Todd In The Shadows Thread

Regarding the video, I admittedly laughed at the Canadian joke… I probably shouldn't, I don't know if I'd like being constantly made fun of if I was Canadian.

Though I guess I do laugh at English people making fun of the French, as long as it's all in good fun…

Edited by Lyendith on May 9th 2024 at 1:29:30 AM

We don't take it personally. We laugh at ourselves all the time.

Unknown if it's related, but one of drake's security guards was shot at his mansion a couple days ago.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/shooting-bayview-lawrence-1.7196240

Edited by Wabbawabbajack on May 9th 2024 at 7:08:17 AM

Yeah I go back and forth. I did feel kinda weird in the back of my head how much I should let myself enjoy this. The rumors about Drake have been swirling around long enough I'm not really surprised another rapper brought it up.

Somebody said the shooting at Drake's mansion was more to do with The Weeknd or P. Diddy than anything with Kendrick, but I'm not informed enough on all that to say anything.

Best case scenario, there's not anymore actual violence, if there are any actual victims of whatever or whoever they get justice, and then we all watch a solid 7/10 direct-to-streaming docuseries about it 10 years from now.

Edit to add: the one part I can fully enjoy without worrying about the broader implications are all the jokes about what a bullet J. Cole dodged and how he's off chilling at the beach or whatever.

Edited by BigMikeyTyson on May 9th 2024 at 8:58:29 AM

How true are the things Drake and Kendrick are saying about each other?

(Kendrick is an abuser who cheats with white women while being an activist to get people [including himself] to think he's a good person and Drake is a self-hating black man with a secret daughter and runs a sex trafficking ring. [And of course, is a PDF File] At least, according to each other.)

Edited by Smasher on May 10th 2024 at 10:35:17 AM

None of us will ever know, really, unless hard evidence comes out about either. In Drake's case, at least, there's apparently video of him being weird with a minor on stage, plus Millie Bobby Brown has also made allegations against Drake directly. That's about all I feel (relatively) comfortable bringing up in this thread.

Kendrick's allegations as yet have no real evidence supporting them, though if there's something to reveal, time will reveal it eventually.

In all seriousness, Cole is probably back in album mode, but the memes about him doing the most wholesome things imaginable while Kendrick stuffs Drake in a locker or something are very funny.

Edited by PhysicalStamina on May 10th 2024 at 2:36:54 AM

Yeah, I remember somebody said something like "there's video of Drake kissing an underage girl on stage, there's no video of Kendrick going around slugging women" which is pretty much why I don't think less of Kendrick for bringing it up. Like I said earlier, it felt kinda inevitable.

I did grin a bit where Todd pointed out how, for all his weaknesses, Drake did manage to put out a legitimately great diss track but it just fizzled out because Kendrick is just that good and also just apparently the entire industry is sick of Drake's shit.

Just the high of these songs coming out within hours of each other feels like it could be a once in a lifetime thing.

Tupac's murder is unrelated to the beef. He picked a fight with some Crips at the MGM Grand, and they retaliated. One of the people who was involved has been openly talking about it for years, even appearing on podcasts and everything, and he was recently indicted. There's no real evidence of a connection to the beef.

What happened to Biggie is a bigger mystery. Suge Knight has been suspected of organizing the hit, either through his connection to gangs or the LAPD. Investigators have a couple of suspects, but there's no consensus on who is more likely, there's no direct evidence of any of them on the scene (compare to Orlando Anderson and friends caught on camera at the casino). Now, knowing what we know about Suge Knight and the LAPD, the car being a SS Impala, and the forensic countermeasures, and the case being bogged down in the department, a Dirty Cop on Knight's payroll seems pretty likely.

But back to this beef. I'm on team Fuck Drake. As Todd did say, it's a lot of smoke with no fire, but it's a lot of smoke. I like Kendrick's tracks, but I do also admit it's troubling that he's also standing on ten toes for Kodak Black, which I can see if the point is that he's done his time and is trying to change as a person, which is something I believe people should be allowed to do, but I don't feel Kendrick or Kodak have really expressed satisfactorily.

Not Like Us shooting to number one this week is pretty wild. I feel like there really has ben a long brewing cultural resentment against Drake, and when you put it on a DJ Mustard beat, it really broke though. It also broke the previous record for most daily streams for a hip-hop song, previously held by a Drake song that I don't even get why it was a hit in the first place, though I can say that about just about any Drake hit.

[ed.] you know, just checked Kodak Black's wikipedia article. Man is NOT taking rehabilitation seriously.

Edited by JethroQWalrustitty on May 13th 2024 at 11:49:25 AM

Re: the Dua Lipa thing, I think he said once that her stuff has been consistently really good so far, but not in any really complex way. "Dua Lipa has made an album full of really good modern disco songs" is true, but it's also not very interesting to analyze. Todd's current pop song reviews aren't of the "really good and no one can argue they aren't" songs because there's very little to say.

Even Dua Lipa's career isn't very interesting, because it's just "yeah, she's put out a lot of good songs" and even if she flames out, it'll probably not be a trainwreckord and will just be the Cyndi Lauper thing where her career just kinda winds down on its own.

Really good artist and singer, not particularly that interesting to talk about. Even her podcast is like that. It's a good podcast (she has a bewilderingly wide array of interests that range from generic standard stuff to bafflingly high-brow things, like, she's learning Spanish specifically so she can talk to a Spanish art film director), but Dua Lipa herself comes off as generically nice and friendly and doesn't really seem to have any sharp edges or unpleasant habits. Which is apparently true to life, everyone just says she's really nice.

That's great, and from the stuff she's talked about with her interests, I wouldn't be surprised if she started showing up in the documentary space, but there's no narrative or story there. She's just a nice person who's good at music and has an incredibly wide range of interests. That's interesting for her as a person, but it's not a great narrative for a video because there's no hook there.

I've noticed Todd has done very few Pop Song Reviews in the past years, and I have chalked it up to the charts being really boring, middle of the road, decent enough stuff, and Dua Lipa kinda falls into that category. Todd's pop song review golden age really was when Lady Gaga was on the charts with a new outrageous video every month, and Pitbull had a ridiculous guest verse in every second song. Those had material to discuss. And as a personal opinion, "Unholy" and "Montero" pale in comparison to the vision Gaga had when it comes to visuals, but more crucially, are just more boring as songs.

Historically, I feel like the music industry is in a similar situation to what it was in the mid 1970's, at the most stagnated nadir of (commercial) disco and stadium rock.

I do wish he had done a Pop Song Review on Jack Harlowe's "First Class" (you know the one, that samples Fergie's "Glamorous"). I can't STAND that song. The lyrics just feel like disjointed lyrics from separate songs Frankenstein'd together on top of a lazy sample.

...But maybe that's why he didn't do it, the badness is obvious.

And also the love-hate relationship that Todd has towards Katy Perry. There's just a lot to talk about in the early to mid tens. These days I'm far more keen to watch whenever Todd drops a new episode of one of his retrospective shows.

Edited by GrafVonTirol on May 15th 2024 at 9:08:19 AM

I miss early to mid 2010s music. I want that to come back in vogue.

Only a decade or so until it becomes retro, you're already halfway there.

Bowling For Soup's "1985" came out in 2004, making the time from then to now as long the time between the subject year of the song and it was released (yes it's technically a SR-71 song, a previous topic of One Hit Wonderland), which would be fun to have it covered in OHW sometime soon, but also makes you think about the nature of nostalgia.

The weird thing is, 2004 doesnt seem that long ago. I mean, as a child of the 80s, even though the 60s were only 20 years old at that point, it seemed ancient by then, but 2004 isnt that far off from 2024, aside from some natural innovations in tech, and even then, some of them were already around, the last two decades just enhanced them. Even when it comes to music, a lot of the artists who were already big names in the 2000s like Beyonce and Taylor Swift, are still putting out successful albums today.

Bigger difference is probably that you're older. Things seem less different because you've been more stagnant.

An interesting corollary is that, as Todd put it in the Beach Boys video, the 80's was unusually kind to the 60's when it came to music chart success - a lot of 60's artists getting new hits and remaining big names. In hindsight, they don't feel like they're part of the zeitgeist, but that's at least partly historical revisionism, at least from Todd's narration of it.

But then, 90's US television had this really distinct sense that the 50's and the 60's were almost...a revered history? Kids' cartoons would reference Elvis and the Beatles and Leave it to Beaver and Fantastic Voyage and It's a Wonderful Life as if they were all just the primal history of culture, and I wonder if the 50's being the dawn of mass television adoption has anything to do with that.

Edited by TheEvilDrBolty on May 18th 2024 at 11:43:21 AM

Back in the 90s, the 50s-60s was still far enough in the past to be considered old, but not too old that nobody remembered it. Nowadays, a lot of the people who grew up in that era are considered elderly, and save for the music, a lot of that pop culture, aside from the major stuff, is getting harder to find (though streaming does help a bit).

The 80s were like that about the 50s and 60s in general. Happy Days was one of the biggest shows out there and it was an 80s view of the 60s and Grease was gigantic. There was a lot of throwback stuff across the whole spectrum of media. The thing is, the 60s was really fixated on the 40s and the 40s were really fixated on the 20s in a lot of ways, but the 80s being fixated on the 60s so much seems like it really fucked up the 20 year nostalgia cycle because now we're running into this weird fixation on the 80s as seen in the 2000s and the core of the nostalgia cycle will occasionally go older (as evidenced by the disco revival), but a lot of nostalgia stuff seems stuck in the 80s. Every time things seem to be moving forward, it just reverts back once the next big boomer franchise gets a reboot.

Some stuff of the 90's has come back, but it feels like it'll be stuck at the 20th century for a while.

Wonder how many people see those years with some kind of regret.

Edited by Blueace on May 21st 2024 at 8:12:05 AM

Song vs Song revealed that Todd's first favorite band was none other than The Turtles. A strange pick indeed. Of course, being 4 and a TMNT fan had something to do with it. He probably rightfully considers them a Rick Astley, as even though Happy Together is by far their most famous song (one of the comments in the episode said that when they saw The Turtles, the band played Happy Together three times!) they had other hits.

Edited by Smasher on May 21st 2024 at 9:25:00 AM

Let's see. Aside from "Happy Together" and their even more deliberately cheesy "Elenore" (I still like it), they had a Bob Dylan cover ("It Ain't Me, Babe") that sounds a lot better than the original, which is almost a given. I also remember liking "You Baby" and "She'd Rather Be With Me". "You Showed Me" is more somber than usual but got play around here.

There needs to be a thing where the TMNT sing Happy Together.

In the Song vs Song they also mentioned that they don't want to do an episode about Eric Clapton because people would complain their opinions would be too clouded by their opinions about his politics.

I propose a simple solution: Clapton vs. Morrisey. Just start with "both these guys suck, and we will bring that up, but we obviously won't favor one over the other because, they both suck".

Edited by JethroQWalrustitty on May 22nd 2024 at 12:26:47 PM

the 80s being fixated on the 60s so much seems like it really fucked up the 20 year nostalgia cycle because now we're running into this weird fixation on the 80s as seen in the 2000s and the core of the nostalgia cycle will occasionally go older (as evidenced by the disco revival), but a lot of nostalgia stuff seems stuck in the 80s. Every time things seem to be moving forward, it just reverts back once the next big boomer franchise gets a reboot.

To be fair, we're not even halfway through the 2020s. It's possible there will be a big boom of 2000s nostalgia in the next couple years.