Holiday Reading Powered By Complex Carbs

By Scott Smith in Miscellaneous on Nov 26, 2004 4:42PM

The tryptophan seems to have worn off by now but we’re still gorging ourselves on Thanksgiving leftovers here at the Chicagoist offices. And it’s hard for some of us to do any real work while we’re all bloaty so we’ve been catching up on some online reading.

While there’s plenty to keep us busy on Slashdot and Salon (Smart phones! Nick Cave!), we’ve been really enjoying Asian Mack Super Filter, if for no other reason but its title—which sounds like a 70s blaxploitation film that’s been translated into Mandarin. Fellow Chicagoan Jamie Dihiansan runs the site with the help of four contributors and reading it is a lot like sitting around your dorm room with the funnier/less pretentious members of your college radio station.

AMSF’s goal is to provide more information about the albums you can buy on iTunes. At first we thought that they were just doing it to get rich by suckling off Steve Jobs’s hairy teat and we were jealous that we hadn’t thought of it first. But the meager funds AMSF gets through the iTunes Affiliates Program is merely used to pay for the costs of hosting the site.

AMSF provides capsule reviews of five albums a day. Not content with merely reviewing the newest album releases, they review classic records you should already know about, audiobooks, French pop, and albums from a variety of other genres including inspirational music (which doesn’t feature the usual slew of gospel albums but rather one lone entry: Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs. If that qualifies as inspirational, we can’t wait until someone gets around to writing about Peter Green’s In The Skies.)

Unlike the Staff Recommends feature of iTunes, the reviews all have a unique personality. The one that almost moved us to tears was this lamentation to lost youth masquerading as an Appetite For Destruction review. Keep ‘em comin’ Asian Mack. Cause we got a whole lotta yams to go through here.