Myself

$$$: $PORTS $OLD $EPARATELY | 2026-08-19

In one way or another, sports fandom has always involved some resemblance of value exchange. Since the emergence of modern and contemporary societies, fans, patrons, and pundits have gone on to buy tickets, jerseys, subscriptions and, alas increasingly, gambling products. Yet, there is something afoot amongst the current juncture of professional Western sport that transcends a callous commercialization squeeze of devotion. It resembles much more a conversion of athletic achievements—and the rooting attached to them—into a commodifiable and investable asset: an ROI-bearing recurring revenue stream to be optimized, over-leveraged, and ultimately extracted largely by private-equity firms, sovereign wealth funds, and individual billionaire owners.

As a case in point, the ongoing watershed ownership transfer of the NBA‘s Los Angeles Lakers offers a proto-canon event with a revealing lens through which to understand this transformation. Don’t get it twister; it isn’t so much about who ends up owning a team. Rather, it is a sectional and surgical procedure that allows us to redefine what ownership means in light of a host of parallel macro trends in the wider sports industry. Simply put, it’s about what happens when a storied franchise that functions as a cultural folklore institution—arguably the most iconic in its lane of dribbling—is treated like a real estate object to be flipped, a media property to be monetized, or a portfolio asset to be repositioned.

A major concern about this Lakers story is the extraordinary speed and opacity of the reported sale transaction. To back up the truck a little bit, just days ago at the time of this writing it was reported that the Los Angeles team was being sold (again!) to U.S. empresarios Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a whooping $12.5 billion, a record-breaking price in the history of professional sports. This report come less than a year after American businessman, philanthropist, and CEO of Guggenheim Partners Mark Walters himself bought a controlling interest in the team from the Buss family for a then-record franchise valuation of approximately $10 billion. Incidentally, Kushner and Iger were initially involved in the NBA expansion process in Las Vegas; they however pivoted to make an aggressive offer to buy the Lakers in a dazzling plot twist.

All this to say that Walter’s own purchase of the legendary hooping franchise was somewhat inexplicably followed in a rapid succession by a prospective transfer to former Disney-CEO Iger as well as Thrive Capital and Oscar Health-executive Kushner after just nine months. Such a timeline is unprecedented and difficult to comprehend outside a wider network of financial, political and institutional relationships. Chief amongst all concerns; where does that leave the Lakers fans? Also, the deal ought to be understood via the plague of questions surrounding Walter’s hinky business affairs, including Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funding and the broader arrival of institutional capital in sports.

Granted, these relationships do require careful scrutiny, and do not necessarily benefit from compromised premature conclusions. Yet, even with all genuine benefit of the doubt conceded to this financial engineering operation, in this hypernormalized post-Covid-19 era it has become painfully clear that at the highest levels of professional sport, teams and franchises increasingly circulate among a restricting circle of filthy rich owners, whose relationship to them appears solely financial, strategic or political—certainly not emotional.

This latest Lakers deal also marks a decisive break with the mythology of the family-owned franchise. For many decades, the LA team was associated with the Buss family, whose stewardship—whatever its flaws—provided some resemblance of custodianship, allegiance, and continuity. The 17-time NBA champ-brand was not simply a tradable commodity; it was embedded in rich and nuanced Los Angeles history, memory, and identity. Last year’s transition from the Buss family to Walter—and in turn this summer from Walter to an Iger-Kushner ownership structure—have arguably put an unceremonious and uncelebrated end to the romanticized ‘family business’ right before our eyes.

This same trend is visible elsewhere in the NBA’s current zeitgeist. Steve Ballmer’s ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers kind of established the billionaire technology executive as a new archetype of sports impresario: energetic, ostensibly personally invested, and capable of treating a franchise as both a passion project and a multibillion-dollar asset—while breaking a few rules here and there. In many ways, we should have seen Iger and Kushner’s knee-jerk entrance coming. The writing was on the wall. The tea leaves were crystal clear. For their reported interest in sports follows investments in other NBA franchises (Memphis Grizzlies, Miami Heat) and an attempted venomous private-equity model for FIFA’s soccer World Cup. As it has been turning out, the whole point we’re making is that the ballooning Wall Street-captured financial architecture of sports ownership increasingly makes the team’s emotional and athletic purposes subordinate to the imperatives of capital appreciation.

This brings us directly to the defining dilemma of modern sports stakeholdership: fans want championships, while angel-turned-devil investors want the value of their asset to rise—ideally sooner rather than later. These goals can and in many ways do certainly overlap, but are not identical. Winning is expensive, lengthy, costly, burdensome, and often irrational from a narrow financial perspective. It requires investment in players, coaching, scouting, logistics, medical infrastructure, and organizational stability, with no guarantee of a title in return. By contrast, extracting and maximizing more immediate proceeds from media rights, sponsorships, premium seating, gambling, merchandise and digital products can produce measurable and predictable gains without necessarily improving the team’s performance on the court.

This fundamental and inherent goal divergence can perhaps best be unpacked through the notion of the ‘green arrow’-slash-hockey stick metaphor, moving upward toward the right in your typical financial charts. It stands for the embedded assumption that institutional owners—as docile and skivvy subservients of a supply-based neoliberal capitalism—are structurally oriented toward growth: higher valuations, fatter media contracts, expanded commercial opportunities, and ultimately improved returns. Fans and diehards, however, do not tend to experience the team as linearly growing, upward-trending asset. They experience it viscerally, temporally, and emotionally. They remember a parent watching games, a childhood playoff run, an upsetting game, a particular arena, a player who embodied a city. Sports fandom is a heirloom, not a quarterly performance indicator.

This realization is what makes the present alienation of fans so especially vile and acute. For fans are by and large treated as consumers. Yet, their attachment is way deeper than consumption. Think of it this way: consumers switch brands, while nine times out of ten a supporter cannot switch teams without violating a personal, integrity, or communal identity. This asymmetry now resides at the core of the sports economy. Owners can—and do!—buy and sell a franchise at mind-bending price tags after nine months. Players can be traded. Executives can resign. Fans remain. Their loyalty is ironclad precisely because it is not bound by conventional market specifics.

Truly and honestly, the systemic danger is that owners mistake this loyalty for unlimited tolerance. In this sense, Pulitzer-winning Filipino-American journalist Pablo Torre’s metaphor of ‘fracking sports’ is gnarly precisely because it identifies this abhorrent and breakneck logic of extraction, while at the same time alluding to such a quintessentially exploitative industrious practice. As owners and leagues know that for the most part fans will continue watching, they shall drill further. Keep raising ticket prices, restricting public gathering spaces, multiplying subscription tiers, moving games behind various paywalls, selling increasingly invasive sponsorships and turning every moment of attention into a monetizable product. In this process, the rooting fan is not necessarily expelled outright; they are gradually priced out, gentrified, segmented, and reclassified according to purchasing power and tax bracket.

If you’ve attended a live sports event in recent years, you might have noticed that while arenas and stadiums may still be full, the social meaning of the physical on-premise attendance has largely changed. In so many ways, it has become an ultra-luxury, premium experience, all the while ordinary longtime supporters are pushed toward distant low-resolution screens, expensive streaming packages, or unofficial public spaces. For Christ’s sake, New York fans could not even gather freely on public soil outside Madison Square Garden after a Knicks NBA championship earlier this year. This points to the same God-forsaken socio-economic contradiction we’ve been riffing about this whole piece: teams purportedly celebrate collective passion, while enclosing and monetizing the traditional cultural spaces in which that passion can be expressed in the first place.

Think about it; live sports remain extraordinarily and singularly valuable. Except for perhaps music, sport events are the last true monocultural experiences in fragmented Western (media) societies. Audiences no longer watch the same films, read the same news, follow the same television shows, or inhabit the same cultural references. And yet, live games are different. They create a dying breed of synchronized, largely simultaneous attention. Look no further than this year of our Lord 2026: a championship game, a World Cup final, or an NBA playoff contest can still bring millions, if not billions, of people into the same temporal and emotional space. Sports are a remaining form of shared, expressed collective life.

Herein lies the profound concern as to why privatization carries consequences beyond fiscal ownership. Much like with traditional industrial and capitalistic systems, when a common cultural institution—let alone the last one—is optimized around the beck and call of shareholders and investment funds, the public is asked to supply the emotional labor, while private capital captures the financial reward. Privatize wins, and collectivize losses. The key irony in it all is that sports supporters provide the atmosphere, mores, and legitimacy that make franchises valuable. In return, they are being told that prices must rise, access must narrow, and traditions may change.

Look, in fairness, all this is not to proclaim that wealthy oligarchs and billionaires do not, or cannot, genuinely love sports. We’re sure that some undoubtedly do. But our call to arms is instead a pledge to sports ecosystem stakeholders to rethink whether the governance structures of their contemporary industry still allow pure love of winning, loyalty to place, and responsibility to supporters to prevail over the demand for senseless perpetual financial growth. If the answer is no, then the commodification of fandom shall reign supreme, and eventually usher sports into an endless undermining of the very emotional, social, and cultural asset being monetized.

Fans endure losing seasons; they forgive bad decisions; they (at last, reluctantly) even accept changing players and coaches. However, this latest private equity trend in sports might be on borrowed time, for what fans will hopefully increasingly uphold is a realization that their once sacred and undying allegiance has become a loss leader collateral for someone else’s diversified investment strategy. When the game and its beauty are reduced to a fungible asset, the betrayal is not necessarily that its owners seek profit. It is that they seek profit from a source of loyalty they can never seem to reciprocate.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

ALEX REVIEWS MUSIC (ARM): RYAN ADAMS – THE SUICIDE HANDBOOK | 2026-06-23

Ryan Adams has gone dark in 2026. Not in a creative or musical way (although his 2025 tail-end LP Self Portrait wasn’t exactly wedding material), but in the sense that he’s all but disappeared from the global ether. In many ways, one could argue he’s been dark since his embryonal artistic early days in the mid-Nineties. But what we’re noticing here is a relatively uncharacteristic online strike on the part of the 51-year old singer/songwriter, whose otherwise spontaneous, irreverent, and unhinged social media approach had largely been dominating the past few years, for better or worse. Interestingly, the tumbleweed of silence appears to have transferred over to his natively managed PaxAm email newsletters too, with the last issue—announcing the underwhelming live ‘re-imagining’ of Another Wednesday—dating as far back as early 2025.

Sure, what appears to be a carefully constructed absence might have something to do with the presumable umpteenth change in management style, an agency representation line up switch, or the fact that his main source code of news and updates—his official Instagram page—has been bio’d with a ‘Run by mgmt’ for a while now. Because of all of this, aside from announcing gnarly custom signature guitars and a solo acoustic European tour slated for this Fall via boilerplate publicity post write ups, the DRA has been missing in action in the year of our Lord 2026. Expect for… teasing new studio albums. That should track for someone with almost forty full lengths out attached to his name, shouldn’t it?

At any rate, to get our ducks back in a row, let us point you in the direction of as recently as mid May this year, when the PaxAm CEO and founder made a rare online appearance to low-key couch an informal announcement within a more formal announcement that he was in the middle of working on his second new album, tentatively titled Animal (this in spite of declaring it ‘finished’ last December…). With that being said, the real reason we’re here today is momentous, for it is to discuss a different PSA from the Adams camp that came out just a tad before that, on 27th April. On said date, his management put out an unexpected message alerting fans in a somewhat sterilized and sanitized fashion that the long-awaited, long-requested Suicide Handbook LP was indeed going to finally come out on 12th June. We didn’t hear it from the former Blue Note recording artist directly, but this is generational news if you’re an early Noughties Ryan Adams nostalgic and a third act revisionist.

Billed by his label PaxAm as one of the alt-country prodigy’s “most elusive and mythic recordings”, the 21-track compilation was further advertised as “a raw and intimate collection of songs that captures the songwriter at his most unguarded. Recorded at the beginning of his solo career and long circulating only through bootlegs, the album has earned a legendary status among die-hard fans and fans of the Americana genre alike for its stark stripped-back beauty”. So, a quarter century since it first began circulating as a leaked bootleg in light of his then-label Lost Highway Records’s refusal to release it as an official album due to its darker and sadder tones, The Suicide Handbook has at long last, miraculously, seen the light of day. Let us delve into it head-first.

Filed as what should probably count as the former Whiskeytown and Cardinals frontman’s thirty-second solo studio album since his 2000 debut Heartbreaker, the lore tape did in fact come out a few weeks ago as promised. That felt like a good start. Available in both physical formats (vinyl and CD) as well as digitally, The Suicide Handbook‘s official (and original) 21-song tracklist was regrettably downgraded to 18 records on DSPs (digital service providers, ergo the Spotifys and Apple Musics of this world)—in all likelihood due to ongoing rights disputes over three cuts that ended up getting released in their original version on 2002’s Demolition via Lost Highway/UMG: “She Wants to Play Hearts“, “Cry On Demand“, and “Dear Chicago” (bizarrely listed as just “Chicago” on PaxAm’s website).

Luckily, the same fate wasn’t reserved to the batch of songs that went on to be re-recorded for DRA’s Gold (“Wild Flowers“, “Touch, Feel & Lose“, “Firecracker“, “La Cienega Just Smiled“, “Just Saying Hi” later retitled to “Answering Bell“) and his Cardinals’ joint Easy Tiger (“Off Broadway“). As music industry cats and copyright lawyers would know it, the clue is in the re-taping of the masters, aka the sound recordings of all of these, whose streaming licensing exclusive is probably still owned by Lost Highway, unlike the song ideas themselves, aka the compositions, which should be under Adams’s publishing control no matter the exploitation format (alongside the early acoustic renditions of these songs, i.e. the ones being released now on The Suicide Handbook). Look no further than this litmus test artifact to get a sense of how deliberately intricate and nuanced the copyright framework is for commercial music. As a case in point—and to add insult to injury—the album actually began to disappear from DSPs at around 6am ET on Monday 22nd June, and is still unavailable for streaming at the time of this writing.

It’s a good thing PaxAm was allegedly in a position to at least salvage the non-Demolition songs, for releasing the record without all nine aforementioned tunes would have made little to no sense at all—particularly accounting for the loud vox populi calling for The Suicide Handbook to finally be released in its original 21-track incarnation for over two decades… Mind you, even considering how stunning and enchanting this collection is wall-to-wall, losing “She Wants to Play Hearts”, “Cry On Demand”, and “Dear Chicago” to Demolition sounds and feels like an incredibly low blow for the end digital product.

Not only were these three tunes sacrificed for a top-down imposed, glorified palate cleanser mixtape of loosies following the stratospheric success of his first two records (2000’s Heartbreaker and Gold the following year), but both “Cry On Demand” and “Dear Chicago” would have remained peak standouts even amidst such a strong collection of tracks. One is left wondering whether Ryan ever considered re-recording those three to re-snatch their master rights back, effectively putting out a more cohesive and unified record across playback formats? Let us run with the assumption that this was the time he thought better of whipping up impromptu low-fidelity home-spun versions of exquisite gems in the spirit of retaining the original sound cohesion across all 21 tracks.

Something we should say for full disclosure at this point is that we weren’t exactly terribly familiar with or attached to the 2001/2002 bootlegged version of The Suicide Handbook before this revamp. That acclaimed and treasured collection seemed to be unifying legions of his erratic and disjointed fanbase, acting as the one album that slipped through the cracks, the one that put even the most voraciously polarized in agreement. The reason for our alleged indifference is that even though we have been covering every single release the DRA has dropped since 2015, we weren’t necessarily soaked in nostalgia, and mostly kept it a buck oriented to his forward-looking, newer material. Not that there was any scarcity of it, mind you: just in the eleven-year lifespan of this site, the world’s preeminent pinball historian has dished out as many as twenty studio albums (not counting live ones!).

Back to the record. What immediately stands out when bumping the tape from the top is the incredibly crisp and fine-tuned quality of these recordings. This alone is a welcome breath of fresh air on account of the relatively inconsistent production, mixing, and engineering found on some of his latest albums. This thing is an acoustic and mostly unplugged affair, with Ryan’s sharp song crafting, his voice, and some impeccable guitar playing carrying most of the weight, most of the time. Cuts like “Perfect and True” and “Tell It to My Heart” on the front end of the record, or even “Bow to the Sad Lady” and “Miss Sunflower” on the flip side, are not only sensationally intense and catchy, but they also reveal themselves over repeated listens, thus carrying lofty replay value.

The hushed and untouched veneer that permeates these tracks feels almost unfair in the way that it further decouples the already unmediated heart-on-sleeve confessionals committed to tape beyond any self-effacing charades. A tune like “For No One”, at number nine on the tracklist, has got to be one of Adams’s best tracks in his released catalogue, hands down. The way its melancholic yet self-aware storytelling gets accompanied by soft and husky piano licks and a tasteful steel guitar is just true blue trademark DRA. Truly and honestly, with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, it does strike us as odd and ill-informed at best that such a sticky and timeless collection of songs—one that he might have intended to come out as a double-disc album in 2001—was shelved by the imprint on grounds of lack of commercial viability. This album in its totality stands as a top 3 all-acoustic Ryan Adams project ever (we’ll throw Ashes & Fire and Wednesdays in there too).

And don’t even get it twisted—the performances are far from perfect, but as most music goes, that’s kind of the point. In spite of the refreshingly elevated studio-grading recording and playback quality of most of these songs, there are a whole host of apparent blemishes still in the mix, such as hitting bum notes at the end (“Bow to the Sad Lady”) or portions of studio mic banter bleeding through (check out the concluding seconds of “Off Broadway”). There are also a couple of tea leaves left on the record that strict music historians would perhaps have liked to have seen elsewhere; cf. streaming-version coda “Idiots Rule the World” both hinting at and perhaps better belonging to his later LP Love is Hell (2004). Nothing that distracts or takes away from the unified listen to The Suicide Handbook though. This is a statement—or better yet, signature—release by Ryan Adams.

The multi-hyphenate creative auteur has sure been keeping busy at work over the past year, and not insignificant parts of us are glad he’s done that largely while being away from the jaws of online hell. There also appear to be clues that he might even have relocated away from Los Angeles and the U.S. West Coast altogether. During the aforementioned rare online camera appearance this past May, he hinted at a cleverly subtle rebrand of his label to PaxPm—something he first teased in November last year.

The business transfer assumption further appears to be validated by the copyright disclaimers printed on physical formats of The Suicide Handbook, listing his new label mailing address in the Southeast of the U.S., on 3630 Peachtree Road NE, Suite 600, Atlanta GA 30326. To make matters slightly more convoluted, PaxAm’s merchandising arm seems to be incorporated somewhere else altogether: PaxAm Shop 3200 South 24th Street, Kansas City KS 66106. Not that it should matter all that much. Instead of geographical or logistical clarification, if there is anything we could ask him and his entourage would be to please bring back this record to global streaming services—after being held prisoner 26 years, it’s too good for its time in the limelight to just have lasted ten days.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

RYAN ADAMS

THE SUICIDE HANDBOOK

2026, PAXAM

https://ryanadamsofficial.com

FROZEN CHARLATAN IN A FROZEN LAND | 2026-06-14

As it turns out, we couldn’t have imagined we’d be witnessing history as we caught Detroit’s very own Jack White at Gröna Lund in Stockholm, Sweden, earlier this week. Gröna Lund is the Swedish capital’s flagship theme park, and let’s be honest, in all likelihood doubles as the world’s cheapest live marquee concert series. For just over $40, one gets access to dozens and dozens of gigs throughout the summer, set amidst a kaleidoscopic rollercoaster of merry-go-rounds and a total capacity of just over 10,000 people a night. This year includes folks such as Rick Astley, Natalie Imbruglia, Garbage, Brad Paisley, Shaggy, Anthrax, Charlie Puth, and of course, The Cardigans. Pretty sweet deal if you’re from the land of ice and snow (in fairness, a vast majority of the acts are either domestic or Nordics-centric). At any rate, the White Stripes and Third Man Records founder graced the wide-ranging-demographics crowd members this past Tuesday 9th June with a totally fuzzy, messy, and zany near two-hour set that included 22 songs (of which 13 White Stripes and Raconteurs “covers” lol, according to setlist.fm), as well as a bout of cold rain toward the end.

Something else the 50-year old Michiganian did on the same day was announcing a new album without actually… announcing it. Himself, at least. Once again. Aside from quietly squeezing the raucous and testy new lead single “Dollar Bill” at number three on the night’s setlist—unbeknownst to the crowd in attendance—the singer/songwriter-turned-upholsterer did not utter a single word in reference to his new LP, entitled Frozen Charlotte. Sporting the previously released “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs” b/w “Derecho Demonico” singles to open up the dances, the new thirteen-track project—Jack’s seventh solo outing—sees “Dollar Bill” sequenced halfway through the record at number 7. Naturally, the full length is being marketed and released via his own imprint Third Man Records—slated to drop worldwide on 10th July next month.

Speaking of Third Man Records, given that the boss himself couldn’t be asked to make a mere mention of his new album while literally being on a tour promoting it, the “official” announcement cue had to come by way of the haphazard Detroit-based label’s Third Man Release Lab webinar. A free online series in two parts, the thought leadership series was billed to offer “a behind-the-scenes look at our creative approach to record releases, discussions on the music industry’s evolution, and the strategies we feel still hold up in 2026. Whether you’re an artist, independent label, or simply interested in the mechanics of the music industry, this series offers something for everyone interested in how modern release campaigns take shape”. Well, it was during the second and final installment of the video series—ostensibly an educational deep dive into the label’s marketing strategies, published on the same day as Jack White’s Stockholm gig—that the Easter Egged information about his brand new solo album were disclosed.

For all intents and purposes, the webinar focused on the campaign behind 2024’s terrific No Name, an album that was first ushered into the ether when physical vinyl copies were secretly slipped into customers’ bags at Third Man shops all over the world. Yet at around 24:25 into the video, a dry roundtable of Third Man execs Ben Swank, Ben Blackwell, Morgan Perry, and Jordan Williams gets briefly signal-jacked by a low-fidelity black-and-white footage of a chrome skull-helmeted character in front of a picture framed with the sole word “CONTENT” in it. The mysterious action figure’s nameplate reads “FROZEN CHARLATAN”, as they eventually hold up a sign that says “NEW ALBUM”. A front cover then briefly flashes onscreen before the Release Lab continues without anyone at the roundtable batting an eye.

Truth be told, a similar low-key tease happened during Part One a day prior. As co-founder and Third Man minority owner Blackwell blabbered about releasing the Dead Weather’s “Hang You From The Heavens” 7″ in 2009, the video got warped and interrupted by about thirty seconds of new music, which in twenty-twenty hindsight we now know stems from the aforementioned “Dollar Bill”. That clip was then surreptitiously uploaded to a new standalone YouTube account, @FrozenCharlatan, whose description box currently includes a Linktree to blue and chrome vinyl pre-orders for, you guessed it, Frozen Charlotte. Par for the course, Thee Frozen Charlatan’s YouTube account’s bio simply reads “CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT”, and redirects to a hilariously domain-named site: https://wwwwwwwww.000000000.net.

Intriguingly, this time one should look beyond sonic wavelengths to arrive at source of the total marketing strategy around the LP, as its title appears to stem from White’s recent visual fine art work, as reported on his official IG profile. Incidentally, “Frozen Charlotte” is the name of a series of his sculptures currently on display at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in London (as well as being rocked as part of the stage choreography on his current tour, see above), for what is the garage rock pioneer’s first museum exhibition. For those interested, here’s how both the installation and its curious name came about:

An old carnival prize chalkware statue from the 1940’s of a sailor boy falls over in my recording studio and its head breaks off. I grab a nearby blue skull shaker percussion object and glue it in the head’s place. I paint the body white and suddenly an all new character avatar that I called “Frozen Charlotte” came to life.

A “frozen Charlotte” is a penny doll toy from victorian times, they were ceramic but could float or have a dress put over, recalling an old folk song about a girl who froze to death from not dressing properly in the winter. I wanted to make the modern version of chalk ware of the 40’s and 50’s which to me is 3D printed plastic. We took the piece to be scanned and CAD filed in order to make more of her with the help of Daniel Birkhead at @pr3nter_inc and my good man Daniel Mancini facilitating. Then sanding, priming, spraying back at my own shop to create numerous avatars of her including a male trixter hero version named the “Frozen Charlatan” who is the chrome metallic alter ego.

Some of them felt like they needed to include the original broken off sailor’s head. Many versions of the sculpture started to come out of me, different personalities and characters, some to mimic the fast airbrush style of cheap carnival prizes made assembly line style, and some more elaborately painted, all of which are in the art show.

For now, this seems to be all we know about Jack White’s latest project. The record’s up as a pre-release on Apple Music et al. There is never a world in which we don’t need a new Jack White album, but this current juncture’s erratic and off-the-wall nature—one in which the New York Knickerbockers return to eternal hoopin’ glory after more than half a century while World Cup referees are sent back home—really does seem to warrant it. Yet, don’t get it twisted, you better set a calendar placeholder for Friday 10th July, for you wouldn’t know Jack White had a new album out if you only got your news from the (third) man himself.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

TEN BLONDES | 2026-04-20

Don’t look now, but this summer it’ll be a whole ten years since the release of Frank Ocean‘s Blonde (as well as his underrated visual album companion Endless, you abolitionists!). Notwithstanding the highfalutin subterfuge he pulled off to ensure his hotly-anticipated sophomore record would be fully owned, distributed, and self-released via his own imprint Boys Don’t Cry—completely outside of the major circuit grip—the 17-track, hour-long tape has been aging like the finest of red wines. Landing more and more Top <insert here> album accolades as the years go by, Blonde‘s undeniable impact and influence only worsens the holdout wait fans have been plagued by throughout the past decade.

Yet before unpacking musical longing and nostalgia by way of ancillary creative prisms, let us weave in a brief hoopin intermission, just as motivated by the present timely juncture as by our own volition. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that the 2026 NBA postseason officially kicked off this past weekend, with its first full rodeo of games across the Western and Eastern conferences. As it’s storied tradition within this corner of the web, we once again made sure to churn out our impulsive, instinctive, and impromptu Playoffs bracket prediction as soon as the final (disappointing, no wasps…) Play-in verdicts trickled in last Friday night. Peep it below in its full glory.

Suffice to say that through a mere linear extrapolation of projected first round series winners per the above, our post-game one hit rate stagnates at moderately mediocre 62.5%—having correctly guessed five match up winners out of the possible eight. While we are quick to concede that the Wolves edging out the ex-ex-Champs Denver Nuggets remains a daring call, we just can’t even coexist with the idea that a Dončić- and Reaves-less Lakers would actually go on to upset a, well, for now Durant-less Rockets (at least as of game 1’s IL). Even more stupefying was the out-of-nowhere road win that a harassed and blemished Orlando Magic-ally managed to conquer in the Michiganian lion’s den of the #1 seed in the East, Detroit. Yeah we know, it’s just the first game of the first round of a long postseason. Matter of fact, we’ll keep and stand by our predictions; not least because last year‘s didn’t exactly pan out all that better…

Back to Blonde. Frank, where the Goddamn album at already?! Glazing over the personally dispelled rumors of that lore-ridden pre-Pandemic Look at Us, We’re in Love tape (that nonetheless yielded us a string of incredible standalone singles), it’s been awfully quiet on the musical front for the 38-year old former Odd Future wunderkind. So naturally, as with every addicting product not immediately available on the market, folks have been resorting to derivatives or, worse, copycats as their blonded fix to get by. Thusly, we thought we’d both celebrate and hopefully summon the right Ocean-esque vibrations necessary to memorialize a decade of Blondes, and who knows, perhaps even Mandela-effecting a new thing from Frank sooner or later.

One fun thing that has been circulating under the title Blond (!llmind Remixed) is a six-track, free-download revisitation dating back to 2016, the same year the OG Blonde dropped. Less a conventional project than a kind of digital sample pack—it’s likely a spontaneous combustion artifact of the immediate, saturated, chaotic afterlife of the record. If our memory serves us right (we copped the remix bundle around the time it dropped), this project came and went from the Interwebs a few times throughout the years, probably due to IP fingerprinting reasons. As of this writing however, it appears to be available and supplied as a free SoundCloud download by one Roseville Music Group (RMG), “a music entity founded by !llmind” himself, according to their profile.

In his reimagined pack, the Brooklyn, NY-based DJ samples six significant tunes from the full tracklist, and only ever so slightly alters their sonic tapestry by minimally intervening at various nooks and crannies. One is left wondering whether !llmind ever managed to get a hold of the full DAW session and stems for these in the first place, for the closeness to the original sound recordings and the thinly invasive modifications have us believe he simply worked his way down from the main monolith mixed and mastered full track file. Although it’s certainly enticing to hear selector reworks of slower deep cuts such as “Ivy” and “White Ferrari“, we would have also been curious to check out more dancey and EDM-adjacent cuts such as “Nikes” and “Nights” getting the remix treatment too.

By contrast, there’s also something called Piano Tribute to Frank Ocean—a fully realized, if enigmatic, solo piano cover concerto by the imaginatively named artist Blond Piano. Released in early 2017, the album presents a near-comprehensive instrumental rework of the Homer-founder’s eponymous LP, translating its layered, loose, and experimental production into sparse keyed arrangements. Stripped of vocals, effects, and ambient textures, each Blonde song (minus the two spoken interludes “Be Yourself” and “Facebook Story”) is reduced to its melodic and harmonic foundations. In case it still weren’t clear enough to someone, these renditions go to reveal just how structurally robust compositions like “Pink + White”, “Skyline To”, and “Seigfried” truly are.

Equally striking is the creative anonymity behind the project. Unlike Frank’s carefully managed and syndicated mystique, Blond Piano’s identity appears entirely absent. Aside from organic trade press speculation at the time, no promotion, no interviews, no context. This vacuum lends the album a quiet, almost accidental quality, as if it simply appeared and was discovered rather than released. The good people over at DJ Booth called the classical fifty minutes of keyed Blonde conversion “the closest you will get to being purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka without traveling to Minnesota”. For some reason, it’s kind of no cap.

Together, these two Blondes show that Frank’s timeless 2016 record can be both endlessly reworked, and radically reduced. Functioning at once as a mutable cultural artifact and a deeply rooted piece of musical concoction. Blond (!llmind Remixed) and Piano Tribute to Frank Ocean are but two expressions of the artistic vastness the gifted singer/songwriter allows us to swim within. While there is no amount of words or images that can aptly describe the salivation we and all of his fans are producing as we eagerly await his next musical output in agony, there is also no end to the gratitude and grace we should feel knowing he’s given us this decade-old masterpiece. Happy tenth anniversary, Blonde.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

TAKING BACK SONATA | 2026-02-13

We’ll start by saying that the new A$AP Rocky and J. Cole joints both go pretty hard. Mega hard, in fact. They better do, after almost a decade of teasing, undoing, and gestating for each. At this time, we’re fairly confident in saying that DON’T BE DUMB and The Fall-Off are the two MCs’ best projects to date. Let us throw in some context. As far as J. Cole is concerned—nearly two decades after his debut mixtape The Come Up, the Dreamville Records-founder has handily risen to the top tier of the hip-hop stratosphere as a rarified album-focused spitter, amongst a legion of singles-driven ambulance chasers. The Fayetteville, NC-native deliberately forged his body of work on his own terms, earning major accolades and a fiercely loyal fanbase. Now 41, he gives us what is reportedly his final album, aptly titled The Fall-Off. Rather than a true blue victory lap, the expansive, 2-disc, 24-track oeuvre showcases sustained creative energy and nurtured reflection. And it’s jammed with hoopin‘ references.

The front-end, filled with nods to his Carolinian stomping grounds and his 2014 Forest Hills Drive era, highlights Cole’s storytelling strengths and influences—from Nas-inspired lyricism to more personal, vulnerable moments. On disc 2, the stronger of the two, he shifts from nostalgia to self-assessment, examining his legacy and growth with heightened maturity. By the album coda, he ties past and present together, returning to the profound sense of place that has long defined his journey. A diametrically opposed introduction is in order when it comes to Rocky. As soon as he emerged as the breakout star of Harlem’s A$AP Mob in the early 2010s, he seemed destined for fame—pairing striking flows with a sound that blended New York street rap, Houston chopped-and-screwed textures, and hazy electronic ultralight beams. After the success of his 2011 breakout mixtape LIVE.LOVE.A$AP, he quickly rose through rap’s heavyweights ladder. In recent years, Lord Flacko vastly expanded his focus beyond music, stepping into acting, high-fashion design, and high-profile cultural moments—not without prompting some to question whether spitting 16s was still his priority.

His latest fourth studio LP, DON’T BE DUMB, answers that decisively. His first full-length since 2018’s TESTING, the Tim Burton-artistically directed tape reasserts his place among hip-hop’s narrow elite, balancing brash confidence with refined avant-garde artistry. The pretty motherfu**er addresses rivals and past conflicts head-on, while also embracing a seasoned, eclectic sound—moving from jazz-inflected experimentation to psychedelic trap. True to form, his sharp curatorial instincts shine throughout the hour-long full length, pairing unexpected collaborators and producers (aside from Burton, BossMan Dlow, Brent Faiyaz, Gorillaz, Doechii, Jessica Pratt, Sauce Walka, Slay Squad, Westside Gunn, and will.i.am inter alia) in ways that nod to his beginnings while pushing his style forward.

The above mentioned rap excursuses aside, we’re actually here to talk about the twentieth anniversary of a classical music tribute to Taking Back Sunday? Yup. Our curious object of inquiry is a bizarre 2006 musical ode by the so-called Vitamin String Quartet—VSQ in short—featuring instrumental, string-driven covers of the most popular Taking Back Sunday tunes at the time. The 12-track collection, released on Vitamin Records in the April of two decades (under the influence) ago, re-arranges the Long Island emo veterans’ high-energy, guitar-driven sound from their first two records through violin, viola, and cello renditions. There’s even an original composition and arrangement by VSQ, titled “You’re Good News (To Me)“, to bookend the collection. The whole thing kind of rules. Not sure a whole lot of TBS stans are aware of it.

Oddly enough, the album changed its nominal title from the initial ‘Strung Out on Taking Back Sunday: The String Quartet Tribute‘ (as evidenced here) to VSQ Performs Taking Back Sunday around 2015—presumably due to changing distribution licensing reasons. Hilariously, by virtue of its main high-brow genre, the concerto is also listed under the Apple Music Classical streaming service (peep here), causing the composer metadata to get rendered as a scrambled itemized hodgepodge including a mix of Mark O’Connell, Adam Burbank Lazzara, Shaun Cooper, Fred Mascherino, Frederick Paul Mascherino, and Tom Tally, a former VSQ member. Yeah, no John Nolan sadly.

So what’s good with Vitamin String Quartet? Since launching in 1999, VSQ has been dubbed as a leading force in classical crossover, bringing string interpretations of contemporary music to a global audience. Their work seems to have soundtracked study sessions, weddings, and standout film and TV moments, with high-profile placements in recent productions like Bridgerton and The King of Staten Island. Praised by Variety and Nylon, VSQ is now one of the world’s most popular contemporary string ensembles. With more than 300 releases under their belts at this point, the quartet has reimagined an eclectic range of artists—from Cardi B to Björk, and from Studio Ghibli scores to goth metal—seamlessly blending classical instrumentation with original pop, rock, hip-hop, and electronic music. This kind of goes to show how big Taking Back Sunday was at the halfway point of the 2000s to be handpicked amongst such company (and to think that their most commercially successful record, Louder Now, hadn’t even come out yet at the time).

To date, VSQ has amassed over two billion streams, nearly four million downloads, and more than one million physical sales. For all intents and purposes, they’re pretty huge. Apparently, seven of their LPs have charted on Billboard, including a #4 peak in the Classical and Classical Crossover categories. VSQ Performs Lana Del Rey even earned them a 2021 Libera Award nomination for Best Classical Record. The outfit is based in Los Angeles, where the rotating collective is said to be frequently collaborating with fellow musicians and visual creators, continuing to expand a vast catalog. As a case in point, their long-running VSQ Performs the Hits instalment series has helped make classical versions of modern pop both accessible and culturally relevant, while front-to-back album tributes showcase the ensemble’s versatility.

Happy twentieth anniversary to this fabulously weird record. It rules so hard. We wouldn’t mind checking out an updated 2026 version with some of TBS’s more sophisticated and mature tunes in the latter part of their discography. Surely “Where My Mouth Is“, “Everything Must Go“, “Call Me in the Morning“, “We Were Younger Then“, “Nothing At All“, “Fences“, “Holy Water“, and “Amphetamine Smiles” would all absolutely rip when performed with the magic fiddles of VSQ. There you go, that’s more than half the tracklist of the redux album already. Over to you, Vitamin String Quartet.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

A DEAR IN HEADLIGHTS | 2025-07-20

It appears as though we’re in the midst of another summer of bars, ladies and gentlemen. With new full lengths from everyone from Rome Streetz, Wayne, Kevin Abstract, Boldy James, Clipse, Open Mike Eagle, Tyler the Creator, Freddie Gibbs & Al, Joey Bada$$, and JID all within the span of two months and change, there sure remains little room during the year of our Lord 2025 for any other outings to stick their head out. Unless they’re… head-lights. Very unassumingly, 32-year old American musician, producer, and singer-songwriter Alex G, a proud Philadelphia native, dared to swing his indie toy axe at the moon and challenge the aforementioned hip-hop avalanche by revealing his tenth studio LP Headlights right in the midst of that enemy crossfire. We’re pleased to report that both him and his music came out unscathed.

The project was released this past 18th July, couched right in-between the hallmark summer rap drops of Clipse and Tyler, the Creator, amongst others—not exactly two negligible acts at the turn of this decade. Believe it or not, Headlights is Mr Giannascoli’s major-label debut, marketed by Sony Music-owned RCA Records, and it follows the iconic and accomplished four-album deal run on British indie stalwart Domino Recording Company, between 2015 and 2022. That particular stint included perhaps his best overall, 2019’s House of Sugar, and culminated a few years ago in what at the time was his most well-rounded and wholesome effort with God Save the Animals. His latest offering is twelve tracks long, and clocks in at just about forty minutes of runtime: Alex G self-produced most of it himself, with additional help recruited in Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s bass guitarist Jacob Portrait (who had previously worked with Giannascoli on his aforementioned previous two studio albums). Less excitingly, before kicking off the Headlights cycle, the artist FKA (Sandy) Alex G also found time to score two official soundtrack albums for Jane Schoenbrun’s indie flicks We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022) and I Saw the TV Glow (2024).

On this record, Alex G confirms he’s a naughty, albeit friendly, singer/songwriter. One that very deliberately exhumes public images of himself as if shunning away from the spotlight, and perhaps even suffering from it—all the while appearing more comfortable with this laidback set up than diving headfirst into the distribution and promo machinery that a major label would call for. Mind you, this is not inherently bad, and he is well within his rights to spin doctor such a framing onto his prime creative endeavor, particularly as it fits a narrative continuum started fifteen years ago. Hear us out on this though—as anticipatory singles for this project he plucks “Afterlife“, a pretty and catchy gem out in late May alongside the project announcement (featuring the drumming of none other than the E Street Band‘s Max Weinberg!), the kind “June Guitar” a month later, and finally the soft-spoken “Oranges” a day before street date. Are these three the best tracks on Headlights by quite a margin? Yes, probably.

Who does that, though? Who picks the cleanest, lushest, and glossiest numbers and de-contextualizes them from their housing record as teasers, if you’re Alex G? Everything from the gentle acoustic and electric guitar flourishes, the enveloping strings, and the timeless piano keys on these three cuts are something to behold. Were they a short single bundle issued by, like, James Taylor or Neil Young, people would scream for them to put out a whole album’s worth of this shit. Truly, all three are incredible exploits of pristine folk-pop, without Alex G’s trademark homespun low-fidelity enriching or spoiling them—depending on what side of the lore fence one stands on. Moreover, their lyrical ineffability transcends anything he has done before: “Love ain’t for the young anyhow / Something that you learn from fallin’ down“, “Let me write down / Every word / Once I was a mockingbird / Not an angel / But I’m your man“, and again “Wash in the river with the one I love / Every good thing with a little bad luck / You can cry baby, now, I ain’t bluffing / Wash in the river on bended knee“. I mean, come on?

One can tell Headlights is an Alex G record by the LP’s vicarious middle section, though. It’s the Pepsi test. Cuts like the loose and scattered “Spinning” sounds uncannily like a House of Sugar-adjacent cutting room floor extra, while the following “Louisiana” at number six on the tracklist harkens back to the legendary pre-Domino era of self-released hypnotic Bandcamp drops. It’s so direct and on the nose that one would think it’s bidding farewell to that DIY zeitgeist, for good. Perhaps it is. Regardless, it fits on the record, and it matters. Meanwhile, “Bounce Boy“, at number seven, comes close to us fantasizing how Alex G saw fit to dust off some of the guitar effects and pedal pre-sets he so unceremoniously championed on Frank Ocean‘s Blonde and Endless almost ten years ago. Yet he’s doing so in a self-referential and, yes let’s use that word, experimental way. Bottom line is, can anyone name us any major label artist who puts something like “Oranges” and this thing on the same marquee record? Well, in 2025 that might be less of a tall order, but still. You get the point.

What hasn’t changed throughout Headlights is Mr Giannascoli’s childlike naïveté, the earnest innocence at the core of these sound recordings. And yes, his extremely pleasant to the ear melodic layering is still in these tunes, too. Such pureness continues to belie distinct creative choices, though. For instance, he chiefly misses the mark on the record’s third act. But that’s ok. For we’re not going as far as declaring the tangible drop in quality from track number nine onwards as intentional, because that’s precisely Alex G’s inscrutably mystical quality. He comes across as knowing better than committing to tape the nasal and contrived vocal delivery on “Far and Wide“, yet does he really? Absent the self-indulgent and rowdy live take of album outro “Logan Hotel“—he isn’t new to bookending a project with a live version, see House of Sugar—and conceding that the title track is a bit of a grower with inherent replay value, “Far and Wide” and penultimate cut “Is It Still You in There?” are simply too lukewarm for his standards. Let us not forget, this is his tenth studio album after all.

Yet, part of it is what makes him so endearing and gentle to the outer world. Deep down we (wanna) know he does have the full album of pristine folk-pop in his bag, but either willingly or unwillingly, he opts for linear evolution over abrupt revolution. However, does he realize he’s playing in the major label leagues now? Most likely. On the dire and forlorn front-end standout “Beam Me Up“, he nods both that degree of revelatory self-awareness (“Some things I do for love / Some things I do for money / It ain’t like I don’t want it / It ain’t like I’m above it“), and sketches a long-shot metaphor borrowing from American football, not a foreign signifier to him: “Coach, I’m on the rocks / Coach, I’m threading needles / I leave it on the field“. We like to think that the titular headlights he finds himself surrounded by are the ultralight beams of the mainstream music circuit—while for someone like him it would be tempting to withdraw and burrow even more deeply, he instead chose to fight back with love and kindness. This album is proof.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

CLIPSE’S LET GOD SORT EM OUT IS SYNTHESIS PERFECTION | 2025-07-13

Veteran hip-hop fraternity duo Clipse (Malice and Pusha T) put out their fourth studio full length, Let God Sort Em Out, just a few days ago, and a sudden underground thrust imploring us to chuck down a few words about it immediately took over. We were all powerless to deny it. The LP marks the rapper pair’s first project as Clipse since 2009’s Til the Casket Drops, which preceded the tectonic industry splashes of Lord Willin’ (2002) and Hell Hath No Fury (2006). In the sixteen years since their last full length, everything but the kitchen sink has happened. Senior bother Malice quit the group in 2010, briefly changed his stage name to No Malice by virtue of his conversion to Christianity, only to reappropriate his original moniker a few years ago. King Push, on the other hand, went on to successfully pursue a consummate solo career that involved the release of four records as well as a couple high-profile rap feuds. The storied Virginia outfit then saw fit to reunite in 2019 for a guest version on none other than Kanye West‘s Jesus Is King—which kinda leads us to this thing coming out earlier this month to great anticipation and acclaim, after about two years of gestation.

Longtime collaborator and early DMV scout Pharrell Williams—who lent his production duties on each of the previous three Clipse albums—returns for Let God Sort Em Out, having overseen each of the thirteen cuts back-to-back, for a total runtime of just over forty minutes. The former Neptunes and NERD record producer extraordinaire also doubles as a featured guest on wax, together with a slew of marquee collaborators including John Legend, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, Stove God Cooks, The-Dream, and Tyler, the Creator. Lead standalone single, the ominous and engrossing “Ace Trumpets“, first arrived in late May, alongside with the project announcement, while non-streaming promo-only single “So Be It” was initially released as a music video halfway through June. A day before the album dropped, Malice and Pusha windowed two more cuts from the big joint exclusively to Apple Music: the highly-anticipated K Dot-featuring “Chains & Whips” (also sporting some gnarly guitar work by Lenny Kravitz), and “So Far Ahead“. Oh yeah, and the album was low-key subsidized by leading French international fashion house Louis Vuitton (it was recorded at their Parisian headquarters). If you still hadn’t guessed it, this thing is a big deal in hip-hop.

The high anticipation for the drop was in no small part due to the fact that Let God Sort Em Out was allegedly initially slated for a 2024 release. Yet, in a turn of events that has had the music industry up in arms since the nuclear Drake–Kendrick Lamar rap battle last year, the album was stalled for a long time as Clipse’s then-imprint Def Jam Recordings—owned by major label Universal Music Group, this will become important in a minute—reportedly requested Kendrick Lamar’s guest bars on “Chains & Whips” be either censored or else they wouldn’t drop the record. Although the official explanation for the failed truce remains unclear, Pusha T publicly claimed in multiple interviews that UMG’s boycott stemmed from his and Kendrick’s ugly brawls with Canadian megastar rapper Drake—most notably via Pusha T’s 2018 diss track “The Story of Adidon” and the aforementioned generation-defining beef from last year. Crucially, a few months ago Drake filed a self-referential defamation lawsuit against UMG for its promotion of K Dot’s beef coup de grâce “Not Like Us“. Refusing to acquiesce, Clipse agreed to pay a seven-figure sum to stunningly buy themselves out of the Def Jam album deal, instead self-releasing Let God Sort Em Out via a distribution agreement with Roc Nation. Wow.

Now, with a few paragraphs of introduction out of the way, let us cut to the chase: this record is a near perfect hip-hop coalescence. More than any this decade, hell arguably since Kanye West’s Yeezus, this collection of tracks is a true blue masterclass display of sonic synthesis, sound curation, and creative extraction—at least on the mainstream front. We don’t jive with numerical scores over here, but this album is wall-to-wall rap enchantment, and would see it fly damn real close to the 10 sun. Malice and Pusha T’s bars are so carefully selected and lyrically impactful that virtually not a single word or ad lib is wasted on the album. Both of their enunciated, matter-of-fact flows coast in and out of pockets making each stanza sound like the most important thing you’ll need to hear this year. Pharell’s backtrack beats are so linear, synthetic, and one-dimensional that silence and space become fruitful allies in this no-waste mixing approach. That’s how even the slightest beat switch, such as on “P.O.V.”, feels like entering into a whole new dimension of sound. This is outta sight.

Nearly each single one of the thirteen numbers features a lone driving beat motif that gels its track from front to back. Whether that’s bass, piano, horns, strings, or percussions; everything sounds so necessary. And sanitized. The refrains are so few and far in between that not only do they feel like they could get modularly stitched to any of the songs on the tracklist, but they become so memory-engrained and sticky it’s ironic for an hip-hop outfit known for its hardcore rapping, anti-earworm chorus stance. Clipse have always heavily relied on their grooves, beats, and production, but this exploit feels like they have finally perfected their acclaimed trademark songcraft. The music on Let God Sort Em Out is all-enveloping, hypnotizing, ethereal, and just so damn thick. There’s a gelid, cold industrial tapestry that bookends the forty minutes of material. And precisely because one is to assume there are so few individual tracks in each of the record’s partial stems, this kind of overture allows for each sonic pillar to crank up to eleven, and go assemble a muscular gesamtkunstwerk that lines up thirteen architectural marvels on the tracklist.

As most people undertaking creative endeavors know, reducing and essentializing a work of art is so much harder than adding bells and whistles to it. As celebrated American writer, humorist, and essayist Mark Twain famously said “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. Less than an artistic compromise, knowing how to cut what fat and which darlings to kill oughta be seen as a purifying act of love toward the art being made. In the Apple Music interview hyperlinked above, the Virginia Beach duo revealed how nothing was left on the studio’s cutting room floor—the thirteen records that made Let God Sort Em Out were all they wrote. A rarity in today’s bonus tracks/B-sides/deluxe version streaming obsessed climate. This is a pursuit of clarity and distillation. We can’t think of a rap outing that hasn’t done that better than this album in a long, long time. Naturally, by virtue of spacing out the recordings so much and weaving constituent room for certain segments to breathe, the Thorton bros rhymes stand out like crown jewels. On this album, the vocals are so front and center it’s not even funny.

When Malice dedicates all his bars to this old man on the parental tribute opener “The Birds Don’t Sing”, he achieves spiritual heights on passages like “I can hear your voice now, I can feel your presence / Askin’ “Should I rap again?”, you gave me your blessing / The way you spelled it out, there’s an L in every lesson / ‘Boy, you owe it to the world, let your mess become your message’“. Conversely, King Push’s articulation on track number seven “M.T.B.T.T.F.“; “My presence, your plеasure / Peasants, he’s prеssure / I been knee deep, ki deep / We at ZZ’s, me and Lee Lee / Get you fronted for the summer so easy” is so cold-blooded and sinister that quite literally no one else could deliver it the same way. What’s even more remarkable is that unlike the reputation that precedes them, Clipse manage to pull such a compound stunt off while keeping cocaine bars to a bare minimum—instead opting for obscure financial report jargon on the unforgiving “E.B.I.T.D.A.” (acronym for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization).

The latter is arguably one of the fastest beats Pusha T ever laid vocals on. And yet, in spite of—or precisely because of—the heightened BPMs, the 48-year old former GOOD Music label president manages to invokes the central mantra that underpins this album: “I need more space to make pace“. Every his wish is Pharrell’s command. With a producer-rappers chemistry completely off the charts, for God’s sake, these gentleman are literally related and from the same childhood neighborhood, it’s no wonder each piece of music on here sounds indispensable. This is an outstanding project in the mainstream hip-hop space precisely because it stands out from the pack so much. Alas, the intention with which each single sonic nook and cranny is perfected feels like a lost practice, a manufacturing no longer worth engaging with. Well here we are stating the opposite: this shit still matters. Mostly because it sounds so freaking good. Mark our words—not Pitchfork‘s—this record will land in the upper single digit rankings for most of the Albums of the Year lists you’ll be checking out this November. Let God sort those out.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

THOUGHTS ON SPRINGSTEEN’S LOST ALBUMS | 2025-06-26

The Boss is back in towns. Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band returned to the road earlier last month for their only as-of-yet scheduled shows this year, bringing what has been re-dubbed the grand Land of Hope & Dreams Tour to more than half a million fans in six countries throughout summer, after being forced to cut short their European leg due to illness last year. Beginning with a three-show run in mighty Manchester, UK, these re-scheduled dates serve as the culminating finale to the two-year-long run of what were Springsteen and co’s first live performances in almost seven years. And while an E Street Band roadtrip is always sure to turn a fair amount of industry heads, particularly when your ringleader is 75, this latest one managed to garner an extra notch of attention thanks to some inadvertent promo from none other than the sitting President of the United States.

During his tour opener, on 14th May, Springsteen let out a few less-than-flattering speeches about the current executive branch governing his home country. In response, US President Donald Trump posted an unhinged statement going at the Boss’s appearance and intelligence, while also demanding an investigation into former Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s endorsements that came from Springsteen himself, as well as a slew of other A-list celebrities. Not even a full week later, the New Jersey success story saw fit to release a whole brand new live EP—conveniently titled Land of Hope & Dreams—taped at that momentous Manchester tour opener. And yes, he included those ad libs. As the good people over at Apple Music put it: no shade to the four defiant songs captured during the gig, but this may well be the first live record surprise-dropped for its stage banter.

We might’ve buried the lead though. For the real kicker this #BruceSummer have got to be the seven previously-unheard studio full lengths dropping for the first time tomorrow, Friday 27th June. The widely-rumored, long-anticipated Tracks II: The Lost Albums—a spiritual successor to the 1998 cult four-disc Tracks collection that has become the ultimate non-studio album fan favorite over the years—is a gargantuan set spanning 83 songs (74 of which never-before-heard). Conspicuously filling in essential chapters of Springsteen’s expansive timeline, Tracks II arrives in limited-edition nine LP, seven CD, as well as all the obligatory digital formats—including custom packaging for each of the seven records-in-record, with a 100-page cloth-bound, hardcover book featuring rare archival photos, liner notes from essayist Erik Flannigan, and a personal introduction on the project from the Boss himself. A more digestible and chart-friendly companion bundle—Lost And Found: Selections from The Lost Albums—will instead feature twenty highlights from across the full tracklist, also out the same day on two LPs or one CD.

Upping the overall B-sides count by a generous 17 offerings, compared to the 66 off the first Tracks instalment, Tracks II maps a creative trajectory that includes writing sessions ranging from 1983 to 2018. For the project, Springsteen and longtime producer/multi-instrumentalist sideman Ron Aniello polished the sound quality and sparsely added instrumental enrichments here and there to the old tapes. The bulk of the material does stem from the Boss working as a one-man studio band, as he has since the 1980s. The umbrella front cover for the vault collection—linked at the end of this piece—lets us deduce that the top-to-bottom chronological order in which the seven projects are listed should refer to their gestation period over the projected 35-year range (i.e. with LA Garage Sessions ’83 being the oldest, and Perfect World the one compiled in 2018). As of the time of this writing, just mere hours away from the big reveal, Columbia Records and the Springsteen camp have been unleashing six standalone teasers from as many distinct discs within the coveted assemblage, with the inaugural LA Garage Sessions ’83 LP remaining the only one without advance listening (safe for an elusive low-fidelity 20-second teaser on the box set’s splash website).

Things kicked off early into April, along with the first project reveal, when a debut look at the series came in the form of “Rain in the River“, a blistering and expansive Perfect World cut that aptly encapsulates that project’s arena-ready E Street blend. Halfway through that same month, the synth-heavy and drum machine-programmed “Blind Spot” was served to quench the longstanding thirsts of all those salivating over Springsteen’s allegedly mythical ‘hip-hop influenced loops record’—ours included. As it turns out, that collection of ten numbers has now been billed as the Streets of Philadelphia Sessions, perhaps the most highly-anticipated of the seven LPs, if you ask us. Curiously enough, the previously available “Missing“—from The Crossing Guard OST—remains true to its title and does not in fact appear on the tracklist of what would’ve felt like its perfect home album.

Meanwhile, on the 1st May, the The Lost Albums roll out added another notch to its cowboy belt, by completely switching up the mood: “Faithless“, the titular song of the 11-track third disc in the catalog, is a reserved, husky, and unplugged country Western affair. Not the most immediate and ear-catching jam in the Springsteen lore—particularly considering his accomplished foray into the genre on 2019’s Western Stars—but one that rewards patience and repeated listens by way of a more focused TLC. This collection of songs was actually initially meant to soundtrack a ‘spiritual Western’ motion picture based on an unidentified book, started in 2005. Springsteen wrote and recorded the music all by himself in a matter of weeks, building on a foundation of spiritual piano and bluesy slide guitar—twenty years later, the film is reportedly still ‘in development’. Somewhere North of Nashville‘s “Repo Man“, released two weeks later on 14th May, pulls another 180° on the promotional roll out sonics, with its lively, saloon-y, and galloping blues-country flairs, couched in an infectious immediacy that is poised to make it a catchy live staple (tall order, we know!).

A couple weeks after that, Mexican ranchera-disc 5 Inyo‘s unplugged preview came through in the shape of “Adelita“, a soft and gentle ode to Mexico’s ‘soldaderas’—women who played a major role in the country’s fight for independence. Lastly, but not least of the advance pack, this past 12th June the Boss unwrapped the subdued piano-jazz brushed “Sunday Love“, a final teaser off the Western Stars-cutting room floor exhumed retro-pop affair Twilight Hours. The major 7th chords-record is a collection presenting a window into the ‘what-if’ the 2019 country folk outing were a double album instead, offering the New Jerseyan’s take on a softer, more jazzy revisitation of the storied American songbook. In a recent press release about the tune, Springsteen says, “I love Burt Bacharach, and I love those kinds of songs and those kinds of songwriters. I took a swing at it because the chordal structures and everything are much more complicated, which was fun for me to pull off. All this stuff could have come right off of those ’60s albums.” Sure, but it also still sounds a lot like Springsteen, and like a cut that wouldn’t have been too out of place on 2002’s The Rising.

In summation, over the course of almost three full months of promo we’ve been fed with six previously unreleased Bruce Springsteen rarities, amounting to about 23 minutes of new material. Tracks II is 83 songs long, and a quick inferential stunt on account of this initial sample suggests we could expect something in the region of 320 minutes (or more than five hours!) of runtime. That’s an inordinate amount of never-heard-before music to sift through, let alone for somebody with 21 studio albums already in the catalog. It’s a barrage of music that would put whole careers’s worth of tracks by average artists today to shame. All (re-)released on one day. We’re no doubt living in times of Springsteen abundance—and we have no complaints over that. Oh, and didn’t we mention last month’s live EP that was basically taped and released overnight?

In case you were wondering, we’re going to catch Bruce and his E Street Band live in a matter of days in Milan, Italy, as part of one of those rescheduled tour dates from last year. The chances of hearing a cut off Tracks II performed live when you have a cherished catalog of almost 400 to pull from are slimmer than your average American’s budget left at the end of the month, but hey we’ll keep you posted in case he does. As a consolation, we’ll have seven new studio LPs to savor wall-to-wall as early as tomorrow morning. Speaking of which, here’s how we’d rank them in order of anticipation and excitement, before hearing any more of the whole thing:

  1. Streets of Philadelphia Sessions
  2. LA Garage Sessions ’83
  3. Perfect World
  4. Twilight Hours
  5. Somewhere North of Nashville
  6. Faithless
  7. Inyo

No empirical rhyme or reason over this; just gauging the enjoyment the various teasers have been providing hitherto, and knowing Bruce Springsteen a little bit. Yet, clearly not enough to predict what happened next. In a recent video deep-dive into the genesis and design of Tracks II, the 75-year old New Jersey native came through with a cold-blooded twist right at the end: there exists a Tracks III collection. And it’s apparently already finished. He went on to explain that ‘[Tracks III] is basically what was left in the vault‘, including outtakes from as far back as his 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and as recent as last year: ‘so there was a lot of good music left. There are five full albums of music‘. It might just be true that all good things come in threes, after all.

Streets of Philadelphia Sessions

“Sometimes if you lock into one song you like then you follow that thread. I had this song ‘Blind Spot,’ and I followed that thread through the rest of the record.” — BS

Faithless

“Faithless was a piece of work I took (on commission) for a spiritual Western film that was preparing to be made around 2004. In Hollywood, I have found, you can disappear into “development” for long periods of time so I thought I would release these now and let you hear my results of this interesting project.” — BS

Somewhere North of Nashville

“I wrote all these country songs at the same time I wrote ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad.’ Those sessions completely overlap each other. I’m singing ‘Repo Man’ in the afternoon and ‘The Line’ at night. So the country record got made right along with ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad.’ Very similar to ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and ‘Nebraska’” — BS

Inyo

“‘Inyo’ was a record I wrote in California during long drives along the California aqueduct, up through Inyo County on my way to Yosemite or Death Valley. It’s one of my favorites.” — BS

Twilight Hours

“At one time, it was either a double record or they were part of the same record. But I separated the ‘Western Stars’ material out and what I had left is ‘Twilight Hours.'” — BS

Perfect World

“‘Perfect World’…is a record I pieced together from work I had held for this project…I wanted just a little fun, noise, and rock ‘n’ roll to finish the package.” — BS

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

REPENTANT SINNERS | 2025-05-31

[***spoiler-free***]

We went to see the movie Sinners in theaters. Twice. We’ll watch it again. We’ve also been listening to the Ryan Coogler and Ludwig Göransson-supervised Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, acting as the commercial companion to the incidental Original Motion Picture Score (fully written and arranged by the award-winning Swedish composer—it has gotten a fair amount of spins itself). For the uninitiated, the blockbuster opened in theaters on 18th April, and is a US Southern gothic supernatural horror joint by 39-year old Californian film director, producer, and screenwriter Ryan Coogler—of Black Panther and Creed fame. Starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, and Jack O’Connell, the movie is distributed by Warner Bros Pictures and at the time of this writing fares as the seventh highest-grossing film of 2025, having received widespread acclaim from audiences and critics alike.

The motion pictures narrates of identical twins Smoke and Stack Moore returning to Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932, after a multi-year stint working for Al Capone in Chicago. Leveraging illegitimate funds stolen from outlaws up in Illinois, they acquire a decaying sawmill from local racist landowner Hogwood, with the intention of converting it into a blues-infused juke joint for the local black community overnight. Their cousin, ‘preacherboy’ Sammie, a gifted and aspiring guitarist, joins them despite his pastor father Jedidiah’s warnings that messing with blues music means invoking the supernatural. The twins also go on to recruit blues pianist Delta Slim and singer Pearline to boost their line up—as well as Smoke’s estranged wife Annie as cook, local Chinese shopkeepers Grace and Bo Chow as suppliers, and longtime field worker Cornbread as door bouncer.

On account of this premise, the full movie takes place over a narrative arc of 24 hours, from dawn to sunrise, as it were. True to its loaded title, it leaves no character able to cast the proverbial first stone. Above all though, it recounts of the power of soulful, dangerous music, summoning ancient tales of Faustian bargains involving legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, as well as of grit, persistence, and defiance. In it, belief and damnation aren’t presented as a discrete dichotomy, but rather as a continuum into which different people can strive to insert themselves. Some of them will stick their landing more toward the hell-bent end of the spectrum, whereas others will manage to redeem themselves by doing good. Or at least, better. The film displays remarkable performance by a slew of extremely well cast actors, but its main protagonist is undoubtedly blues music.

Music not only low-key furnishes utilitarian plot elements that weave together a robust, catchy, and well-rounded narrative, but acts as a fourth-wall of sorts, upon which rests a whole Stranger Things-esque premise of good vs evil. Unlike the Netflix teen-horror sensation, in Sinners the upside down is journeyed through the conjuring of otherworldly blues music. Music with a message, with a heart, and with a purpose. Music that served as triage for a peoples faced with all systemic injustices and structural exploitations of this world. Thing is: when played by the right person, blues riffs and licks crack open the Venn diagram separating heaven from the abyss. More often than not, with unintended consequences that tally up in communal baggages carried on by generations.

That’s what so relatable about the screenplay and its execution. Absent the cinematic bells and whistles tied to folkloric allegories that envelop the aptly unraveled story, the movie tells of a time and a place that occurred not even a century ago. Memories of societal textures, political orders, and civic mechanisms are still vivid in a lot of people’s minds, especially those of African American descent. Sinners presents us with a window into a slice of society whose perspective was completely negated at the time, and in doing so offers us a restaurant menu from which we can cherrypick who and what we want to see ourselves in. This thing has black people, Asians, native Americans, and of course the white. In many ways, the juke joint launched by the Moore bros can act as a Petri dish for the many communities we live in. The storytelling device of setting it during the segregative Jim Crow-era US South renders it poignant and important, but the greed, selfishness, and self-righteousness of most characters is timeless.

The feeling of belonging and the fight for self-preservation run deep in the thick plot—yet incidentally, those are two of the main motors that power the engines of blues rock. Most music stemming from heart-on-sleeve honesty, truly. Case in point: when local pastor Jedidiah bestows the cautionary tale upon his preacherboy son about the dangers of ‘bringing evil home’ by playing blues on the cursed guitar, he appears to be doing so while well aware of the artistic might of the music style in question. Unwavering, Sammie politely listens to his father’s dire warning, but still proceeds to join Smoke and Stack in their entertainment venture. In Sinners, much like real life, everyone has their own self-centered agenda, and is ready to go quite at length to impose its devils unto others. Whether in a dignified way or not, that’s for Belzebuth to determine.

The movie is far from a survival of the fittest, winner-takes-it-all parable though. Compassion and humanity surface to the top for a sizable chunk of the characters, good or bad may they be. This dynamic renders them well aware of the misdeeds they are committing, albeit not quite while they are committing them. L’esprit d’escalier. Without giving anything away, after repeated screenings of this flick, the sensation is that the sincere power of community—brought together inside the juke joint by the Moore twins—enacts a vessel that helps demystifying the cynicism of everyday life, bringing patrons and owners alike to the realization that their lives are more than the sum of their daily decisions. Uncompromising and unapologetic with respect to staying true to their innate identities, various protagonists in the feature film do seem to want to do the right thing. When amongst peers, they become selfless and free; all of a sudden their thirst for petty revenge fades into the background.

In typical Göransson fashion, the commercial-leaning soundtrack LP he curated features as a diverse an array of acts as trap singer Don Toliver, blues mainstay RL Burnside’s grandson Cedric Burnside, English alt-pop giant James Blake, Alice in Chains-founder Jerry Cantrell, Chicago Blues godfather Buddy Guy, as well as disgraced R&B singer/songwriter Rod Wave—who penned the official lead single for the Various Artists compilation. Blues is by definition anti-snob music. Blues is lunch pail and shovel music. Reflectively, Sinners is for everyone. The incidental original score by the 40-year-old Swedish musician, composer, and record producer is gripping and asphyxiating, whether synched to the moving images or listened to in audio-only isolation. Yet it is none the less an evocative recall of the range and dexterity of the underlying blues music.

“All money come with blood, baby“, says Smoke to Annie at one point in the movie, as she questions him about the dubious provenance of the cash stash he brought back from Chicago. Seas of blood and violent deaths are certainly not in short supply in here—yet the most lethal weapon of them all might just turn out to be a six-string with the right chord progression.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time.

AV

GENTLEMAN GIANNIS | 2025-05-01

More than half of the 2025 NBA Playoff First Round match-ups have already been sorted out. In less than ten days of scheduled playtime since the official kick-off of the ‘postseason that counts’, five teams across the Eastern and Western Conferences have already taken care of business, securing a landlocked spot in the Second Round. Two series sweeps, seeing each Conference’s top seed flat-out ridicule their fellow lowest-seeded Play-In Tournament hopefuls (Oklahoma City Thunder and Cleveland Cavaliers versus the Memphis Grizzlies and the Miami Heat, respectively), one giant upset (sixth-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves dethroning the LA Lakers), as well as a couple predictable verdicts, albeit not without late clutch play drama (here’s looking at you, Indiana Pacers—more on this in a jiffy). Amidst it all, there isn’t even a need to front here: our predictions have so far left a lot to be desired—see bracket below; the 19th April Bluesky timestamp is proof…

Were the Nuggets, Rockets, and Knicks to go on to win their respective series tie in the next couple days, that would leave our bracket accuracy attainment rate at a measly 3/8 correct guesses. That’s a laughable 37%. Achieved by guessing that OKC, the Cavaliers, and the Celtics would win their charitable trips to the Semis, no less—wow. Geniuses. What’s troublesome too here are two deadpan implications from these first ten days of Playoff action: our presumptive NBA Champions Lakers are already on their way to Cancún as of 1st May, and this year’s wishful Cinderella story—the unlikely thrusting of the living-breathing scaffolding Milwaukee Bucks all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals—well, ain’t happening either. Nostradamus would be proud of us.

When your biggest postseason’s brag is that you predicted that the defending NBA Champions Boston Celtics reach the Eastern Conference Finals again, you should definitely stay away from sports betting. Frankly, even a 100% correct bracket guesses should, but that’s a story for a different day. And yet, we really believe(d) in our earnest predictions when we first filled them out. Did we go out on a few limbs here and there, just for fun? Of course. Comment this post if you also had the Lakers making it all the way to raising the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy this year. Or if you too were hopelessly optimistic that Damian Lillard’s miraculously unprecedented return from his blood clot issue would be the decisive X factor that could bring a somewhat disgraced franchise to unthinkable heights this season, only to capitulate in a seven-game series loss against the reigning champs.

Yes, they were both stretches, but not entirely unfounded. The Lakers won seven out of their ten final Regular Season games—including a marquee triumph against the top Western seed Thunders—and finished third with their best record in six years (50-32, .610 win percentage). Oh, and they low-key pulled off the biggest blockbuster NBA trade of this century, acquiring Slovenian superstar guard Luka Dončić in a multi-pawned deal that sent veteran center Anthony Davis to the Dallas Mavericks. Also, Austin Reaves was on a sensational ascent. And this might be LeBron James’s last season, so why wouldn’t he do everything in his power to tip it off with at least one last Finals appearance? It all kind of made sense.

Not dissimilarly, the Milwaukee Bucks wrapped up the Regular Season with eight straight wins, that arithmetically pulled them out of the Play-In relegation slump, and officially set them apart enough to lock in the official fifth seed vis-a-vis the unlikely All-American success story of the Detroit Pistons. Considering how brutally disappointingly the 2024/2025 season started for the Giannis Antetokounmpo-led franchise, there was a great deal of new wind in their sail that would have allowed us to fantasize about them at the very least making it past the fastidious Indiana Pacers in the First Round (yup, even we’d have to acknowledge that beating the Cavaliers four times out of seven was perhaps too prohibitive and likely not on the cards for this year…). So, about that Bucks-Pacers series…

On Tuesday 29th April, Tyrese Haliburton and co. officially took care of business by eliminating Milwaukee 4-1 in a frankly pretty one-sided best-of-seven series. Pacers in five. The game ended 119-118 in dramatic fashion in overtime, and while the Bucks would probably have deserved to win the game and force a game six back in Indianapolis after blowing multiple double-digit leads, it’s what transpired in the moments immediately following the final buzzer that took on a whole other life of its own. To recap the succession of events for the uninitiated—right after Indiana clinched the series, Tyrese Haliburton’s father John Haliburton, sitting courtside, entered the floor during the celebrations. He then walked up to a petrified Giannis Antetokounmpo and proceeded to wave a towel featuring his son’s face, before directing provocative remarks at the Greek Freak. Giannis then confronted John, leading to a brief but tense exchange before teammates intervened to dissuade the situation.

There is so much that can, has been, and will be written about the altercation. For starters, the public embarrassment expressed by Tyrese over his father’s actions, indicating in a postgame press conference that he had had a conversation with his father to address the situation while also planning to speak with Antetokounmpo at a separate time. Tyrese’s awkwardness was followed by John’s too, who took little time to issue a forced public apology on social media, acknowledging how his behavior did not reflect well on himself or his son. As if it were not enough, it’s news as of 1st May that after conversations with John Haliburton, the Indiana Pacers front office saw fit to ban Tyrese’s father from attending the team’s home and road games for the foreseeable future. And yet the teachable, noble moment here comes from the former NBA MVP and Champion himself. Let us unpack the complete answer Giannis gave during his own presser after the game, when asked to speak on the incident:

All I’ll say is that I believe in being humble in victory. That’s the way I am.

Now, there are a lot of people out there that can say, ‘No. When you win, you gotta talk shit. It’s a green light for you to be disrespectful towards somebody else. I disagree. I have won a championship. They haven’t. That doesn’t say anything. I’m not trying to minimize their effort, but I remember when I won, my mom, she’s never missed a game from February 11th or 13th when she came to Milwaukee against the Knicks, she’s never missed a game. When we won a championship, I remember my mom was scared to cross. She was like, ‘Am I allowed to come and hug my son?’

Except now my brother does media this year. He wants to come back and play, but like, except Thanasis, you’ve never seen my family sit in a courtside seat. This is not something that we do. We don’t. I try to keep my family away from the game.

But losing the game emotions run high. Having a fan, which at the moment I thought it was a fan, but then I realized it was Tyrese’s son, which I love Tyrese – I think he’s a great competitor – he was his dad, sorry.

Coming in the floor and, um, showing me his son a towel with his face. ‘This is what we do. This is what we f**king do. This is the f**k we do.’ I feel like that’s very, very disrespectful.

You know, my dad, my dad if you guys go and ask and learn my dad’s not with us no more. My dad used to come in the family room and was the most respectful person ever. You know when you come from nothing and you’ve worked your whole life to sell stuff in the street and your whole life you’ll be scared of the police of deporting you and sending you back to your country. You have to protect your kids with all means. You create this mentality of being humble your whole life.

To not kind of disrespect anybody, not make the tension high, the emotions high, so anybody can you know snitch on you, say something bad about you. So when he came here I remembered I was like, ‘Dad, why are you so humble? Why are you going to the family room? You don’t even say a word. You sit in the back. Why, why, why are you like that?’ ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry.’ That’s how I grew up. That’s what I had around.

So when I see other dads, which don’t disrespect, maybe if my son play basketball, I might be in the court. I might be the one on the court and like 20 years later you can play this interview and say ‘Giannis, you’re contradicting yourself.’ But we’ll see in 20 years, but I’m talking about right now how I feel. You know having somebody’s that which I’m happy for him and I’m happy for his son and I’m happy that he’s happy for his son. That’s how you’re supposed to feel.

But coming to me and disrespecting me and cursing at me, I think it’s totally unacceptable – totally unacceptable. OK, and … I’m not the guy that points fingers because in my neighborhood snitches get stitches. So I don’t want to say something you know for him to say to get fined or anything, but it’s not respectful. I talk with him at the end and we huh, I think we’re in a good place.

For the record, John Haliburton’s social media handle is @PapaHaliburton. Please. Like, who does that? How much more obvious can the familiar vestibule guised as genuine grassroots support get? While it’s evident that the Haliburton-Antetokounmpo incident has sparked welcome discussions about appropriate conduct for family members and fans during professional sporting events—highlighting the importance of sportsmanship and respect—we claim no better metaphor could be realized to capture the modern day’s delusion of spoiled nepotist entitlement. The kind that involves parents as chief architects of it. And honestly, the Haliburtons embody so much of that. Incidentally, 25-year old guard Tyrese, a two-time NBA All-Star, just won the Most Overrated Player in the NBA award this year in a recent anonymous player poll by The Athletic, receiving 15% of the votes (ironically, good guy in this story Giannis Antetokounmpo finished tenth on the same list).

This story basically writes itself—Haliburton is a non-factor Olympic gold medalist, too. Last summer, he was drafted as part of Team USA’s men’s basketball roster at the 2024 Paris Olympics, where the selection managed to secure the highly coveted gold medal (all the while this season’s NBA Clutch Player of the Year, the New York Knicks’s Jalen Brunson, stayed home to record podcasts…). However, unsurprisingly, Haliburton’s on-court contributions were limited. He merely appeared in three of the six games, totaling 26 minutes—the fewest among all players on the roster. He did not step foot on the hardwood floor in either of the games past the group phase (the semifinal against Serbia and the gold medal game against France). Granted, he was a good sport about it all, tipping off the experience with legitimately funny humor on social media (posting ‘When you ain’t do nun on the group project and still get an A‘). But this also kind of makes sense. Doesn’t it?

Go back to Giannis’ integrity lesson for a second. Re-read it in full. This doesn’t all happen in a vacuum. John Haliburton doesn’t walk up to Giannis with hostility at the buzzer, before even hugging his own game-winning shooter son, had he and Tyrese not perfected the gold digging upwards mobility of ‘take your dad to work’ models. Heritage, respect, and sacrifice typically don’t fail people in moments of need. They don’t get washed away by ’emotions’. They either pre-exist, or they don’t. The Nigerian-Greek power forward is obviously one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Arguably the greatest and most incisive player of the last decade. Since his 2013 debut, the guy has been sporting a career average 24 points per game (accompanied by a 55% field goal percentage), with a peak 31.1 points-per-game registered during his 2022-2023 season. As he reminded the audience during the press conference, he is the one with NBA Championship and three MVP titles, not them. Still, Giannis’s most honorable achievement to date might just have come off the court. Yes, Giannis Antetokounmpo is a gentleman, and a damn good basketball player whilst at it.

We’d like to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read this and we hope to feel your interest again next time. Oh and yeah, we do root for the Knicks over here at EMS, but these Pistons man…

AV