Set for release through Def Jam and GOOD Music on June 18th, Kanye West’s sixth studio album, Yeezus, has leaked. In the follow-up to the critically acclaimed hip-hop opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye returns to a dark form and then some. The key difference being, this album lacks the star-studded roster of guest verses. Nevertheless, we at the Airspace have worked to single out the moments of brilliance in the oft-underrated lyrical workings of Mr. West.
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It’s a behemoth. Two weekends, 90,000 people each, four security check points, 175 bands: all happening in the middle-of-nothing desert. The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was born in the age of the compact discs. Its debut in 1999 brought headliners Beck, Morrissey, Rage Against the Machine, Tool, and Pavement. 25,000 people showed up in the desert in October to hear them play. In the space between then and now, Coachella evolved from one two day weekend that failed to make a profit, to an international mega-fest which seems too big to fail.
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As the dust settles in the wake of all the best music of 2012 lists, one thing is clear: some music has gone under the radar. Some LPs and EPs were critically unappreciated, underplayed, or underhyped throughout 2012. And at The Airspace, we think that is just wrong. So here is our list—not merely of the best music—but of the best music you probably overlooked.
In alphabetical order.
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“Some of the things I’ve said in the past month have taken some fear away from myself,” says Frank Ocean timidly into the mic. “I’m grateful for that love.” The four-piece band eases in and Ocean starts: “Taxi driver/ be my shrink for the hour.” Two minutes into “Bad Religion,” Ocean’s R&B art confessional, I’m crying like an infant.
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“Weed!” giggles an eighteen year old wearing nothing but a bandana to cover her chest. She does a little flutter kick in the air before pirouetting. Spinning without much control, she stops herself upon hitting another person. She plants a wet kiss on this strangers face, blushes, then runs away. A group of three fifty-year-old women headed from the bar tent walk past me while laughing to one another. “This is the time we would run into our kids, while we’re each double fisting!” One of the mothers snorts, sloshing the foam of her Hoegaarden onto the grounds of Grant Park.
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It’s time. That time. The one when three hundred thousand human beings congregate in a park in Chicago, IL to stand, and soak, and sweat, and kiss, and drink, and smoke, and puke, and love, and cheer, and fight, and fuck. It’s the most raucous, unwieldy collection of strange and disfigured people: small, tall, fat, thin, old, young. And they’re all together to listen to some other folks make glorious, glorious sounds from metal boxes. They’ll hit things, shake things, strum things, blow things, crash things, smash things, and vibrate their throats until we’ve had enough and then they’ll do it some more. That’s the human transaction. That’s the state of music. That’s Lollapalooza.
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It is Friday afternoon and I’m standing silently alongside many large groups waiting impatiently for the Green Line train to take us to the Pitchfork Music Festival. The scene is nothing new for people who annually attend the festival in Chicago’s Union Park: clusters of predominantly white, flannel-wearing men with their hands in their pockets excitedly muttering amongst each other about the acts they want to see; women arguing with their respective partners about whom was supposed to buy cigarettes and bring the tickets; two guys in matching Minor Threat t-shirts scoffing at the crowd who, to them, don’t seem like the real Godspeed You! Black Emperor fans they were looking for; nervous looking people crouching to check if their contraband is well hidden in their backpacks; and all while the regular Green Line patrons look on confused as if aliens had dropped bunches of disaffected hipsters from the sky. One of these patrons rolls their eyes at someone who loudly remarks “I’ve never even heard of this El Line!” as if to say, “this happens every year.”
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If you were on Facebook or twitter last Monday, July 9, you probably heard something about Frank Ocean’s channel ORANGE—someone scrobbling late at night, or maybe a cryptic lyric posted. Monday marked the true genesis of Frank Ocean as major recording artist, and the world is taking notice.
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The musician Charles Wynne, the force behind Sorry, Charlie, is a singer-songwriter hailing from the northwest suburbs of Chicago. He began playing guitar at 13 and writing songs at 16, and over the years has honed his craft while drawing influence from the likes of Bon Iver, Peter and the Wolf, and The Mountain Goats.
Now 19, Wynne plays a unique brand of emotional, genuine music that comes directly from his experiences. His lyrics narrate the journey of his life, providing honest reflection and poignant observation from the perspective of a young man on the verge of adulthood facing the daunting life choices that will define him while learning from his past. Carefully crafted melodies provide the platform for Wynne’s straightforward yet poetic lyricism, forming a whole that is at once blissfully minimalist and intriguingly complex.
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A$AP Rocky has had a busy week: distancing himself from the pack, hyping his new album, and working with Lana Del Rey. Read about his roles as trillwave pioneer and JFK inside.
Read More...“Balloons. That’s right. Balloons,” says the voice of a young girl in a video for Google’s latest endeavor: bringing the world online with massive balloons. The initiative, called Project Loon, comes from Google X, the experimental lab within the company whose sole purpose is to dream up big, borderline insane, ideas. Google X created self-driving [...]
Thonis, the legendary port city that served as an entryway to the Egyptian empire, was long considered to be a myth. The tales of its immense power and vast riches conflicted with the evidence of its existence—mainly that there was none. Cities of such grandeur do not typically disappear off the face of the earth. [...]
Kanye West says the darndest things. On his unrelenting quest to become his own species of hip-hop artist, he has established a reputation as irreverent, controversial, and unapologetic. Though he makes time for public grandstanding by claiming a US President “doesn’t care about black people” or interrupting the VMAs, he remains mostly quiet when it [...]
In Holiday, Florida, sits a warehouse. From the outside, it looks like nothing special, but as a joint investigative report from the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered, inside is one of the most useless charity in America: Kids Wish Network. For every dollar it raises, a mere 3 cents goes [...]
American English is a unique beast. Taken from British English and then purposefully tweaked to be different, the American variation has itself taken on diverse forms. We know this, of course, but you might not have realized just how pronunciations remain. As new data visualizations from Joshua Katz of NC State University (based on data [...]
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