Ariel Bitran

Here at the Stereophile office, we listen to lots of different tunes ranging from Bach to Fucked Up to Sylvester, but in the Bitran/Mejias cubicle, there has been a recent resurgence in our passion for POPULAR music. Thanks to SM’s discovery of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne and Drake’s Take Care, and my irrational passion for Rihanna and her latest Talk the Talk, sometimes walking into our cube can be like walking onto the set of MTV’s Total Request Live or a nightclub in Hoboken.

I could enumerate the reasons why these artists and their most recent records have captured our interests. Maybe it’s the impressive dynamic range on Drake’s record, or the heady topics that Kanye and Hova delve into on Watch the Throne (as SM elaborates in a Facebook post: “big themes like African-American pride and the American dream”), but I would really rather leave most of the reasons why these records are so great up to your own discovery.

In the meanwhile, you should check out the new “Bad Girls” music video from M.I.A., the Sri Lankan international pop sensation. Big Guns. Gold Chains. Cars Racing. All set in Morocco. This video is killer. You can probably expect to hear it in our cube, along with images of dancing girls, Sennheiser headphones, and fillet of fish sandwiches.