Re: Amanda Blank I Love You Zip
Nelson Suggs
A few good hooks, in fact, would go a considerable way toward redeeming Blank's largely forgettable debut, I Love You. Remember, Santigold's eponymous bow certainly didn't blaze any trails either, but it was chock full of irresistible, indelible tunes. Not so with Blank, who submits an album that runs a mere 33 minutes and yet still can't manage to outfit it properly, eschewing even the pursuit of catchiness and pop fun in favor of deathly deterministic robo-chants like "Lemme get some/ You don't want none" and "hottest motherfucker on the whole damn block," repeated ad nauseum. (Admittedly, "Big Heavy" does have a nice Blondie-ish breeze.) The torpor extends to Diplo, Switch, and Blank's other beatminders, who largely recycle well-worn tricks they've ponied up elsewhere, from the skipping vocal samples and dancehall drum fills of "Something Bigger, Something Better" to the crunk claps of "Lemme Get Some". Only "DJ", with its burbling techno groove, really succeeds at wringing something useful from Blank's "persona," evocatively communicating the self-abnegation of loneliness without sounding too much like a Peaches-level lobotomy victim. Of course, it's sandwiched between two tracks that troublingly rely on a beloved 1980s pop classic for much of their juice, Blank's Top Ranking mixtape holdover "A Love Song" (interpolating LL Cool J's "I Need Love") and I Love You's first single, the pointlessly "titillating" "Might Like You Better", which cannibalizes Romeo Void's "Never Say Never". Keep in mind, to date these are Blank's two best-known songs.
Far more apropos is the straight-up cover of Vanity 6's trashy relic, "Make-Up", a song penned for the 80s pop tarts by their puppetmaster, Prince. I don't know who's responsible for picking this song for the album, but if it's Blank then I at least ought to tip my cap at her stunningly precise grasp of her own place within the Diploverse.
I think she is a fantastic artist. I listen to her album - I Love You since it came out until now. Just can't get tired of it. I especially love it when she does live! I really wanna know what happened to her, she's so good.
A picture of Meredith appears on the internet, achingly pretty, with a bit of the little girl still about her. So we have it: a beautiful young woman, full of love and promise, brutally cut off from life; two innocent young people made to suffer lengthy false imprisonment and an ongoing nightmare of lawsuits and litigation, their lives wracked by false accusations that have blackened them in the minds of many; and the brutal killer given a light sentence and early freedom. Yes, some might well call it diabolical, only not in the way the prosecution has claimed.
Amanda Bower
Out of toilet paper and or the insides of a Saturn, you know. So those were really cool and if they ever brought it back, I don't know if they ever if they ever would, but if they did, I would love to see how they would do it from media standpoint. You know, original kind of, creative media standpoint. It would be very cool.