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Jody Rosen: Jonah, let's cut to the chase: John Mayer is a douchebag. Or, rather, he's a meta-douchebag—a guy who's smart enough, self-aware enough, to know that he's a douchebag, and to meditate on douchebaggery and its discontents in his music.
And so we turn to ''Who Says,'' the first single from Mayer's fourth album, Battle ...
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One of the most important components of a rap performance is one of the easiest to overlook: What a rapper chooses to do with his hands when he's rapping. Notwithstanding hip-hop's ancestral sibling, break dancing, it's a resilient trope in the genre that MCs don't dance—some might bop a little bit, rock their shoulders some, but ...
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Jonah Weiner: Hi, Jody. In deciding the song we'd discuss this week we considered a few candidates, but ''Ambling Alp'' excited us most. Yeasayer is a New York band, and this is the lead single from its forthcoming 2010 album, Odd Blood. We start the song ankle-deep in noise, out of which bursts an ecstatic eighth-note clatter, snares that ...
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Late last month, I wrote an essay about Miley Cyrus's ''Party in the USA,'' a song produced and co-written by Lukasz Gottwald. Gottwald, who also goes by Dr. Luke, has had his Swedish fingerprints all over pop radio for several years, and around the same time the Cyrus piece ran, the video for another of his creations hit the Web: a ...
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Yesterday, ''RIP Kanye West'' was a trending topic on Twitter—the result, it turned out, of a hoax involving a Photoshopped version of the Fox News Web site announcing the rapper's death in a car crash.
This was West's second brush with fake death in four days. On Sunday evening, the music video for his song ''See You In My Nightmares'' leaked ...
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In a new Browbeat feature, Slate critics Jody Rosen and Jonah Weiner discuss a recent pop song that has caught their attention. This week, they take on the new single from Shakira.
Jody Rosen: Hi, Jonah. Coming to you live from a cafe in brownstone Brooklyn where, needless to say, some sad-sack indie balladeer is whimpering away on the ...
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On Dec. 27, 1999, Sean ''Diddy'' Combs, Jennifer Lopez, and Jamal ''Shyne'' Barrow—Combs' protégé at the time, who purported to be the disowned son of the prime minister of Belize—went to a Manhattan nightclub. When they left, three people had been injured by gunfire (one had been struck, nonfatally, in the face), and Combs, Lopez, ...
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In a new Browbeat feature, Slate critics Jody Rosen and Jonah Weiner will discuss a recent pop song that has caught their attention. This week, they take on Vampire Weekend's ''Horchata,'' which the band has made available for free download.
Jody Rosen: I'm predisposed to like this song because of the title. I do love horchata. Such creamy, ...
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Two weeks ago in The New Yorker, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a profile of the rapper MF Doom that doubles as a eulogy for hip-hop's so-called ''Golden Era''—Coates celebrates Doom as an eccentric holdover from a time when hip-hop actually brooked eccentricity. Around 1998, he argues, the genre took a nose dive into rank commercialism, and ...
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Jay-Z releases his 11th studio album, The Blueprint 3, on Friday—a day that marks the eighth anniversary of both 9/11 and, as he's intent on reminding us, The Blueprint, a 2001 album regarded as one of his finest, which hit record stores that same fateful Tuesday. Invoking the World Trade Center attacks as part of a marketing strategy ...