outkastWith news breaking this week that OutKast will embark on a tour starting at Coachella in 2014 for the first time in a decade, the music community, hip-hop in particular, is already trembling with excitement. These bastions of southern rap have done enough separately to keep things interesting since the 2003 release of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (or the 2006 release of Idlewild, depending on who you ask), but even if they hadn’t it would still be a monumental reunion by any standards. We at Tuesdays With Horry are just as excited as everyone else, so a few of us discussed what this means from a personal or macro standpoint.

Read More

ESPN Retweet

It’s been a big week for me. OutKast is reuniting. The video for “Bound 2” was released. And, as you can see above, I got a retweet from ESPN. It was amazingly exciting, with RTs and favorites pouring into my feed like never before. There were 7.5 million strangers out there in the world following ESPN who could potentially be reading a joke I had carefully groomed to come in at less than 140 characters. I gained 32 new followers and have only lost one of them since. I even got some replies from Giants fans who wanted to yell at me. I decided that I might try to capitalize on this moment of attention, sending one more tweet to ESPN. Read More

Courtesy of okayplayer.com

Courtesy of okayplayer.com

Disclaimer: Since about the age of 16, I have been under the impression, which many share, that James Marshall Hendrix is the single best guitar player this world has ever seen. His musicianship continues to astound me, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt in my mind that I like, with varying degrees, every single piece of music he ever recorded. His influence is such that, even 43 years after his extremely premature death at the age of 27, guitar players today cannot even begin to imitate anything that Hendrix did with any real success. For all of Clapton’s disciples (which, if you ask any of the guys with whom I was in a band in high school, they will tell you I am, to an annoying degree), all the wannabe-hip Django-heads and the legions who trust in Jimmy Page’s mysticism, it is Hendrix’s shadow which keeps everyone searching for the light.

Read More

I couldn’t believe it. I stared at my television screen trying to digest what just happened as the ESPN generated scoreboard displayed ’20 Patriots 24 Panthers Final’. I watched as Luke Kuechly pumped his fist and Cam Newton flashed his signature smile. My mouth gaped open as Tom Brady yelled at an official and then proceeded to head to the locker room. I could hear all of Bank of America Stadium scream jubilantly in a moment of much needed catharsis.

I have not seen Charlotte like this since 2008 when John Fox was still the head coach. There was electricity in the city again. I could hear it two doors down as my neighbors entered into the night to vocalize their joy with bursts of “WHEWWWWWWWW” and “YESSSSSSSS.” Their gleeful expressions soundtracked the immediate press conference that followed where a frustrated Bill Belichick had to describe what went wrong in New England’s loss to the Carolina Panthers in the year 2013.

For many, it was redemption for the loss to the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVIII. For me, it was a point of great civic pride in a city that has been plagued by the perception that it is an unexceptional town with unexceptional sports teams.

Read More

The ROC

Last Sunday I did not think about football.

After packing for my trip and writing my Week 10 column, I had caught a bus, a train, and a flight to Barcelona, Spain. There were beaches. There were beers. There were pictures of me and my friends throwing up the ROC for my tumblr and plenty of general debauchery. I was living in the moment and swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, and gambling could not have been further from my mind.

Was this due to temporary transcendence? Had my soul gotten in tune with the universe and freed me from my absurd weekly devotion to following point spreads and fantasy production?

Maybe, but I think it had more to do with the lack of Wifi. There was no Wifi anywhere in Barcelona. Read More

James Dolan

 

Two weeks into the NBA season, and the landscape has a few peaks and valleys: Indiana is the lone undefeated team left in the league, while Chicago is 3-3. Even though we are early in the season, as it stands now, Philadelphia and Charlotte, respectively, have the 4 and 5 seeds in the Eastern Conference. Kevin Durant is going full-MJ, and Kevin Love is the second-leading scorer in the league right now. LeBron is still LeBron, putting up 33 in three quarters of action. The Knicks are still the Knicks, and James Dolan is still their owner. Reddit can be a clever place when it wants to be.

Read More

Blood Orange

In 2011, producer and multi-instrumentalist Devonté Hynes released Coastal Grooves under the moniker of Blood Orange. The album was hit-or-miss, with more tracks that were outlines rather than fully-fleshed out ideas. It was an unrestrained attempt at injecting post-punk moodiness into late-70s stylized R&B. With clunky melodies and equally awkward song structure to match, Coastal Grooves seemed like Hynes picked his new project out of a basket without any full realization of its potential. After a year of working with artists like Sky Ferriera and Solange, as well as releasing cuts like “Dinner” and “Bad Girls,” the blanks in Blood Orange’s sound were starting to be filled in with denser production and immense improvement in song craft.

On Cupid Deluxe, the project’s sophomore effort, Hynes has taken his market fresh idea and squeezed as much crimson juice as he could out of it.

Read More

Barcelona Skyscape

Allow me to paint a picture for you.

I am sitting at my desk, slightly drunk on Jameson and completely plastered on life. My workspace is littered with old assignments, empty water bottles and Kit Kat wrappers, old receipts, and a pair of fingerless gloves. It is one in the morning. In 5 hours, I will have to be awake and conscious enough to navigate public transit from London to a tiny airport so I can hop on a plane to Barcelona for the weekend.

Barcelona is that place in the picture at the top of this article.

I am living a blessed life and I am very aware of it. Read More

bstrong

A lot of people have already said a lot of things regarding the meaning of this strange, scrappy, magical, bearded band of men we call the 2013 Boston Red Sox. After two years that included fried chicken, beers, and the worst season in recent memory, these guys took advantage of the period between the heartbreaking end of the Bruins Cup run and the beginning of Patriots season to bring Boston back to its roots: baseball.

It was awesome to have a baseball team that was not only winning, but also likeable, on the diamond at Fenway again. But if you say you picked the Sox to win the Series this season, you are (probably, most likely) lying. That’s what made October so fun: it was totally unexpected.

Every championship win is special (something that can be kind of hard to remember when your teams have won eight in twelve years), but at the risk of being cliché and repeating something you’ve heard over and over again: this one was more.

The Marathon Bombings shook everyone in the Greater Boston area to their cores. As someone who grew up a mere fifteen minutes from the race’s starting line, who has friends and family who volunteer along the route and at the finish line, never in my wildest nightmares could I have imagined a tragedy like this happening on Patriot’s Day. But—as tends to happen in these situations, far too many of which we’ve seen the past few years—the good in humanity outshone the bad. Not only did Bostonians and marathon runners band together to help one another, so did people from across the country and the world.

Where do the Sox play into all of this?

Read More

Kobe Bryant stares into Nick Young's soul just before the Laker rapture.

Kobe Bryant stares into Nick Young’s soul just before the Laker rapture.

Because of the fluid nature of academia, which mirrors the National Basketball Association and how much can change day-to-day, TwH will track the NBA’s oddities and biggest stories each week with this, the 3-Pointer. It’s a cop-out name for an NBA weekly column, but it just makes so much sense. The weird, the wild and the wonderful all rolled into one, the 3-Pointer will act as a league thermometer, sure only to get hotter as the season moves forward. This week, we focus on the magnificent MC-W, the toils of Anthony Bennett and injuries in a post-Adrian Peterson/Derrick Rose world.

Read More