Photo by David Black

Yup, you guessed it: this is the end of this particular road, and 5ingles is headed to that great big blog column scrapheap in the sky. Five (!) years and God knows how many columns later, the time has come to call an end to acid-tongued assaults on dumb pop songs and obscure underground chestnuts.More »

Despite having jammed "Goldie" dozens of times since it dropped, it's still pretty easy to kind of loathe the thing. Not the beat from Hit-Boy, which is sleepy/sinister nightmare lollipop genius that was hopefully really expensive, but the way that A$AP Rocky slimes it with lame pro forma kid-gangsta bullshit. It was inevitable that the song would wind up on tons of mixtapes eventually. That still hasn't happened, but it did find its way into the hands of dozens of no-name rappers who, based on an unscientific study, managed to do next to nothing interesting with it.

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Sometimes pop and rock songs are at their best when the grooves are especially spiral-like or boa-constricted, when melodic ecstasy and sonic claustrophobia combine to create something amazing.

This week, 5ingles explores that idea with five recent jams that aren't trying to make you listen passively.
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LeVar Burton hosted Reading Rainbow from the early 1980s to the mid 2000s. Earlier this spring, Burton -- who you may also remember as Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation and its associated films -- announced the impending return of the pioneering bonkers-for-books children's program via his Twitter account. 
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Won't you give Lee Fields another chance?

Ask yourself: are you over it, or are you going to nurse a grudge? How long are you going to be mad at someone close to you for a perceived sin or sin of omission that ultimately doesn't mean that much? The good news, of course, is that modern pop music has a great deal on hand to fit your mood no matter which side of the forgiveness coin you happen to find yourself on right now. This week, 5ingles offers five songs directly or tangentially related to forgiveness.
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A$AP Rocky: "Stink" does not normally rhyme with "bank."

You've been here before, haven't you? Killer chorus, solid hook, great pick-up, inspired singing, and then, bam: lame, bullshit verses. Verses so dire and undercooked that it'd have been better had the singer pulled a reverse-engineered version of Crash Test Dummies' "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm."

Here are a couple recent examples of what happens when lyricists can't quite get it up.

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Photo by Jimmy Fontaine

This week, 5ingles explores songs that boast connections to mental illness. None of these are quite as stupendous as Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized" or Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" or Green Day's "Basket Case" or Lil B.'s "Wonton Soup," but the last song on the list comes pretty damn close -- it's liable to drive you mad.
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Spring -- in case you were too busy holed up with an Xbox and a case of Five-Hour Energy to notice -- has pretty much sprung. Which is why this is as a good a time as any for rousing, energetic tunes that resonate equally well through ear buds and car stereos and home hi-fi systems, like the latest track from Lissy Trullie (at right).
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This week, 5ingles tiptoes idly through spring tulips and the wild, weird world of drone, sampling conventional and unconventional takes on the form. It is recommended that you pull the shades down, turn off other mechanical devices in your domicile, and savor the sinuous, scabrous sound of overlapping and competing timbres calibrated by musical geniuses infinitely more brilliant than you or I. 
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​This week's edition of 5ingles spotlights songs by artists who seem to be undergoing an identity crisis -- musicians who aren't quite themselves, who apparently woke up a bit off of their game. So these five tunes sound sort of like what you've come to expect from their creators, but not quite, which is somehow more disappointing than a wholesale fail while navigating their usual lanes.
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