Tyler, The Creator- Domo 23: TRACK REVIEW

   

   Along with the Wu-Tang Clan, Tyler, The Creator, the head member of the California rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, was key in my development into a hip-hop fan after seeing my friends posting songs by him obsessively on facebook in 2011 when "Yonkers" dropped. I was pretty late to the party, but I was taken aback by his astute lyricism on songs like the aforementioned "Yonkers" and the disturbing "Tron Cat", and buying the Goblin album introduced me to "Nightmare" and "Window" which also impressed lyrically, at least to me. Not all his songs hit the lyrical mark (the immature "Radicals" and "Her") but overall, the album totally piqued my interest in the Odd Future world and in hip-hop in general. There has been no shortage of Odd Future material since the group broke through with Goblin with full length albums by Domo, Mellowhype and others, but for the last couple of years I've been most eagerly awaiting Tyler's follow-up to Goblin and what it had in store, mainly because of that album's cliffhanger ending. 

The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal 2nd Edition: BOOK REVIEW

   The one book I would distinguish as my favorite book of all time isn't a novel, nor is it a picture book from my childhood. It's an encyclopedia, specifically the encyclopedia that covers my all time favorite topic: the oft-maligned bastard offspring of rock, heavy metal. Having this book has gone so far as to reassure my faith in the genre. It has let me know that there is at least one person out there, author Daniel Bukzpan, who cares so much about this music that he's written a physically huge 200 page book glorifying the artists that have kept it alive over the last four decades, and judging by the fact that it has been in print for ten years at this point, it lets me know that me and Mr. Bukzpan are absolutely not alone.

Strapping Young Lad: My Unpopular Opinion

With the loads of Devin Townsend Project material over the last few years igniting the boners of metalheads the world over, I'm reminded of his previous band, Strapping Young Lad and how much people glorify them...and how much I dislike them. I just don't get it. Well, here's what I think.

METAL (Monday) MOUTH-OFF: Guilty Pleasures

   Enjoying certain bands, especially while being a metalhead, can be a little sketchy when you aren't surrounded by very positive and open-minded people. For example, talking about how much you love Avenged Sevenfold to a neckbeard who owns two boxes of late '80s black metal and death metal demo tapes and thinks that Master of Puppets deserves a zero out of ten compared to Holy Terror's Terror and Submission could earn you a heavy wooden speaker to the head (because a "trve" hesher doesn't use no particle board lightweights.) Avenged Sevenfold, Poison, Disturbed, KoRn, and Ratt are all bands that may earn you a blunt, heavy projectile to your noggin and  fit the "guilty pleasure" description in the metal world. They are bands that are considered by-and-large to "suck" and you simply aren't "trve" if you really enjoy their music. But honestly, are there really such things as "guilty pleasures" in music to begin with?

Black Veil Brides: OBVIOUS APPEAL

   One band that most jaded metalheads get all pissy about these days has to be Black Veil Brides, a melodic metal band that lies in the same vein as the equally polarizing Avenged Sevenfold in terms of overall sound. While I find many of their songs to be really catchy, perhaps even good (minus some stuff I've heard off their over-bloated latest album), I have never considered myself to be a fan of the group (this has absolutely nothing to do with protecting my metal cred, honest Abe) but I understand their appeal to so many suburban teenagers who wear their t-shirts and go to their shows with scars painted on the sides of their mouths akin to the band's singer Andy Biersack. But honestly, the people I don't understand are the people who DON'T get their appeal.

METAL MODAYS: Varg Will Never NOT Be Funny

   I don't have a lot of time here today, so if you don't know who this crazy bastard is then let me tell you in short: He's a Norwegian black metal guy who burned a bunch of churches to the fucking ground in the '90s and stabbed Euronymous 23 times, killing him. Who's Euronymous? Fuck, I gotta do math homework now so just look it up, and you can read all of his confusing, almost "exclusively contradictory" statements (said Daniel Bukzpan) in the book Lords of Chaos (a book that Varg claims to have taken all of said contradictory statements out of context, if not, they were totally fabricated.)The point here is, he will never NOT be funny. For example:

CLASSICS: Wu-Tang Clan-Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) ALBUM REVIEW

   There is hip-hop, and then there is this masterpiece of the highest degree. In my opinion, this is the greatest album in the genre's history due to how aggressive, raw, and just flat out enjoyable it is above almost all other hip-hop. There are a select few albums I'd put on about the same level as this gem (Fugees-The Score, Viktor Vaughn Vaudeville Villain) but 36 Chambers gets the edge for how important it was to the development of hip-hop as a whole. It literally changed the game and, at the time, defied categorization. It wasn't jazz rap, gangsta rap, conscious rap, or even traditional old school rap, it was just...a new sound for hip-hop entirely that came out of left field to ensnare everyone who would listen to its greatness, and I'm one of those people. In fact, this was the album that got the ball rolling for me when it came to hip-hop; it turned me from a jaded rap-hating rocker into to a fan of music well outside the rock spectrum.