That is just a terrible sweater

When it's used right, a Twista guest-verse can be a seriously powerful weapon. Twista's speed-rap style is a very specific and specialized gift, and it only works in certain contexts, but when he finds the right space for it, it dazzles. Think of his appearance on Beanie Sigel's "Gotta Have It," where he weaves his voice in and out of Chad Hamilton's off-kilter drum-shuffle, first throwing syllables all over the place in concentrated bursts of chaos and then switching up and only putting words on the downbeats. Or the original version of Jay-Z's "Is That Yo Bitch," before he gave it to Memphis Bleek, where Twista raps circles around one of Timbaland's most cluttered and intense beats. The way he raps is amazing just on a purely physical level: he clearly enunciates every single word, but he does it so quickly that it can be tough to hear what he's saying. And that's fine; Twista rarely says much. His style is more of a parlor trick than anything else; there's a reason you never hear about whoever broke his fastest-rapper Guinness Book record. His solo albums have always been a bit uneven because it's hard to hear someone rap that fast for an hour and because he always sounds a bit uncomfortable whenever he tries to slow it down. Twista went platinum a couple of years ago with Kamikaze largely because of a couple of Kanye West collaborations, but I always thought that the album itself was a perfect representation of a rapper overreaching his limitations by trying to be as well-rounded as possible. I've been thinking a lot, though, about Twista's new single, the Neptunes-produced "Give It Up," a track that I find both really frustrating and really intriguing. The song itself is just OK, but I'd really love to hear Twista do more stuff like it.

So fucking ugly

The beginning of Kanye West's new mixtape Can't Tell Me Nothing finds Kanye yelling bravura over Daft Punk's "Harder Better Faster Stronger," starting out by identifying the date: Friday morning, May 25, 2007. This past Friday. And the thing was all over the internet two days later. "I might as well mark the day our lives changed," says Kanye, which seems a little extreme. Still, that's startling speed even in an era where the Cam'ron/50 Cent beef only needs a weekend to catch fire. Honestly, I haven't been by my local mix hut in a while, and I don't even know if any physical copies of Can't Tell Me Nothing exist. It's a pure internet product, which might almost explain why the tape finds Kanye going full-bore for what I guess I'll have to call a hipster audience. The warning signs have been there for a minute. "Stronger," the possible second single from Graduation, samples Daft Punk, and he debuted the track at Hiro Ballroom during a night that A-Trak, his DJ, was sharing space with Parisian house bigshots like DJ Mehdi, pretty funny considering that less than a year ago Kanye threw a bitchfit when Mehdi's Ed Banger labelmates Justice beat him out for an MTV Europe Award. And I guess it's not even all that surprising that Kanye would like Peter Bjorn & John's "Young Folks," since everyone likes that song. Still, it's tough to imagine, say, Fat Joe actually freestyling over that song on a damn mixtape. On the mixtape, Kanye also raps over tracks from the Thom Yorke solo album and from A-Trak's new dance-rap prospect (and, um, girlfriend) Kid Sister. If all that is any indication, he probably reads Brooklyn Vegan and listens to Yo Majesty and shit. If Kanye is actively trying to court a hipster audience, it's probably not for financial reasons. For one thing, he already has a hipster audience, as well as about fifty other audiences. And for another, hipsters don't buy music. So he's probably just rapping over Daft Punk and Peter Bjorn & John and Thom Yorke and Kid Sister because he really likes Daft Punk and Peter Bjorn & John and Thom Yorke and Kid Sister and because he thinks that these artists, in one way or another, all have something to do with the current moment. From what I can tell, Kanye's biggest professional obsession has always been to encapsulate some particular moment. It's a noble goal.

La la la la wait til I get my money right

I drove five hundred miles today. Memorial Day weekend being the official-unnofficial beginning of summer and all, it made a lot of sense to get out of town for the weekend, so I've spent the past three days in a cabin an hour north of Albany with my fiancee and my brother and some friends, drinking beer and playing wiffleball and shit. But that weekend out of town meant that my brother and I had to spend pretty much the entire day in a car today so that we could make it down to Maryland for my sister's high school graduation tomorrow. Fortunately, today turned out to be one of those insane and unpredictable great-for-driving days; there were points where we were driving over middle-of-nowhere valleys, coming to the peaks of hills and seeing miles of road sprawled out before us. Even better: I kept my iPod on shuffle the entire time (114 songs by the time we showed up in my parents' driveway), and most of the time it did a really good job finding songs that fit with everything going on around us. So I picked the best of those songs and put together a playlist, since it's been a while since I've done one of those. For those of you who live in New York, where the entire city will start to smell like complete ass sometime in the next couple of weeks, I encourage you strongly to rent cars, to track down those things that let you plug your iPods into cassette decks, to avail yourselves of this playlist, and to get the fuck out of town.

We really don't talk about this album cover enough

That's right: two running diaries in two days, conclusive proof that I watch too much TV. This is the second year of VH1's Rock Honors show, basically an attempt at a brand extension following the success of the Hip-Hop Honors show. But rock, for better or worse, doesn't have the same sort of consensus-based canon that rap does. The rock bands widely considered to be the most important or influential aren't generally the most commercially successful, and it's virtually impossible to imagine VH1 picking, like, the Velvet Underground for this show. Anyway, the Rock in the title of this show apparently just means 70s and 80s arena-rock, but I guess that would've made the name too long. I also have a creeping suspicion that this entire show is just a barely-disguised excuse to heavily promote Bret Michaels' new Flavor of Love show, which looks really grisly.

I can't believe it's going to be another seven months

Well, it's all come to this, the big showdown between good and evil, a girl who can sing against a guy who can rhythmically hiccup. We'll find out which one wins after two hours of glorious schmaltz, and you know what that means: another running diary.

8:00: Blake Lewis and Jordin Sparks kick things off by making stupid faces at each other while Ryan Seacrest solemnly intones their names. Feel the excitement!

8:02: Randy Jackson's suit has, like, paisley cuffs and lapels. It's not quite as eye-damaging as his Michael Jackson chain-jacket from last night, but it's pretty staggering nonetheless. Simon Cowell and Seacrest exchange vaguely homoerotic barbs one last time.

8:03: Blake and Jordin sing "I Saw Her Standing There" together, a song probably chosen entirely for the "she was just 17" line. (Jordin, you see, is just 17.) So far, this looks like an early-60s sock-hop movie. It's also Blake's second chance to disembowel a Lennon song! Yoko is caking!

It's. About. To go. Down.

This has been a totally weird, schizophrenic season for American Idol; the contestants have been vocally and stylistically all over the place, and stuff like Antonella Barba's nude pseudoporn internet pictures and Sanjaya Malakar's constant hair weirdness have overshadowed the actual performances most of the time. But considering that American Idol's music has traditionally been watery and boring as all hell, that's actually a good thing; it means this has been a totally chaotic and interesting year for the show. The big finale is tonight, and I'm actually sort of bummed that it's finally ending. So since last night's Beanie Sigel show was cancelled, here's my rundown of all the contestants who made the final twelve, in order of elimination.

Skree

The French electro duo Justice may be this year's fresh new dance music hope/hype, but the music on †, their just-leaked debut album, only barely qualifies as dance music. On a purely physical level, it's nearly as tough an album to listen to as anything I've heard from the No Fun Fest axis in recent years. The duo doesn't just ignore old dance constructs like flow and build and sweep; they actively work to sabotage them, pushing instead toward compression and distortion and disruption, doing everything they can to smash their own momentum. Everything falls all over itself. Melodies lumber awkwardly when they could swoop and soar, in-the-red synths always seem to be on the verge of decomposing completely, disco strings divebomb in from nowhere and disappear just as suddenly. The whole thing is a seething, violent mess, and even in its most accessible moments it never lets up. A few weeks ago, I had this to say about Justice: their "midrange-addled filter-metal bangers have the same problem as their Skint Records spiritual forbears: they've got coked-up delirium down, but they don't have a whole lot to offer beyond that." I was more right about Justice than I originally thought: † doesn't just exploit the adrenal exhilaration of coke; it also wallows in the gritted-teeth edginess that comes with the drug, a celebratory sort of stress. One song is actually called "Stress," and it's a perfect case in point, a jagged pileup of looped, layered, diced Bernard Herrmann strings that wriggle and dart and pound like jackhammers, eventually making room for sirens and dentists'-drill sound-effects. Seriously, I can't listen to this record without first gritting my teeth. It's chaotic and assaultive and relentless, and, um, I sort of like it.

Higher than a thumbtack on a flier of Reba McIntire somewhere up in the hood

Devin the Dude
Knitting Factory
May 18, 2007

Devin the Dude's music is so loose and unhurried that his live show presents an interesting problem: he has to make intimate, unobtrusive, shambling songs big enough to hold the attention of an entire roomful of people, a harder task than you might imagine. Most great rap shows rely on some combination of intensity and persona: the Roots furiously display their raw technique, T.I. projects his iconic swagger to enormous levels, M.O.P. scream the ceiling tiles down. But Devin never leans hard on either quality, so it's a little harder to explain just what made his Friday night Knitting Factory show so completely satisfying. Where other rappers work to build momentum onstage, Devin never really pushes the energy-levels, and it wouldn't make sense for him to try. Instead, he lets his songs ripple and breathe, standing onstage by himself, no hypemen, Matt Sonzala standing behind him cuing tracks and staying out of the way. He never yells, never even really talks loud, but we can always hear every word he says. He doesn't miss cues or fall off the beat, and he even stays steadfastly on key during his singsong choruses. For someone who raps so much about weed, he's a model of show-business professionalism, smoothly and seamlessly transitioning between tracks and talking to the audience like we're his roommates or something. His charisma isn't the larger-than-life type; it's more of an approachable drunk-uncle kind of thing. He makes the simple act of performing look much, much easier than it is.

Blood. Thunder.

Mastodon + Against Me + Cursive
Roseland
May 17, 2007

A while ago, I promised myself that I wouldn't go to Roseland again. Roseland is my least favorite venue in New York: the sound is terrible, there's nowhere on the floor where I can stand without blocking somebody's view, and the security guys always make some dumbshit joke about how tall I am. They also fuck up with the guest-lists more often than not, and it just never seemed worth the effort of talking my way into such a shitbox. I had to break that promise last night, though, since Roseland managed to book a show that I wouldn't forgive myself for missing. The three bands who played last night all share the same doggedly persistent touring work-ethics, and they all boast higher-than-average numbers of beards and tattoos, but they still made for as musically diverse a triple-bill as can fit into the limited parameters of underground rock. And so this made for an exciting prospect: three bands who'd spent years working the dingy underground-club circuit, all of whom are just now graduating to bigger things. Both Mastodon and Against Me have signed major-label contracts, and Cursive could probably have one if they wanted one. (The pretty great Chicago gothcore upstarts These Arms Are Snakes were supposed to open the show, but their van broke down, so they had to cancel.) All three bands come from different scenes, but all of those scenes have at least a few embryonic roots in the 80s basement-hardcore revolution. And so there's something organically defiant about these different sounds (Mastodon's epically elemental tech-metal, Against Me's bruisingly beery protest-punk, Cursive's depressive midwestern post-hardcore) moving out of the margins at the same time and sharing a big tent together. The big question was how well all these bands, all of whom are at or near the top of their respective scenes, would do in a venue as large and hostile as Roseland.

You definitely cannot see me in this picture (photo by Rebecca Smeyne)

Dan Deacon
Studio B
May 16, 2007

My brother Jim hates Dan Deacon. Jim just moved back to New York after a couple of years in Baltimore, and Deacon seems to play about five shows a day in Baltimore, so Jim ended up seeing Deacon a whole bunch of times before moving. Here's what Jim told me about Deacon's show, loosely paraphrased: "He tells some stupid long-ass story about, like, 'I had a dream where I walked into Spider-Man's dickhole,' and all these fucking MICA kids go nuts." (MICA is the Maryland Institute College of the Arts; native Baltimoreans love to hate on MICA kids.) I'd somehow never seen Deacon before last night; I went to at least a few shows that had Deacon on the bill before I moved from Baltimore to New York, but he always played before I showed up or while I was upstairs drinking or whatever. In some ways, I still haven't seen him, since I didn't catch more than a few disconnected glimpses last night. Deacon plays shows on the floor rather than on the stage, singing over a CD backing track and fiddling with an array of homemade electronics while the crowd surrounds him. If you stand maybe forty feet away from Deacon, you won't see him at all, even if you're as tall as me. What you'll see is a cluster of people at the center of the circle losing their shit and a few concentric circles of diminishing enthusiasm further back. At any given moment, at least half the people in the crowd are standing on their tiptoes and trying to see what's going on. What you'll hear won't be much different from the music on Deacon's new album Spiderman of the Rings (he does, after all, sing over a CD) interspersed with stage-patter that grinds self-conscious performance-art weirdness with pop-culture-addled ADD standup comedy (no stories about Spider-Man's dickhole last night, but they would've fit just fine).