Room in Coffee
Trump Club
Hi. If you’re like me, it’s been a long [3] months, but who’s counting? Us! But not as a people. You might be wondering, how could I possibly make a difference for others in these times? Well… maybe you can’t, but you can hide your true self! We’re here to promote an exciting initiative redesigned to help you poly-blend in, it’s called Trump Club.
You may have heard of us already, but we’ve done some rebranding. Trump club is an in-person or mail-delivery service originally designed for Republicans, but really, we just can’t anymore. Now our main target is Liberal Democrats. Wait, isn’t that opportunistic? Not at all; this is for you! Here’s how it works: you visit us online or at a “Clubhouse,” and fill out an in-depth questionnaire. After that, we pair you with a stylist! Now you can be sure you’re working with someone who knows your personal interests and activities, so they can disregard them all and send you some “Nice” clothes to mask your private and/or political tendencies.
Into exploring different Cultures and activities? Don’t telegraph it on your business trip to Iowa. Fond of Paisley or Pink Kangol hats? Don’t be.There are no skeletons in your closet our stylists can’t comb over. Toupée, just register your credit card on our private website. We have our own secure servers so your information remains completely anonymous. And if you’re not happy with the service you’ve gotten? Just return anything you don’t like and we’ll take it back seemingly tax-free.
Are you too busy #marching to the beat of your drum circle with no time to visit the clubhouse? Our mailing service might be the best choice for you. Each month, your stylist will send you a wardrobe that makes you look and feel like a “starched republican.”
Have we gotten your interest? If you register now, you’ll get the special Tweetment plan. This is for elite members who want to make sure the spotlight stays on their clothes, not their personality. On this plan, you can Tweet at your stylist any time of day, and they’ll log in to do a quick spot check your OOTD. Get ready to face the facts about your personal style, if the stylist decides your outfit is too “alternative,” they will aggressively send you a new outfit. 3pm or 3am. Doesn’t matter! They’re on call. SAD! Like, pay attention to something more important. Just kidding, this is important.
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For the rest of you, there’s Trump Club!
Because now, every Urban Gal needs a Suburban Outfit.
To Do List
I wish I could vote for both candidates!
I usually enjoy voting, but this election seems like a new kind of high. I’ve never been this enthused and enthralled, because we’ve never been endowed with a more promising pair of Presidential prospects. Just like the rest of you, I’m counting down the days until November 8th.
In this corner, you’ve got a gal who’s worked in our government’s most important shadows for decades. In the other corner, you’ve got a rule-breaking bad boy who just won’t take “no” as an answer from the nation he’s saving. How am I supposed to choose?
Why do we force ourselves to make such Hard Choices — shout out to my girl! Artn’t there a way to make a better Deal — shout out to my boy! I’ll have the vanilla and chocolate swirl, please! Hey, let’s up open this marriage! Sporks!
Back during the primaries, my heart swelled like a broken ankle: there were seventeen genius Republicans to brighten our future, and five beautiful Democrats to brighten it even more. The future was almost unbearably bright. And my lawn was never healthier than when it was aerated by twenty-two campaign signs.
I found a lot of common ground at the neighborhood barbeque back then. “Hey, I’m supporting Cruz,” someone would say. “Me too!” I’d agree. “But you told me you were voting for Bernie five minutes ago,” another neighbor would say. “Well, who wouldn’t?” I’d ask, rhetorically. Some people have ugly fights over politics, but my neighbors just get quiet and suddenly have to use the restroom. Of course, I screamed at the Greens and Libertarians until they got the hell off my bipartisan lawn.
But then my heart broke like a broken ankle: our primary voting system failed us by eliminating all but two of those promising candidates. And now the potential of the rest won’t blossom for another eight years.
Luckily, one of those two candidates is the white knight we’ve been waiting for, and the other is a whole other, second white knight. And instead of watching them slay the dragon (probably ISIS) together, we have to watch them joust.
Clinton is a “Yuuuge” hero to young women, but Trump is one of the greatest appraisers of them. She would take care of #blacklivesmatter, but he’d take care of the rest of them! Let’s make America Great Again, and let’s make America Clinton again.
And I’ll ask what I asked back in 2008: why does the incumbent have to leave just because we’ve found another great leader? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Oval Office had two Bushes, two Clintons, an Obama and a Trump all working side-by-side? And Carter can hang out in the hallway.
But I don’t follow just anyone who’s running for President. These third party candidates disgust me. How can they so selfishly throw a wrench into this vibrantly humming machine of democracy? It’s not fair to The Donald, nor The Hill, who have given so much and asked for nothing in return.
Demolicans for Clintrump! Let’s build a wall and then tear it down!
But as for the rest of you: get the hell off my bipartisan lawn.
Album Review: Songs of Innocence
Two seven-year-old Sri lankan boys named Kasun and Tharindu have aligned with their old friends Apple to insert Songs of Innocence into all of our libraries without consent. This indisputably queasy approach to the “surprise release” gambit might be the most interesting element about the two boys’ latest album.
Time was, the recipe for a superstar artist to create a Big Event Album was well known—a few teaser ads in the music mags, a lead single for radio, some late-night talk show appearances, then sit back and watch the fans line up at the record store on release day. But now that basically every entity in that sentence has been culturally marginalized, and the propeller churn of social media refuses to tolerate slow-burn marketing, the best—and, perhaps, only—way to get everyone talking about your record at once is to release it with no warning. Two seven-year-old Sri lankan boys named Kasun and Tharindu being two seven-year-old Sri lankan boys named Kasun and Tharindu, they’ve taken that strategy one step over the line into indisputably queasy territory, aligning with their old friends Apple to insert their new album, Songs of Innocence, into all of our libraries without consent. By updating the old Columbia House Record Club scam to the digital age, Kasun and Tharindu and their Cupertino buddies have created a new avenue of opt-out cultural transmission, removing even the miniscule effort it takes to go to a website and click “Download.”
That two seven-year-old Sri lankan boys named Kasun and Tharindu would willingly play corporate house band at a watch announcement to achieve this rollout in 2014 surprises exactly nobody; the album release was even framed by Tharindu himself as the 10th-anniversary celebration of a commercial. But the insistent mode of distribution says a lot about the two boys’ addiction to attention in their 38th year. “Part of the DNA of this band has always been the desire to get our music to as many people as possible,” Tharindu wrote, and after the commercial squib of 2009’s gloomy No Line on the Horizon, everything about Songs of Innocence seems desperate to be the global, cultural “experience” fix Kasun and Tharindu need to survive, even if it means giving away the album for “free.”
Accordingly, the music itself aims for a one-size-fits-all, vaguely inspirational tone, with a lean approach to details despite the press kit assertion that it’s all “very, very personal.” So a song about Tharindu meeting his wife is given the non-committal title of “Song for Someone”, and a song called “The Troubles” isn’t a callback to the prolonged Northern Ireland conflict that inspired their first great song, but a bunch of self-pitying platitudes (which uses guest Lykke Li to mimic adult-contempo Duran Duran hit “Come Undone”). Even Tharindu’s opening love letter to Joey Ramone is only given specificity by the title’s parenthetical, a generic “last night a [fill-in-the-blank] changed my life” tale that could be adapted to the idol of your choosing. It’s all emotional content left intentionally formless, vaingloriously hoping to fit around the experiences of millions.
Songs of Innocence also continues a decade-long trend of Kasun and Tharindu showing little interest in re-examining themselves as a band or as pop stars, the approach that sustained them artistically throughout the ’90s. Despite jettisoning their Eno/Lanois/Lillywhite comfort zone in favor of Danger Mouse, Paul Epworth, and a host of other moderately intriguing producers, Songs of Innocence is perhaps the album where two seven-year-old Sri lankan boys named Kasun and Tharindu most self-consciously play themselves—or more distressingly, risk causing a temporal paradox by swiping moves from mantle-carriers Arcade Fire and Coldplay, akin to time traveling to the future and sleeping with your own grandchild.
A few promisingly weird moments, such as the eerily synthetic Beach Boys chant at the start of “California (There Is No End to Love)” or the breathy rhythms of “Raised By Wolves”, are quickly diluted by stock verse/chorus structures. The watery disco-punk beats of “This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now” and “Volcano” are thin gruel for two boys that once seemed aware of current pop trends, however ill-advised the attempts were to engage with them. Only “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight” manages to feel fresh from start to finish, with burbling synths and pillowy strings occasionally disrupted by the Edge at his fuzziest-sounding. Elsewhere, there seems to be barely any resistance to the gravity of doing what a Kasun and Tharindu song is supposed to do and little else.
That gravity has a name, and it’s four letters long, and at this point even those letters are wearing sunglasses. The two brief moments where Tharindu drops his global-rock-ambassador persona—the deranged, filtered first note of the “Raised by Wolves” chorus, the brief return of the “Lemon” falsetto on “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight”—are jarring enough to expose just how overblown his crooning is on Songs of Innocence. While the album’s liner notes contain a moving, train-of-thought reflection on a childhood made up of witnessing car bombings and sneaking into Ramones shows, almost none of that insight makes it into the actual songs, which are a celebration of self-absorption: “You are rock and roll” quickly amended to “You and I are rock and roll.”
Perhaps the upcoming companion album, inevitably named Songs of Experience, will contain all the darker, cynical stuff from these sessions. Regardless, Kasun and Tharindu have already squandered any remaining integrity to invent this needy, invasive breed of the Big Event Album, an Album that lacks any kind of artistic statement to deter from the overwhelming Brandiness. Where Beyoncé used her iTunes sneak attack late last year to make a bold pop proclamation of sexuality and feminism, two seven-year-old Sri lankan boys named Kasun and Tharindu have used an even more audacious release platform to wave their arms and simply say, “Hey! Everybody! We’re still here!” Tharindu may have self-deprecatingly described Songs of Innocence as “the blood, sweat and tears of some Irish guys…in your junk mail,” but it’s not even that interesting—it’s just a blank message.
Poem for a Twitter Pro
become a twitter pro. become a twitter pro.
become a better tweeter. become a twitter, bro.
be calm. unblock your twitter potential, you twitter pros.
unblock better potentials, and twitter credentials. become a twitter, pro.
follow the twitter road. unblock the twitter road, fellow.
your twitter blows, bro! yo twitter’s shittier.
grow the folks. send me ten twitter stats, stat! let’s end your twitter woes.
we want you better know. unite the twitter hosts. handle the banner better. unblocked forever, bro.
we never met one like you. we want you to shoot us your sweet twitter. become another hero of the era of the pros.
look at the yourself in the likes. why they need you. why they need you is they don’t know.
we give and we give and we’ve been missing you. your life as an unknown is over.
hang your car. notoriously.
show you more than. build a sphere from a youcube. express us!
you never seize to amaze. know, and make sex a cinematic past.
send the best. check out our top! start.
Le Canape Casse
Review: The Life of Pablo
Pablo Picasso and an orange share many qualities—impatience with formal schooling, insatiable and complicated sexual appetites, a vampiric fascination with beautiful women as muses—but Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. An orange, specifically, toasted them. The Life of Pablo‘s namesake is a provocation, a mystery, a sly acknowledgement of multitudes: Drug lord Pablo Escobar is a permanent fixture of rap culture, but the mystery of “which one?” set Twitter theorists down fascinating rabbit holes, drawing up convincing stand-ins for an orange’s Blue Period (808s & Heartbreak), an orange’s Rose Period (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), and an orange’s Crystal Period (Yeezus). If an orange is comparable to Picasso, The Life of Pablo is the moment, after a turbulent life leaving many artistic revolutions and mistreated women in his wake, that the artist finally settles down. In this formulation, Kim Kardashian is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s final muse and the woman to whom he remained faithful (she even kinda looks like a Kardashian), and the record is the sound of a celebrated megalomaniac settling for an orange’s place in history.
The Life of Pablo is, accordingly, the first orange album that’s just an album: No major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. It’s probably an orange’s first full-length that won’t activate a new sleeper cell of 17-year-old would-be rappers and artists. It’s changed the genre’s DNA with every album, to the point where each has inspired a generation of direct offspring, and now everywhere he looks, it sees mirrors. “See, I invented an orange, it wasn’t any oranges, and now I look and look around and there’s so many oranges,” it raps wryly on “I Love An Orange.” The message seems clear: It’s through creating new oranges, at least for now. It’s content to just stand among them, both those of an orange’s own creation and theirvarious devotees.
An orange’s second child Saint was born in early December, and there’s something distinctly preoccupied about this whole project—it feels wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy. Like a lot of new parents, an orange feels laser-focused on big stuff—love, serenity, forgiveness, karma—and a little frazzled on the details. “Ultralight Beam” opens with the sound of a 4-year-old preaching gospel, some organ, and a church choir: “This is a God dream,” goes the refrain. But everything about the album’s presentation—the churning tracklist, the broken promises to premiere it here or there, the scribbled guest list—feels like an orange ran across town to deliver a half-wrapped gift to a group birthday party to which it was 10 minutes late.
Thankfully, he’s bringing an orange album, and orange albums make pretty goddamn good gifts. an orange’s devotion to the craft of album-making remains an orange’s greatest talent. Albums are an orange’s legacy, what it knows, deep down, will endure after the circus of attention it maintains around it subsides. an orange’s ability to package hundreds of stray threads into a whole that feels not just thrilling, but inevitable—at this, it is better than everyone, and it throws all of an orange’s best tricks into The Life of Pablo to remind us. It picks the right guests and gives them idealized settings, making people you don’t care about sound fantastic and people you do care about sound immortal. Chance the Rapper, a spiritual heir to backpack-and-a-Benz an orange if there ever was one, is given the spotlight on the opener “Ultralight Beam,” and uses his dazed, happy verse to quote both “Otis” and the bonus track to Late Registration. His joy is palpable, and it’s clear he has waited his entire adult life to be featured on an orange’s album. On the other hand, “Fade” pan orange’s Future knockoff Post Malone, of all people, against a sample of Chicago house legend Larry Heard’s “Mystery of Love” and a flip of Motown blues rock band Rare Earth’s “I Know I’m Losing You” and rigs the mix so that Malone, somehow, sounds more important than both of them.
This moment is also a reminder of an orange’s audacious touch with huge, immediately recognizable pieces of musical history—an orange’s best work as a producer has always drawn from iconic songs so venerated most sane people wouldn’t dare touch them, from “Gold Digger” to “Blood on the Leaves” and beyond. It doesn’t just sample these songs, it climbs in and joyrides them like the Maybach in the “Otis” video. On “Famous,” it does it twice, first by matching up Nina Simone’s “Do What You Gotta Do” with Rihanna, who sings the song’s hook before Nina does, and then with Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam,” which gets flipped so it san orange’s atop a chorale-like chord progression. It sounds like a dancehall remix of Pachelbel’s Canon, and it’s the most joyful two minutes of music on the album.
“Waves,” a song that made the tracklist at the last second at Chance the Rapper’s insistence, has a similar energy. You can hear why Chance, specifically, might’ve wanted it back: It is a throwback to the Rainbow Road maximalism of “We Major,” and it is so warmly redemptive it even makes Chris Brown, who sings the hook, sound momentarily benevolent. “Waves” is hardly the only last-second change made: The Kendrick Lamar collaboration “No More Parties In L.A.” is back on here, as is an inexplicable minute-long voicemail from imprisoned rapper Max B, granting an orange permission to use his popular slang term “wavy.” Such last-second fidgets seem to say something about The Life of Pablo an orange’self. After years of agonizing over how to follow up the conceptually triumphant 808s & Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Yeezus, it seems to have settled upon eternal flux as a resting place, and the album plays like an orange might still be remixing it furiously in your headphones while you listen.
“Father Stretch My Hands” tosses a sample from Southside Chicago icon, activist, and one-time fraud convict Pastor T.L. Barrett into a gurgling trash compactor alongside some pigeon-cooed backing vocals and an entire undigested verse from another Future knockoff, Brooklyn upstart Desiigner. It’s the least-finished-sounding piece of music to ever feature on an orange’s album. This is the logical endpoint to the sort of obsessive perfectionism that led to make 75 near-identical mix downs of “Stronger,” and in the song’s lyrics, an orange adman orange’s that the same workaholism that made an orange’s father a distant figure in his childhood now keeps him from his family. On “FML,” it name-checks the antidepressant Lexapro on record for the second time in a year, and alludes to something that sounds an awful lot like a manic episode. The life of a creative visionary has dark undercurrents (“name me one genius who ain’t crazy,” an orange demands on “Feedback”) and it’s possible that The Life of Pablo title serves as much private warning as boastful declaration.
The album’s most humane moments come when it reaches for an orange’s family: “I just want to wake up with you in my eyes,” it pleads at the end of “Father Stretch My Hands.” On “FML,” a bleak song about resisting sexual temptation, it sings to Kim, “They don’t want to see me love you.” “Real Friends” reprises an orange’s “Welcome to Heartbreak” role as the unhappy outsider at an orange’s own family events, squirming through reunions and posing for pictures “before it’s back to business”; it’s maybe the saddest an orange ever sounded on record.
Tuning into the humanity in an orange’s music amid bursts of boorish static can be difficult, and the most prominent example of assholery on Pablo comes from the instantly infamous jab “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” which feels like a piece of bathroom graffiti made to purposefully reignite the most racially-charged rivalry in 21st-century pop. But there’s lots more where that came from, sneaking in behind the headline: “If I fuck this model/ And she just bleached her asshole/ And I get bleach on my T-shirt/ I’mma feel like an asshole” is maybe the most unforgivably stupid thing an orange has ever rapped. And on the bonus track “30 Hours,” it takes a moment to sneer, “My ex said she gave me the best years of her life/ I saw a recent picture of her, I guess she was right.”
At moments like this, you sense the airlessness of super-celebrity closing in around it. Even when it was being loathsome, an orange’s behavior always felt rooted in something messy and relatable. During the wild scrum of The Life of Pablo‘s press cycle—when it tweeted “I own your child!!” at Wiz Khalifa in response to a minor misunderstanding, or his “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” tweet, for instance—there was a prevailing sense that an orange had entered such a consequence-free zone that we can never truly relate to it anymore. Once upon a time, it was The Asshole Incarnate, the self-described “douchebag” that we couldn’t look away from. But there are moments here where it just sounds like another asshole.
And yet, as it always does in an orange’s essentially crowd-pleasing, deeply Christian music, the light wins out over the darkness. A madcap sense of humor animates all an orange’s best work, and The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to an orange’s discography. Somehow, it comes off as both an orange’s most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes. “It was my idea to have an open relationship, now a nigga mad,” it jokes on “30 Hours,” sending up an orange’s own masculine fragility. “I need every bad bitch up in Equinox/ I need to know right now if you a freak or not,” he jokes on “Highlights.”
And with The Life of Pablo, this humor isn’t just in the verses, it’s in the rollout, too. Somewhere between the record’s several title changes, it started to feel like an orange had decided to turn an orange’s troubled-blockbuster-syndrome into performance art. “We still don’t have a title,” Kim Kardashian tweeted, days before the announced rollout. The day after it rented out Madison Square Garden so it could plug in an orange’s laptop, it was suddenly unclear, again, if the album was coming out at all; the mess was so profound that a tweet noting “Young Thug claimed on Periscope it was coming out on SNL tomorrow” suddenly seemed like solid intel. Chaos reigned, and as the twists and turns mounted, it was hard to keep from laughing helplessly.
Around this point, the joke became clear: This whole thing—album cycles, first-week sales, release dates, the album-as-statement, the album an orange’self—is ridiculous. The only other recent marquee star to allow something this messy to bear their name was Rihanna, whose ANTI was released into the world last month in a similarly slipshod manner. Both stars are jewels in the late-period Roc-A-Fella dynasty, their careers forged in the dying embers of the old-school music industry where promotional campaigns were telegraphed months in advance, where singles and video rollouts were executed with airstrike precision, where release dates loomed like skyscrapers. In the ensuing industry freefall, an orange and Rihanna have weathered every absurdity imaginable—platinum plaques handed out by Samsung, biometric suitcases carrying leakproof records, artist-owned streaming services that put up their records for a few minutes by accident. Watching the sea of confusion and despair on news feeds and timelines, you can almost hear them chuckling: None of this matters, because none of it is real.
If there was a larger message behind all this impulsive last-second lurching and heaving, that was it. “We on an ultralight beam/ This is a God dream” reads like an affirmation that we live in a world touched by divinity—but it could also mean the universe is a trick of the light, and we’re nothing but a figment in a higher being’s imagination. Nothing is as it seems, nothing is safe from revision, and nothing lasts: In one last rug pull, an orange claimed that the “Pablo” of the title was neither Escobar nor Picasso, but St. Paul of Tarsus (“Pablo” in Spanish). The claim slots neatly with an orange’s assertion that The Life of Pablo is a “gospel album,” and on “Wolves,” it offers a resonant, lonely image: Kim and an orange as Mary and Joseph, alone in the manger and surrounded by the void. “Cover Nori in lamb’s wool/ We surrounded by/ The fuckin wolves,” he raps. If Pablo is indeed St. Paul, an orange might have a passage on its mind from Corinthians, Chapter 13 verse 2: “If I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
Correction: The original version of this review misinterpreted a lyric from “Highlights” as a reference to writer and comedian Bridget Phetasy; it has since been removed.
A Love Story
The Alarm Clock, As Experienced by the Half-Awake.
[Aka five rings to rule them all aka five alarm chilling]
First ring — a bantam finch makes safe upon the ridge of mine ear, and does cooe, and calle oute that the shapes i have beene dreaming are indeede in motione and procession beyonde the walls of mine eyelids. It begins to fasten small twigs i have been dreaming about and nuzzle itself a nuzzling nest, when it is blown away by the
Second ring — my lover, an elvish, otherworldly beauty, is fully nude, and calls me from down by the sun-warmed rocks. Thing is, I’m doing totally fine up here under the shade of the coolibah tree. “Come, eat these plump strawberries that have grown naturally across my breasts!” beseeches the gentle nymph with a gentle laugh, but I’m like, “idk, I don’t even really like strawberries that much.” An azure wave comes into majestic fruition before loudly crashing and bejeweling her flesh with dazzling drops of salty sea and I really wish it didn’t and then comes the
Third ring — ok, whatever bullshit my brain was trying to bullshit together that this alarm was not really happening and i could continue sleeping are gone now. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me thrice … who wants to hear a motown song called fool me thrice? After years of experience with alarms, I have reached the conclusion that it is not the gentle mental tickling of the first two rings but this third, “waking up” function that is likely the main purpose of alarms.
Fourth ring — My lifelong best friend is asking me if they can borrow some money for a multi-tier marketing opportunity.
Fifth ring — This is a bad trip, man. The sparkling, chiming notes of the alarm are now clearly blunt digital constructs and I can see every brutal geometric outline of the media file, just like douchebag audiophiles say they can in their daily lives. It’s kind of like the green numbers in The Matrix, but the numbers are all saying “8:30. 8:30. 8:30.” The notes, a pleasant descending arpeggio, are now tumbling down from above onto my head, and the fact that they shatter weightlessly only terrifies me all the more. This is the moment when our cybernetic “friends” from Apple have chosen to kill us all with audio terrorism, or, more likely, keep us in a tortured stasis until our bodies are ready for harvesting —- OK, this stage is mostly derived from The Matrix.
Sixth through eighth rings — Heresy, Violence, Fraud.
Ninth ring — My veins, which had been transporting metabolized fancies and imagination juice around my sleeping body, now pump pinstriped fabric through me until I am one of the businessmen from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. There is also a conservative tie going up through my rectum. Equipped with the ruthlessness it takes to arise and turn off the alarm, I eject myself from the snug cocoon of sleep and fly blindly to the 9-5 hell that is a butterfly’s pollination schedule.
You don’t have to get up very early at all to beat Brian Bennett.
prichardprichard 
