Currently Listening:
Rome Fortune x OG Maco - Yep
Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper
100s - IVRY
Rae Sremmurd - SremmLife
Ford & Lopatin - Channel Pressure
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Currently Watching:
The Wire HD
Bojack Horseman
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Currently Reading:
Racecraft by Barbara Fields and Karen Fields Promethea by Alan Moore Brain Training for Runners by Matt Fitzgerald Middlemarch by George Eliot| You Gotta Learn to Live With Regerts: The Funny Jokes, Loud Guitars and Catchy Hooks of Chastity Belt | September 12, 2013 |
B. Michael Payne is casually sipping a yolorita. Chastity Belt are branding geniuses. They landed on NPR’s “All Songs Considered” and this 2.5 million+ view BuzzFeed listicle all because of an astounding band photo. Which, look at it. The foursome resembles another notorious quartet of Girls except for the more obvious and cringe-inducing imagery front […]
You know when someone derisively describes something as “tumblr rap”? (You’re reading Passion of the Weiss, so of course you do.) What they usually mean is that the music, tumblr rap, is very stylish without actually being good. Earlier this year I might have begrudgingly lumped Spark Master Tape into the tumblr rap category. But […]
| The Corrections: A Defense of Phish | August 15, 2013 |
Brian Michael Payne is a Buddhist prodigy. Throughout this “The Corrections” series, writers have been grappling with the question of slept-on albums. But for my entry, I wanted to share a correction made to my music listening habits that has affected my entire life. It’s a journey I’ve just started on and one of the […]
| You Deserve Some Weed | May 22, 2013 |
No amount of weed could make B Michael Payne find Waterboy jokes funny. The other day I was sitting at my desk wondering if maybe I weren’t missing out on a basic human experience by abstaining from weed. (Yeah, that sounds like the thought process of someone who needs to smoke weed, right?) Synchronicity being […]
| Who is Spark Master Tape and What Does He Do? | May 3, 2013 |
B. Michael Payne owns stock in both Fanta and jolly ranchers. There’s a version of this piece that doesn’t play the Guess The Race Game. I think we can all agree the Guess the Race Game is the worst. But there are many, many pieces to the Spark Master Tape experience that lend themselves to […]
| The Raw Retro-Futurism of Huntronik | March 5, 2013 |
B Michael Payne wrote this in a hovercraft-converted Edsel. The debut album by Brooklyn trio Huntronix starts off in a retrograde fashion. A wash of synths with a retro-futuristic posture and echo-heavy live drums carry its first lines in like the surf at the end of Planet of the Apes: “We’re gonna tell you how […]
Hit-Boy occupies an unsettled but not uncommon space in modern rap culture. At 25 years old, he’s had an inordinately busy career producing pop singles for acts like the Pussycat Dolls, Brandy, Jennifer Lopez, and Rihanna. He’s also created a significant body of production work for rappers ranging from Snoop Dogg to Slaughterhouse. Hit’s biggest […]
| Don’t Let Me Get in my Zone: The Weeknd and Drake Discover David Lynch | November 12, 2012 |
B. Michael Payne’s favorite trilogy remains the only trilogy worth being your favorite trilogy. Now that The Weeknd’s three mixtapes are about to see a “proper” release as Trilogy, the Drake-featuring song, “The Zone”, has become the latest Weeknd video (directed by Abel Tesfaye). It opens with a familiarly Lynchian image. We’re in a car […]
B Michael Payne keeps an eye out for gypsies. George Lucas ruined everything great about my childhood. Now substitute “Yoni Wolf” for “George Lucas” and “confused young adulthood” for “childhood.” I know, I know – we all grow up, see The Dark Knight and feel vaguely disappointed when we agree with the re-heated idea of our […]
| September is the Cruelest Month: The Event Horizons and Turning Points of Kanye West | September 13, 2012 |
B. Michael Payne steps into the arena. It must feel weird being even a relatively old-school hip-hop head. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, you only knew Kanye West as a Roc-a-Fella producer with occasional placements on semi-underrated Jay-Z projects. The College Dropout leak and College Dropout album were game changers, but for […]
