BREAKING NEWS: KING COBRA UNDISPUTED CHAMPION OF ALL FORTIES

According to recent, entirely unscientific taste tests, King Cobra is the undisputed best of all forties that are out there, or at least all of those worth trying. Now, as most of you know, I'VE BEEN SAYING THIS SHIT FOR YEARS. Specifically ever since the glorious spring break of 2003 (WOOOOOO SPRING BREAK!!!!), I've been evangelizing the many benefits of this brand. So it feels really good to be vindicated by the experts at [whatever that website was].






Here is a breakdown of the study's results:

Colt 45:
It has an over-carbonated sweetness that reminds me of Miller High Life, and I hate Miller High Life. But if it's good enough for Billy Dee Williams, it's good enough for me, even if Billy Dee's famous claim that it "works every time" is only applicable to my life if the work in question involves passing out in the bushes on the way home from Kevin O'Malley's house the summer before 12th grade.

Mickey's:
The taste is mild and unassuming, which is a good thing in a beverage category full of dubious assumptions. With rebuses on the underside of the caps, it's also the thinking man's 40.

Steel Reserve:
This sickly yellow beaut is 8.1% ABV and tastes like dry topsoil, and not in an altogether unpleasant way.

St. Ides:
Celebrity endorser Ice Cube is my favorite West Coast rapper, which is not nearly enough to compensate for the ugly truth. It tastes like cotton. St. Ides sucks.

Haffenreffer Private Stock:
This was the easiest 40 to come by during my misspent youth, and I still like it even though it's a bit soapier than I remembered. Bonus points for being brewed in Jamaica Plain back in the good old days before the bakeries squeezed out the malt liquories. (My research assistant, despite having been conceived in JP, thought it was the worst of the bunch. She cited the taste and the aftertaste as two particular flaws; when pressed for a specific description, she said, "It tastes like something I hate.")

Olde English 800:
This tastes like nine parts stale beer mixed with one part store-brand cream soda. I hope my man Eazy E snuck into heaven, but if not the silver lining is that they surely serve his beloved OE in hell.

King Cobra:
This tasted faintly of overripe lemon and very little else, which made it the runaway winner of our tasting.

BLACKOUT IN A SHOT GLASS

There is nobody in the entire United States, even overweight midwestern soccer moms, who are not familiar with "all I wanna do is chk chk chk and take your money!" the iconic line from MIA's Paper Planes. On Arular and Kala, MIA crafted brilliant songs that were not only genre bending but insanely catchy. CXXX parties lived and thrived off them. When Paper Planes hit in late 2007 we were immediately ALL OVER THAT SHIT. Way before that godawful Pineapple Express movie pushed the song completely mainstream to the point that obnoxious frat boys and their lady friends in too short skirts drinking Coors Light out of Solo cups were miming gun shots while playing beer pong. The entire thought continues to make me shudder. At least we still have Bird Flu. and DIT DIT DIT (don't fuck my man! disturbingly this is currently Mike Moss. please fuck him). Those songs will be ours forever. Thank God.

But let's be honest here. /\/\/-\Y/-\, her latest outing, is a trainwreck. The first single off the album, Born Free, was an atrocious, overwrought, and self-righteous attempt at political commentary. In previous albums she did this in a much more subtle way that sort of kind of worked. With Born Free, I get what she was going for, but seriously? Ugh. I'm not even going to start on the video.

Critics eviscerated the album. Even Diplo, who worked with MIA and contributed heavily to her previous work, hardly had anything good to say about it. There is something to be appreciated about this, but MIA essentially took full creative control and ignored the suggestions of most of her collaboraters in creating it. What ensued was a tremendously mixed bag that those expecting another gem like Kala felt broken hearted and outright rejected. How could she attempt such an incredible departure?

I'm torn about /\/\/-\Y/-\.I did like the overall idea of the album: the internet is terrible and stealing all your personal data and yet we are still irrevocably and continuously connected to it. At the very least I enjoyed the Geocities aesthetic she appropriated for the album and single covers (see the images in this post). Design-wise, she's clearly a woman after our own hearts.

So here we go: when I pretended that this was never going to MIA as we knew her, I actually enjoyed /\/\/-\Y/-\. Why else would I bother spelling out the album name? I mean, right? Don't get me wrong. I will admit that even for Not-MIA some of the songs were downright awful, yet I continue to listen to the whole album. All except Born Free, which I skip every. single. time. I play it. On that note, all the songs sound like they had completely different production. Especially XXXO (which I love) doesn't have the same kind of fidelity that any of the others do. I suspect it's intentional but it's still really jarring.

I can't believe I've written this much about a single artist and a single album without even getting to the point. I'M FINALLY THERE, I SWEAR. My absolute favorite song from /\/\/_\Y/-\ is Teqkilla. I GUARANTEE that if this were still the Rikoloff days Teqkilla would get played right along Toxic and DIT DIT DIT. This is catchier and more-sing-along-able than any other track on the album. And it's LONG. Listen listen listen and tell me what you think! In the meantime I'll be bumping this while I work at my horrible, horrible "precision cut-and-paste" job. Awesome.


Teqkilla by Babasonicos

I promise I will never write anything this long ever again.