JM Houle

By all means, click to enlarge

Brooklyn's Shark? finally released their Kickstarter-aided first full-length True Waste three Tuesdays ago, and we can safely report that the 12-track production is a Barney Gumble burp of garage-punk bar-band excellence. Think Blood on the Wall haunted by late-period Morrison's demon. We still are, but maybe that's because of True Waste's "disgustingly awesome" (their words) wall-spatter cover art by photographer JM Houle, which, as you can see, resembles an ungodly expulsion. So what is that nastiness?

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If you follow a band as slavish to style as Interpol, you've got to expect the quartet to surf art-world tides as effectively and dramatically as their music, well, doesn't. To wit: the move from the stark three-color minimalism of the Antics cover image to the bold, three-animal maximalism of Capitol debut Our Love to Admire (the work of noted high-art fauna photog Seth Smoot). Nothing to do with consistency, in other words, and everything to do with cultural currency. And now, while the cover of the quartet's forthcoming eponymous LP reverts back to stark, single-word brand management, the video for first single "Lights" errs more in the gooey, sci-fi direction of Matthew Barney.

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I could probably be fired just for asking Camille to compile this.

Hey let's all stop fretting over the Motherland for a few minutes, demurely tilt our monitors away from any authority figures, and enjoy the totally classy video for "Be By Myself," wherein Asher and Cee-Lo preen wanly amidst a tableau of sexy ladies covered in white, gooey liquid. Must be some fancy metaphor. It may please you to learn that Porn Week is almost over here at SOTC. Starting to fear the same for our boy's career.

Ewwwwwwwwww.

In the event you were barred entry from Friday night's MSTRKRFT/Bloody Beetroots fete at Webster Hall, first of all you're not alone by a long shot (one scarred Voice employee's tale of his unsuccessful attempt to get in ends with the words "blow me"), and more importantly, here is what you missed. Papermag.com allegations include "a sweet game of spin the bottle being played to pass the time," "stripping and drunken hook-ups in bathroom stalls," and climactically, "Until an inebriated rager threw up on themselves or someone else, both of which went down." The show went on until dawn and was supposedly awesome. I am thrilled to have not been present. But the show at Webster two nights earlier was even grosser.

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Screenshot via 2DopeBoyz, where they've posted the whole sorry tape, which is where we reluctantly draw the line

Different sex tape entirely--didn't Cam look young in '02?

So the above is nominally 50 Cent's revenge on Rick Ross for a crime whose origins are already murky at best--Ross made fun of him for burning his baby mother's house down in "Mafia Music," back in January, and things just got more upsetting from there. 50 struck back with "Officer Ricky," a barely disguised homage to Cam'ron's own 50 Cent takedown, "Curtis." Then 50 took Ross's baby mother shopping, which we predicted would end in violence and has instead, apparently, ended in 50 finding a tape of the mother of Rick Ross's other child having sex on camera. A tape he narrates in character as Pimpin' Curly, which means he wears a curly wig and robe and generally talks fast, and in a high voice. A tape which is enough to keep you from eating solid food for the next week.

Anyway, for the truly masochistic, there are precedents. Who can forget Cam'ron in Paid in Full, also wearing a robe, screaming "THAT'S HOW YOU FUCK" while screening his own sex tape in a bar full of horrified actors attempting to remain in character?

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Boy Crisis: check that weird man-ponytail

Oh, Great Depression, if there's a silver lining to you murdering all our livelihoods, putting our friends out of work, instilling unspeakable fear in those of us who didn't follow Jesus into carpentry, it's the hope you will stop songs like Boy Crisis's "L'homme" from coming into this world. This track is everything that's wrong about the Lower East Side--it is I CAN HAS DOWNTOWN compressed into MP3, the Rivington smokers' battalion depicted in a click--pieced together by New York types who mistake weird man-ponytails for creativity. The lyrics are Babelfish doggerel masquerading as witticism: "I feel like a monster truck at the Botanical Garden." Funny, listening to this song, I feel like a Corvette at the dump.

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