Continuing my trend of invoking Outkast’s musical stylings at least once per weekend, I now present to you Big Boi’s isolated vocals from “Bombs Over Baghdad.” (You can check out other isolated vocal tracks unrelated to Outkast over here, but I have to wonder why.)
Who Needs Music?
Reevaluating Yoko Ono
After you finish reading this reconsideration of the music of Yoko Ono, you might want to get reacquainted with her entire oeuvre, starting with the fascinating Cut Piece.
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For Science!
Celebrate of the recent discovery of the Higgs boson with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s list of science fiction stories based on “more or less accurate science” and the recently uploaded sci-fi themed New Yorker fiction podcast.
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Culture Shock
“When it comes to living in a democracy, Nato Thompson argues, nothing affects us more directly and more powerfully than culture. Culture suffuses the world we live in, from TV to music to advertising to sports. And all these things, Thompson writes in his new book, Culture as Weapon, ‘influence our emotions, our actions, and our very understanding of ourselves as citizens.'”
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Love in the Archives
“‘Are you wearing lipstick to the archive?’ my husband asked, peering over his coffee.
‘I always wear lipstick to the archive,’ I said.” On falling in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald in the archives.
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Digital Love
Jonathan Franzen’s 2011 Kenyon commencement speech, published this weekend in the New York Times, covers love, consumerism, and narcissism in the digital age. If you’re concerned with critical reception, looks like you’re not a creator of “serious art and literature,” in Franzen’s eyes.
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The Humanity of Books
“To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.” Digital pioneer and theorist Jaron Lanier fears that the Internet might be destroying not just literature, but also the middle class.
Hate to be that guy, but Big Boi doesn’t even come in for 1:15, and while his verse has some great moments (namely the way his cadence plays off the incredible beat–obviously absent here), Andre’s is way more impressive on this song…maybe his best, in terms of rhythmic play, unconventional rhyme, odd imagery and pure Three Stacks weirdness.