Send "The Lonely Island " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 When the Lonely Island's parodic viral rap anthem "I'm on a Boat" snagged a Grammy nomination in 2009, guest singer T-Pain expressed a bit of confusion: This thing was a lark, a skit for "Saturday Night Live" and (maybe more to the point) for YouTube, and here it is, getting one of the highest honors T-Pain will probably ever get. In "We're Back!", the opening track of their sophomore album, Turtleneck & Chain, Lonely Island member Jorma Taccone points out how weird that was: "Lonely Island! Grammy nominated!"-- this right after Andy Samberg raps about how his dick looks like "the fat that you cut off a steak." "We're Back!" is an absurd, overblown take on the intro to every self-aggrandizing blockbuster rap album ever, but Turtleneck & Chain could well outsell plenty of the stuff it spoofs. Ridiculous as it may be, these guys are now something resembling pop stars. And no 2011 album has a list of guests as star-studded as this one: Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Akon. They may be fake rappers, but real rappers don't have that kind of pull anymore.And since they're pop stars now, the Lonely Island face a familiar problem on Turtleneck & Chain: How do you follow up a big debut album without just repeating all the same tricks? These guys are, after all, "Saturday Night Live" employees, and repeating tricks is what "Saturday Night Live" does. Turtleneck & Chain brings back a few characters from debut album Incredibad: Shy Ronnie, the "Dick in the Box" guys. And, for the most part, it recycles what made Incredibad work. The Lonely Island guys make jokes out of rap music but do it without mocking the genre, putting lifetimes of fandom in service of absurdist jokes that get progressively more absurd as the songs go on, bringing their superstar guests along for the ride. Michael Bolton, for instance, just kills his bit on "Jack Sparrow", wailing his absurdly catchy dorked-out movie-fan chorus and refusing to let the Lonely Island people stick with their boring club jam. Lesser comics would've just made fun of Michael Bolton's past; on this album, he actually gets something to do. Of course, "Jack Sparrow" had a funny-as-hell video on "Saturday Night Live", and it doesn't play as well without its visuals. That's a problem here. Of the tracks that already appeared on "SNL", some of them work just fine on their own, like the infectiously joyous Akon collab "I Just Had Sex" or "Threw It on the Ground", a devastating but affectionate skewering of Dead Prez/Immortal Technique-style conspiracy-theory rap. Others, like "Shy Ronnie 2: Ronnie & Clyde", are visual jokes that just don't make any sense without their videos, though it definitely helps that a DVD of those videos comes with the CD. The non-TV tracks generally don't hold up as well, but it's fun to match them up with their inspirations. "Rocky", for example, pushes the already-jokey premise of DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince's "I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson" to gory extremes, and "Trouble on Dookie Island" turns the breathless crime narrative of something like Ghostface Killah's "Shakey Dog" into a gross-out joke by having its desperate thug narrators shit themselves over and over and over....full text |
| Music |
| Andy Samberg, SNL writer Akiva Schaffer and MacGruber director Jorma Taccone are back with a whole new album's worth of club-rattling parody tracks guaranteed to put a smile on your face. Not every single song's a winner, but the idea here, and behind most Lonely Island jams, is that this is serious music about mostly self-deprecating bulls***. The comedy here lies in the aggressive production behind the music and how it's paired with contrasting lyrics, which serve to undercut the over-bloated, amped-up mixes. One of the most unexpected parts of the Lonely Island phenomenon though is just how damn catchy these tunes are. Some are so good I almost wish they weren't about squashed penises. Almost. But if you're a fan of hearing what it sounds like when Neverending Story's Falcor rapes Atreyu, or if you love hearing Rihanna sing out "Boner Alert!" then "Turtleneck & Chain" is for you and yours. One of the drawbacks to an album like this though is that many of these songs, some of which we've already seen in video form on SNL, lose a bit of their majesty and hilarity when we don't get to see the video. Songs like "The Creep," "Reba" (featuring SNL's Keenan Thompson as a drifter who finds a red wig), "I Just Had Sex" and "Shy Ronnie 2: Ronnie and Clyde" suffer a bit without their videos – especially "Shy Ronnie 2" where the listener can't actually see that it's Jon Hamm that Rihanna walks off with in the end....full text |
| Hiphopdx |
| Hundreds of writers and performers have been a part of the comedy institution that is Saturday Night Live but few can say that they’ve defined their era. Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccome are among those few, having created and starred in the wildly popular SNL Digital Shorts (under the name The Lonely Island) that the show has recently been known for. After banking millions of hits on Hulu, the trio compiled a number of their songs into a hit album—2009’s Incredibad—and now present its follow-up, Turtleneck & Chain. The problem with musical comedy is often that the artists rely too heavily on lyrics to make up for uninteresting music or make songs that are deliberately terrible as part of the joke. The Lonely Island breaks the trend by making music that would actually still be good if they were repurposed as “real” songs. “I Just Had Sex” and “Rocky” wouldn’t need much adjustment to work for an emcee with a sense of humor, and a DJ could easily work the title track ("Turtleneck & Chain" featuring Snoop Dogg) into a set without clearing the dance floor. This time around the trio made it a point to record a large portion of the songs first (i.e. Nicki Minaj on "The Creep" ) and then create Digital Shorts around them. This makes for some more well thought out music, as opposed to a few funny vids ripped to MP3. Fans of the first album might miss its diversity since Turtleneck & Chain is almost entirely hip-pop, but it’s a genre the group knows well. They obviously “get it,” so Turtleneck & Chain never feels like they’re making fun of rap music or its culture, just using it as an effective delivery system for their comedic sensibility. All three members of the group love rapping and put effort into doing it respectably well. ...full text |
The Lonely Island lyrics Music videoclips
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