jay-z - magna carta... holy grail

It's a shame that Magna Carta had to exist in the shadow of Yeezus.  If this had been released on any other year, it'd be a disappointing effort propped up by some solid Timbaland beats, a mediocre record from a fading superstar.  Instead, it feels like a half-assed response to Yeezus, combined with an absurd cash-grab through the Samsung app.  Kanye forced Jay's hand with one of the most ridiculous records in the history of hip hop, and he crashed and burned in his attempt to match him.

Jay-Z's at a point in his career where he can no longer rely on braggadocio alone.  You're rich, you're fucking Beyonce, you've sold a lot of records...we get it, Jay.  If you're gonna keep repeating the same tired themes over and over in the laziest ways possible, we can't be expected to care anymore.

Kanye came out screaming "I AM A GOD," and in the process forever raised the bar for traditional rap egotism.  It's hard to be impressed by a hustler once you've come face-to-face with a deity.

zz top - degüello

Growing up, my parents maintained an impressive collection of adult-themed music that was almost always within my reach.  My mom's favorite artist was Prince, and my dad's favorite was Donna Summer.  I took me a decade to hear more than a handful of tracks on , and probably longer to realize "Bad Girls" was about prostitutes.  I had no idea what kind of music I was listening to at the time, with a few exceptions: "Let's Talk About Sex" by Salt 'n' Pepa, and "My Head's In Mississippi" by ZZ Top.

"Let's Talk About Sex" was the unfortunate case of my parents letting me listen to the song beyond the point of simple novelty of a child saying unchildish things, into the period where I retained memories, and eventually found out what the word "sex" was.  "My Head's In Mississippi" was more ZZ Top's fault than my parents'.

In hindsight, ZZ Top was always a hilariously sexual band.  Even before Eliminator and their string of terrible MTV releases, when they were a legitimate blues-rock band, their songs were laced with innuendo and crude metaphors.  But they always seemed to be just sly enough about it to evade my eight year-old consciousness.

For years, I thought a line in "Tush" went "Damn those taxes / Honey would," transforming the song into some kind of abstract political commentary that I just assumed was above my head.  I had no idea what "La Grange" was about, but it sure as hell wasn't a whorehouse.  And I was nowhere near comprehending the complex subtleties of "Pearl Necklace."  But even I understood what "Mississippi" was about: "Last night I saw a naked cowgirl / She was floating across the ceiling."

What I never realized was the same dark, confusing sexual energy that coursed through that song was in just about every other ZZ Top song I loved.

"I Thank You" is literally thanking a woman for sex.  "She Loves My Automobile" is nothing but clumsy comparisons between car parts and female anatomy.  "Hi Fi Mama" even turns playing a record into a phallic "needle in the groove" metaphor.  And so on, with damn near every song on Degüello.  And I had no idea.

The band maintains that this all comes from the lost art of rock 'n roll innuendo.  In reality, it's just a clumsy gimmick unnecessarily piled on top of some of the finest blatant blues worship this side of Led Zeppelin.

What impresses me is that even after revealing ZZ Top's cheap sexual act, the music really doesn't suffer at all.  Pretty much everything after Eliminator is still complete trash, but I don't think any less of Degüello or Tres Hombres.  On the contrary, I'm rather impressed that I'm still unpacking these lewd details so many years later.  It doesn't exactly make them sophisticated musicians, but it somehow makes them more ZZ Top than ever before.

dj 6666 - death breathing

I consider myself a pretty huge Alec Empire fan.  Destroyer was my introduction to breakcore, and also largely to electronic music in general.  From there I took in every album of his I could find, leaning more towards his Digital Hardcore period, which I absolutely devoured.  For years, I thought Live at CBGB's with Merzbow was by far the heaviest album he ever made.  But that was until I discovered Death Breathing.

Live at CBGB's is arguably the closest Alec ever came to recreating the sounds on this album, but even that doesn't come particularly close to matching it.  This is Destroyer played even faster, amplified well into the read, laced with feedback and screeching noise way more dynamic than what Merzbow was doing on CBGB's.

This is Alec at his most nihilistic, most extreme, and most disturbing.  Long gone are the childish calls for anarchy from Atari Teenage Riot--DJ 6666 exists in a world beyond hope, and the result is an endless stream of death and suffering that amounts to perhaps the heaviest album ever made.