According to Wikipedia, on August 30, 2006, Pharrell Williams himself said on BET that the new song he’d produced would not only show off his gangsta side, but also tackle the issue of racial conflict in Los Angeles between African Americans and Hispanics and call for racial unity.

The song he was talking about was “Vato,” by Snoop Dogg featuring B-Real (the guy with the nasally voice from Cypress Hill) as the voice of the Hispanic community. Observe and enjoy.

Does the song deliver? The answer, right here –

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If you’ve been watching TV at all lately, you’ve probably come across this commercial for the shamelessly sleazy CW show Gossip Girl.

I’ve not watched the show before, and I don’t think I care to.  But what is UP with that music?  The man you’re hearing is Plastic Bertrand, and the song is 1977’s Ca Plane Pour Moi.  It’s way better when it isn’t chopped up into three second clips. more »

From Isaac Hayes’ breakthrough 1969 album, Hot Buttered Soul, which remains one of the great achievements in American pop music.  If you only know him as Chef from South Park, you owe it to yourselves to give his music a listen.  If you already know his catalog backwards and forwards, you owe it to yourself to listen again.

He will be missed.

I’m a two-blog man now.

As some of you know, I write and produce Hotnewz.tv, the best darn news show for college kids on the web. We recently started a blog where we talk about some of our favorite segments. After the jump is something I wrote for it, on the enigma that is Andrew WK. more »

The film composer Howard Shore has written an opera. It is an adaptation of one of the movies he did the music for. However, it’s probably not the one you’d expect/hope. Here’s a list of operatic movies Howard Shore has scored, that are NOT the movie in question: The Lords of the Rings, The Departed, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Aviator, and The Gangs of New York.

Instead, Howard Shore looked back upon his body of work, and decided The Fly really needed to be an opera. And there’s a photo after the jump. more »

Okay, in my original Eurovision post, I dismissed the Russian entry, “Believe,” as being “too lame to embed here.” But after the song’s victory, I watched it again. And I realized that when something is lame enough, it becomes camp, and camp is very much worth embedding.

So now I invite you all to enjoy a truly silly performance, Dima Bilan (a man that Reuters describes as “lithe“) singing “Believe” — after the jump. more »

On Saturday, the finals of Eurovision 2008 will take place in Belgrade. This mother of all talent shows has been organized by the European Broadcasting Union every year since 1956. Each European nation gets to send one singer or band, to perform one original song. Over 100 million people watch the show, and everyone gets to vote for the winner via phone (but you CAN’T vote for your own country).

Okay, let me take you back a couple years, get you up to speed. more »

Ponder while practicing yoga or drinking profusely:

1. Did Elton John’s Rocket Man ever meet up with David Bowie’s Major Tom (Space Oddity) in space? If so, what did they talk about?

2. Is “Run DMC” a command? And if so, what are they running from?

3. (Based on a true story.) Is there anything whiter than driving through Harlem with your parents while they’re singing along to Kenny Loggins?

So last night I was randomly wikipedia-ing Craig Thompson (points if you know who he is), and when I saw his picture, I said, “Holy crap! He looks exactly like Sufjan Stevens (points if you know who he is)!”

The more I looked, the creepier the similarities became. Besides both having

• windswept hair the color of dew beaded raven down

and

• piercing, limpid green eyes that allow us to peer into their unfathomable souls

but they also were both

• born in Michigan

• born in 1975

• Fundamentalist Christians who had a crisis of faith that they explore through their art

• bittersweetly optimistic

• beloved of hipster females

It is bizarre! How could they have so much in common? Really, there was only one answer.

THEY ARE THE SAME PERSON.

It’s like Paul Dano’s “brother” characters in There Will Be Blood. Just as Paul Thomas Anderson used tricky casting to keep Oscar judges on their toes, the Brooklyn-based Jewish indie media conspiracy has done the same thing to keep the hipsters at bay so they don’t take over the universe as is their wont.

Speaking of Paul Dano, he and Wil Wheaton are the same person.

Until recently, I only really thought of the archtypical 80s metal band Whitesnake as a punch line. If pressed, I guess I could have sung through the chorus of “Here I Go Again On My Own Again,” but I wouldn’t have actually known that it was a Whitesnake song. Which is shameful, really. But that all changed the other day, when I sat down and watched a whole bunch of Whitesnake videos on youtube. It was a bruising and confounding experience (The hairspray! The fog machines! The horror!), and it may have weakened my grip on reality. But as the grueling marathon came to a close, I arrived at the following conclusion.

Dear reader, mirabile dictu: Whitesnake is flippin’ sweet.

Video and seriously, seriously overthought analysis after the jump.

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