Of Stan Brakhage’s ephemeral Desert, Fred Camper once wrote that “large and small, and inner and outer, worlds dance about each other in a kind of equivalency,” which is high praise for a piece that wasn’t even shot in an actual desert, and was…
If it hadn’t already been claimed, a much more appropriate title for Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere would be The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes — after all, Anthony’s documentary does posit at one point that “an act of seeing is always…
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream isn’t the exercise in solipsism or self-serving appropriative art its premise threatens, but its overall effect is one of cautious distance. In 2010, visual artist Christian Marclay premiered a new montage work, titled The Clock, that was 24-hours in length…
“Fuck Soulja Boy. Soulja Boy, I know you’re young enough to be my kid but you single-handedly killed hip-hop, man. That shit is such garbage. We came all the way from Rakim, we came all the way from Das EFX, we came all the…
The Hustles Continues is a bit too busy and suffers from a glut of features, but once again proves J’s relevance and absolute buoyancy. There are few constants in this precarious universe that we inhabit: the sky is blue, the grass is green, and as…
My Life 4Hunnid reflects yet a further dip in quality from YG’s long-ago days of Still Brazy. My Life 4Hunnid, YG’s latest, is the type of record one produces when they’ve officially given up on the whole trying thing when it comes to their music.…
To call Bladee a rapper would be a bit misleading — sure, he sorta sings in a cadence and manner one could associate with “rapping,” but the music the young Swedish savant crafts is decidedly outside the parameters that such rigid genre labels would…
If you listened to and believed the hip-hop gatekeepers, influencers, and bloggers (whose reviews read like thinly disguised PR campaigns) from the past few months, you’d be sold on the narrative that 2020 was Megan Thee Stallion’s year. While she doesn’t really have the…
For nearly two decades now, The Avalanches have repurposed pillaged sounds of yesteryear in order to locate a current emotional resonance, to connect the past with the present and vice versa. Within this compelling artistic process, they’ve consistently elucidated how music functions as one…
The Cloud in Her Room is an one-note exercise in empty style that fails to marry its form and content. Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in Her Room represents the type of opaque arthouse drama that tends to do exceedingly well on the international film…
