ST JAMES'S PARK RENAMING: A MORE COLLOQUIAL (YET PERHAPS MORE LINGUISTICALLY ALIVE AND CERTAINLY MORE TRENCHANT) RESPONSE

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PAUL MORLEY ON X-FACTOR

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I've got pretty ambivalent feelings about Paul Morley, but I thought this was brilliant.

Nicely not-too-oblique.

ON THE PROPOSED RENAMING OF ST JAMES'S PARK

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"Let this
be a lesson
to you:
names
don’t matter!
Remember
Shakespeare,
Nietzsche,
think of
Derrida.

Meaning slips
and slides,
is not
fascistic,
cannot
be controlled,
has
no memory,
soon runs
out of juice."

See this
wagon full of
terrapins
stalling and
then 
failing,
in a final
abject disaster,
halfway down
the A69.

WHAT IS THE POINT OF FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE?

Friends.

Perhaps the most pernicious cultural institution in recent memory (Radio One's Live Lounge) is now the presenting vehicle of FEARNE FUCKING COTTON.

In light of which, how has FATM's bile-inducing, stage-school-awful, Live-Lounge-incarnate cover of 'You've Got the Love' managed to slip through the credibility net?

'THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION IS THE PRESENT TENSE'

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That photo:
the two of us,

you holding me aloft
in a dangle of triumph.

In those days we
were round and hopeful,

joy thread tautly
on our spirit-level gaze.

‘Respect for you – that
I did not expect,

looking up
into those spry pupils;

a face so sharply
distinct from my own’.

Later on the scales would tilt,
splashing endless excessive

effusions of water
all over your brain.

NEW BIG BOI TUNE

Dreamy, dirty, laconic, fantastic.

DIALOGUE: HE MET SHE

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ME: How did we meet, again?
LOUISE: Fatality.

EMPIRE STATE OF MIND

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I can't decide whether this is timely optimism or hollow American Dreamery.

In a way over-harsh review Pitchfork made much of the indie/hip-hop crossover context on Blueprint 3. So how about 'Paris' by Friendly Fires as an inspiration for this one? If the genealogy holds, although I quite like FF, this is surely a step in the wrong direction for Jay Z (and hip-hop generally) - a step off the ground and into the clouds, a step into hedonism and the rarefied melancholy that comes with it.

Aspirational-Thatcherite? Or Obamanian-communitarian?

Whatever, the album's (mostly) delicious.

KEEGAN DISMISSAL VERDICT

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I think this is good news overall.

At least, on top of the fact of this horrible desecration of the club's recent history, the really malignant elements have gotten a tiny bit of their just desserts.

CUBAN LINX Pt II ...

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... is an astonishing bit of kit.

Highlights include: 'Surgical Gloves', 'Ason Jones', and the two Ghostface tracks, 'New Wu' and 'Penitentiary'.

Further proof of the roughly Obama-coinciding resurgence of mainstream hip-hop as a vital musical force in the last years of the decade (I'm thinking it started post-Nas's 'Hip-Hop is Dead' - within months you got Ghostface's Fishscale, Jay-Z's American Gangster, then came Lil Wayne, The Renaissance, Wale, Blueprint 3 etc).