Sam Richards 

Sesame Street Star Wars and the latest Kanye rant – plus the rest of today’s breaking pop culture news

Passing today’s pop cultural torrent through a filter of skewed opinion til 5pm. Coming up: Kanye ranting, Bono flushing, indie-rockers beefing and cookie-control techniques
  
  

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Can you tell me how to get to Tattooine? Photograph: sesame street

Stuff to do tonight

If you’re in Edinburgh, go and see Cate Le Bon at Electric Circus.

If you’re in London, get a load of Carter Tutti Void at Oslo.

And you’re in Reading, go and see Henning Wehn crack jokes at the expense of both the Germans and the English (take that, Stan Boardman) at the South Street Arts Centre.

Otherwise, there’s plenty on telly tonight. The Leftovers finally starts on Sky Atlantic (The Guide’s Filipa Jodelka is a fan), Bad Education is back and Guide cover stars Banks and Alt-J are on Later With Jools.

That’s yer lot for today, thanks for reading. Gwilym and Lanre will be here tomorrow, so please humour them. Night.

Tuesday tune injection

Remember we told you earlier this year about underground dance music supergroup Future Brown? Well they’ve just signed to Warp, and here’s their first single due out in November.

Stripped-back singer-songwriter Angel Olson will release a deluxe version of her acclaimed album Burn Your Fire For No Witness in November. Here’s one of the bonus tracks, All Right Now (no, not that one, although it might have been fun).

And if wacky psych-rock in robes is your thing, let me introduce to you King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard. As far as wacky psych-rock in robes goes, though, I’m not sure they’re a patch on Goat.

Eraser of love

We all love Eraserhead, right? The heartwarming tale of a sexually harassed chubby man with high hair, caring for his wailing, skinless, deformed child in a desolate post-industrial world while hallucinating about a singing radiator.

But what is Eraserhead really about? We may never know, because director David Lynch ain’t telling. All he’ll say is, whatever we think it’s about, it’s not that. The tease.

I like to have people be able to form their own opinion as to what it means and have their own ideas about things. But at the same time, no one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the film the way I see it. The interpretation of what it’s all about has never been my interpretation.

Could it be that’s it not really about anything? That in the words of Homer Simpson, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened? Still, it managed to create a genre, and here’s a nice read on that very topic.

How To Dismantle A U2 Album

Last week, U2 deposited a “gift” in our iTunes folders, much like a corpulent house guest might leave a “gift” in your toilet bowl. Thankfully, Apple has now provided comprehensive instructions on how to flush the new U2 album out of your life permanently.

People might have been less annoyed about Bono’s presumptuousness had the U2 album sounded more like this exhilarating new effort from the band’s sometime producer Daniel Lanois. It’s Fuck Buttons with better drums, basically.

A whole album of this, called Flesh And Machine, is due out on Anti- at the end of October. Hopefully you can also hire the bro in the vest and shorts to come and leap around your living room euphorically, thus completing the experience.

Songs of love and hate (but mostly love)

Music that’s helping us make it through the day:

Grimes’ Bedtime Mix for Annie Mac

The new album from Leonard Cohen, still killing it (softly) a week shy of his 80th birthday.

Mr Twin Sister’s second collection of twinkling indie disco, belying their rubbish name.

Woody? He would, you know

Woody Allen seems unlikely to return to classic Woody Allen territory any time soon, so into the breach steps Alex Ross Perry with the distinctly Allen-esque (by way of Wes Anderson) Listen Up Philip. Let’s play indie film bingo with the trailer.

Classy retro font – check. Jason Schwartzman – check. With a beard – check. And a nice range of tweed jackets and scarves – check! Being incredibly rude yet witty and somehow charming – check! Flirting with a string of impossibly hot women, some with sexy foreign accents – check! And a prominent role for a cat – that’s house!

Good to see roles for Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss and Breaking Bad’s Krysten Ritter, too, although they seem as if they might be a bit underused here. It’s all about the beards, really.

Melancholic indie-rock beef!

Rap beefs are ten-a-penny, but when dolorous indie-rockers start beefing, that’s when we sit up and take notice. At the weekend, former Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon moper Mark Kozelek was playing the Ottawa Folk Fest when he happened to be the victim of noise leakage from The War Of Drugs playing on a nearby stage.

Kozelek is an entertainingly cranky stage presence (last week he called another festival audience “fucking hillbillies” when they wouldn’t “shut the fuck up”) so couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a swipe at The War On Drugs’ “beer commercial lead-guitar shit”, referring to them as “John Cougar Mellencamp” and introducing his next song as “The War on Drugs Can Suck My Fucking Dick”.

Sadly, The War On Drugs are too nice to really bite. They are just “doin what they do”.

This petulant beef is all the more amusing when you consider that these two acts have made two of the most beautiful and melancholic albums of the year (Sun Kil Moon’s Benji and The War On Drugs’ Lost In The Dream). But which is the most beautiful and melancholic? There’s only one to find out, etc.

"I had that Kylie Minogue in the back of my cab once…"

Nick Cave’s quasi-mock-autobiopicumentary 20,000 Days On Earth is out on Friday. One of the famous friends hitching a ride in the back of Nick’s car for the purposes of the film is his duet partner from 1995’s Where The Wild Roses Grow, Kylie Minogue. Here’s a nice behind “behind-the-scenes” offcut from that particular scene, featuring a rare snap of Cave in shorts.

If you’re wondering who the hell this Nick Cave fellow is, we made a handy infographic telling you (almost) everything you need to know.

Kanye rants back

Yesterday, we brought you the video of Kanye West halting his Sydney concert in order to harass some punters who weren’t standing up (they turned out to be in wheelchairs).

We weren’t the only news outlet to point out Kanye’s faux pas. But rather than apologise and move on, Kanye chose to interpret the coverage as another example of media persecution and took the opportunity at last night’s show in Brisbane to go on another of his infamous rants.

If you’d rather watch a whole episode of Keeping Up With Kardashians than endure the whole tirade, here’s the highlight:

I’m a married Christian man with a family. At my concerts, I make sure everybody has as good a time as possible. So all this demonising me, it ain’t goin’ to work after a while. Pick a new target. Pick a new target. Because I’m not one of these dumbass artists that you’re used to. You come at me, I’m going to take my platform and break this shit down for real, intelligent people every night. And then, we’ll get back to the music.

Basically, he’s saying: don’t ever dare criticise me, or I’ll rant at you for ten minutes when you’ve paid to enjoy some music. Which, all things considered, is quite a threat. Let’s all agree to go easy on the guy for a while, huh? After all, he’s a married Christian man with a family. Not sure where that leaves all those single Muslims, though?

Updated

Ross-On-Why?

Just six months after the release of his last album Mastermind, Rick Ross has announced another one, Hood Billionaire. The cynical among you might suggest that Rick’s prolificacy is aided somewhat by the fact that most of his tracks sound pretty much the same. But at least you aways know what you’re getting, and in the case of new single Elvis Presley Boulevard it’s a chorus that hangs on the booming rhyme of Priscilla (as in Elvis’s wife) with vanilla (as in Ice, as in diamonds, I’m guessing). Have to admit that guest rapper Project Pat has me foxed with his reference to leprechauns, however. Any ideas?

Read what happened when our very own Lanre Bakare spent a day in the company of Rick ‘The Boss’ Ross right here.

May The Petit Fours Be With You

Morning all. Sesame Street’s pop culture parodies are getting increasingly sophisticated. Here they are turning Star Wars into a riot of cake-based gags. Obi Wan Kenobi’s named has previously been punned to death, so kudos for coming up with a fresh take in the form of Only One Cannoli.

 

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