Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

I remember being a teen in the late 90s, and wondering what the decade would be remembered as… the 60s had the peace/war/love/hate contrast out front, the 70s were decadent and paranoid, the 80s were campy, neon, and egocentric… but it wasn't clear at the time. This article says it, and the music says it, and the memory shows it – it was the last gasp of global optimism and futurism. It was genuinely trying to break from the past to imagine a different future, we had post-cold war peace, the Clinton years of prosperity, and a middle class that could still make art and music and make out okay. When things are generally good, we can afford to be principled and purposeful, in contrast to the 'sell out at all costs to survive' mentality of the present.

I didn't love Belly like I loved the Breeders, but this song and Superconnected live on in my head for sure. Feed The Tree is sticky. I would also add in Juliana Hatfield in here for Universal Heartbeat, she had a similar mix of sweet and harsh as Donnely here.

These write-ups always feel like personal excavations, disinterring the past to understand who we are now. It's just crazy to realize how many others are doing it in parallel.

Tom's bio of Post Malone reads like it'll be the template for the "Walk Hard" parody movie about artists from this era:

o The first time the artist plays Guitar Hero & gets inspired to write & perform

o The artist meets the Minecraft streamer that will vault them to fame

o The artist gets their stage name from an online name generator (or, it'll be their "porn name" (name of 1st pet + name of street you grew up on) )

o The first face tat

o The first time the artist drinks a bottle of cough syrup & figures out how to use Auto-Tune

Shit just writes itself.

Signed,

Muppet Burbank

Oof. Man, I don’t know. Even a 6 feels generous. This one strikes me as “baby’s first hedonist anthem.” Posty and 21 are trading in the kind of bad-behavior imagery that’s been commonplace in the genre but do it in the most uninteresting way. Then again, I don’t know if I’ve ever liked 21 Savage’s music so that’s a handicap going into it (21, 21). Posty likes to do this bleated-goat thing with his voice, which thankfully isn’t present here, that also drives me away all too often. The “Rock Star” beat comes off more lethargic than menacing to my ears. I need more of that “Black Beatles” sparkle. The video leaves me with nothing either. It’s a 3.

"sober aside from LSD" is one of the funniest sentences ever.

Of course the shithead in chief and gop are playing politics with this, like they do any tragedy that doesn't affect them. What scumbags. Wishing the best for any Gummers involved, i hope everyone and their homes, belongings and pets are ok, as this looks horrible. And props to Fat Tony for assisting the Pasadena Humane Society.

This man is on an unprecedented own-goal streak.

This is fucking awful. For those of you not familiar with SoCal, Altadena isn't like the Palisades, Malibu, Montecito, Lake Arrowhead, or other areas that have been hit hard by big fires recently. Altadena is mostly on a traditional grid layout platted nearly 150 years ago, consisting of mid-sized suburban lots (1/4 acre, mostly) with municipal water and proper sewers. Unlike Malibu or the Palisades, this isn't houses up narrow canyons where it's impossible to control the vegetation that feeds wildfires: this is well established suburbia in the pre-WWII style, with smallish houses on medium sized lots on sloping but not at all rugged terrain. A lot of bohemian and artistic types have moved there in the past decade and change because it's relatively affordable (emphasis on "relatively"), especially now that most of Northeast L.A. is getting close to fully gentrified.

And holy shit has this winter been dry. I don't think there's even been a quarter inch of rain since last April. We all saw this coming, but it's still terrifying.

I’m glad he finally got recognized for his work dismantling nuclear weapons.

Yep, I live in Altadena and most of the place is just gone. Going back to see if mine is still standing. When I visited yesterday almost every other house on my street was in ashes.

As many online have pointed out, Drake has LeBron’s face tattooed on his body.

LOL!