We have been having a great time with our Kindle Fire! Such a cool device. I like all of the apps that it comes with, plus how easy it is to stream video off of Amazon.
One thing we have learned is that it’s important to get Kindle Fire Accessories. What’s an example of a good accessory? We think a cover or a warranty!
All in all, we love our Kindle Fire. It’s way cooler than the iPad.
Andy Rutledge:
Regarding content strategy and mechanism, today’s ‘news’ is rife with irrelevancies and distractions. Part of this is due to the news industry’s abandonment of actual journalism, but much of it is due to thoughtless promotional strategy and pathetic pandering. I suggest that digital news acquire a responsible and more usable approach.
Andy’s arguments and mockups are both very well-conceived — I would love to see online journalism (all of it, not just NYT) head in this direction. His design concepts are fabulous.
I do believe, however, there should be an affordance for social components in news media, which Andy leaves out of his concepts. The context of others’ opinions as to what is news and what isn’t, and what is more important news for that matter, can be helpful in sifting through the daily deluge of reported information. Not that peers are more discerning than editors, mind you, but that their voices (ours, that is) should be allowed to influence society’s understanding of the world around us.
If the island-meets-rock-and-roll vibe of Mick Jagger’s Superheavy is any indication, it’s obvious that the rock and roll legend has a thing for Reggae jams. But Jagger says his enchantment with the genre started back in the sixties.
“We were interested from a rhythmic point of view, so we started to play reggae beats with the band, and the rest of them picked it up,” Jagger says.
To find out which songs made his Reggae Playlist - and to see who else contributed to Rolling Stone’s second annual Playlist Issue (on stands now), go to RollingStone.com.
—Keegan Prosser
You knew that when Jay Z and Kanye West got together to make Watch the Throne, people were going to talk about it. After all, most people lead boring lives, where the most exciting part is a kerfuffle in the produce section over spaghetti squash. Doesn’t exactly compare to the jetset lifestyle of Jay Z and Kanye.
That being said, let’s check out the latest single from Watch the Throne, Otis. If this doesn’t make you want to dance, you’re probably a zombie who, instead of eating brains, eats fun! Those exist, right?
We love this album and it’s easy for us to see why it’s shattering sales records. Jay Z is back and at his best, and Kanye is as good as ever. They got a crazy number of all-time great guest producers on the album too, including Q Tip and RZA! Rumor has it that Jay Z and Kanye are going on tour in October to promote the album. We expect the full VIP treatment, dudes.
What do the critics have to say about Jay Z and Kanye West on Watch the Throne?
even on The Blueprint, Jay-Z’s soul-searching rarely cut so deep. Watch The Throne was crafted in the heat and intensity of a very specific cultural moment, but Kanye and especially Jay-Z have the long view in mind. The album has the flash to dazzle and the substance to last.
Jay is in particularly fine form: He’s as sharp as he has been in a decade, and he shows flashes of the emotional depth that is West’s calling card. In “New Day,” Jay lays bare the pain of his fatherless childhood; in “Murder to Excellence” (with a turbulent beat by Swizz Beatz and S1), he places his success in a wider sociopolitical frame: “Only spot a few blacks the higher I go/What’s up to Will/Shout-out to O/That ain’t enough/We gon’ need a million more/Kick in the door.”
When it comes to listening to hip hop, West and Jay-Z are those friends — bringing you the bravado, but knowing when to turn it off and let you in on the fact that they too just want to be appreciated and respected. They live in that space between “yes this is as fun as it looks” and “but nothing in life is free.” Neither rapper beats their all-time best performances here, but as messy as putting these two careers on the same disc could have been, it’s hard to be anything but impressed. They’re hard guys to dislike, and the album gets our stamp of approval. Today, the sons of Brooklyn and Chicago did us all proud.
The long-gestating project, released exclusively on iTunes Monday morning at 12:01 a.m., combines the strengths of two of the most acclaimed rappers of the last two decades, Jay-Z and West, who have worked together often but never on a collaborative full-length album, and couples them with some of today’s most respected producers, including the RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, DJ Premier, the Neptunes, the Jugganauts, Swizz Beats and Q-Tip. The result is a cocksure, fiery, smart, if problematic, collaboration that showcases the pair’s distinct lyrical skills, their way around a metaphor and an ability to execute both a grand narrative and the details that turn it into truth. Musically, the production is captivating — especially West and RZA’s odd, syrupy beat on “New Day” — even if a relative lack of structural variety within the songs makes the record feel a little longer than it actually is.
You want more music? So do we.
We love this album, and we think that Jay Z is back on top of the hip hop world. One of those reviews said cocksure, right? We agree: totally cocksure. What about Kanye? Well, Kanye is Kanye and he never left. He’d say it’s his world and we’re just subletting space.
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