Maps, Sunny

On music, lo-fi hip hop to relax/study/sleep/choom to is a real genre du jour. Especially choom. I'm of two minds here. The extreme lo-fi-ness of this album was a turnoff to start, but then it won it me over with the jazz-forward "Blue Smoke" and "Bad Dreams," complete with cymbals, bass, and horns, as well as the spooky/moody "Babylon" through "FaceTime." There are some highly memorable lines ("like Phil Jackson in '96," "Matisse without the colors," the FBI phone tap bit) mixed in with plenty I've forgotten. woods' shines in lyrics and flow, just listen to "Year Zero," but I don't have enough magnetism to dig in much more than a week's listening.

On misappropriations, re: in "Soft Landing," "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." —50 Cent. While it's debated whether this quote is actually attributed to 50, it's more than likely what woods is referring to.

On art, both album art and airplane safety parody art are two genres I enjoy. Also combined with the music itself, we've got a nice thematic mix going here. It's funny, and in an album full of depresssion and the depressing realities of travel, it's nice to see a little humor shown forward. That's enough to be a win.

On internet, I do wonder a bit why this is the third most popular album on RYM. Can 10000 users be wrong? I'm not saying that it is wrong by any objective sense, just interesting how public sample sites represent a population. I get the same feeling when I think about IMDB's top movies, or whenever twitter/reddit agrees about anything anytime. There's clearly some self-selecting to someone who contributes to a forum, any forum, in the greater sense of the word. 90% of people are lurkers, anywhere. Third best album of the year is a big statement, and browsing the full list of ten is also kind of confusing. What I'm asking, I think, is the Y of RYM the same Y of PoYB?