Broken Bells Live 4-13-14 (spoiler alert)

Do you know what the great pink globe on the cover of the newest Broken Bells album represents?  Is it significant enough to consider?  We recently read an article about the upcoming Wu Tang album called A Better Tomorrow.  Leading member Rza has hatched a plan to tour the newest Wu Tang album as an art installation.  Only one copy of the album will be made.  It will tour the world.  Willing fans will pay an entrance fee, pass through security measures, and have the opportunity to listen to the album.  Once the album tour is over, the single copy will be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

First off, we hope the highest bidder is a competitor like talent succubus Jay-Z.  We hope some sycophant spends the equivalent of the price of college educations for the entire population of New York City on this album and then tosses it into the fire before the rest of us can hear it.  We need to behave in this manner for something so important, in order to make it meaningful.

Second, does anyone remember the box that Thomas Eckhardt leaves Andrew Packard and his sister Catherine Martell in the television series Twin Peaks?  If we remember correctly, the puzzle box contained a second puzzle box.  The second puzzle box contained a third puzzle box.  The third puzzle box contained a metal box.  The metal box contained a safety deposit box key.  When the safety deposit box was opened with this key, it exploded the bank and everyone within it.  Goodbye forever, hip hop. 

Lastly, this is where we get real nasty.  Toting yourself as supreme is only an attempt to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, or culture than is actually possessed.  We loved 36 Chambers because we were young, and Wu Tang was young.  We still love this album.  But upon repeat listens, it's pretty bad.  Come on, face it.  Return to some of the lyrics yourself.  We counted forms of the word "nigger" more than fifty times.  Remember that we read the word "nigger" in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn to a sickening degree.  And the lesson is that this word was used in history with bad intentions.  The purpose of Twain's realist art is to show us how sick this word is, and show us a part of history that is ugly, a history that we should have overcome.  We get the sense that this word is never used on the 36 Chambers album for right reason, or intentionally meaningful artistic intent.  We would also like to point out that of all the members on this album, our favorite rapper Old Dirty Bastard, the potentially most offensive member of the group, uses the word the least, except for maybe U-God.

So back to the original question.  Do you know what the pink globe on the cover of the newest Broken Bells album means?  If we are going to have a serious conversation about art, we have to discuss things like "right reason" and "intentions."  Furthermore, words are very interesting.  We use some words to identify ourselves, e.g. "nigger."  Other words are said and their meaning is immediately contradicted, e.g. "I am humble."  We get the feeling that both uses of words that we have just described are at work here when Rza describes Wu Tang's next album as "art."

karat y chop