5. Aloe Blacc – Good Things
Have you ever seen the (awesome) HBO show How To Make It In America? If you have, chances are, much like me, you never skipped the opening credits just so you could hear the catchier-than-cigarettes Aloe Blacc song I Need A Dollar. Well, step two in that downward spiral is buying the album the song is from. Step three is listening to it over and over and over again. I need I Need A Dollar. 2073 plays in my iTunes so far. Please help me.
Sidenote: I would give panhandlers a lot more money if they sang I Need A Dollar to me. And let me whip the change at them after. Humane!
4. Broken Bells – Broken Bells
This album crept further up my list every time I listened to it. I may have to retire it just to not render my list inaccurate. Somebody asked me if there was anything Danger Mouse can’t do? I guess we’ll find out. I dared him to suck next year…
3. The Black Keys – Brothers
This is a pair of sentences by Nuv. These sentences are an endorsement for The Black Keys’ album, Brothers.
2. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy & G.O.O.D. Fridays
Okay. I know half of you motherfuckers want to hate Kanye for interrupting the cute white girl that went on to sell three times as many albums as she would have had he not interrupted her. The other half named this album the album of the year. Fuck you both. First group: the man’s antics outside the booth have nothing to do with the music. Judge it of it’s own merits. Second group: I actually (almost) agree with you. I just wanted to say “Fuck you” to you.
This album is a sprawling, epic, monstrosity of…well, of an ALBUM. In this era of iTunes pick-a-pop downloading and ringtones, the album is all but dead, right? So what the fuck is Kanye doing? He’s doing what motherfuckers did in the days of Pink Floyd and The Who and shit. (And, YES, Grey-pubes, he does belong in that company. As of this album, this achievement, this fucking opus, he does.) Not only did he blend reality into the ‘Twisted Fantasy’ of this concept album by acknowledging the douchery of his awards show antics with Taylor Swift, but he also flipped you all the bird. While toasting himself self-deprecatingly. AND he crafted the song of the year out of all that (Runaway.) TWICE! (Power.) THRICE!! (Monster.) On that third one he even did the impossible and made me not hate the usually ultra-annoying Nicki Minaj. AND leading up to all of this, he made his website a once-a-week stop by giving away FREE music (that was by no means throw-away) with ‘G.O.O.D. Fridays’ at kanyewest.com. AND he capped it all off with, in his words, some “Michael Jackson-ass shit” by releasing a beautifully shot, weird-as-fuuucckk 35 minute short film/music video titled Runaway about some Weird Bird-Bitch. Come on. MJ’s dead. Prince is old and religious. Movies need villains. Girls need bad boys. Music NEEDS Kanye.
So after all that, how the crap is Kanye NOT #1? Because somebody captivated me even more this last year. More so than I’ve been since Eminem’s debut at the close of the last decade! Who is it? You’re about to hate me more than a Lost finale cliffhanger…
– Nuv
Tune in tomorrow for Part Three…
