Amid all the excitement generated by Odd Future pair Tyler, the Creator and Hodgy Beats’ show-stealing appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, nobody seems to have noticed that they sold out.

Not that there’s anything expressly wrong with that – it’s just interesting to note when a group that have built their reputation on the uncontrolled, self-consciously offensive speech abandon that schema at the first offer of a plush TV spot. With little or no material in their armoury that would be deemed suitable for network television, Tyler and Hodgy took to the NBC stage with an altered version of new single ‘Sandwitches,’ minus the four f-words contained in the first line and numerous instances thereafter.

In spite of Tyler’s liberating use of the entire set during his performance and an unusual diversion involving a gnome, the duo’s performance was notable for how tame it was in comparison to the group’s deliberately provocative material. Tyler’s debut mixtape, 2009’s hugely promising Bastard, runs the gamut of hip hop clichés from misogyny, homophobia and rape fantasies right through the trite devotion to his mom. The beats are simplistic and undeniably raw, but there’s an obtuse sense of melody on tracks like ‘Odd Toddlers,’ ‘French!’ and ‘Bastard’ that hint at the potential of this 19-year-old, husky-voiced artist.

The concept of a hip hop collective is one that is alien to most rock critics who are wedded to the ideal of the nuclear four- and five-piece rock band, but the…

‘Twas not Bieber Fever that did for the young lad, but an old-fashioned torrent of bullets courtesy of CSI Nick Stokes. A real music snob that guy.

I’ve listened to a lot of mashups in my day. Normally they are party tracks that take a popular club beat and superimpose the vocals of a top 40 track of the moment ala Girl Talk or sometimes they tend to dig a little bit deeper to give us something like last year’s Kids and Explosions or the noted Jay Z/Linkin Park collaboration, but every once and a while I’ll stumble upon a mashup that truly leaves me floored. Four Tet’s mash up of Nas’ “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” with Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Sleep” is simply mesmerizing. The ebb and flow of Nas’ rhymes and the gentle swell of strings that build and build come together so flawlessly that it was almost as if they were made for each other.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u255K97aXEY&feature=player_embedded#at=72

This has been everywhere on the Internet today, but for those who, for some reason, have missed out on what will almost certainly end up as a defining moment for hip-hop in 2011, then watch the video below. Unbelievably, OF manages to scare the fuck out of old white people in middle America, make Fallon watchable (and even sorta cool), and make Mos Def go totally insane, in less than four minutes. These guys are so totally gonna blow up like crazy. Swaaaaaaag

There’s a lot of great sites out there offering interesting, artistic and often unique videos of the artists you love talking, creating and playing music. Here are some you should definitely know about:

La Blogotheque: Take Away Shows

I’ll say this straight away: The Take Away Shows series produces some of the most consistently incredible videos of any of the sites I’ll post in this blog. Started in 2006 as an expansion of La Blogotheque, director Mathieu Saura (under the pseudonym Vincent Moon) began filming one-take videos of artists playing songs in completely regular settings (someone’s apartment, taking a walk down the road, on a park lawn) and often stripped down and/or acoustic. He has since gone on to film music documentaries for The National, R.E.M. and Beirut amongst others, but it’s his Take Away project that really shines, having now produced over 120 videos.

For No One

For No One is a relatively new site that I don’t know anything about but they’ve put out six sessions so far and they’ve all been brilliant.

Titus Andronicus | FOR NO ONE from FOR NO ONE on Vimeo.

Pitchfork.tv

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you guys can rip on the Fork all you want but the .tv side of the site compiles some of the best music videos out there. From the Daytripping sessions with artists like Bon Iver and The Black Keys, to the Tunnelvision live series, and not least of all, the Special Presentation videos featuring…

Sometimes history is hard, you guys. I mean big history. Like, Hegelian sized history. History that spans across entire civilizations and generations. It’s hard for us because sometimes that historical meta-narrative is forever just out of each. There are moments, though, when we are thrown a little bone by the gods; we are given a fragment in time that simply defines a generation, nay, an entire civilization. Roman antiquity had Caligula naming his horse as his consul, Early Modern Europe had the Defenestration of Prague, The Victorian Period… was just depressing, and the 1990’s had Sockem Boppers with arguably the greatest commercial jingle of all time.

But what about our generation? Where’s our summarizing event? Sure, some might argue it’s Radiohead’s Kid A in long, pretentious, essayist reviews. Others might even claim this war, or that war, or the internet, or other such fads. I will not mince words: these are all horribly inaccurate. I know these suggestions are inaccurate because I myself have seen the very moment that defines our generation.

It has a little bit of everything: fat men breakdancing, rastlin’, grown men in silly costumes, historical inaccuracy, hypnosis, hillbillies, borderline mental deficiency, music that isn’t even from our generation, overzealous commentators. In so many words, this is our generation in a nutshell. A glorious, glorious nutshell.

Roland Barthes theorized that there are two types of text: the text of pleasure and the text of bliss. The text of pleasure is simply that which washes over you in an aesthetically pleasing manner; the text of bliss, however, forces you to question your very…