What surprised me most about Def Jam Rapstar, a new Sing Star-like videogame with a unique angle that should be fairly self-explanatory, is just how much a change in genre could distinguish one rhythm game from the glut of Guitar Hero knockoffs crowding the market. My friends and I have poured countless hours into Rock Band—still the crown jewel of the genre thanks to its unrivaled availability of downloadable content—since its release in late 2007, but despite the continued efforts by every game developer out there to produce bigger and better iterations of more or less the same product, there just hasn’t been any incentive to move on to something new. But the problem with Rock Band has always been right there in the title: we’re necessarily restricted to the confines of rock n’ roll. Which, I mean: fair enough, because “Ride the Lightning” or some shit is a lot more conducive to hardcore simulacral drumming than, like, Tim Hecker would be. But as a general rule, the kinds of songs that are the most fun to play plastic guitars and plastic drums along to are also the kinds of songs that are the least fun to sing. Which is why if you bust out, say, “Reptillia,” nobody wants to be Julian Casablancas. Rock Band does try to mitigate the issue a bit with the inclusion of songs more in line with a modern karaoke playlist, but if you’ve spent five seconds strumming along to nonexistent guitar parts on “Bad Romance” you know why that’s really no better.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Def Jam, Rapstar

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So apparently I’m too late and Spike Jonze has demanded that the entire Internet, and that includes Kanye, take down this video of “We Were Once A Fairytale,” his short film exposure of Kanye’s downward spiral into a hell of Yeezy’s own making, a place where Kanye can do nothing but play with the ruinous vestiges of his fame and indulge the swelling appetite of his infamy. The purpose of Spike’s copyright plea can only be that no one see the video, the Internet being the one place where most people will get to see the full thing. So what’s the deal? Why make a video then not let people watch it? If you’re one of the five Glow readers who hasn’t seen this beast already, let me just spell out the awful wonder of it all for you: Kanye stumbles around bars and clubs, trying to spit game and boasting over how “See You in My Nightmares” is his song, getting stoopid and then mistaking a pillow for a tryst, all culminating in a bathroom trip with some serious disembowelment. And I’m not talking shitting, though shitting is what Kanye does all over every moment of this fairly horrifying inlet into his psyche. Is Jonze’s removal request an attempt to protect us, maybe? Protect Kanye? Or himself? All of the above? You’re right, Spike, this shit is private.

⊙ Keyword Tags: David Lynch, Kanye West, See You In My Nightmares, Spike Jonze, Wtf

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Towards the end of You Weren’t There, someone laments that Chicago has been forgotten in punk rock’s history outside of Steve Albini’s contributions. But the documentary itself seems hellbent on proving that’s how it should stay. Albini figures in every discussion—one subsection consists exclusively of him talking shit to Articles of Faith’s Vic Bondi—and provides the film’s most lucid and nuanced insights into the city’s various scenes. His take on bands is treated not as his but as Truth. And in the film’s final third, the emergence of Big Black becomes the city’s capstone achievement, the grand final fuck-you sound everything was building toward.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Big Black, Chicago, Punk, Steve Albini, You Weren't There

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It’s been nearly forty years since Ethiopia boiled over with the revolutionary politics that claimed thousands of innocent lives and nearly killed the proud East African nation’s sultry and horn-driven music. Thankfully, after the Dergue regime’s blood-soaked revolution came to an end in 1991, the producers of Éthiopiques took on the honorable task of distributing to a wide audience the musical epoch that began in the ’60s with auxiliary police bands in the capital, Addis Ababa. Today, the series is epic and irresistible, boasting 23 volumes of reissues and surveys of musical styles, plus a new sister DVD series called Éthiosonic that seeks to document collaborations between Ethiopian musical legends and contemporary artists. Stéphane Jourdain film 11 Ethio-Punk Songs, the second Éthiosonic installment, documents a jawdropping set of live collaborations between the master saxophone player Gétatchèw Mekurya, the Dutch avant-punk band the Ex, and a battery of horn players who keep the performances true to Ethiopian music’s expressive form.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Ex, Gétatchèw Mekurya

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Here's a DVD that was released seven months ago. The ten pieces that compose it were completed in 2002 and exhibited in a number of Agnes b. boutiques in Japan, a year later shown at the CAI Gallery in Hamburg, Germany. Since then, Takagi Masakatsu, a multimedia artist from Kyoto, has participated in over thirty exhibitions and screenings, eight of which were solo, somewhere around there, all ove ...read more

⊙ Keyword Tags: Takagi Masakatsu

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J.L. Aronson's handmade wonder about Daniel Smith and the Smith family has finally found a DVD release, and while the Special Features read like laundry lists of fan bits and ephemera, the bulk is never too demanding or esoteric to be indulgent. That standard of humility permeates the movie all the way to its open end, and Aronson makes a point to call his contribution a "realiz[ation]" -- pouring ...read more

⊙ Keyword Tags: Br Danielson, Danielson, Sufjan Stevens

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Thax Douglas is a laconic man trapped in a loud body. He's also a man frighteningly at ease with his carry; we watch him tread slowly down faceless streets, the same trundling step wherever he goes, with whatever he says. Sometimes what he admits is unnerving, even shocking, but Thax seems ignorant of the effect his stories have on those not familiar with him. Or maybe he's invulnerable to the imp ...read more

⊙ Keyword Tags: Thax Douglas

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There’s this one beat, four tracks into Liquid Swords, that simply shouldn’t exist within this time-space continuum. Over a down-and-up-again fire-breathing guitar riff and marching-into-war bass drums, an ear-piercing synthline meanders menacingly, a host of horns and chants seemingly stretched to infinity in the distant background. Bassline, drums, synthline, spookiness: these are cen ...read more

⊙ Keyword Tags: Wu-tang Clan

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