January 31st, 2008
You’d be hard-pressed to find two rappers more diametrically opposed than Zilla Rocca and the man known as Weezy F. (Scott Fitzgerald) Baby. The two practically exist in different galaxies. Wayne, an iced out, ecstasy popping maniac from the streets of New Orleans, practically extra-terrestrial in his weirdness. Zilla, an underground rapper (if such a thing still exists) from South Philly, a place where there’s only so weird you can get before someone smacks you upside the head to tell youse to stop dressing like a freak. On paper, the only thing the two have in common is that they both make rap music and no longer drink Cristal, instead only “pouring it on white bitch’s heads” (maybe).
But despite this obvious polarity, Zilla and Wayne have a few things in common. No, there aren’t any pictures of Zilla making out with Beat Garden co-founder Big O, but the two do share a mutual desire for greatness, the ability to harness the power of the Internet for self-promotion and the fact that they’ve both gotten much much better in a very short amount of time. When I first wrote about Zilla, a year and half ago, he was good, but hadn’t yet transcended his influences. Obviously in thrall to the GZA, Aesop Rock, and a little Tom Waits, he could flow just fine, but hadn’t yet crafted a style capable of taking him beyond being just another solid but unspectacular MC trying to gain a foothold in the ever tenuous industry. Still, the debut was good enough to rightfully garner a lot of praise in this weird corner of the Internet, as did his follow up, last year’s Clean Gun’s Living in Harmony mixtape.
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Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 9 Comments »
January 31st, 2008
William Howard Taft. Our 27th President. Our 10th Chief Justice. A Possible Walrus. And the man behind arguably the greatest campaign theme song in history: “Get On A Raft With Taft.” Some say that you can tell a lot about a candidate based on their choice of campaign song, and maybe in some respects that’s true. But even if it isn’t, it was certainly fun to mock the theme songs of this year’s presidential candidates. I mean Celine Dion? Jesus Jones? And that was just Hillary Clinton alone (I take it Fleetwood Mac was Bill’s pick?) Anyhow, find out who’s rolling with Taft and who’s bound for the level of ignominy forever allotted to Herbert “If He’s Good Enough For Lindy” Hoover.
LA Weekly: Discovering the Candidates Through Their Playlists
Download:
MP3: Curtis Mayfield-”Move On Up”
MP3: The Clash-”Rudie Can’t Fail” (Though I guess he did)
Posted in LA Weekly | 5 Comments »
January 30th, 2008
I haven’t wanted to listen to anything but Fela Kuti for weeks. It’s getting a little weird. In the car, Expensive Shit/He Miss Road has monopolized my stereo. and at home, rather than feebly attempt productivity, I’ve burnt countless hours scrounging around miscellaneous legally dubious corners of the web vainly attempting to acquire his entire discography. This isn’t the first time I’ve been on a Fela kick either. When I bought Expensive Shit, a few years back, I had a nice few weeks driving around Los Angeles, letting the afro-beat horns shower my eardrums with a soft copper rain and occasionally doing my best white-boy afro chants along with Fela (it wasn’t pretty, we’ll leave it at that.).
But this obsession is different and I’m not quite sure what to ascribe it to. Maybe it’s that after having pretty much ignored jazz for my first 26 years of living, I’ve been listening to a lot of it over the past few months, digging (I believe this is the only suitable verb) Miles, Coltrane, Andrew Hill, Mingus, Pharoah Sanders, and Tony Williams, among others. Or maybe it’s the way in which Fela’s hypnotic, afro-beat contains a protean quality that’s mirrored Los Angeles’ schizophrenic weather of late; with violent storms passing with almost tropical impatience, thundering for an hour or two and breaking into pale unbroken sky and bright, cold sun.
I guess it’s this sort of duality that makes Fela’s so music so compelling. It sounds like the music of a man who’s seen both heaven and hell, a wounded triumphalism suffused with radiance and pain, ecstatic vision and plaintive sorrow. There’s an atavistic wisdom there, the beatific notion that no matter what happens, transcendence is available at a slick burst of rainbow-colored keys and a golden wail of saxophone peals that twist towards the sky. Every culture’s got its own myths, a different path to that hazy notion of transcendence, and for me, Fela’s music is the Nigerian manifestation of god (well, that and Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon).
Cooler Than A Polar Bear’s Toe Nails
Such praise would be hyperbole were it lavished upon anyone else, but when you factor in the details of Fela’s Greek Tragedy existence, his music gains an added resonance. Inspired by the Black Panthers, whom he encountered during a short stay in Los Angeles at the tail-end of the 60’s, Fela’s music is rooted in a sense of struggle and resistance. When the immigration authorities deported him back to Africa, Kuti re-christened his backing band, Africa ‘70 and sought to impart this new-found philosophy into song. Building himself a compound (The Kalakata Republic) that was part commune, part disco and part recording studio, Fela declared himself independent from the Nigerian state and married 27 woman. Sort of like Brigham Young, if Brigham Young were really cool. Naturally, his ideology flew contrary to the corrupt military dictatorship then ruling Nigeria (not like Brigham Young), and when you factored in Fela’s wild popularity, he was bound to draw static.
The shit went down (literally) in 1974 when the police raided his compound, hoping to plant a joint on him and frame him on drug charges. Wisely, Fela immediately grabbed the J and swallowed it, leaving the fascists dumbfounded. Beside themselves, the army officers hauled Fela into prison anyway and waited for him to shit out the joint, only for him to switch feces with another prisoner and walk off scot-free, mocking the government in song months later. A song, oh so subtly entitled, “Expensive Shit.”
The most toothless cliche around is the notion of the “brave artist.” Most recently, a spate of newspaper eulogies used the phrase to describe Heath Ledger and as much as I like “10 Things I Hate About You” the notion of bravery being defined as an actor playing a gay cowboy seems pretty laughable. Bravery is releasing an album called Zombie (no Cranberries) , flipping the metaphor to indict the repressive savagery of the Nigerian Army, watching them come to your disco crib with 1,000 blood-thirsty soldiers and throw your elderly mom fatally out of a window, while barely escaping death yourself. Bravery is delivering your dead mother’s coffin to the main army barrack in Lagos, and writing two hit songs, “Coffin for Head of State” and “Unknown Soldier,” about the ordeal.
Does This Guy Know How To Party Or What?
Among the music-nerd world. Fela’s a pretty well-known commodity, but in the world o’ the normals, the name Fela Kuti is more likely to be confused with an imaginary disease you may or may not have acquired from a girl in the first grade. That’s a shame. If anyone deserves the lucrative world of dorm room martyrdom a la Bob Marley, it’s Fela. If you haven’t heard him, there’s a sampler below. It’s good stuff, I promise. In the meantime, I’m going to start google searching for hotlines to wean me from this addiction. Do they use methadone for this sort of thing?
Download:
From The 1969 Los Angeles Sessions
MP3: Fela Kuti-”My Lady Frustration” (Left-Click)
From Live! (With Ginger Baker) (1971)
MP3: Fela Kuti-”Let’s Start” (Left-Click)
From Expensive Shit (1975)
MP3: Fela Kuti-”Expensive Shit” (Left-Click)
From Everything Scatter/Noise For Vendor Mouth (1975)
MP3: Fela Kuti-”Who No Know Go Know” (Left-Click)
From: Upside Down/Music of Many Colours (1976)
MP3: Fela Kuti-“2000 Blacks Got To Be Free” (Left-Click)
From Zombie (1977)
MP3: Fela Kuti-”Zombie”
Posted in The Old Testament | 19 Comments »
January 29th, 2008
Yeasayer are a jam band, they just aren’t aware of it yet. At one point during the Brooklyn four-piece’s set Saturday night at the Echoplex, lead singer Chris Keating even paused to extemporaneously inform the crowd that “people call us hippies, but that’s just not true. We’re from Baltimore.” This is arguably the worst ever defense of someone’s lack of hippiness. C’mon, Yeasayer, you guys aren’t fooling anyone. You went to the same private school as Animal Collective and granted, those guys might not be hippies in the classical sense, but they’ve clearly popped enough peyote to join several Native American tribes.
Moreover, take a look at the picture above and tell me that you disagree with Ian Cohen’s assessment that Yeasayer look like they tried to dress as the Spin Doctors for Halloween but couldn’t quite pull it off. Not to mention the fact that for the first fifteen minutes of their show, I was standing next to a greasy, dull-eyed, dead-ringer for Devendra Banhart. The guy smelled like he’d been guzzling rancid soy milk and rolling around in a patch of pachouli all afternoon. Fucking hippies.
Not like I blame Yeasayer for traveling the indie route, it’s probably a smart move. Hell, the hippies and hipsters have been on a collision course since Phish broke up in 2004 and at last year’s Bonnaroo, (the Wimbledon of the hippie jam circuit), over half the bands could’ve been classified as “indie rock.” So maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Yeasayer rep for the ever-growing sub-strata of indie bands that do drugs or at least look like they do (see also, Brightblack Morning Light, Black Mountain, Comets on Fire, and of course, the entire open-toed shoe freak-folk scene.)
Well, I Was Going To Make A “Two Princes” Joke Here, But Instead I Think We Should All Just Gaze In Awe and Horror At The Guy On the Left’s Red Nipple Shirt
On record, Yeasayer’s loopy, writhing, polyrhythmic jams work out quite well. Clocking in at just 46 minutes, the band’s ‘07 debut, All Hour Rhythms conjures a sort of compressed majesty, an ephemeral opium-dream full of nervous Far East sitars, African drums, and wispy, choral harmonies. It’s a big, epic-sounding record. The sort of thing you’d expect to hear at a yoga studio in Williamsburg. Take that how you will. Keating’s lyrics blur into an almost unintelligible chant and you pretty much forget the fact that what’s he’s saying is some real hippy-dippy gibberish. Truth be told, these guys make The Klaxons sound like Aldous Huxley.
In person, these weak spots are hard to ignore. Songs that float like a lazy, sun-baked river on wax perpetually find their momentum halted by Keating’s between-song rambles. At one point, the guy even hurled something into the audience, sparking a brief unenthusiastic war between the stage and the unimpressed crowd. The problem is that while the album shrouds the band in mystery, their live show reveals them to be a bunch of kids on their first national tour, who have neither mastered their instruments nor figured out how to work the crowd. Stripped of their studio wizardry, their Pro-Tools wall of sound felt attenuated and two-dimensional. Occasionally, it felt like watching Jethro Tull try to perform Phil Collins songs. Or Animal Collective doing songs for a Queen covers compilation. Or any number of the mediocre Robert Plant albums from the 80s.
Ultimately, it’s this occupation of the middle ground that makes Yeasayer remind me most of The Spin Doctors. If you think about it, The Spin Doctors were the ultimate tweener band, hippie enough to get invited to the first H.O.R.D.E. Festival, , alternative enough to get played on 120 Minutes, and poppy enough to filter down to the Junior High set. And rest assured, “2080″ is every bit as catchy as “Two Princes” or “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong.” (I think the statute of limitations has passed long enough for us to accept that these are great songs). But for them to move past being just another indie band riding the world music wave, Yeasayer are going to have to decide which direction they want to go in. Do they want to cultivate their inner weirdo and de-construct melodies to the point where no one likes them but music critics and art kids? Or will they retain their penchant for exploration while simultaneously finding their inner Garcia and letting their sound breathe? C’mon guys, go for it, there’s no shame, add a second guitarist who can shred, be willing to embrace your inner…gasp…hippie. Because honestly, as lame as tie die is, it’s still a thousand times cooler than red nipple shirts.
Download:
MP3: Yeasayer-”2080″
MP3: Yeasayer-”Sunrise”
Posted in Beards, Blazers, & Glasses | 8 Comments »
January 28th, 2008
No sane, self-respecting website would publish Ian Cohen’s review of the Juno soundtrack. Luckily, this website is neither of those two things.
With the possible exception of Passion Of The Christ, few recent films have been able to trigger a fight or flight response quite like Juno. It isn’t the province of religious or political nutjobs of either camp, but something almost as irritating: one can’t help but feel that Juno is acting a hand puppet for Diablo Cody, a reincarnation as a teenager that’s cool enough to hang with the cheerleaders, smart enough to talk like a Simpsons writer, hot enough to tempt Jason Bateman’s Melvins/slasher-flick loving jingle writer to leave his wife (Jennifer Garner), altruistic enough to forgo abortion and donate her baby to them in the first place and a big enough asshole to see herself as being above nearly everybody involved. It doesn’t feel like Cody envisions Juno being complex so much as perfect, and you’re put face-to-face with it almost immediately.
In a gut-wrenching scene during the movie’s first ten minutes, Ellen Page’s titular character runs into Rainn Wilson’s convenience store looking for a pregnancy test and the following dialogue takes place:
Wilson: “Your eggo is preggo, no doubt about it!”
Page: “Silencio! I just drank my weight in Sunny D, and I have to go, pronto!”
Michael Cera: Still Awesome
Cute and all until you realize that you’re being asked to make an emotional investment in a movie where these are the kind of things a 16-year old and a convenience store clerk are capable of saying to each other. It’s a tribute to the skilled professionals in the cast that Juno isn’t half bad despite having some of the most stilted and unrealistic script writing you’ll likely ever hear (see: “swear to blog!”). But if the jaded teens in Juno act like suspiciously whip-smart hipsters, the soundtrack is like its photographic negative- jaded hipsters obsessed with arrested development (no pun intended), talking out of both sides of their mouths. One side’s saying “can’t we all just get along,” but the other one’s saying “aren’t we fucking clever?” far more loudly.
From a brief eyeballing of the track list, one might think that the biggest potential pitfall might be a case of hyperglycemia (Moldy Peaches, Belle & Sebastian, The Kinks), but this is more akin to eating a handful of wasabi peas thinking that they were gumballs. As with the film itself, there’s a mean streak of condescension and narcissism in the soundtrack, best illustrated by its insertion of Sonic Youth’s “Superstar,” salvaged from a mid-90’s curio of alt-rock Carpenters covers. After Bateman’s character informs a pregnant Juno that he’s thinking divorce with a shockingly skeevy manner, in the ensuing freakout she exclaims that the Sonic Youth mix CD he burnt for her is a bunch of “noise.” Even as someone who doesn’t care for the band all that much, I can say that hasn’t really been accurate for the past two decades (what did he give her- NYC Ghosts And Flowers?), and the inclusion of “Superstar” (essentially, the original plus some mumbly vocals and feedback) feels like it’s out of spite, smugly assuming you agree with Juno.
For the most part, there’s an assumption from everyone involved that an overall sense of amateurish faux-charm will prevent you from ever calling them out on their bullshit. Juno OST ends with Page and Michael Cera doing a first-take of “Anyone Else But You,” a scene that ends the film as well. While the two are clearly untrained, the fact is, it’s indistinguishable from the Moldy Peaches version and the bulk of its surroundings, nearly everything sounding like a first-timer doing covers of “We’re Going To Be Friends” in their bedroom or Tilly & The Wall sapped of their vital horniness.
GADZOOKS!
Barry Louis Polisar starts off the proceedings with the impossibly saccharine “All I Want Is You” (”if you were a river and the mountains tall/the rumble of the water would be my call”- it goes on like this), setting the stage for soundtrack linchpin Kimya Dawson (featured solo, as a part of Moldy Peaches and with Antsy Pants) to handle the lion’s share of what are basically bad folk songs, poorly sung and seeming to sneer at the genre they work in. At this point, is possible to get any enjoyment out of lyrics like “I was quiet as a mouse/when I snuck into your house/and did roofies with your spouse” being voiced in a bored monotone? Antsy Pants puts you in an incredibly uncomfortable position of having to evaluate the cutesy meanderings of a 13-year old’s mind (”Tree Hugger” and “Vampire” offer what you expect), and then you go to the Plan-It X website and find that Dawson seems excited by the mere fact that she’s working with a 13-year old. It shows what’s at the core of this soundtrack- the exploitation and fetishization of childlike naivete (and the Unexpectedly Articulate Wisdom there found), moving beyond interesting, beyond cute, into empty and nauseating self-absorption.
Granted, this is more a failure of concept than content- 99% of all records could only hope to have three songs on it as good as “Piazza, New York Catcher,” “All The Young Dudes,” or “A Well Respected Man” but even they feel cheapened by association. Unlike the thorny movie that it rose from, Juno OST feigns sweetness while surrounding itself by an impenetrable force field of irony. And yet, with her belief that 1977 represented rock music’s zenith, Juno exposes the biggest irony of ‘em all- basically telling me she’d enjoy this record about as much as I did.
Download:
MP3: Belle & Sebastian-”Piazza, New York Catcher”
MP3: The Kinks-”20th Century Man”
Posted in Sexy Results | 23 Comments »
January 27th, 2008
If I get my act together, I hope to have a monster post on Fela Kuti up some time this week or next. In the meantime, the disco-inflected lilt of “2000 Blacks Got to Be Free”, from Fela’s 1980 collabo with jazzman Roy Ayers, is doing me just right on this rain-slicked Sunday. Downloading is highly advised.
Download:
MP3: Fela Kuti-“2000 Blacks Got To Be Free” (Left-Click)
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 6 Comments »
January 27th, 2008
Jeremy Fish is brilliant and Aesop Rock’s videos are better than your favorite rapper’s. Sorry, but this is true.
Posted in Videos | 3 Comments »
January 25th, 2008
I remember watching The Show for the first and only time when I was a freshman in high school. I wasn’t very impressed. This was 1995, Biggie was alive, Warren G was the biggest star in the world, Wu-Tang was in the middle of the greatest run in rap history and Snoop Dogg hadn’t yet released Tha Doggfather, let alone Father Hood. The concept of watching a documentary about all my favorite rappers didn’t seem particularly mind-blowing. Like most 14 year olds, I wasn’t really aware of that concept that times and trends change and quite stupidly, I assumed that this was way things always would (and should) be. Sort of like a Republican presidential candidate. Re-watching it a dozen years later, the film is a revelation, at times hilarious, at times chilling (particularly the Biggie interviews), and at all times eye-opening. A time capsule of the hip-hop world circa 94-95, The Show comes highly recommended not just for rap fans but for anyone who likes music.
- The moments between an incarcerated Slick Rick and Russell Simmons’ are among the film’s most poignant. They open and close the film and are the closest thing the often-scattershot documentary has to a framing device. It’s difficult to watch the Ruler behind bars, humbled, stripped of his gold chains and swagger (but not the patch), shuffling in standard Rikers prison garb to Russell, head bowed, eye
s lowered. Simmons is visibly uncomfortable and admits he’s only visiting Rick for the documentary. He then gives a weird laugh and starts babbling about how he’s 37 now and all he wants to do is chase models around. “I don’t want drama unless it’s coming from Naomi Campbell.” Rick seems broken, mumbling about how he’s learned to appreciate freedom during his spell for attempted murder. He seems a little off, a fact that Russell confirms when he describes Ricky as being “crazier than a bag of angel dust.”
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Posted in Pause and Rewind | 16 Comments »
January 24th, 2008
One of the most common complaints I hear from my female friends is that they always seem to fall for “assholes.” Quite mistakenly, they ask for advice on how to remedy this situation and the ensuing conversation inevitably leads to elliptical arguments about how maybe they should stop liking guys that are assholes. However, had I re-watched the video for Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract” at any point during the last two decades, I would’ve quickly been able to point out how Paula Abdul’s dysfunctional relationship with MC Skat Kat, eerily mirrored their own romantic woes. Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of girls who like perfectly nice guys. Apparently, I’m just not friends with any of them.
1. He Parties All Night.
Poor Paula Abdul. So naive. There she she is, dashing up the stairs in high heels, wildly enamored with her animated furry love and all MC Skat Kat can do is try to lift up her skirt. But being the trusting Paula Abdul that she was, she erroneously believes MC Skat Kat’s lies about his skirt-chasing, in spite of his avowed penchant for carousing (yes, carousing). Wake up woman. He’s a world-famous rapping feline. Sure, opposites might attract. But on all those nights that “you go to bed early,” believe you me he’s out chasing tail. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
2. He Associates Himself With Riff-Raff
If the old cliche about judging a man by the company he keeps is true, Abdul shouldn’t be surprised by Skat Kat’s avowed preferences for the “fast-lane lifestyle.” How can she have noticed the seedy hooligans that he surrounds himself with and not realized instantly that the relationship was doomed to failure? I don’t like the looks of that mouse one bit and I’ve made my thoughts clear about guys in fedoras and ironic day-glo orange shirts a few times too many; to say nothing of the two-bit floozies that Skat Kat includes as the token female members of his posse. Suffice to say ladies, if your man rolls with vermin, pink-haired hussies and questionably gay beefcake leather types, don’t be surprised it he turns out to be a cat cad.
3. He’s Got A Temper
Maybe if Abdul had even take the time to listen to her beau’s solo album, she would’ve noticed a song called “I Go Crazy,” a harrowing, perilous descent into madness. If you want to avoid dating assholes, pay attention to the little signs. If your man is writing first-person confessionals about his inner turmoil and rage, don’t be surprised when he lashes out at you. Sure, when things are good, they’re great, but relationships aren’t all tap-dancing on rooftops and wearing sunglasses at night. Indeed, Abdul’s Florence Nightingale complex might have led her to attempt to salve Skat Kat’s myriad psychic wounds, but there was no healing the turbulent riot of his soul.
4. He’s a Smoker
Another reason why girls fall for assholes is that they feel the need to change their man, they just know that with time, love and patience they will be able to cure him of all his bad habits. Right? Wrong. Abdul seems intrigued by the cool, aloof air that Skat Kat strikes when he lights up a cigarette, maybe she even subscribes to the Chander Bing school of “smoking is cool and you know it,” but deep down, she’s waiting for the moment, when she can say, “y’know what, MC Skat Kat, I think it’s time you stopped smoking.” But that’s wrong Paula Abdul. If you don’t like to smoke, find yourself a non-smoker, don’t try to kill all of Skat Kat’s fun. Like Rakim said, “Know the ledge.”
5. He’s Always Broke
To be honest, this part of the song is probably a lie. Though Abdul tries to claim that “she’s got the money and he’s always broke,” Skat Kat’s rapping and hustling career would certainly indicate that he’s got crazy cheddar (if you are to believe Young Jeezy). Moreover, Skat Kat is exonerated by the fact that Abdul is a Jewish girl from the Valley and thus would be banished from the tribe for dating anyone who was constantly indigent.
Download:
MP3: Paula Abdul-”Opposites Attract”
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought?, Best Of | 7 Comments »
January 23rd, 2008
Re-watching it a decade later, I’m pretty sure it might be.
Posted in Videos | 5 Comments »
