If you saw it, you know it was the best television moment since Prince kicked over the microphone stand at the 1985 American Music Awards. Almost immediately, the kind of people who can't tolerate actual people expressing actual dissent in real-time began to put spin on Kanye West's impassioned, emotional, and most importantly accurate outburst on NBC earlier this evening: they hauled out their abusive epithets as they always do. They're especially fond of the word "disgusting"; I'd wager they've done some focus-group research on it. These are the same people who're all for shrinking government until it comes to your bedroom, at which point they're all about legislation. Whatever. If you saw it, and you feel like I feel, please post this banner on your site, or your LJ, or wherever you got space. Control-click the image and upload it to your favorite server, and then go nuts. Let's show love to a guy with the guts to go off-script and say it out loud.

Pour beer out on the curb for Olympic Recordings, one of my favorite metal labels around, unfairly driven into parent-company absorption by the Olympics. One rather sees the United States Olympic Committee's point: certainly, every time I got out my copy of Dechristianize, I assumed I was listening to Florida death metal that'd been vetted and approved by the USOC. Didn't you, fellow death metal enthusiast? Didn't you call your Olympics-lovin' relatives and tell them that, at long last, the Olympic games had a metal label all their own? No? You didn't? You say the word "olympic" predates the USOC by about four millenia if you go by its Greek root and by a mere four centuries if you're going strictly by English usage? Huh. Imagine that. Next thing you'll be saying that we shouldn't let biotech companies put patents on rice or something, you big communist, you.

All right, dig it. A week ago my man at Decibel sends out the mass email soliciting year-end lists. My longstanding opposition to year-end lists is a matter of public record, but my stance softens a lot when the list is genre-specific: I can understand a "ten best dance albums of the year" list a hell of a lot better than I can understanding trying to quantify how Young Jeezy's album compares to the Anonymous 4's treatment of Hildegard von Bingen.