Word: weirdness
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...years, it's been the same question: Which Neil? The lumber-shredding, screeching Canadian eagle of vengeance? The willfully weird but kind of dull experimenter? The acoustic guy? This time it's just Good Neil. Neil Young, 59, started making Prairie Wind, out Sept. 27, his (lordy) 31st album, a week before he had brain surgery--a nice p.r. detail but also a legit reason for him to think about mortality and drift back to his days on the Canadian steppe. There's politics and religion too, as well as some of Nashville's best musicians, though...
When West finally got a deal (in the end, Roc-A-Fella overcame its institutional bias against Polo shirts), he shattered the myth that he was too soft, too weird and too bourgeois to fit the mold of a platinum-selling rapper. His 2004 debut album, The College Dropout, went nearly triple platinum, topped all the major critics' polls, earned 10 Grammy nominations and made rap accessible to audiences that hadn't paid attention in years. "That record restored my faith in hip-hop," says Jamie Foxx, who lent comic vocals to West's No. 1 hit Slow Jamz...
...spring of 2004, I quit hip-hop. It wasn't the first time. Our relationship was stormy from the start. Hip-hop was my first literature, and it was Rakim, not Fitzgerald, who first made me consider writing. Still, all that macho blathering was a weird match for me, a kid with the self-esteem of an earthworm. So every few years, I'd bemoan the state of the music, rip my Public Enemy posters from the wall, unspool all my mix tapes and swear, "Never again!" That was mostly posturing--all it took was something arch and underground...
...truth is, even if Ellis decided to drop all the layers and the games, you get the feeling he wouldn't know how. He's just as confused as we are. "I'm a weird person," he insists. "I'm not normal. Do you think the guy you're sitting across from, who wrote these books and who's put himself out there, do you think that that's, like, conducive to normal behavior? I'm beginning to think it's not. I'm beginning to think it's all one big mistake." He gives me the quizzical stare again...
Alex Slack ‘06, an editorial executive, is a history concentrator in Leverett House. He is jealous of his friends who are sure of what they want to do post-college, and he hopes no one noticed the weird mixed metaphor in his postcard’s last sentence. Expos taught him to try to connect his titles with his conclusions...