Why sample when you can do it all yourself (presuming you could)? Well, don't the records you sample already mean something? What happens to the old meaning on the new record? Why on earth would you want old meanings? et cet.

For sake of comparison, my robot helper sez these are approximately - it sez that in a robot voice, A-PROX-I-MATE-LEE - the most-played tracks of the past two years according to me, and it, er, uh, me, with it:

'Breathe' (23)
'Party and Bullshit' (20)
'Still Tippin' (17)
'Hey Now (Mean Muggin)' (17)
'To Live and Die in L.A.' (16)
'Kevin Rowlands 13th Time' (15)
'Fancy Clown' (14)
'Black Superman' (12)
'Bathysphere' (12)
'You're Wondering Now' (11)
'Diagonals' (11)
'Gotta Have It' (10)
'II B.S.' (10)
'High Come Down' (10)
'The Jump Off' (10)
'Bus Driver' (10)
'Southern Man' (10)
'Happy People' (10)
'Orange Rolls, Angel's Spit' (10)
'Unmade Bed' (10)
'Happiness' (10)
'B R Right' (10)
'Cadillac on 22's' (9)
'Hovi Baby' (9)
'Under the Sun' (9)
'Just Blaze, Bleek & Free' (9)
'Tokyo Eye' (9)
'Body and Soul' (9)
'Ain't a Thug' (9)
'Yeah' (9)
'Three Card Molly' (9)
'Rainy Night in Georgia' (8)
'Wheaton Calling' (8)
'Rock 'n Roll Suicide' (8)
'Shopping Bags (She Got From You)' (8)
'I Love You (Listen to This)' (8)
'Mind Playing Tricks On Me' (8)
'Bellona' (8)
'Last Exit' (8)
'Send Me Shivers' (8)
'Born Again' (8)
'Bring Em Out' (8)
'Me and Mia' (8)
'Lean Back (Remix)' (8)
'Try Again' (7)
'Flipmode Squad Meets Def Squad' (7)
'KoKo' (7)
'25 or 6 to 4' (7)
'Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is' (7)
'Flava In Ya Ear (Remix)' (7)

I'm sure this all means something or other.

I used to be unstoppable with a comma.

I dunno about least interesting - I'm kind of impressed that somehow Mike Jones has grafted onto his flow, here and elsewhere, which kind of wavers between bluntness and lameness (so that, you know, he's real or something), two tics that complement it: the incessantly one-joke self-promotion campaign (who is Mike Jones? who is Mike Jones? who is Mike Jones? I'm Mike Jones! - speaking of which, I'm too shy to call his phone number, 281-330-8004, which is plastered all over the packaging and recording of one of his mix cds, but I would be pleased to find that he actually answers it himself, and disappointed if it's just a message drop, or worse, his agent), and the vaguely hypnotic (I wonder if it has anything to do with screwing and chopping?) repetitions, where for apparently very little reason he'll pick a whole couplet and repeat it like forty times.

I have consulted iTunes, which is more organized than me, except that it fucks up keeping track of playcounts sometimes. It says that I have 57 tracks sitting in my '2005 singles' playlist right now; I've played less than half of them, played those 32 tracks 92 times, and played 'Still Tippin' at least twenty percent of the times. If it does not turn out to be my Skinner Box rat-pellet single of the year, it will be because I get sick of it and never want to hear it again until I am 40, which will probably be embarassing (to someone else).

I've been wishing I could get ahold of the papers presented at the pop conference. Oliver Wang has posted the paper on 'Apache' by Matos (who posts the original draft on his blog anyway), as well as a bunch of different recordings of, or sampling, 'Apache'.

'To watch them play is to wonder why everyone in the audience is taking them so seriously. As refugees from the zealously ethical punk counterculture seeking asylum in the hopelessly style-obsessed indie subculture, that's their cross to bear.'

!

Does it seem odd that stripping wasn't invented until the twentieth century? Does it seem odd that it was 'invented'? (Or 'discovered' maybe?) I can't decide.

Another way of saying that might be to ask how much sense it makes to talk about the 'form', in Adorno's sense, of a joke. My intuition at the moment is that anything that could be interestingly called the 'form' of a joke will draw in so much about the joke's situation - in language, in the knowledge and affective understanding (a la Ted Cohen) of the joke-teller and the audience - that it would be missing some kind of point to insist on it being the form of the joke, as the brief event of speech or writing between people that we might be inclined to limit it to. And, if so: then wouldn't we really be looking to attribute the 'form', the sedimentation of content, to something larger, shared, and most importantly, not yet objectified, about language? Wouldn't that be nice? A reason for saying: it's not as bad as it seems. (Adorno would probably prefer to say: it could be worse, then.)

I wonder just how surrounded by these promises we might find ourselves if we were able to locate them in creations less formally elaborated than the string quartet, the play, the painting; Ted Cohen, for example, would probably let in jokes and metaphors, having found no great reason not to. These are made of language; it's a small step from there to the possibility of hearing the promise whenever someone opens her mouth.