So why see the world when you got the beach

Like I said, Frank Ocean literally shits on other R&B artists, I can't believe that at one point I actually preferred The Weeknd to Frank at one point but I suppose that was understandable due to the fact that The Weeknd had just come out with House Of Balloons and Thursday which my goodness I got lost into them. However with Echoes of Silence things started changing.

I found that while Echoes of Silences was good it just didn't grip me as much as the previous two mixtapes. There were certainly more high points on there in comparison to the third mixtape which was a tiny bit disappointing. Then came the features on blockbuster albums, The Weeknd on Drake's Take Care and Frank Ocean on Watch The Throne.

No square shall enter in the circle of winners

Curren$y would no doubt probably be one of my favourite artists if I smoked weed or something simply because the production he has on his songs and his flow and rhymes just is so amazing, laid back and is so chilled but as it stands I don't smoke weed but I still love Curren$y and his flow.

I don't remember the first time I heard him, I suppose it might have been Grown Man by Lil' Wayne featuring him but I didn't really pay much attention, even had Scared Of Monsters on my iPod for a long time and I still didn't think anything of him.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…and it is also trite

Trends in music...yes, it's so blatant and so poorly done every single time that it's just...bleh.

I bring this up because it's been on my mind lately and yeah, they have an obsession with beating something to death.

Remember auto tune? Yeah, remember the time where it was everywhere and it just got to the point were I was just thinking "come on now, you're late to the party and even so, you've arrived at the point where it's just annoying"

Go away and begone with you. I can’t stand you people making dance tracks anymore. I’m all for the expansion of a person’s musical repertoire but sometimes you really do have to know when to stay in your own lane.

You and I, we were born to die

I actually love how this happens, I'll just be oblivious to all the hype about a particular artist and then I'll decide to give it a listen before deciding HEEY This is reaally good!

Today or rather a few days ago I experienced that with Lana Del Ray and her "debut" album Born To Die. I say debut but really there was an album before apparently and was pulled or something like that.

Anyway for me music isn't about being the perfect singer or anything as for me the delivery and how you come across on the microphone and the lyrics will mean more to me than singing in perfect tune and melody ever could. I think that's why I'm hooked on artists such as The-Dream, The Weeknd and their kind of music as opposed to people like Usher because of the picture they can paint with their delivery and words.

Anyway with Lana Del Ray, I came into the album without any expectations and was...pleasantly surprised. Her breathless delivery, haunting melody and times of ecstasy just sends me into another world and has me hypnotised from the first verse of 'Born To Die' all the way to the last note on 'This Is What Makes Us Girls' (and even through the bonus songs as well) and I really enjoyed it.

I'm still not feeling Video Games but maybe sooner or later it will grow on me as it was the only single that I knew from her, in fact it was the only song that I knew from her and I hadn't even heard the song, simply saw it in the Top 40 one week and that was it, I didn't think I'd actually listen to the song but yeah it hasn't grown on me but there is still time.

She reminds me of Ellie Goulding and Marina and The Diamonds in that I'm eagerly awaiting their next album and that I want more of them but knowing that it will not be anytime soon if ever...and now I wish I hadn't reminded myself about Marina and The Diamonds as I reeeeeally enjoyed The Family Jewels...I think I need to give that another listen now.

So Born To Die is definitely is going to be my contender for album of the year and several songs will make my shortlist of top songs but hey, there's still the rest of the year to go

My book of rhymes

Okay here we go. So I'm listening to some Blueprint 3 outtakes and then I thought about the time I was just writing songs and then I went over to check some of them and then I was reminded of why I never really finish it, simply because I will look at a line or something while I'm in a different mindset that I originally thought was pretty good and then I think "What. The. Fuck. Was. That". I never know how to feel about some lines, whether to think "ohh that was pretty good to me" or "hmm, I don't like that line now". I can't completely reject them as that was my mindset at the time but ahh well. Maybe I should get back into it and actually really put thought into it but I know that's never really going to happen heh.

Projects to complete

1. Read The Zombie Survival Guide again because it’s such a good book
   
2. Join a gym to get fitter
   
3. Get back into updating this blog and consistently
   
4. Buy myself Niké CTR Astroturf trainers and football boots
   
5. Buy football shirts of teams that I like
   
6. Have at least one competitively viable Pokémon from every single family
   
7. Listen to songs and albums that I haven’t listened to on my iPod
   
8. Get songs and albums from artists whose discography I haven’t been keeping up with
   
9. Organise the songs I already do have on my iPod into categories
   
10. Buy myself an external hard drive
    
11. Get back into learning Spanish, French, Italian and Swedish
    
12. Get back into writing lyrics
    
13. Play the games that I bought but have yet to play. Bayonetta, Gears Of War, Assassin’s Creed, MadWorld, No More Heroes and some others
    
14. Read a list of manga. This includes Pokémon Special, Yu-Gi-Oh and many others, possibly Full Metal Alchemist but I may just watch the anime instead.
    
15. Play the games on my CycloDS iEvolution that I haven’t played
    
16. Learn some types of ballroom dancing such as the tango, waltz and others
    
17. Change my internet settings back to WPA (Danged Pokémon forced me to change to WEP)
    
18. Get my own place
    
19. Think of more items for this list

We Are Lasers

Lupe Fiasco has always been one of my favourite artists in music, his storytelling, wordplay and metaphoric rhymes have always been one to make me actually listen and pay attention to his songs so of course I was going to be pretty hyped for Lasers (Love Always Shines Everywhere, Remember 2 Smile)...whenever it was going to come out.

On first impressions, I was always going to be disappointed with the album as it had release date problems and label issues meant I was worried about how exactly this would turn out. I heard Shining Down and liked it but it was obvious that it was a song for radio and all that, I also heard I'm Beaming which I also liked but again, was a song for the radio but it was all good, but I was still waiting for the album.

Then I got wind of the track list and such is the recent trend that's been going round, it was 12 tracks.

No. No. And no. Getting hyped up for this album for 12 tracks, I was somewhat disappointed as I don't know, I was expecting a 15+ album but what can you do. Upon further inspection of the track listing you had to note the complete lack I'm Beaming and Shining Down (later added as bonus tracks) and no Matthew Santos or Gemstones. This was going to be different, wait what. Trey Songz is one of the guests? Oh...kay, that's worrying. Sway is on it? Interesting, I was curious to hear how that goes as I want to hear how Sway's style would fit into it. This will be an interesting album.

Then Words I Never Said and All Black Everything came out and I had sort of learned from the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy saga not to listen to it as it will spoil my listening of the album and there weren't many tracks on the album so I wanted to enjoy it as a whole. Anyway, after finally listening to the album, I felt slightly...meh, nothing special here, my most liked tracks being the bonus tracks, 'Words I Never Said', 'Never Forget You' and 'All Black Everything' and the others were okay, not brill but okay with lots of people slating 'I Don't Wanna Care Right Now' and the use of auto tune. I conceded that this wasn't a patch on Food & Liquor and The Cool but I think that was expected but was the album going to be consigned to the graveyard on my iPod along with others or would it be getting constant plays at various times?

It's not horrendous, no, not at all, in fact it's starting to grow on me, even that Trey Songz song 'Outta My Head' and that I do like some of the tracks but then when I give recent tracks like SLR (TEN FO'!), Fire, We Can Do It Now and Go To Sleep, I just think, it could have been better and that.

Here's hoping his next few albums are amazing again, right now I'm going to listen to it all again.

My song choices II

One song that’s been getting heavy play on my iPod recently is a G.O.O.D Friday track form Kanye West which features various guests. Christian Dior Denim Flow by Kanye West with John Legend, Pusha T, Ryan Leslie, Lloyd Banks and Kid Cudi is one that I suppose I would be disappointed that it didn’t make the cut for the album but nonetheless it’s still song that I will very much like and if I had a car, I would be playing this in it.

My Album Choices

Albums. They can be so many things, whether it’s just a collection of songs put together by the artist, whether it,s a story trying to be told or whatever, album fulfil so many uses.

Nowadays with the ease that you can pull apart an album, sometimes a whole album isn’t really listened to. There are songs where sure it’s not good and to your own tastes it’s pretty poor and as an individual song it’s not up to much but what it does have is that it fits in with the rest of the album which can boost my liking of a song for me. I like to think of an album as a journey and that I allow the songs on it take me on that journey, a good album for me is one that takes me there successfully while I’ve heard albums that have good songs, as a whole it’s meh.

Anyway I got to thinking about albums and despite my never having favourites in anything really I attempted with a top albums I like, I wanted to really think about it, really listen to it and decide what were in fact my most loved albums and not what the critics and the fanbase deemed the best albums. Never really understood how you can do that really as people will have different experiences in life which meant they would look at an album in a different perspective to another but anyway here goes.

Outkast- Stankonia

This is actually the last physical copy of an album I have ever brought…ever. Even when it was preferred that I downloaded my music so it could go on my iPod I still brought this album. I remember the scene so well, I had gone in HMV in Newbury and I had a five pound note in my pocket and wasn’t really planning on buying anything, I was just browsing through really and this caught my eye and I thought, “Why not?”. I am so glad I made that decision.

There is not a single song I hate on this album, all the songs with the exception of We Luv Deez Hoes have a 4 star or more and it would be a 4 and half star if I could do that but I can’t. It actually has the most 5 star songs (9) on the album than any other album I have, they all have a sufficient number of plays on it and I just love it to bits.

My favourite in terms of play count is Toilet Tisha but as I looked at that I thought wait…this doesn’t actually count the amount of times I listened to B.O.B on the CD’s, previous iPods and video games it featured in but that really would be another of my favourites on this album if not all time favourite song.

The whole album is just simply amazing, whether it’s the duo going back and forth on Spaghetti Junction, members of the Goodie Mobb also getting in on the action on Gangster Shit or whether it’s the final song Stankonia (Stank Love), this is just an amazing album to listen to and one I will never ever get bored of listening to at all.

My song choices

Yes yes, I’m years late to the party but every once in a while I will listen to a song and it will just grab me and I love it, this happens a lot of the times for all sorts of different reason which I probably explained in one of my earlier posts but anyway Between Me, You & Liberation by Common featuring Cee-Lo Green is a song that a few days ago I rated it five stars on my iPod and there it’ll stay. I guess for the first time I had the chance to really listen to the song and I mean really listen to it and you know what I love it. In the song he talks about sexual abuse, losing someone to cancer and his own homophobia and it’s an incredibly deep song which is always refreshing for me to listen to.

I definitely prefer the albums with a lot more songs on them...depends really

Wow, music is changing and it reflects the times as well. I've noticed it especially recently though it has been happening for a while but albums are just getting shorter and shorter. There are many reasons for this and many that have been heard before so I'm probably not exactly going to contribute any new ideas to this but here goes anyway.

The MP3 format and the fact we can now pick and choose what songs we want and then discard the rest in the metaphorical digital bin from places like iTunes and that that I guess it makes no more sense for artists to create an album with 'fillers' but for me those 'fillers' was what made the album as well and one person's idea of filler doesn't necessarily equate to another. I have many 4 and 5 star songs that a lot of people would consider to be crap tunes and rubbish but I say the same thing every single time, music is always going to be heavily subjective. I suppose people have fooled themselves into thinking you can have a 'good' and 'bad' song and there are certain qualities which make that so but for me, music is all about what is appealing to your ears. That ear worm of a pop tune that nobody you know seems to like but you yourself gets to number one on the charts yet no matter where you go or the reviews you read everyone slates it as a bad song but hang on, what defines a bad song? Surely the fact that it got to number one alone means enough people liked it to send it there? (Of course this is not counting the overexposure of certain songs or because it was featured or associated with a certain show/film/etc).