Entertainment For Lively Minds
Later Pwned
Posted by GunsOfBrixton on 9 October 2010 - 12:08am.
By Janelle
This was good but Tightrope was even better.
- More from GunsOfBrixton.
- Login or register to post comments
-
User login
Recently Updated
Hot Topics - Last 7 Days
Hot Topics - Last 4 Weeks
The Sites We Like
- And Another Thing
- Another Nickel In The Machine
- Crying All The Way To The Chip Shop
- Freaky Trigger
- Fula Fula Ord
- The Ghosts Of Electricity
- Guardian Music Blog
- Idolator
- I Love Music
- The Lefsetz Letter
- McSweeney's
- Mixmag
- My Band T-shirt
- No Rock And Roll Fun
- Paul Du Noyer
- Planet Mondo
- Popjustice
- Pretty Goes With Pretty
- Tales Of The City
- The Arts Desk
- The Rising Storm
- The Rocking Vicar
- Scarlet Mist
- WFMU Blog
A star
The performance of Tightrope was one of the most exhilarating things I've seen on Later. Stunning. Rest of the prog was a right mishmash, though. Steve Miller was a snore, Jim Jones was surprisingly dull given the energy they all put in. Cee Lo was top-drawer. CW Stoneking was very rum, like a strange melange of Dr John, Tom Waits and Leon Redbone. And nowhere near as good as any of them. My highlight was Cheikh Lo, whose voice is really beautiful - although the sax and bass added precisely nothing.
Spot on.
On reflection, I'm starting to think of Stoneking as like a really niche Joe Longthorne: he's an impressionist, rather than an artist. He does an impersonation of 30s jazz-blues. And nowt else. I wish him well and all, but if I want to listen to 30s jazz-blues, I'll buy records that were made in the 30s. A rum proposition, him.
Janelle and Cee Lo were transcendentally wonderful. If I'd been the utterly lacklustre Jim Jones lot, I'd have packed up and gone home before the end of Tightrope.
My reaction
when I listened to the october Word CD and heard C W Stoneking sing Brave son of America was;
"Hm, I really liked this song much better when I listened to the april Word CD and heard Lord Executor sing it as Seven skeletons found in the yard..."
.
.
Pastiche Similarity
Stoneking is a pastiche of 30s jazz (but very well played - loved the horns).
Jim Jones is not even a pastiche of rockabilly, more of a simulacrum.
Janelle Monae was exhilarating (and sooo sexy - if you'll forgive an old man for saying so).
What does...
..."Pwned" mean? I'm confused. Is it some kind of new yoof speak?
Yes, I Googled it, but I'm still no wiser.
Psst
(You're not alone)
Pwned
It's a misspelling of 'owned', meaning totally dominated. It came from World of Warcraft or one of those games - when your character was beaten by another, 'you have been pwned' came up on screen.
As is the way with the internet, it caught on for some reason, usually used with a much nastier tone than it is here in places like the comments on Youtube.
I'd kind of worked out
the "owned" part, but couldn't quite make the mental leap to the place where the misspelling has become a legit word in its own right.
(insert old git joke here)
lol
n00b
all I can say is...
w00t!
It sounds like 'loaned' - I
It sounds like 'loaned' - I always thought it was spelled powned.
It was a well-used expression of my teenage son when playing Call of Duty - though nowadays he has moved onto 'teabagged', 'epic fail' and 'wall banged'
Whatever they mean - its a different world.....
Epic Fail
Is so beautifully dsecriptive that I find myself using it more often
I love "Fail".
It's just so useful. And it's funny. I still check out FailBlog from time to time.
Agree with the remarks on Mr
Agree with the remarks on Mr Stoneking and Jim Jones.
Cee Lo has been class for a while. His "Cee Lo Green Is The Soul Machine" Lp is one of the best hip hop records of the last ten years, and now he seems to be unleashing his great singing voice.
But Janelle?
Three words: Terence Trent D'Arby.
I don't see how you can come down on Stoneking and Jim Jones for impersonating earlier, greater talents and then give JM a free pass for basically doing james Brown's old act (granted she does a terrific job of it). back in the 80s TTD was doing this and, IMHO, was writing better songs.
Perhaps her Lp reveals a more rounded talent. I can't comment, as I haven't heard it.
I'd have to go with Rosbif and say Cheikh Lo was the highlight. But, for all the sniping, it was the strongest programme in the series thus far
The point is
...I wasn't claiming that Janelle M was original whereas the others were rip-offs. Obviously there are plenty of forerunners to her style (although not many of those are women, I think). I was merely describing my reaction to the performances. I was ready to be underwhelmed by JM after all the hype, and that first song blew me away. The band were superb, she looked and sounded fabulous, it was an object lesson in how to put a song over. Jim Jones? I'm not saying he was any more or less original, but I was bored. I wasn't bored by CW Stoneking, but I didn't particularly like it either.