You know what’s up:

More Lost stuff coming up:

As promised, here we have another cut off of Jaydiohead: “No Karma”. This one mixes “Karma Police“, off of the great OK Computer, with “No Hook“, off of the not-so-great American Gangster. What I like about this mashup is that “No Hook” cries out for it. Jay-Z’s point, of course, is that he can put together a great song with minimal production tricks–he doesn’t even need a chorus [for this shit]! But you have to admit, his flow sounds better with Radiohead’s backing. I like how “Karma Police” steadily builds, then falls off as Thom Yorke sings in a near whisper, “this is what you get when you mess with us”–all while Jay-Z’s flow builds in intensity until he dissipates its energy with that understated non-chorus, just as the musical backing kicks back in. That’s enough patent nonsense rationalizing why I like the song–I think it’s a good mashup and I hope you enjoy it. Stream it below, download it here.

More Lost spoilers and sarcastic observations after the jump:

Bullet points on episodes 3-5 of Lost, Season 1, coming up after the jump (yes, spoilers).

Yesterday we looked at a Kanye/Radiohead mashup. Today we reach the next link in the chain: Radiohead/Jay-Z. This song (and tomorrow’s as well) comes from the Jaydiohead album, which is exactly what you think it is. I won’t say too much about it, except to note that Jay-Z makes for a great half of a mashup, for a couple of reasons. 1) There seem to be a lot of vocal-only tracks of his work, which makes for a clean integration with other audio. 2) His delivery is really ideosyncratic–he stays on beat but varies his tempo within that framework, so if you lay it on top of a regular rhythmic background you get something more interesting than you would if you mixed two metronomic songs. When this really comes in handy is when he has a song with great lyrics/rapping but mediocre producing. Like, oh I dunno, how about “Fallin’“?

Other thoughts: unlike in yesterday’s song, the mashupper actually does quite a bit of manipulating the musical component here. The original song (“15 Step“, off of In Rainbows) is already kinda choppy, but it’s even glitchier and weirder in the mashup. Also of note is that we actually get a taste of the vocals from Radiohead’s contribution to the mashup, unlike in “Reckoner Lockdown”, which really bifurcated Kanye’s vocals from Radiohead’s music (though incorporating percussion from both). Okay, you get the idea. Here’s the song: Fall In Step.

Tomorrow: More Jaydiohead! Which, in all candor, you can listen to/download in its entirety on the aforementioned website!

I hear that Season 6 of Lost is going to circle back to a lot of stuff that happened in Season 1. To prepare for this, therefore, I plan to watch some (all?) of those episodes before the premiere on Tuesday night. And I saw that Arlene just started watching all five seasons from scratch and plans to blog her thoughts about it. So I figure, why not provide you with my extremely inane observations about Season 1 as I rewatch it? Without further ado, here are my thoughts about the pilot episode. Note: spoilers abound, although I sorta tried to keep them vague–still, if you haven’t seen all episodes yet, you probably don’t want to read this:

All right, folks, now that the preliminaries are out of the way, we can get to the business of listening to some good music. The next song is a mashup of a Radiohead song and a Kanye West song (yes, that’s right, two Kanye songs in a row! Prepare to be awed by what I can only describe as a half-assed, kinda dumb organizational theme to this series of posts). It’s by DJ Earworm, who is probably best known for his year-end United States of Pop mashups, which take a bunch of recognizable songs from the past year and force them together (I’m not a huge fan of these). But anyway, he also does standalone mashups, some of which are quite good. This one, Reckoner Lockdown, is my personal favorite. I’ll give you my own thoughts in a moment, but first let’s see what DJ Earworm had to say about it: