Wednesday, April 30, 2014
This week's Short List.

Movie Diary

Tuesday, April 29, 2014
























a) Elysium
I wasn't a big fan of District 9, and this seemed to have a lot of the same shortcomings without having at least the feel of being distinctive or original. Had its moments but never really found it compelling.

b) The Way Way Back
I like Jim Rash and Nat Faxon a lot for their acting work, and thought the success they got for their The Descendants screenplay was well deserved. Their directorial debut was hit and miss for me, though. I just feel like I've seen this kind of movie too many times already, often with some of the same actors (Steve Carrell, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Sam Rockwell). Again, all people I like, but it feels like it's been done. I'm also starting to get annoyed with these kinds of bittersweet reminisces about adolescence that take place in the present day but feel vaguely out of time, like it's still on some level nostalgic of the era the filmmakers grew up in (see also: Super Bad). Also the main kid in the cast just wasn't very compelling, took a while to really identify with him even though it shouldn't have been hard at all for me to identify with that character. By the end I started to get into it, though, it had its moments.

c) Pacific Rim
I was hoping this would at least be a fun spectacle but I tried watching it a couple times and got bored and started ignoring it both times. Seeing Charlie Hunnam and Charlie Day together did remind me of the brief period when I kept confusing the two guys named Charlie who star in shows on FX, though.

d) The Heat
It's kinda crazy how Bridesmaids singlehandedly altered the trajectory of pretty much everyone in it, but noone more than Melissa McCarthy and Paul Feig, who would almost definitely not have otherwise ended up making a buddy cop movie with Sandra Bullock. Anyway this was pretty funny, McCarthy used to much better effect than in Identity Thief.

e) Man of Steel
It's possible that I have never derived any real significant enjoyment or entertainment from any Superman movie, or any type of Superman product whatsoever, in my entire life. So you can take this with a grain of salt, but oh my god what a piece of shit this was. It didn't even remotely resemble a Superman movie for like, half the time, it just looked like an awful sci-fi movie. Superman even had a beard, that shit is not right.

f) Spring Breakers
This movie is somewhat opinion-proof, in that really any deficiency you can accuse it of having is easily spun by its fans as part of what makes it special or unique. But I dunno, I just felt like I was watching Harmony Korine bat around some kind of Tarantino-style reclamation of various B-movie tropes and pop culture figures with a fraction of the thought or talent. Even James Franco's kuh-razy performance was kind of flat, like he can't be bothered to really sell it. And it's really just garbage on a number of levels that I can't get into without feeling like I've been successfully trolled.

g) Hello I Must Be Going
I've always felt kind of bad for Melanie Lynskey, who started her career with Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures, but hasn't done a whole lot of note since then besides a recurring role on "2 And A Half Men." This is a really good starring vehicle for her, very simply told story of a woman trying to pick up her life after divorce and falling into an affair with a much younger guy (played by the dude who recently left "Girls"). It kinda goes through the plot points you'd expect and sometimes feels a little tedious, but by the end it felt pretty emotionally resonant and well rendered to me.

h) JCVD
I didn't realize this was gonna be in subtitles. Was kinda dryly funny but not as entertaining as I'd hoped.

i) His Girl Friday
The only other adaptation of The Front Page that I've seen is the Billy Wilder one, so it trips me out to think about how this is the same basic story, except in this one Jack Lemmon is a woman and at the end Walter Matthau proposes to him. Really good movie, though, glad I finally got around to seeing it, I just love that whole screwball comedy era and the mannered dialogue.

k) Goodbye, Mr. Chips
It always kinda irritated me that the pitch for "Breaking Bad" that Vince Gilligan repeated over and over and over, in hundreds of interviews was "from Mr. Chips to Scarface," because everyone knows Scarface but I had no idea what this movie even is, it came out before my parents were born. So I kinda watched this just to gain some familiarity with the reference. It was okay, I guess.

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 17: Paramore

Monday, April 28, 2014

























About a year ago, Paramore released my favorite album of 2013, and last week one of its singles, "Ain't It Fun," became the band's biggest Hot 100 hit to date. And I'm pretty excited about the tour with Deep Album Cuts alumni Fall Out Boy, so it seems like a good time to give Paramore's relatively small (but frequently great) catalog the same treatment.

I've always been more willing than the average music critic to lend an ear to the increasingly dismissed world of rock bands who get played on mainstream radio -- I even used to write a column about the topic. But more and more I'm just grateful that a band like Paramore exists at all to lob songs like "Misery Business" or "Still Into You" into pop culture. Whether they came out of the Warped Tour circuit, whether they were a prefabricated star vehicle for Hayley Williams, whether they can be rightfully called 'punk' or 'emo,' all those questions of credibility kinda mean nothing to me because I love the sound of their songs. And as a lot of their contemporaries have flamed out quickly or revealed themselves to not have a lot going on beyond the hit singles, Paramore's albums have gotten better, and thicker with great deep cuts.

Paramore Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist): 

1. Proof
2. Born For This
3. Looking Up
4. Grow Up
5. Conspiracy
6. Miracle
7. Misguided Ghosts
8. [One Of Those] Crazy Girls
9. Fences
10. I Caught Myself
11. Anklebiters
12. Where The Lines Overlap
13. We Are Broken
14. Here We Go Again
15. Fast In My Car
16. When It Rains
17. Let The Flames Begin
18. Part II
19. Never Let This Go
20. All I Wanted
21. Last Hope

Tracks 5, 14 and 19 from All We Know Is Falling (2005)
Tracks 2, 6, 9, 13, 16 and 17 from Riot! (2007)
Track 10 from Twilight: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2008)
Tracks 3, 7, 12 and 20 from brand new eyes (2009)
Tracks 1, 4, 8, 11, 15, 18 and 21 from Paramore (2013)

As much as I loved Riot! when it came out and put it in my year-end top 10 in 2007, the self-titled album really does tower over the rest of their catalog for me now. And given that that album ventures into a lot of sounds not found on the previous albums, and was made by a dramatically different lineup of the band, it sometimes felt a little odd to find away to piece all the eras of the band together. Of course, there were some obvious bridges, like Paramore's "Part II," a sequel to Riot!'s "Let The Flames Begin." And the earlier albums do have interesting outliers, like "Misguided Ghosts," which is still one of the strongest and most unexpected moments in their discography to me.

One aggravating thing about an exercise like this is that Paramore is one of those bands that releases a ton of singles for every album but only maybe half of them are hits of any kind. So there are songs I really like on brand new eyes that were just barely singles that I otherwise would've included here, or likewise "Daydreaming," which was recently a UK-only single.

It was nice to have an excuse to delve into the band's first album, All We Know Is Falling, which I'd never really spent much time with. A lot of the band's pop smarts that crystallized on Riot! weren't quite there yet on the debut, which is a little too dour and emo for me sometimes, but there's a few really strong songs on there, some of which were singles and some of which weren't.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy

Sunday, April 27, 2014
























I wrote about Tate Kobang's great new mixtape Crown Of Thorns for the Baltimore City Paper's Noise blog.

Saturday, April 26, 2014
I wrote a piece for DDotOmen.com called The Namedrop: How Brands and Celebrities Respond To Songs About Them.

Friday, April 25, 2014





















This week Complex unveiled its 90 Best Rap Albums of the '90s list, and I wrote blurbs for 10 of the albums (including Tribe, Jay, Outkast, Black Sheep, B.G. and others).

I also participated in a side feature where individual writers list their personal top 10 rap albums of the '90s, name 5 albums that should've made the main list, and share schlubby pictures of themselves.

Thursday, April 24, 2014






















I recently began contributing to the Washington, D.C. radio station WAMU 88.5's site Bandwidth, and this week I posted "Wine & Cheese," a great new song by the Baltimore rappers Greenspan, Ellis and Rome Cee. I also recently profiled Greenspan and Ellis for the Baltimore City Paper.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014
This week's Short List.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014
















My first post for DDotOmen.com is a list of the best and worst "life's a bitch" wordplay in the history of rap.

Monday, April 21, 2014

















Baltimore hard rock greats Kix just announced that in July they'll be releasing their first studio album in 19 years. I wrote a blog post about the news for the City Paper, for which I interviewed Kix's Steve Whiteman in 2012 and first got wind of the possibility of a new album.

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 16: Trick Daddy

Friday, April 18, 2014























I haven't had much hip hop in this series -- largely because I do the playlists on Spotify, and almost every rapper whose career has taken place primarily in the last decade or so has done the bulk of their work on mixtapes, or on other artists' albums (the only previous rapper, in fact, was Jay-Z, who is admittedly the last guy who needs to have his deep cuts championed, so I went extra deep). But Trick Daddy is perfectly suited to this exercise: a guy well known for his singles who's never  been taken too seriously as an albums artists, but whose albums have been incredibly consistent and full of underappreciated gems. Of course, he's the guy who put the word "thug" in the title of 7 consecutive albums; that's not the kind of thing that serious rap fans tend to take seriously.

Trick Daddy occupies an odd niche that puts him on the halfway point of several spectrums. He's either an unusually grimy pop rapper or a hardcore gangsta rapper with shameless commercial instincts. He hasn't quite been around long enough to be one of southern rap's real trailblazers of the early and mid-'90s, but his career peaked before the mid-'00's generation that still holds a large influence over the current state of affairs. He enjoyed a streak of 5 albums that all went gold or better, but only one got up to platinum, and he never hit that big multi-platinum level.

Since that streak ended, things went downhill -- over the last decade, he's released one last underperforming major label album, an indie album and then a mixtape, none of which made much noise at all. Other than appearing on a few DJ Khaled singles, he's just fallen off the mainstream radar. This month, he was briefly in the news a couple times, for a cocaine possession arrest, and for having some kind of run-in with Lil Wayne (apparently after Wayne had an issue with the Miami Heat and talked shit about the city, Trick took it personally). Trick Daddy has been known to have lupus for years, and so mostly people talk about how terrible he looks in his mugshot and other recent photos, which is just sad to hear. So hey, let's talk about the good music he made at his peak.

As the flagship artist of Slip-N-Slide Records, Trick Daddy Dollars presided over a crew that seemed to pattern itself after the No Limit/Cash Money model, if those labels were from Miami instead of New Orleans and based their sound on bass music instead of bounce music. But other than Trina (and, much later, Rick Ross), Slip-N-Side never worked up a big roster of stars like those labels, just a bunch of guys I've only heard when guesting on Trick Daddy albums. But with a run of singles like "Nann" and "Shut Up" and "I'm A Thug" and "In Da Wind" and "Let's Go," he almost singlehandedly built that label into a recognizable brand. And ever since I got a promo of Book Of Thugs back in 2000, I've been consistently impressed by his albums. In fact, he's one of only a handful of artists who had 2 albums on my top 100 albums of the 2000s list.

Trick Daddy Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Down Wit Da South (featuring Trina, Ying Yang Twinz and Deuce Komradz)
2. Sittin' On D's (featuring Izm)
3. Gangsta (featuring Birdman and Scarface)
4. Where U From (featuring Trina and Deuce Poppi)
5. Thug's About (featuring Dirtbag)
6. Ain't A Thug (featuring Trey Songz)
7. Thug Life Again (featuring Money Mark Diggla and Myiera B's)
8. Could It Be (featuring Twista)
9. Fuckin' Around (featuring Kase 1, Young Jeezy and T.I.)
10. Ain't No Santa
11. Ho But You Can't Help It (featuring Buddy Roe)
12. Let Me Ride (featuring Rick Ross)
13. I Wanna Sang
14. Living In A World (featuring Society)
15. God's Been Good (featuring Betty Wright's Children's Choir)
16. The Children's Song
17. SNS / Roland (featuring Deuce Poppi and Tre+6)
18. N Word (featuring C.O. and Deuce Poppi)
19. Tonight (featuring Jaheim and Trina)
20. Tryin' To Stop Smokin' (featuring Mystikal)

Tracks 11 from Based On A True Story (1997)
Tracks 14 from www.thug.com (1998)
Tracks 2, 7, 8, 11* and 20 from Book Of Thugs: Chapter AK Verse 47 (2000)
Tracks 4 and 18 from Thugs Are Us (2001)
Tracks 3, 10, 12, 15 and 17 from Thug Holiday (2002)
Tracks 1, 5, 6, 9, 13 and 16 from Thug Matrimony: Married To The Streets (2004)
Track 19 from Back By Thug Demand (2006)

* "Hoe But You Can't Help It" appeared on both his first and third albums, in the exact same form, although it was never a single. Something similar occurred with "Amerika," which was on two different albums, but was released as a single the second time.

One thing I will note, with some annoyance, is that it's gotten harder and harder to find versions of rap albums with explicit lyrics on Spotify, or distinguish them from the clean edits, and I've unfortunately only been able to find clean versions of songs from Book Of Thugs and Thug Holiday for this mix. So I apologize if you are offended by the lack of profanity on a few of these tracks.

Trick Daddy never really relied on guests for hits -- on most of his singles, the biggest guest was Trina, who became famous initially by collaborating with TDD -- but his albums were always full of great features by guys like Mystikal, Scarface, and Twista. He had DJ Khaled talk all over a track back in 2001 ("The Hotness" on Thugs Are Us), and had Rick Ross on three tracks on Thug Holiday, 4-5 years before anybody outside Miami really heard of those guys. He was really just ahead of the curve in general, giving Young Jeezy and Trey Songz their first feature credits on a major label album.

One of my favorite things about Trick Daddy is his propensity for songs featuring little kids singing on the chorus -- something that comes off corny and pandering from some rappers, but makes for an interesting contrast to TDD's rough style. "I'm A Thug" may be his greatest hit, and "Amerika" was also a dope single, but he's got 4 different deep cuts with kids on the hook, which make up tracks 14 through 17 here. And really, "The Children's Song" is the only one that I think is a little too saccharine, the rest are just straight up good songs. Trick loves the kids!

The most remarkable thing about Trick's catalog is his consistency. I never checked out the mixtape he did a couple years ago, hilariously named Dick & Dynamite, but I can really say he never made a bad album. Even the last one, 2009's Finally Famous: Born A Thug, Still A Thug, which I didn't include anything from here since it didn't have any hits, was pretty decent. And the early albums from the '90s, which I hadn't really checked out before doing this, impressed me with the quality of the production. Trick Daddy never really had a formative stage in his career, he pretty much arrived the way you know him and stayed that way, whether you love it or hate it.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan

Thursday, April 17, 2014























The Remix Report Card, which I've been doing here on Narrowcast since 2007 (here is the most recent 2013 edition), made its debut this week on Noisey, looking at the rap remixes of the first quarter of 2014.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014
This week's Short List.

Sunday, April 13, 2014



























A few days ago, Mobtown Studios unveiled the latest edition of the BSides series, featuring the D.C. band Drop Electric. As usual, I wrote the text for the feature, but there's also a great YouTube video from the session, audio of both songs the band recorded, great photos and other stuff from the amazing team Mobtown assembled for these projects. I really like the band and how this one turned out, check it out.

Saturday, April 12, 2014






















I posted on the City Paper's Noise blog about #Letspushthebutton, a new mixtape featuring Ogun, Los, Starrz and a ton of other Baltimore rappers.

Monthly Report: April 2014 Singles

Friday, April 11, 2014






















1. Coldplay - "Magic"
Coldplay were never a particularly cool band to like, and they've only gotten less cool from there. But I really dug Viva La Vida as an album and enjoyed singles off of the last album that nobody seemed to care about like "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall" and "Princess of China." And now, after years of Coldplay being one of the only bands played on both pop and alternative radio, they're re-entering a very crowded field of crossover hits, and nobody seems to care. But whatever, I like this, it actually reminds me a bit of the last lead single by the other big Stadiumhead band, Muse's "Madness," although it's not quite as good as that. Here is my running Spotify playlist of favorite 2014 singles, by the way. 

2. ScHoolboy Q - "Man Of The Year"
I thought it was pretty unfortunate when this song dropped a few months ago right on the heels of Kendrick appearing on the cover of GQ's 'man of the year' issue, TDE is really kinda failing at their mission to have a bunch of equally successful solo artists as everything after Kendrick trails off. But it's kind of a shame that Q hasn't really shaped up to at least be a radio fixture, because the singles off his album have really been good, especially this one. I'm kinda past rolling my eyes when big name rappers sample random indie bands I've never listened to, the Chromatics sample on this is really dope and puts an eerie edge on what's otherwise a pretty straightforward club banger. 

3. Bando Jonez - "Sex You"
I laughed so hard the first time I turned on the radio and heard a pitched-down voice intoning "SEX -- HAVE YOU HAD IT?" But it's really sapped my enjoyment of this song that all my local stations have been playing the "Love You" edit -- and these are all stations that played the hell out of songs like "Birthday Sex" and "Sex Therapy" and "Sex Room" so I didn't think it was possible for that word to be objectionable on R&B radio anymore.

4. Kacey Musgraves - "Keep It To Yourself"
I've only heard this song on the radio exactly once so far, but it sounded more at home there than I expected it to. In any case I'm glad Kacey's label is continuing to push the album with a 4th single even as radio has been resistant to her charms, relative to her sales and acclaim. Giving a great performance and winning an award on the Grammys telecast probably bolstered their confidence in her, "Follow Your Arrow" is still my least favorite single off the album but that was an awesome moment.

5. Pearl Jam - "Lightning Bolt"
Although I try to take all new Pearl Jam music at face value and not compare it too much to the period that made them my favorite singles act of the '90s, it's really kinda refreshing that Lightning Bolt is now the first Pearl Jam album with 3 good singles since Yield.

6. Sara Bareilles - "I Choose You"
I've been spoiled as a journalist about getting to meet and interview a lot of musicians I listen to, which has made it weird at my current day job, teleprompting, where I'm frequently around very famous people but, more often than not, am just kinda there and have no opportunity to socialize with them. A case in point, the other night I worked a corporate event where Sara Bareilles was the headline performer, and I'm really a fan of her music and wrote a very complimentary column about her a few months ago that it would've been cool to show her. But I was only backstage at the same time as her for a couple minutes, and it just felt too awkward to go up to her and try to make small talk or act like a fan. The performance was good, though, she played this song on acoustic guitar and it was a good arrangement. Glad she finally has a follow-up single to "Brave," which I was never very into, but I'm still hoping "Little Black Dress" becomes a single.

7. Colbie Caillat - "Hold On"
It's probably weird that I can say I'm a fan of Sara Bareilles but I find it embarrassing to admit I like a Colbie Caillat song, since they're probably looked at as similar artists for a similar fanbase. This song is really catchy, though, part of this hot streak that I hate to admit Ryan Tedder is on right now.

8. B.o.B f/ Chris Brown - "Throwback"
Here's one I really am embarrassed to like. Chris Brown is, of course, awful as a musician and as a person, and I just shit on the B.o.B album a few months ago for the cynical way it was assembled as a change in direction, and the way even the singles buoyed by Mike Will Made It and DJ Mustard and Future and 2 Chainz and Juicy J all seemed to be those guys' mediocre leftovers. But now that the awful "Jon Doe" has put B.o.B back on pop radio a little bit, rap radio has picked up on this song, which I totally didn't realize was kind of awesome when I listened to the album, that beat is just insane and B.o.B actually produced it himself, so respect where it's due, I guess.

9. Silversun Pickups - "Cannibal"
It's funny that these guys did a singles compilation after only three albums -- maybe it's an indication that they're finally leaving for a major label after years of being the only indie band consistently making hits on alt-rock radio. The new song on the comp is good, though, kinda follows on the synthy direction of their last big single, "The Pit," which suggests that even as they continue to get constant comparisons to the Smashing Pumpkins, their foray into electronic sounds won't be too derivative of the Pumpkins.

10. Imagine Dragons - "On Top Of The World"
It's funny, the weird grungestep power ballad "Radioactive" has become their gigantic crossover hit, but the upbeat acoustic debut single "It's Time" is still the reason I don't totally hate Imagine Dragons. And so I'm glad that their current single is another chipper pop song that sounds good in commercials and stupid movies like The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, which had this play over the credits.

Worst: American Authors - "Best Day Of My Life"
Going back to my lingering affection for "It's Time," it's mildly horrifying that a new band is getting big crossover money with a debut single that sounds like a deliberate carbon copy of the first Imagine Dragons single. The alt pop game is so dirty.

Tuesday, April 08, 2014





















In this week's Baltimore City Paper, I wrote a Rap Sheet column (about D. King, J Who? Worldwise, E-Dubble, Bink Baghdad and more) and The Short List.

TV Diary

Sunday, April 06, 2014























a) "Doll & Em"
I gave this a couple episodes, but I think I got the idea and don't have much of a will to keep watching. A couple of pretty middle-aged English ladies doing the mockumentary comedic caricature of themselves thing that Americans ran into the ground a decade ago, no thanks.

b) "The 100" 
For a show on the CW based on a young adult novel, this is kind of a respectable Sci-Fi show, more on the level of SyFy's better shows. Or at least, I was impressed by the pilot, I haven't really kept up with it, although my wife has and says it's been good.

c) "Broad City"
Well this pretty quickly became one of my favorite new shows, I'm already bummed that the first season is over. A couple of the later episodes had tangents that didn't totally pay off for me, but for the most part it just seemed to get funnier and funnier as it went along, particularly the hurricane episode and the wedding episode. Also it's pretty cool that Abbi Jacobson used to live in Baltimore and went to MICA.

d) "Inside Amy Schumer" 
Another Comedy Central star who went to college around here! I'll spare you another telling of how I briefly knew Amy Schumer at Towson, though. It still trips me out that she's kind of famous. This show is still cool, though, I think in the new season premiere there was one sketch that was a little stale but everything else felt like she's just hitting her stride and kinda finding a space somewhere beyond mere shock humor or absurdity for absurdity's sake.

e) "Enlisted"
I was pretty dismissive of this show at first, but it has grown on me big time. One of those sitcoms that has a lot of heart while also being almost cartoonishly silly, but fuses those two elements together in a way that works. Really strong cast, too, great to see Keith David just go for it in a comedic context.

f) "Hollywood Game Night" 
This primetime schedule filler is so self-evidently not must see TV that I only ever stumble into watching it for a while by accident, usually halfway into the show after they've introduced everybody. So the game for me is mostly trying to figure out who half of these minor celebrities even are or if I've ever seen them before. It is kinda fun, though.

g) "Brooklyn Nine-Nine"
Definitely feel like this show has come into its own by the end of the season. It shouldn't be so easy to make me laugh just having Andre Braugher say things like "oopsy doodle" and "kwazy kupcakes," but it is.

h) "Episodes" 
This will never be a great show but it is a good one. And the longer it drags on and the characters' misadventures in network television get more ridiculous and pathetic, the more that aspect of the comedy grows. This season was a little hit and miss, though, I hope that there's more John Pankow next season and that Leblanc gets to be a little more over the top again.

i) "Community"
It was weird when they recently had back-to-back episodes guest starring the creators of "Arrested Development" and "Breaking Bad," it was like a dog whistle tribute to the way Dan Harmon coming back to the show is the tipping point for TV fans to obsess over showrunners and behind-the-scenes guys. This season has been really fun, though, I think the way they kinda rebuilt the ensemble dynamic in the absence of Donald Glover and Chevy Chase has been mostly refreshing, although some of the theme episodes are a bit much, even the "G.I. Joe" one, as much as it made me laugh.

j) "The Colbert Report"
I have mixed feelings about the whole #CancelColbert ordeal -- he'd been doing the Asian racism thing as a running gag for years, initially to lampoon Rush Limbaugh, but every time he trotted it out it got further removed from that context, and a little less funny and a little less defensible. Still, the controversy itself became pretty absurd, and it raised the bar pretty high for how he would address it on the show, and I thought he killed it with that whole episode.

Thursday, April 03, 2014
This week's Short List.