Prophets of Rage, the supergroup featuring members of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill, will release its debut EP, The Party's Over, on August 26th via Caroline Records.
The five-track ...
This article originally appeared on www.rollingstone.com: Prophets of Rage Prep Debut EP 'The Party's Over'
Watch: George Takei sends a message in Spanish about how we can defeat Trump
George is doing such important work right now. I’m so grateful he’s speaking out.
Houseboat neighborhood on the Mississippi River near Winona, Minnesota.
Contributed by Jim Ward
Mike, CEO of the Useless Duck Company, continues to make us laugh with his hilarious Arduino innovations. Despite all the comical projects, which range from a fedora that tips itself to an automated toilet paper-dispensing machine, he may be onto something with one of his more recent contraptions.
If you don’t want Google Chrome to save a record of what you visit and download, you can always surf the web in incognito mode. However, what happens if your loved one bursts into the room without warning? With hopes of solving this all-too-common problem, he has created a door that automatically locks itself whenever you open a private browser–a perfect way to prevent your wife or significant other from catching you… shopping for gifts online.
Mike hooked his PC up to an Arduino Uno that’s connected to a servo-controlled lock. A self-written program then checks all of the browsers running on his computer, and if it finds one in incognito mode, it sends a signal to the Arduino to bolt the door.
On the second night of Radiohead‘s tour behind the release of their new album A Moon Shaped Pool back in May, the band opted to perform a wide variety of songs from across their discography. They graced the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam, Netherlands on May 21 with everything from The Bends b-side “Talk Show Host” to a brief snippet of “Creep” to the outro of the instrumental “Hunting Bears,” from Amnesiac.
Radiohead has long been known for their diverse set lists, but what makes this show notable is that YouTube user Johnny Airbag put in a bunch of work and created a complete-show video compiled from fan-shot footage. He found video from over 30 sources and searched Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram to find them. The clips are all set to a single audio recording of the show, which is definitely of listenable quality (via Consequence of Sound).
All in all, it’s a completely enjoyable project, but it’s also not the first of its kind: Radiohead themselves have previously approved the creation of similar full-concert, fan-shot videos, back in 2010 and 2012. The band even provided the editors with official soundboard audio, so the result would sound as professional as possible.
Watch the show above, and find the setlist below.
Radiohead May 21, 2016 setlist (Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam, Netherlands):
“Burn the Witch”
“Daydreaming”
“Decks Dark”
“Desert Island Disk”
“Ful Stop”
“Lucky”
“There There”
“Lotus Flower”
“All I Need”
“Talk Show Host”
“Identikit”
“The Numbers”
“Present Tense”
“Separator”
“Nude”
“The National Anthem” (with “Hunting Bears” outro)
“Everything in Its Right Place”
Encore:
“Give Up the Ghost” (followed by “Creep” tease)
“How to Disappear Completely”
“Karma Police”
“Bloom”
“Street Spirit (Fade Out)”
Encore #2:
“Bodysnatchers”
“Idioteque”
Featured Image: YouTube/Johnny Airbag
“Music-wise right now, I suck.”
In 2014, Schoolboy Q bluntly described his difficulty staying off lean, and what the drug had done to his art and personal life. He told radio personality Angie Martinez that he’d managed to keep it at arms’-length while recording his major label debut, Oxymoron, but that as soon as the album was done, he’d had something of a relapse.
Listening to the album though, you suspected that Q may have been dabbling before the record was mixed. Lean leads to bloat, and while Oxymoron featured plenty of memorable moments, it had too much empty material to fully capitalize on the promise of the rapper’s snarling sophomore album, Habits & Contradictions. Q’s enormous personality had been downsized, his sharp edges smoothed, his straight-talking iconoclasm receding into rote gangsterisms. So while Oxymoron was received positively upon release, enthusiasm soon dwindled for the record and for the rapper once thought by many to be the slyer, less-earnest equal of his TDE labelmate Kendrick Lamar.
Two years later, Quincy Matthew Hanley says he’s no longer addicted. He’s lost 30 pounds and with his second album for Interscope, Blank Face, he’s returned to the trajectory that had him looking like the yin to Kendrick’s yang. Q’s unpredictable flow, as likely to morph into a bizarrely appealing sing-song melody as it is to shift to sneering double-time, has returned. With it comes a collection of catchy, urgent gangster rap songs that show the South Central native at his charismatic best, gallows humor and tough talk failing to obscure a humane core.
The new record is loaded with features, a warning sign of scattershot focus on most major label albums. But Q’s voice holds the center of nearly every track on Blank Face. Anderson .Paak, rap’s scene stealer of the year to date, is compelling as ever on the album’s title track, but it’s Quincy who grounds the narrative, his spoken-word verses painting a past on Hoover Street and a future with the daughter he refers to as both a munchkin and a queen. Kanye West and Vince Staples, two of the biggest personalities in hip-hop, trade bars with Q without overshadowing him, and the songs on which they’re featured, “That Part” and “Ride Out,” are standouts that nonetheless fit seamlessly into the course of the record as a whole. (Miguel is the only exception to the rule of polite guests: His smooth hook and Q’s sandpaper verses repel each other on the late-album misfire, “Overtime.”)
We’re accustomed to seeing concept albums from TDE, but Blank Face strays from the polemic, reaching instead for portraiture. Q’s verses are built from concrete details and raw emotion, and his flexibility is such that he’s able to channel two seemingly conflicting emotions into a single verse. His bitterness will be palpable, one moment; in the next, pride shines through. “Guess I’m being a real n**** like I’m ‘pposed to be,” he raps on “Lord Have Mercy. “But being real never once brought the groceries.” Then, in the span of a couple bars: “Hope was all that I needed/dreaming myself to work. The working affair was better than bullet holes in my shirt.”
Tracks like “Groovy Tony/Eddie Kane,” which was produced in part by TDE producer and frequent Q collaborator, Tae Beast, signal a return to the collective’s house sound. Blank Face turns away from the ambitious fusion of To Pimp a Butterfly, instead doubling down on a smoked-out atmosphere that points the listener’s focus toward rapping. That puts the onus on Q to hold attention for the duration of the record’s hour-plus running time, and he does so with a wide array of tricks, lacing his bars with tone and tempo shifts, a melodicism reminiscent of a young 50 Cent, and ad-libs worthy of Jadakiss, whose signature growling delivery and descriptions of Tony Soprano-esque nihilism provide a thrill on the back half of the track (the first part of which was released as a single without Jada in April.”)
Schoolboy Q’s resemblance to those stars—both of whom flamed out to some degree as the commercial and creative center shifted away from gangster rap—is natural. Unlike Drake, or Future and Young Thug, Q’s music doesn’t represent a definitive break with the past. Instead, he symbolizes something of a road not taken, a gangster rapper with the personality and pop instincts to translate an antiquated genre for younger listeners, something like YG’s work with DJ Mustard. Q’s early hits, “Hands on the Wheel” and “There He Go,” were classic rap songs with pop appeal, and Q continues to ably tread that tightrope on Blank Face, with tracks like the E-40 feature “Dope Dealer” and “Whateva U Want,” which somehow makes a trance beat work.
But it’s Q’s reemergence as a distinctive voice that makes Blank Face so welcome. Quincy isn’t the preaching type, but he’s a careful observer both of his own tendencies and those of the world he occupies. Bluster and braggadocio are traditions in rap, but while Q spews plenty of both, he also has a penchant for telling it like it is. In our current political moment, that makes some of the songs on Blank Face particularly unforgettable. “Black Thoughts” features some of the most moving production from TDE familiar Willie B, as Schoolboy Q raps the blues: “Ole gangsta crip, my papa was a bitch/ left me while hope just don’t exist.” It’s one of many points on the record where Q casts something like a documentary eye on his own surroundings.
In the early morning on July 7th, Q tweeted out four bars from “Neva Change,” the blistering centerpiece of Blank Face: “You see them lights get behind us/They pull me out for my priors/Won’t let me freeze ‘fore they fire/You say that footage a liar.” The song was most likely recorded months prior. But hours after Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer while reaching for his license and the aftermath of the encounter was watched by millions, the rapper’s words were more timely than most reporting.
Quentin Tarantino has the kind of career just about any filmmaker would envy. He’s worked with huge names like Leonardo DiCaprio and Ennio Morricone, revived John Travolta’s career, and transformed Christoph Waltz and Michael Fassbender into international stars. His films are hits with budding cinephiles, picky critics, and general audiences alike. They’re constantly quoted in casual conversations, pored over for thinkpieces, and memorialized on dorm room posters.
But even so, Tarantino has no intention of doing this forever. The filmmaker has long maintained that he plans to quit directing after his tenth film, and he recently reiterated that that’s still the case. For those keeping count, The Hateful Eight was his eighth film, since Tarantino counts both Kill Bills as one movie.
Variety reports Tarantino recently stopped by the Jerusalem Cinematheque to present Pulp Fiction and deliver a long, wide-ranging talk. Among other things, he revealed that he only plans to direct two more films:
I’m planning on stopping at 10. So it’ll be two more. Even if at 75, if I have this other story to tell, it would still kind of work because that would make those 10. They would be there and that would be that. But the one he did when he was an old fucking man, that geriatric one exists completely on its own in the old folks’ home and is never put in the same shelf next to the other 10. So it doesn’t contaminate the other 10.
Tarantino has mentioned this ten-film plan several times in the past. Here he is in 2012:
I just don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker. I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film fucks up three good ones. … When directors get out-of-date, it’s not pretty.
I don’t believe you should stay on stage until people are begging you to get off. I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more. I do think directing is a young man’s game and I like the idea of an umbilical cord connection from my first to my last movie. I’m not trying to ridicule anyone who thinks differently, but I want to go out while I’m still hard. … I like that I will leave a ten-film filmography, and so I’ve got two more to go after this.
Obviously, it’s not always the case that directors get worse as they get older. Just last year, we (along with everyone else on the planet) were singing the praises of Mad Max: Fury Road directed by George Miller, who was 70 years old when the film came out. And Tarantino has acknowledged that he could change his mind. Maybe he’ll feel differently after movie nine or movie ten.
As for what the ninth of his ten movies will be, Tarantino hasn’t confirmed anything. But he has floated a few possibilities over the years. He mentioned earlier this year that he was looking at a 1930s gangster movie set in Australia, and Morricone has spilled that he and Tarantino are planning to work together again. Whatever it is, just don’t take it for granted — it could be the second-last Tarantino film you’ll ever see.
The post Quentin Tarantino Only Has Two Movies Left appeared first on /Film.
Benjamin Bennett makes ad-free videos of himself silently sitting in a corner of a room and smiling at the camera. He live streams each one and saves them on his YouTube channel. He posted his 220th one today. (One commenter said it's the "best episode yet.")
Bennett launched a Kickstarter in 2015 to fund 200 hours of sitting and smiling. It was unsuccessful but it didn't stop him from doing it anyway.
I sit and smile for 4-hour durations, and stream it live on YouTube. By the end of this Kickstarter campaign, I will have sat and smiled for 100 episodes, or 400 hours. I will soon be moving to another city, leaving my part-time job, and so will need a new way to support myself. It is my wish to turn Sitting and Smiling into my job, and this fundraiser could be the beginning of that. If viewers support this project, it would allow me to devote more time and energy to Sitting and Smiling, increasing the frequency and quality of the videos.
My goal for this campaign is to make $8 per hour of sitting and smiling for the next 200 hours. My deadline for completing the next 200 hours is August 31st, 2015. I am giving myself leeway because I am moving, but if all goes well with the move, I will be able to finish well before the deadline.
The money will go a long way, covering my bills and living expenses, which are quite low by most people's standards. I may also purchase a more comfortable sitting cushion, to replace my chunks of mattress foam.
This is amazing.
