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Don't Die is the third sampling off R.A.P. Music we've heard since Killer Mike and EL-P announced the release of their collaborative effort some months ago. Since then, there's been a lot of "what an odd pairing!" type-shit and "oh this reminds me of..." going on. I guess everyone who has made a single statement about this album in any respect has probably been right so far. Odd pairing? I guess. Musical marriage made in heaven? Undeniably, so don't question it. I'm lucky to be old enough to remember thinking "Ice Cube with Keith and Hank Shocklee, whaaaat the Fuck?!?" There was something about it that didn't seem natural, but the end result was a fucking masterpiece of an album that made perfect sense. I think it's safe to say that EL and Mike have that same chemistry....

Yes, deep inside, I am a 15 year old girl, writing song lyrics on my arms and the walls of my room. I remember standing backstage at Lollapalooza trying to decide who to go see next, it was either 30 Seconds To Mars or whoever everyone else in my band wanted to go see. I didn't argue with anybody, but I walked away from them and towards the stage where 30STM was about to start. I knew nothing about them besides having met Jared Leto a few times while living in Santa Barbara, and because I had nothing but positive experiences with the dude, I figured I'd see what dude was offering up as music these days. My previous musical experience with Jared was with a band he was in back in 1999, as they were playing a bar in SB and he approached my group of friends and asked us to go. I...

The Coasts are cuties, yet, they have such a gritty and dirty sound. This is why it does not surprise me that these lovable pricks would choose to rock the nutz off a Disney song. When lead singer, Ike Peters, told me that he’d be covering a song from Robin Hood, I honestly didn't know what to expect, but I knew it’d somehow be awesome. The Coasts lived up the hype I built up in my head and surpassed it ten fold. This cover of The Phony King of England is morphed into a Kink-y sounding 60’s garage rock anthem that will make you want to kick your foot through a guitar amp. A word from The Coast’s Ike Peter’s Robin Hood is my number one favorite Disney movie. And if it's not in your top 5, then you need to watch it again. And other than every word uttered by Sir Hiss and Prince...

It is always a sad day when you have to lay to rest one of your friends, whether it was someone you grew up with and knew forever, or someone you just recently met but had an instant rapport with. Today we find ourselves remembering the latter of those two situations. It is with heavy hearts that we lay to rest Old Yeller’d – our weekly column where we take an artist we love(d) and head out to the woods to put em down Old Yeller style. Today we had to turn the shotgun on ourselves and send the column to the big farm in the sky with such other luminaries as Jay Z, Metallica, Portishead, The Grateful Dead, Generation X and most recently The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. Sure we could have kept on sending these artists to a merciful death, but that isn’t us. We didn’t start SYFFAL to cast...

Yup. It's official. Let's get a time of death. I have officially become a professional jerk off, the thing I swore I would never be - one of "those" parents. I fucking love Yo Gabba Gabba. I always remember friends of mine who had kids telling me about Yo Gabba Gabba and how it was the only tolerable children's show. I usually made a mental note that these people were dicks and kept drinking, now I'm the dick and could you please pass the seltzer with lime. See what I mean? I'm one of “those” fuckers now. I don't know how the fuck it happened. The first time I threw it on was during the particularly harsh winter of 2011. We were buried under snow; everyone was suffering from cabin fever and on a razors edge. Add a frustrated 1 year old to the mix and you have a recipe for infighting. In...

My dad stopped buying vinyl after my mom burped me out the babeslot. There wasn't much of a need to purchase shit your kids might potentially snap in half while playing topless toddler frisbee. His collection wouldn't cause any audiophile to orgasm, but the motto of quality over quantity prevailed and nearly everything inside that area of the living room (with the exception of Procol Harem, c'mon pops) is shit I still listen to today. Once I got closer to fourth grade, when on more than a few occasions I'd wake up with my arms wrapped around my pink electric guitar, I started to snoop in the cabinet below the stereo where pops kept his vinyl a bit more. That was when I first started connecting the music I had been listening to since birth, with the images of those who created it. It...

Red Hot Chili Peppers. They are pillars of the community. Icons in a city of icons. They have sponsored community programs that have given the gift of music and more to the people of Los Angeles. They are former students of Fairfax High School. They are die-hard, mother fucking LA Lakers homers! Actors, authors, fathers, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees. You name it! I even heard Flea might be running for mayor. I know! It is not for any of these reasons that I write these words. Those reasons make this harder than it has to be. The reason is that every single time “Tell Me Baby,” or “Snow (Hey Oh),” come on, I change the radio station as fast as possible and then slap myself for still listening the radio. It’s led to an outright auditory protest in my brain, and it’s bled over into...

I was 15 when Moshe died. When I think about my sophomore year in high school, I don't remember dances or concerts or anything like that, I remember that weird feeling I had like everyone around me was dying. I went to nine funerals that year. Two friends died of medical reasons, three committed suicide, two family members passed away, and two were killed by gunfire in the town where I grew up. While every single one of those people could earn a dozen pages in the story of my life, the one that I still think about most often happened today, February 17th, but back in 1995. Let me back this thang up a second. I was a perpetually grounded teenager. I spent my time outside of school (or in the bathroom inside of the school) either playing my guitar, reading Michael Creighton novels, smoking...

I am a full on child of the 80s. That means a few things. First, I am old as fuck. Second, I remember a time when rap didn't exist, it sucked. Third, I LOVE THE SHIT OUT OF SOME POWER BALLADS. Now I am not talking about the run of the mill industry churned out sap-fests that ended up destroying a genre of music, that up until record execs figured out the formula, was pretty fucking fun. This means I am not talking about your White Lions, Wingers, or Warrants. I am talking honest to goodness POWER FUCKING BALLADS. The first power ballad that caught my attention was probably the Def Leppard song Bringing On The Heartbreak, a slow but heavy churner of a song that found its way into heavy rotation in the very early days of MTV. This was before the success of Pyromania and...

When I was growing up, I knew this sick girl. Not sick in the physical sense, but in the mental sense. She got made fun of at school because she had some issues that nobody understood. She didn't even understand them herself, and nor did her doctors really, when she was diagnosed with Schizophrenia at the age of 13. It's something hereditary that you're born with that usually doesn't rear it's ugly head until your late teens/early 20's, but it can be brought on early by a traumatic event... like your parents going through a horrible divorce. She was one of the youngest diagnosed cases of Schizophrenia that any of the dozens of doctors she saw had ever seen or heard about. Imagine being twelve years old and opening your closet to find a dead woman with a knife sticking out of her stomach...