NO TRIVIA

February 20, 2013 – Where'd all the good Internet rap go? Rappers of all stripes from all over the map, meeting on Mediafire, felt so necessary a year or two ago. Now, that scene has congealed into an endless loop of RSS-feeding “collabos,” irksome nostalgia trips, and PR firms and quasi-labels shoving all the interesting, engaging personalities who don't play the game to the side.

February 19, 2013 – Baauer's "Harlem Shake," that squeaky, wubby trap-dance instrumental that has, over the past few weeks, gone full-on viral thanks to endless videos of people dancing to the song, is a moderately interesting slab of post-drop dubstep or EDM. But the Harlem Shake is already a dance. A once-popular and very loaded dance, at that. A few decades old, it rose to the mainstream in 2001 thanks to Harlem rapper G.

February 15, 2013 – So, Fox News hired Herman Cain. This will be fun. More importantly though, it is a chance to resurrect my dream remix project: Jamie xx & Herman Cain's We're New Here. Come on bored DJs. The instrumentals for Jamie xx & Gil Scott Heron's remix record are readily available. By the end of week one, Cain will have delivered enough legendary nonsense to flesh this thing out.

February 15, 2013 – So, Randy Jackson was absent for much of Wednesday's show because he was “busy in the studio.” Is Aldo Nova recording a comeback record? What could the only remaining O.G. American Idol judge have to do that's more important than the show? Kind of feel like he just caught feelings because Keith Urban gets to wander off whenever he wants to, and Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey's lateness was a plot point a few weeks back.

February 14, 2013 – The first thing you'll notice about Waka Flocka Flame's DuFlocka Rant 2 (besides the stunning, syrup-rave lurch production), is how often other rappers steal the tape out from under him.

February 13, 2013 – How about that brostep State of the Union address advertisement? Did Tim & Eric direct that thing, giggling the whole time? Nevertheless, contrast it with Republican hero of the moment Marco Rubio (who will soften on some all-important policy or another and be abandoned soon enough), and his perfunctory nods to '90s hip-hop and Democratic wub-wub-wub is, well, at least contemporary.