Customer Reviews

My Machine

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Well her royal flyness is back with an ambitious new album. Real reviewers, y'know, the ones that get paid to tell you their opinions on albums and fail to cover up their snarkiness and holier-than-thou attitudes, would call this a concept album.
But I ain't gettin paid for this, so it's all outta love that I tell you to buy this album.
The concept is that far into the future we communicate telepathically and are no longer bombarded with advertising that tells us what to think or who to be, or who we should want to be. Sounds utopian, except that now everyone who is born is given an advertising slogan as a name per an agreement the government made with the advertising consortium. "Coke Is It" "Got Milk" etc.. If this happened to me, I at least hope it's for somthing cool like rat poison or edible panties. I bet the kids named after tampons get mentally picked on a lot.
Well this whole album pops back and forth from the future with skits to the actual songs on the album. They are presented as part of a report of our current time period. Ah, there's the concept.
All that aside, the music is dope. PS has always shown a lyrical command that is at the same time technically brilliant but funny and poignant.
Songs range from the bumpin trash talkin "Bad Girls N.Y.C.", the club hit "Coochie Coo", to quriky, but lyrically profound songs like "Quitting Smoking Song" and "Initially".
And at 25 tracks this thing is dense. There is a lot of work here to enjoy and try to process. A lot of the skits are pretty much mini songs.
The music encompasses everything from hip-hop, electro, rock, electronica...pretty much everything. This is a work that has been long in the making and the time and care to make every track count is shown.
I've really enjoyed this album so far, and look forward to keeping it in heavy rotation for many months to come.
Great, now I sound like a ponce music reviewer.

This album is more of an epic tale with 26 songs that move through an assortment of contemporary topics mostly dealing with pop consumerism and the commodification of the human. This being my first introduction to Princess Superstar i was amazed by her roots and where they have taken her since. My favorite track is "Coochie Coo" because in combines a melodic sense with fun rhymes that allude to our dirtier sides. Dirty is deffintely my thing, and there is a lot of that here. And i mean that in the sense that there is someone just saying the things that are on everyone's minds and applying it to themes and textures that bring them to life. Overall this is a great album and can offer different reads on every listen. Pick it up and offer up your comments as i would like to see what other fans have to say.

This is one of the most ambitious records I have listened to in my life...so many different layers, themes, and subtleties exist, making each listen through of the album a different experience.
Imagine the future, Princess Superstar has made clones of herself, trying to find any way she can of ridding the world of other pesky celebrities, making herself (and her clones) the only stars. The sexy bass line on "I'm So Outta Control" has her sassing it up while deciding how she and her 'duplicates' will conquer the world, "it must only be me, and ten thousand more me's!!"
Her humor shines through the most in "The Quitting Smoking Song", and she finds her projections most poignant in "My Machine" as she asks what would you be if a machine could make you into anything..even yourself, 'would you be would you manage or would you suffer, would you be a lover, be a fighter, or would you just be all right, could you just be alright..?'
"I Like It A Lot" and "Sex, Drugs & Drugs" are the more let yourself go, party with your friends tracks. The first single, "Perfect" is also something to bop along to while maintaining a sense of irony the Princess has down pat.
The tracks are danceable and fun, while being fresh yet witty, cool yet important. You may not know Princess Superstar as a household name yet, or maybe ever, but it will be very obvious once you give "My Machine" a listen, as she definitely lives up to her name.

I reccomend you buy this cd, and listen to it straight through. It tells a story, of Princess Superstar, and her diabolical plot to take over the world through pop-culture using her duplicants, and some really awesome rhymes. I mean, yes, it's definitely a rap cd, and i don't really like rap, but this is easily one of my favorite cds. it hasn't left my cd player since i got it.

highlights: i like it alot, on top bubble, bad girls NYC, 10,000 hits, the Quitting Smoking song (but nobody likes a song about quitters!), sex drugs and drugs, coochie coo (it gets addictive), perfect, what do you want, what you gonna do, my machine (easily the best song on the entire cd), the death of a superstar (but only if you listen to the whole thing), and the end.

but, i must stress once again, LISTEN TO THE WHOLE THING STRAIGHT THROUGH WHEN YOU GET IT. even if you don't like the song at first, listen to it anyways, or you might miss a huge chunk of the story.

AMAZING album. I've barely listened to anything else since getting "My Machine". She's encompassed so many genres on this album that there's a little something for everyone. It's a shame such a excellent piece of work slips by the general public unnoticed (would they really "get" it though?). Princess Superstar deserves some recognition for this awesome body of work. She put a lot of effort into it, and it shows.

My stand out tracks of the moment are: "I Like It A Lot", "On Top Bubble", "The Mysterious Hanger", "Bad Girls N.Y.C", "10,000 Hits", "Sex, Drugs And Drugs", "Coochie Coo", "My Machine" & "Artery".

And like a previous reviewer said, listen to the album all the way through the first time.

I just got this as a christmas gift form a hipster friend of mine...you know goes to the casbah a lot and worshipper of pitchforkmedia.com...she knows i'm into alternative rap so she got me this. my current favorites are anticon members passage and why? but you know what, EVERYONE has got to check out PRINCESS SUPERSTAR. She is SOO DOPE!! Cuz she's got all this flava right from the start with "I like it a lot" and it's just infectious throughout the CD. I mean later on when I found out that Arthur Baker oversaw the whole thing I realized why it was so tite. SO DEFINITELY CHECK OUT THIS CD. YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT! PEACE~~~

Can't find much to move you on the present comatose music scene? Princess Superstar works on a stratospheric level no one else can touch (leaving aside Faithless).

Don't be put off by comparisons with Gwen Sfefani or Christina Aguilera.
This is no rambling r'n'b. The Princess is pure gutsy hiphop.

At least she was. But My Machine clashes hiphop head on with dance beats par excellence. Not since the great days of Blondie, T'Pau or The Avalanches has pop-dance had such an exhilarating outing. But it still works as intelligent fireside company.

The last album Princess Superstar Is is in the top ten greatest pop albums ever, its subtlety and class outstripping everything else around. Only an artist of exceptional talent could follow up that successfully but Concetta has walked it.

At first listen the ambition has been scaled down. This album might be designed for fun. But after a few encounters the shear quality, invention, production finesse and verbal prowess comes shining through.
Only complaint is the bit pretentious concept. This leads to a few lesser tracks at the start but with 25 on offer there is plenty left that is pure gold.

Look out for the great contributions from Ashley Stevens. A progeny?

You cannot go into this album with anything but an open mind. You also cannot go into this album expecting a listen that could accompany any sort of mentally-involved task. This album requires you to sit and listen. It requires you to pay attention. And it requires you to stop being so critical and just have fun.

As the initial review states, this is a concept album. A man comes from the future to explain to us about a tale a child is telling in her "speaking" class (the people of the future have no tongues, and must go to class to learn to speak without using telepathy) about her great-great-great-great x 50 grandmother, the Superstar. The Superstar was a woman who was tired of being nominally famous, so she froze her consciousness in 2005 after a super-MRI scan to awaken at a time in which she could take advantage of cloning to make an army of Duplicants, making her the ONLY celebrity. My Machine as an album is like a story written on paper, so I won't give away the ending.

Musically speaking, the production and rhymes are tight. This woman has skill! She tackles multiple roles on the album with ease, and she even makes "confronting herself" sound normal, like it could happen. Throughout my listen, I was impressed and eager to hear more. I think you will be too.

To mention any specific tracks is doing you, the listener, a disservice. You don't read chapters out of a book first before reading the book as a whole, and Princess Superstar's album is much the same. Enjoy!

I like Princess Superstar. I like how she uses her white-girl wiles to approach rap from a more self-aware and less serious angle than everyone else in the game. She's just kewl and that's all there is to it. I like Princess Superstar, but I don't like this album much. The musical composition is the weak link. I didn't much appreciate the musical aspect of what I'd heard of her past work, but I bought this album confident that any musical shortcomings would be made up for by her lyrical and vocal presence. After a few listens that turns out to not be the case. Concetta's cool just isn't enough to make me want to endure the mediocrity of the music. The concept of this album isn't really that strong either. Consumerism, celebrity worship and lack of identity. Yeah that's really original subject matter. I dunno, I'm not trying to be mean, I don't hate it, but I really cannot get into it even though I was determined to. I regret buying it.

In releasing a concept album set in the future, you have to give Princess Superstar credit for her ambition. And she might be the first rapper to actually say
"Mazel Tov." No matter how you boil it down though, she's still a grown woman talking about her "coochie." ("Coochie Coo")
"Initially and "Perfect" could've been produced by Giorgio Moroder, and sound like disco anthems from 1978. But everything else is almost as torturous as listening to the President speak. (I said almost)
"Famous" has incredibly grating child-like voices yelling, "I want to be famous!" On "On Top Bubble," she brags that she's "unstoppable," "undroppable," and even "On Top bubble." I did not know that.
"Quitting Smoking Song" is so silly, you expect the Tim Burton Ooompa Loompa's to come out dancing dressed like Amish people.
At one point, she says, "It sounds like s#@t!" That about sums it up.