mrhaironline

If you ever get annoyed when people ask simple questions that can always be answered by typing the question into Google, rather than answering their question, just respond with “Use the fucking Google!” and send them here:

I didn’t notice this until today, but the Kings of Leon picked up three nominations:

Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals
Sex On Fire

Best Rock Song
Sex On Fire

Best Rock Album
Only By The Night

Sex on Fire is a really good song, but with them going up against Coldplay in these categories, I’m pretty sure the Grammy will go to the more widely known band. It’s also unfortunate that the Grammys are worthless - Kid Rock is also nominated for Best Rock Album which is completely ridiculous. Kid fucking Rock? Seriously. Also curious is the lack of nominations for Because of the Times for the 2008 Grammys because that album was far better than Only by the Night. It seems to me the only reason Only by the Night is nominated is due to Sex on Fire getting a shitload of radio play.

Anyway, here’s the link to the full list: http://www.grammy.com/Grammy_awards/51st_show/list.aspx. The show is on Febuary 8th.

So ever since I threw up a Wordpress instance I’ve been ignoring the whole “comment spam” situation. After all, my old software, Mambo, had really good spam prevention built in. Little did I realize Askimet - the anti-spam plugin that ships with Wordpress - doesn’t become enabled by default. Doh! Turns out that in the 6 months or so that I’ve been on Wordpress, I racked up, oh, over 37,000 spam comments!

Here’s what I think of that much spam:

Then:

Eat it.

Also, you all need to be watching The IT Crowd. It’s a British show about a couple of techs and the random crap they do. It’s actually pretty funny most of the time. Below is a section of the latest episode. Because their boss knows nothing about computers yet received the Employee of the Month award, they convince her that a small black box with a blinking light is the internet, and that she should bring it to a corporate meeting. Meanwhile, the boss of the whole company, Douglas, breaks up with his girlfriend because she’s a transsexual. Previously she told him she used to be “a man”, but he thought she said she was from Iran. Hahahaha…watch!

Sorry for the lower quality..I was going for Youtube originally, but it detected “Copyrighted material” and disabled embedding. Bastards! I need to figure out a way around that. Perhaps it’s as simple as naming the video something other than….IT Crowd.avi…

Beum!

Rare is the day I agree with popular media publications on a “Best Whatever of the Year” sort of list, especially when it comes to music and movies. Shockingly enough, I just found myself in total agreement with both Spin and Rolling Stone - two magazines I barely ever read and generally just don’t like at all considering the (better) alternatives (except Blender…Blender does the near impossible and manages to be worse than both). It turns out both mags chose TV on the Radio’s Dear Science as the best album of 2008 and they couldn’t be more right.

Click to view because embedding is disabled: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNWl3o18ddQ

I can still remember the first time I heard Wolf Like Me, TV on the Radio’s huge hit from their second album, Return to Cookie Mountain. It was about the same time I discovered WMSE here in Milwaukee, back in 2006. One morning, driving to work, I heard what was the last section of the song, where Tunde Adebimpe (I assume) was belting “We’re howling, forever, oh-oh” over and over. I needed to hear only seconds of the song before I knew I had to figure out just who the hell was behind this amazing song.

Thankfully, WMSE (and 88.9 Radio Milwaukee FYI) is millions of miles ahead of most radio stations in that archives of nearly ever hour of every day are available online, so once at work I fired up Firefox and Winamp and promptly discovered what has since become one of my favorite bands - TV on the Radio. I must have listened to Wolf Like Me over thirty times that day and at least a hundred in the following week. It was such a dirty sounding song that I initially thought was just a lucky strike by some small-time emo group. I was completely wrong about that. Wolf Like Me, and slowly the rest of Return to Cookie Mountain, became the song and album I turned to most when I needed something I could count on as being good music, all the time.

With Dear Science, I definitely agree with Spin and Rolling Stone - it is, easily, the best album of the year. As a package compared to Return to Cookie Mountain, Dear Science is the more accessible of the two albums. While some may consider more accessible to be analogous with mainstream, I don’t think that is true in this case. Dear Science is a far more artsy-rock album than many of the other albums that appear on these “Best of” lists. But, more than any other album on the lists, Dear Science is also more focused, inventive, and full of songs that sound completely different from one another while always having that recognizable “TV on the Radio” sound. Dear Science also continues TV on the Radio’s indulgence in metaphor-heavy apocalyptic warnings about the dissolution of freedom with songs like Shout Me Out and Golden Age, but doesn’t forget, with Lover’s Day, that good, hard fucking is a good way to feel better about yourself.

Fittingly enough, Spin Magazine chose Return to Cookie Mountain as the top album of 2006, and now, having named Dear Science the top album of 2008, both Spin and Rolling Stone are back in my radar of midly respectable music rags…even though both of them list Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III pretty close to the top. Try saying “Tha Carter III” out loud and tell me you don’t feel like an idiot.

With that, I figure it’s probably a good time to show my list of Best Albums of 2008.

7 (that’s right, 7 is all you get). Metallica - Death Magnetic

6. Kings of Leon - Only by the Night - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhhcKxflMY

5. Flight of the Conchords - Flight of the Conchords

4. Duffy - Rockferry - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2orthS3TQ

3. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

2. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE

http://www.vimeo.com/1726017

1. TV on the Radio - Dear Science - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP4pHeRSK1E

Side note: my most overrated song of the year is Evil Urges from the album of the same name by My Morning Jacket. That is the single most annoying song I have heard in YEARS and it never fucking ends. Evil Urges is so terrible I’d rather listen to any Rush song on repeat. And I hate Rush.

Band I Most Often Confuse With Duffy: Santogold
Band I Most Often Confuse With Santogold: Duffy

Agree with my list? Disagree? What about Spin and Rolling Stone? Let me know!