My Review of The Get Down

This is my review of the Get Down. There will be spoilers so if you haven't watched the Part One of Season One of The Get Down, here is your stop. For everyone else, proceed to reading after the jump.

The Week In Geek: 11/4/15

This Week In Bad Journalism....Complex Magazine just established themselves as the most irrelevant rag in hip hop right now. Recently, Complex just dropped an article basically slandering Kendrick Lamar's latest album To Pimp A Butterfly in a roundabout fashion. In response, the internet lost its shit as it tends to do. Granted, social media is a breeding ground for kneejerk reactions, but it hasn't even been a year yet and we already have think pieces looking back on an album that dropped a little more than six months ago, dissecting it the way Vulture examines The Karate Kid or The Breakfast Club. 

It's reflective of the overall problem with hip hop journalism. Even if you're just reporting on the bullshit like how Rapper A was seen at a club with Rapper B's girlfriend, journalism is meant to inform. Now, YES, I clearly understand (as is evident by this blog) the allure in the human element of op-ed writing. After all, information is only so useful without context. But when you're trashing an album that your own publication JUST GAVE 4.5 STARS OUT OF FIVE, it's blatantly disingenuous. I'm not going to go through and redline the whole article but this one passage sums up the overall problem pretty well.

"Why, in 2015, would a recently platinum-selling rapper make a jazz album with Lalah Hathaway, Ron Isley, and George Clinton?" 

I've read enough of Complex to know that they're not stupid, that they know their roots. They knew how powerful it was to have such greats as George Clinton and Lalah Hathaway on an album tailor made for an African American Studies course in college. So, why throw such "old fogey" shade? The answer is simple: somewhere along the way, Complex found it to be more profitable to become the inexperienced 19 year olds they're supposed to be informing. They might have had more credibility if this weren't an album they'd previously lauded for its chaotic sound, but then, this was clearly an attempt to be contrary for contrary's sake to fuel the fire of a conversation that isn't really happening. As much as we hate comment sections on the internet, we are bizarrely drawn to them at the same time. They're the new "train wreck". Gawker does opinion pieces about poignant exchanges within them all the time. The human equivalent of a comment section is not only running for President, but blue shelling his counterparts in the polls. So, it's only natural that, in the interest of selling clicks, there will be some organizations that become the Lowest Common Denominator and invoke a comment section mentality. But then, this is the way of hip hop publications. The Source handed out 5 mic ratings like free samples until they glad handed themselves right out of relevance. As hip hop evolves, the people chronicling it should evolve as well. Otherwise, you have old fogeys sitting on the mountaintop, preaching about a culture they're not actively trying to understand in its present form.

My review for the week on The Invincible Iron Man is available on Black Nerd Problems for your viewing enjoyment. As always, feel free to read, view, comment and share at your leisure. And don't forget about my ongoing webcomic, Neverland: The Untold.

The Week In Geek 7/29/15

So, this week was (depending on how you look at it) a big week in the world of hip hop....well, the closest Top 40 Radio can seem to get to the world of hip hop. The Drake/Meek Mill slap fight came to a fever pitch.

For those of you that don't know or care, Meek Mill threw a fit because Drake didn't tweet any promos for his album. In response, because Meek Mill is apparently a fifth grader, this led to him exposing Drake for having ghostwriters that wrote some of his songs (It's important that we acknowledge that "ghostwriters" are a long standing, behind the scenes part of hip hop and that the ONLY reason this particular case is news is because Drake is a top selling artist who is often lauded for his lyricism), kicking off a huge a much hyped rap battle for about a week. Long story short, Drake completely humiliated Meek and basically re-polarized the public perception of him and his relationship with Nicki Minaj. In the end, I highly doubt the majority of Drake's audience will give a shit who wrote what and the "ghostwriter" stigma will be left to the hip hop heads who are, sorry to say, in shorter supply by the day, but I digress.

SN: By the way, I'm not touching the whole rumored Drake/Nicki love triangle because I'm not in the mood to break down the stereotypes and problematic gender politics of the whole thing. 

But most of this is just context to my real point this week. Early in the week, (S)Hot 97's court jester, Funkmaster Flex threw himself into the beef in the same way Stephen A. Smith throws himself on the wrong side of EVERYTHING for attention, claiming Meek Mill had given him the reference tracks Quentin Miller had recorded that would prove to be a phony. True to form, when the appointed time presented itself for Flex to play the tracks, he just looped music from Rihanna and someone named Fetty Wap. In an attempt to save face, Ebro claimed Meek failed to deliver the tracks. Whether that's true, given their track record, is still in the "decided for yourself" pile. 

Let me break that down for you one more time. Rot 97 took sides in a beef when NOBODY asked them to. Then, when the beef turned out not to be as profitable as they blindly bet on it being, they then threw the person whose side they took when nobody asked them to....UNDER THE BUS. 

As you could imagine, Twitter lambasted Flex and deservedly so. Charlamagne Tha God from the Breakfast Club had the most accurate and poignant statement during his Donkey of the Day segment on why this marks the end of Funkmaster Flex and, ultimately, (T)Hot 97's credibility. 

More than that, it's a testament to why more and more people are walking away from terrestrial radio. It's been clear since the time Flex tried to go to war with Jay-Z over the histrionics of some Android app (if you haven't heard the Hannibal Burress parody, you should) that he and (S)Hot 97 are desperate to throw themselves into the bonfire because their marketing department says their listeners will watch the pretty lights their disreputable corpses make. But also because music just isn't the commodity for Terrestrial Radio it once was.

Comics are actually making some attempt to keep up with the digital age, but even then, we've established before that they have a pretty loyal niche following no matter how vocal the whiners and trolls are. And with newspapers, they're not as bankable as they used to be but even in the age of Google, you still have the attraction of good journalists and personalities that readers will stand by like Ezra Klein or Chris Hayes or....God help me....Charles Krauthammer. Top 40/Terrestrial Radio's attempt to follow that model (extreme personalities; shock radio) will always fail because the music is always going to be what's important (unless you just listen to NPR which is a different conversation because, let's face it, Funkmaster Flex and Ebro Darden are not and will never be NPR) and Terrestrial Radio is just NOT a preferable source to discover (I won't even say "good") new music anymore. Looking past the increasingly obvious fact that airplay is a bought and sold currency, you have wi-fi, bluetooth, smart phones, tablets.....commonplace gadgets that people use everyday before the thought of a radio even crosses their minds. Hell, at this point, cars have built in wi-fi hotspots and televisions have enough connectability to link your laptops and mp3 players (which are basically outmoded, too). I've been an Uber customer for a few months now and I have yet to see a driver that didn't have either Pandora/Spotify playing from their phone, linked to their car. We're at the juncture where if you don't want to hear the same 15 to 20 songs from the same 7 to 10 artists playing in the same two hour timespan (with 20 to 35 minutes worth of commercials peppered in for advertisting dollars), you just don't have to. Hell, we're three software updates away from having the song we want when we want it by literally snapping our fingers. But instead of changing with the times and trying to appeal to their audience, diversifying their playlists, allowing artists who deserve it the opportunity to crossover from Urban Contemporary, the Usual Suspects are breaking their tired backs trying to shuck and jive way too hard. And all it really amounts to is an insult to the consumers which are way smarter than they're given credit for....who you're already actively insulting by not giving them the diversity they're wanting.

Sure, the Meek Mill/Drake beef was funny and the desperation of Funkmaster Flex was, umm, sad....but the demise of Terrestrial Radio is a thing worth discussing.

My reviews for the week on Thors and Star Wars as well as my Top 5 Dead or Alive article on Superman are up and available on Black Nerd Problems for your viewing pleasure. Feel free to share, comment, like, Tweet at your discretion. You know the drill.