Tag: sza

Is Spellling Just Trollling on ‘Portrait of My Heart’?

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

Seriously though, what the fuck even is this?

You can call this an emergency review. Generally, I would wait until the end of year Necessary Evil countdown to air all my bigoted grievances and problematic thoughts (I got a lot of problems with you people), but right now I can’t see this record making the top 40 and if I don’t air my bewilderment I will literally die. I don’t know what this album is. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. I’m not even convinced how seriously we’re supposed to receive this record and if it’s all just a giant pissstake by Spellling.

Continue reading “Is Spellling Just Trollling on ‘Portrait of My Heart’?” →

Legit Bosses: The 143 Best Songs of 2024

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Hey, look, I’m getting better at this. Recently, I went on a massive cull of the 2024’s greatest songs to make this list as tight and as concise as possible, so that it would be sure to represent the absolute best of the best and would be as brief and easy to write as possible. And look! There are only one hundred and forty three tracks this year!! That’s a whole seventeen less tracks than last year! This post is going to be a breeze!

spoiler: this song is going top five. It INVENTED GAY POP, show some respect

OK, three weeks laternow, and I’m almost done! This post will be longer than most books you read, but to be fair most of the ‘books’ you read are Dr Who fanfic.

So, yeah, these songs are really good. And they get better as the list goes on. That’s how these lists work.

Here’s the YouTube playlist, which I know is the only thing most of you care about.

How much of an intro do you need, seriously?

A/79/232

#1 Fever Ray: Radical Romantics (Greatest Album of 2023)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

This is for our careers

Putting my kid in high school

Even it Out… sort of

All year I adored the opening lines from ‘Radical Romantics’ fifth track. I loved the angry, vicious attack of the commodified work of an artist. How the work is no longer about inspiration or true artistic integrity, but just a career. Under capitalism it has become just another desperate attempt to ensure safety, housing, food and education for your family. And what does such a system force you to do with your artistic inclinations? Or maybe the social safety nets?? “And then we cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut/Cut, cut, cut, cut”. Comrade Karin Dreijer! Give those capitalist pigdogs what they deserve!

There’s no room for you
And we know where you live
One day we might come after you
Taking back what’s ours

Workers of the World unite!!

SUNSET IN THE MAZE (YOU’RE ASKING ME MY SYMPTONS, DOCTOR, I DON’T WANNA FEEL)

3 Prince: Purple Rain (Deluxe)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

In 1984, there was only one man in America more popular than Ronald Reagan. His name was Prince, and he was funky.

Had Prince run for president that year, he would have certainly carried his native Minnesota—the only state Ronnie lost—and he probably would’ve cleaned up most other places. The reason: “Purple Rain,” his groundbreaking, genre-blurring, utterly genius sixth album. It was a massive seller wherever there were radios and people with pulses.

Kenneth Partridge for Billboard

So, this is it. Our annual trawl through Prince’s albums reaches 1984 and His sixth release. His place in eternal pop culture, His position as music’s most influential figure of the past 50 years, His most abiding songs, His eternal iconography and His cultural footprint. They all come from this era. One of the best selling records ever. Prince said that ‘Purple Rain’ is what people shouted at Him in airports rather than His name. For forty years afterwards, if pop culture was going reference Prince, it would be this era, This album.

If you only own one Prince album, it’s this one. It was the first one I bought, as a spotty teen in Glossop Woolworths back in the early to mid nineties. It’s also your favourite Prince album. If you’ve only heard a couple more. It’s the non-Prince fans’ favourite Prince album. It’s massively overrated. It’s massively underrated. It’s impossible to rate at all. It’s just a bigger deal than almost every other record ever released. I was born six months before the album was released. It’s impossible for me to properly assess it because I can’t remember a reality before this record was released. And that isn’t too big a claim: for the last 39 years and six months we have all absolutely been living in a world, a reality where ‘Purple Rain’ exists. Me being expected to critically analyse it is like you asking my opinions on my own liver. I don’t really have an opinion. It’s just there. I can’t offer any opinions on it because I can’t picture life without it.

TOAST UP, SO WHAT? STREET SMALL BUT IT GO BOTH WAYS

4 SZA: SOS

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

This ain’t no warning shot, in case all of you hoes forgot, they know we’ve been more than lost. Us punk-asses tried to replace them but the stakes were too high, we weren’t able to live off some SZA mini-me. In December 8th 2022 they dumped this album like a press squeeze, they were horny like “Suck these”, daring like “Touch me”. They just want what’s theirs, after spending more than five years watching countless people try and fail to replicate the magic of their debut album.

And it’s hard to be a SZA mini-me. Their incredible 2017 debut album felt like a true moment in the history of recorded music. It’s one of the handful of 21st century records – as our tastes become more and more individualised and the latest stage of capitalism involves eliminating community and creating more dividing lines along identity – that is near unanimously considered an all-time classic. It spent more than 300 weeks on the Billboard top 200, selling millions of copies. You gotta rip that off, right??

OUT OF REACH, OUT OF TOUCH, TOO NUMB, I DON’T FEEL NO WAY

40 Nicky Wire: Intimism

~ Lex Leeson ~ 17 Comments

Life has been unfaithful
And it all promised so so much
I am a relic
I am just a petrified cry…

I see liberals
I am just a fashion accessory
People send postcards
And they all hope I’m feeling well
I retreat into self-pity, it’s so easy
Where they patronise my misery

La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)

You all know the song. The third track on the Manics’ criminally underrated second album in 1993. I named it the second best Manics song ever in a 2021 post that’s the most read thing I’ve ever done (and will be the most read post of 2023). Which proves it’s correct. Because I’m a genius. I also named ‘Gold Against the Soul’ as the best album of 1992. Which is dumb. Because I’m a fucking idiot.

ALL OF MY DIAMONDS ARE DRIPPIN’ ON HIM

10 Jazmine Sullivan: Heaux Tales

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Top ten! Whoop whoop! Top ten! Whoop whoop! Feeling good?? Feeling stoked?? In that case, let’s bring the mood down a bit with an Andrea Dworkin quote:

Being Female in this world is having been robbed of the potential for human choice by men who love to hate us. One does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behaviour and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice

From ‘Intercourse
‘

Or maybe I’ll share a quote from a Joan Didion novel, between Grace and Charlotte, two women sojourning in the fictional central American country of ‘Boca Grande’:

I recall telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where the female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the men’s totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. “I mean that’s pretty much what happens everywhere , isn’t it?” she said. “Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn’t show?”

A Book of Common Prayers
MEAUX TALES

Entry #4 Marina and the Diamonds: Obsessions

~ Lex Leeson ~ 12 Comments

What is the point of this blog? I mean, really?

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Don’t answer that.

I don’t mean to say ‘don’t answer that’ as a joke, like the answer would somehow be difficult to hear, it was an entirely serious suggestion. An order, really. It would really slow this entry down to a standstill were I to pause now to open it up for reader’s suggestions. It’s pretty much the definition of a rhetorical question, see? I’m not actually expecting you to answer, merely just asking it for dramatic effect. Do you see? Good.

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The Legit Bosses:136 Best Tracks of 2018

~ Lex Leeson ~ 9 Comments

This is officially the end of 2018! And it’s only the 5th January [EDIT: Still only the 6th!]! Although there’s freaking one hundred and thirty six  tracks to get through, so this may well take until mid May! Happy Cinco de Mayo! No time to talk! A shit load of songs to get through!!

136 Candace: Rewind

Gorgeous, innit?

135 Epic Reflexes: Cha Cha

While Z-Tape’s ‘Spring’ collection was veritably busting at the seems with Legit Bosses, as you’ll soon see, this is the only similarly legitimate position of authority from their ‘Summer’ collection. They’re all still great though, as is the Epic Reflexes’s album ‘ChaChaChinatown‘.

134 The Carters: Apeshit

I had a lot of problems with ‘Everything is Love’, the surprising debut release from Beyonce and Jay-Z. Part of the reason I struggled with it was that I wasn’t sure how canonical it is. Like, is this it, Bee? Is this underwhelming collection of occasionally very entertaining rap boasts officially your actual follow-up to one of the most acclaimed albums of the 21st century? It’s an album about how two very rich people love each other but probably love their money more, that includes the line “My grandchildren’s grandchildren already rich” which, despite Kanye’s crisis of publicity, is by far the line from 2018 that Donald Trump is most likely to high five in a men’s locker room. Also, there’s a moment on the opening track where Mr Carter drawls out “Let it breaaaathe, let it breaaaathe” like JB Rockefeller basking in the glory of a fart he’d just released under the bedsheets, which marks the first time in more than two decades that I’ve thought to myself that I don’t think I really like Jay-Z. However, he often wins me back with the later claim that he’s “Good on any MLK boulevard”. This song’s pretty great though

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Fucking hell, Jay, that haircut though… One hundred and thirty three more after the jump!

Continue reading “The Legit Bosses:136 Best Tracks of 2018” →