientifically proven best album fawned over at length, the stats, and then we’d be officially done for another year?

Boom! You just been Mandela Effected, boyeeee! I actually only think I ever did that schedule once, for Necessary Evil 2019. I’ve always been far more often waaaaaaay late with these statistical breakdowns. What I actually used to do really early is (pfff!) do the stats just before the number one album! I could never (be arsed these days! These days the writing of the list itself is such a huge emotional toil that it takes me a long time to even consider thinking about these fucking albums again. Also, it’s getting harder and harder to think of puns on the word ‘stat’.

But these posts are basically just pictures, so I may as well just freakin’ do it. Let’s glance back at the wonderful year od 2022 when we all collectively thought, as always, “Well at least the next year can’t be as bad as this one…”.

Watch me drift and watch me struggle, let me go

The Necessary Evil Hall of Fame: Gold Star Artists

~ Lex Leeson ~ 21 Comments
  • At least three albums
  • All albums featured on the Necessary Evil best of year countdown

I’ve been doing this dumb blog that nobody reads since my first post on the 1st December 2014 called the latest Pixies album an “especially grievous dirty protest”. 2024’s list was the tenth I’ve written in excruciating detail on the blog. The intelligent thing to do would be to call it a day after that. But then again the really intelligent thing to would have been to never start it in the first place. As a stupid person, I’m definitely conflicted. My (recorded) albums of the year go back to 2007. I’m not wanting to put too fine a point on it, nor am I at all pompous enough to ever overexaggerate my importance, but I think it’s fair to say that I am objectively the paramount and most respected voice on music of the last 15 years. And before that too, I just didn’t have a blog then.

Pulitzer Prize stuff from 2019

But what about the artists themselves? They sometimes play a part in the psychosexual agitprop magic of this blog. We can obviously consider the artists whose work has appeared most in my year end lists, but that’s obviously going to be the Manics (eleven + one very decent JDB solo record and one dreadful Nick Wire one), Prince (eleven, and eventually all 42 of the fuckers) and Nick Cave (I think around eleven, over a variety of projects). Like, duh much? We can all agree without any argument at all that these are the three most important musical artists of all time. It’s like if someone says their favourite food is “crisps”. Like, of course it’s crisps. Crisps are amazing. Everyone loves crisps. But what does that tell you about them as a person?? No, we need a different gage to work out the real stars of Necessary Evil.

Continue reading “The Necessary Evil Hall of Fame: Gold Star Artists” →

#53 Tanya Tagaq: Tongues

~ Lex Leeson ~ 6 Comments

Canada! Throw another steak on the barbie and… No, that’s the other one isn’t it? Throw another poutine on the Mike Myers, aye! We all love Canada, don’t we? They’re like the USA it’s OK to like! So polite! So, like, a bit American, but not offensively so, but then also a little bit English, so that’s OK! There are bits of it that are French, I believe, but I don’t really have time to logically process that right now. Those white Canadians, they’ve, like, always been there, right? There was never any indefensible stripping of natives’ land, like there was in the USA, as far as I – wider culture – am aware of. No old Canadian movies celebrating the Canadian John Wayne brutally murdering the native population, so I have to assume that it never happened. Who’s the Canadian John Wayne, I hear you ask? Probably Drake. No, I can’t explain it, it just probably is, I dunno. Oh Canada! That’s how the anthem starts, innit? Lovely country, lovely people, such a lovely counterpoint to all the divisive silliness that happened ‘down south’! Shows that actually, yes, it is possible to build a civilised society over there.

GREAT! I REALLY NEED THIS BREAK…

#63 Rina Sawayama: Hold the Girl

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Get in line, pass the wine, bitch, we’re going straight to Hell

This Hell

There are few things as indicative of a grossly rotten capitalist system as Elon Musk. If this was a world that worked in the slightest way, if it was properly focused on providing correctly for all human life, or even if it were really the meritocracy that many on the right and the centre claim it to be, then people like Elon would not exist.

Elon Musk has, according to Forbes, eight two sillywillion-scumskillion-foreskillion-skatupllion dollars. Remember how arsey I got about Beyoncé? Well, Elon Musk spends ‘a Beyoncé’ every day on one of his special artisanal morning coffees (he makes it out of unicorn anuses and the condensed tears of one hundred an fifty million starving children, which needs to be collected en masse overnight. Tastes quite nutty. Because Elon nuts in it. Because the idea turns him on so much). If Elon earned this money by being especially good at something like playing billiards – even if he were the best billiard player in the God damn world – then being allowed to greedily accumulate that much wealth would still mean the system is broken. But Elon isn’t especially good at anything. It’s just the whole depressing and boring vulture capitalist, venture buyouts, stock market nonsense that all rich people do.

YOU MUST HAVE REALLY ENJOYED THIS ELON MUSK ALBUM