January 11th, 2008
1. Not being just any geek off the streets
How To Avoid Being A “Geek Off the Streets: Learn how to how be to handy with the steel and earn your keep.
Best Models to Emulate: Gay steel workers, Andrew Carnegie, Iron Man
2. Not Tweaking When You See a Car Full of Girls
How To Avoid Tweaking When You See a Car Full of Girls: Drink less coffee.
Best Models to Emulate: Nate Dogg, Warren G, Dylan McKay
3. The Wisdom to Avoid Dice Games on 21 and Lewis
How To Avoid Dice Games on 21 and Lewis: Consult AOL City Search for a more suitable and safe environment to find games of chance and miscellaneous sinning.
Worst Models to Emulate: Pete Rose, Nicky Arnstein. Dice Raw
4. The Ability To Glide And Swerve So Hard That You Make Hookers Hit the Curb
How To Glide and Swerve Properly: Malt liquor.
Best Models to Emulate: E-40, Too Short, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
5. The Will To Pull Out Your Strap And Lay Busters Down (If Necessary)
How to Obtain This Will: Nihilist German Philosophy.
Best Models to Emulate: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buster Keaton.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in 10 Questions Raised, Best Of | 7 Comments »
January 10th, 2008
1. If one were ever to try to lure a human woman back to one’s spaceship for a late-night probe, it is highly advisable to try to find women dancing in their g-strings and proceed to wave large bills in front of them.
2. When the gangsters come in girls will invariably pause. However, it should be noted that they may just be playing freeze tag.
3. The only thing that girls love more than $100 bills and g-strings is making out with each other in front of Nate Dogg.
4. If you are a famous R&B singer like Nate Dogg, it is possible to get 10 girls to pay you just so they can lay you. This is an astonishing feat. Either that or Nate Dogg is just Mormon. (No Mitt.)
5. Even an alien with scant knowledge of West Coast G-Funk would be shocked by the astonishing increase in the hotness of the video ho, as evidenced by Nate Dogg’s “Indo Smoking” excursion a mere seven years prior.
6. Nate Dogg is “weary of hos.” This is probably the result of his gigolo lifestyle that has nearly a dozen women paying him for sex. The most logical conclusion to draw is that it is best to have no more than five girls pay you just so they can lay you. Six tops.
7. The seemingly random interlude with the club owner in the middle of the video is actually a brilliant Last Year at Marienbad type touch, one meant to reflect Nate Dogg’s scrambled sense of space, time and human relationships. If Nate Dogg is weary, fragmented, and disjointed, so must the cinema be.
8. Not even an alien would believe that girls all pause when Roscoe comes through the door. Even an extraterrestrial would know that Roscoe’s fried chicken> Roscoe the Rapper.
9. Swap meets are great places to meet girls willing to pause.
10. Girls all say the same old thing: they just want to “gangsta’ boogie. ” In the end, this may be the root of Nate Dogg’s self-professed”weariness.” Sure, g-string clad girls dancing for hundred dollars bills and making out with each other is all good, but ultimately, for Nate, only being able to only talk about gangsta’ boogying and miscellaneous affiliated boogery, is inherently limiting.
MP3: Kurupt ft. Nate Dogg-”Girls All Pause”
Posted in 10 Questions Raised | 3 Comments »
January 9th, 2008
In honor of Nate Dogg (who’s currently recuperating in a rest home after somehow having a stroke at 38)) and because I really just want to watch old G-Funk videos for the rest of the week, the next couple days will be dedicated to excavating random Nate Dogg songs. Happy New Year.
1. Let it be said unequivocally. Warren G> Warren G. Harding > Mike Huckabee.
2. Was there really a four-month stretch in college where every time my friends and I got high, we would listen to this song and “Glock-O-Pop?” And if so, how was it possible that this corresponded with my highest-ever GPA?
3. This video’s budget: $2,123 (including 15 roast beef sandwiches, 24 hot dogs and 12 gallons of Kool-Aid). The amount of weed smoked on the set of this video: 3 pounds or $15,000, whichever one came first.
4. How is it possible that Nate Dogg can make singing about changing his thread-bare socks sound this smooth? I blame Kirk Radomski.
5. Snoop Dogg’s ghostwriter? Easy job or easiest job.
6. Are Warren G’s “G Child” and Madlib’s “Quasimoto” the same exact voice? And if not, exactly how stoned do you have to be to decide to huff helium and then rap as your squeaky voiced alter ego?
7. Can this video be officially declared the turning point when Xzibit officially became better at ride pimping than rapping?
8. If the Game really refuses to wait than shouldn’t the rappers involved stop bitching about this fact, and instead show some discipline and put it on time out, threaten to rescind its supper, and then finally, if that doesn’t work, medicate the game with 100 mg a day of the finest ADHD drugs?
9. If Warren G actually did have “your bitch” with her “knees up” would you a) punch Warren G in the face b) stand there stunned at the fact that your girlfriend was copulating with a past-his-prime West Coast rap star c) silently congratulate yourself on your ability to attract a woman that would be desired by a past-his-prime West Coast rap star or d) ask Warren G to autograph your copy of Regulate.
10. Is Xzibit’s claim that there’s nothing like a “one night stand with nice tan and big chest to make [him] feel like a whole new man,” evidence that he has a sex addiction or empirical proof that as the song alleges, the game does not in fact wait for anyone. Not even busters.
Download:
MP3: Warren G ft. Nate Dogg, Snoop Dogg & Xzibit-”Game Don’t Wait”
MP3: RZA-”Glock-O-Pop”
Posted in 10 Questions Raised | 4 Comments »
January 8th, 2008
Not only is this a tremendous victory for wearers of handle-bar mustaches everywhere, but now, men named Goose can hold their heads high and no longer will be mistaken for sundry farm ganders. And yes, in case you were wondering, this post mainly exists because there are few names in the English language more fun to type than Goose Gossage. The only one that might top it is Catfish Hunter. Ah to be a 1970’s American League Closer. (No Sparky Lyle).
MP3: The Shins-”When I Goose Step”
MP3: Bob Dylan-”Catfish”
Posted in It Got Weird, Didn't It? | 8 Comments »
January 8th, 2008
1. Is an opening shot of buying 40’s at the liquor store ever a bad idea?
2. Nate Dogg> a lump of aluminum foil> Akon?
3. Is the only thing better than a G-Funk classic from 1993, a video of said G-Funk classic interspersed with clips from the John Singleton opus, Poetic Justice?
4. When Singleton decided to cast Q-Tip as Janet Jackson’s slain boyfriend,Markell, and 2Pac as her new boyfriend, Lucky, was he foreshadowing the eventual demise of the left-field Native Tongues movement in exchange for the hard-core posturing of gangster rap, or have I just succumbed to the oh-so-meta-temptation of smoking indo smoke while listening to indo smoke?
5 . Is the reason for Mista Grimm’s complete and utter disappearance from rap post-93, simply the result of his adopting an east coast accent and changing his name to U-God?
6. If you could obtain indo smoke capable of making you levitate like Mista Grimm, would your life would be a richer and fuller place?
7. Was the entire second half of Half Baked derived from the plot of this video?
8. Have scientists yet discovered the reason why video ho’s got exponentially hotter from the year 1996 on? Or at the very least can’t a lazy American studies major write a paper on this topic and send it to me?
9. Did Mista Grimm have a drug problem or was he just deeply awesome?
10. Is “Indo Smoke” the greatest stoner rap song ever? And if it isn’t how is it possible that I can’t remember half of college, yet I can somehow clearly remember 100 percent of this song’s lyrics? Take that Nancy Reagan.
Download
MP3: Mista Grimm ft. Warren G & Nate Dogg-”Indo Smoke”
Posted in 10 Questions Raised | 3 Comments »
January 2nd, 2008
Judging by most child stars, I’m willing to bet that if they re-made this commercial today, it’s tagline would be: “Zack, Zack, he’s a methamphetamine maniac.”
5. Dungen-Tio Bitar [Kemado]
Dungen did not tour this record in America. This is because the band’s mastermind, Gustav Estjes was rumored to be alone in the snowy Swedish hinterlands, ingesting enough hallucinogens to give Hunter S. Thompson pause, and trying to untangle the beautiful mess of sounds stampeding inside his head. On the band’s website, Estjes readily admits that his entire sonic leitmotif descends from the memory of being eight years old, hearing his mother’s copy of Are You Experienced? for the first time.
But Jimi Hendrix is merely the jumping off point for Estjes’ lysergic symphonies; aided by Swede postman by day/guitar god by night Reine Fiske, Dungen spit back an impossibly melodic synthesis of the ’60s and early ’70s, seamlessly blending orange sunshine-laced Hendrix solos, snaking Revolver sitars, and some weird willowy flutes a la Aqualung. This is dusty analog music, buzzing with a drugged red-eyed glow, all spray-paint and candy color. It’s not the sort of artistic statement that promises to change anyone’s life (unless you’re this fellow), but Tio Bitar is a great work of escapist art, the sort of essential record I’d pick for any hypothetical list of desert island necessities.
MP3: Dungen-”Gor Det Nu”
4. Ghostface Killah-The Big Dough Rehab [Def Jam]
The people who bitched about The Big Dough Rehab’s lack of originality are the types who would’ve complained that Rembrandt painted too many pictures of Dutchmen with bushy mustaches and black felt hats. They’re missing the point: like the famed 17th century portraitist, Ghost’s brilliance lies in his innate ability to humanize even the most stiff figures and breath life into the most tired of tropes. “Yolanda’s House” (explained at length here) should be merely another Wu heist, instead it thumps off the speakers with a novelist’s eye for detail, from Ghost’s meal of french fries and fish sticks, to Meth reprimanding Starks for laughing at his asthmatic girlfriend, to Raekwon’s description of a drug connect as wearing a lot of “loud shit, you know that Steve Rifkind-style shit.”
Superficially, this just another casually brilliant Ghostface album, but underneath its veneer a greater linearity and thematic consistency emerges (save for “White Linen Affair,” which is plain retarded). If heads were chagrined that The Big Dough Rehab lacked “weird” songs about seeing Sponge Bob underwater, their absence came in exchange for a focus on deeper themes: mortality, a desire to repent, the proverbial Devil on Ghost’s shoulder that that believes that life should be “Bentley’s and big bills, bottles, biscuits, bitches, blunts, [and] bad boys bodying pit bulls” (as declared on “Paisley Darts.”) Cinematically arranged, even seemingly head-scratching decisions like “The Prayer” have a warped logic to them, with Ox’s supplications serving as a second act turning point of sorts, with Ghost navigating treacherous femme fatales and mob shootouts in the third act, before ultimately recognizing life’s fragility and the need to “slow down” on the finale. Of course, it isn’t as consistently thrilling as Supreme Clientele, but it’s still a lot more fun than this guy.
MP3: Ghostface Killah ft. Method Man & Raekwon-”Yolanda’s House”
3. LCD Soundsystem-Sound of Silver [Capitol/DFA]
If you’re desperate, the de rigueur cricism of Sound of Silver is that there’s little else to it besides “Someone Great” and “All My Friends,” and that the latter is the kind of “Stairway To Heaven”/ “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for aging indie types to eventually beat their kids over the head with. But really- do you really want to hang out with people who can’t find anything here? “North American Scum” isn’t Ted Leo with a better sense of humor? The title track doesn’t knock? I realize it’s all hipster catnip, but you know what- sometimes “the blogs” are right.
I refuse to believe this won’t be a record that matters when all’s said and done. Because this seems to be the dovetailing of solutions to complaints about indie rock in general: dance music doesn’t have any emotional resonance and the power trio is too fucking boring. And while 2007 was certainly quite the banner year for club music to go rock, let’s face it: Simian Mobile Disco isn’t sucking any less any time soon. This might have been a record you degraded on your year-end just to be original, but see if it isn’t the one that you bring out in 2017 most often. –Ian Cohen
MP3: LCD Soundsystem-”North American Scum” (Left-Click)
2. Sunset Rubdown-Random Spirit Lover [Jagjaguwar]
Random Spirit Lover is a dense epic sprawl of a record. If you listen to it enough, I’m reasonably sure you’ll start to go a little crazy. For a long time, it seemed to only make sense, drunk, rambling, stoned in the ashy delirium of 3:00 a.m revelation. With a frozen winter nightmare vibe that hits at some raw intestinal level, the sort of thing that sounded fit for a long car ride to the funeral of a close friend, rain clouds cackling overhead, setting the sad soundtrack to the inherent smallness and fragility of life. In the reel that flickers inside my head, it plays like The Chronicles of Narnia re-written entirely from memory by Guillermo Del Toro, with a soundtrack composed by a super-group of David Bowie, Frog Eyes, and the ghost of Elliot Smith. It would do horrible at the box office.
Random Spirit Lover requires a willful suspension of disbelief. Each song in and of itself is a weird tesseract to warp through, passing into a vivid cosmology of courtesans, failed heroes, snakes, stallions, leopards, and various other animals that added together would probably account for 22 percent of the San Diego Zoo. You have to ignore this record’s excesses and pretensions, it’s herky-jerky pacing and its song titles including “Up on Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days” and “Trumpet, Trumpet, Toot! Toot!” (the latter of which has a reasonable shot at being the title of the next big Southern ring-tone rap song). Spencer Krug is the rare songwriter capable of writing songs that can mean 1,000 things to a 1,000 people, an opacity that lends itself to a sort of timelessness that allows you to believe that if you play this in 50 years it’ll retain the mystery and magic it possesses today.
MP3: Sunset Rubdown-”Up On Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days”
1. El-P- I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead [Def Jux]
I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, is El-P’s masterpiece, a record both explicit and subtle, simultaneously political and apolitical, a record for a turbulent schizophrenic year where gruesome headlines from Iraq sat side-by-side with news of the Dow skyrocketing and Anna Nicole Smith corpse-raping. Heavily rooted in his NYC cityscape, El dipped jittery, a “Brooklyn baby / Waterlocked, walkin’ nervous” with a “gonzomatic fear turning [him] Hunter S. Thompson.”
Like many Def Jux records, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is monolithic and impenetrable on first listen. But with patience and time, its lyrical complexities and Bomb Squad by way of My Bloody Valentine sound grows increasingly more vivid. Listen to “Poisenville Kids No Wins,” and try to ignore El-P’s sound-of-a-mind-bleeding beat, a thundering seven-minute soulfuck full of Star Wars synths, Orwellian alarms, and drums big as boulders. Try to ignore lyrics that paint a hazy drugged dispatch from that valley between dawn and night, the story of a lonely train car home, vomited out onto blocks of Brooklyn brownstones and bodegas, nasal drip tearing its way down our narrator’s throat. Slanting against a sleeping storefront, he pauses for one last cigarette, letting the wispy Newport drags dissolve into the weak maroon sun, contemplating that fragile membrane that links light and darkness, sanity and madness, the desire to fight versus the wisdom to flee. Not only is I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, the best hip-hop album made this year, it’s one of the best ever made.
MP3: El-P-”Poisenville Kids No Wins/Reprise (This Must Be Our Time)”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Lists, Best Of | 58 Comments »
January 1st, 2008
Zilla Rocca’s New Year’s resolution for 2008 is to slap more kufi’s.
I don’t know about you, but I love a good gangster rap album. It not only manages to scare the bejesus out of old white people who are running for public office, but gangster rap also shares specific qualities not found in any other genre or subgenre of music. How do you know if that new album you just bought/boosted/shared illegally is an authentic slice of gangster pudding cake? Just following my trusty guide! Below is a list of five songs titles you will find on most, if not ALL, gangster rap albums. Eat a dick!
1. “Gangsta Shit”
If the best hip hop music is based on the theory that “less is more,” what can possibly top any song called “Gangsta Shit?” According to AllMusic.com, there are 52 songs with this titled, with artists ranging from The Game to Tony Touch to Hollertronix (how ironic, right you guys?). If you go out on a limb and enter “Gangsta Sh*t,” you have artists like Diddy, Outkast, B.G., Do or Die, Scarface, and Snoop Dogg to add to the mix. The only difference between a rap song called “Gangsta Shit” and “Gangsta Sh*t” is that Tipper Gore approves of the latter.
WHAT TO EXPECT: Menacing strings, minor chord keys, hectic hi-hats, references to Scarface, Godfather, Goodfellas, Sopranos, etc., someone paying “homage” to 2pac, no actual gangsters present on the song
ALTERNATE TITLES: “Tax Evasion Shit,” “It Fell Off a Truck Shit,” “Heavily Influenced by Al Pacino’s Career Choices Shit.”
2. “My Life”
Ahh…the burden of being a gangster rapper. Not only have you survived this long to make a mixtape, but in your trial and tribulations, you’ve managed to see some horrific stuff. And what better way to express YOUR singular, individual experiences than naming a song called “My Life.” Apparently, Freaky Zeeky, C-Murder, Kool G Rap, DMX, Geto Boys, Shaky Slick, Shotty Capogne and hundreds of others have a lot in common.
WHAT TO EXPECT: Downtempo R&B drums, shrill female vocals on the hook, outside musicians to play the Triton, somber rappin’, “the realest shit I ever wrote.”
ALTERNATE TITLES: “My Best 2pac Impersonation,” “Even Gangstas Get the Blues,” “What My Ghostwriter Has Been Through.”
3. “Ride With Me”
Starting in the late 90s, more and more rap albums had songs with titles similar to this one. Mostly, it was a clubby, car stereo track whereas the rapper was telling a chick to get into his car and just “let herself go” so to speak. Lately, in the post-Pac/DMX era, “Ride With Me” has served as an invitation to the listener so that we may come along for the psychological journey through the mind of a gangster rapper. Both are never recommended if you are a) a woman without a proper martial arts background or b) a man who feels kinda weird about another man commanding you to “ride” with him. Unless that man is Hunter Thompson, I’ll pass.
WHAT TO EXPECT: For the ladies, some hand claps, that “bounce,” rhymes that rhyme the same words together, heavy bass, tambourine/triangle hits, and overt invitations to defile themselves. For the bros, a trip through the struggle. BORING!
ALTERNATE TITLES: “Get Out of My Dreams, Get into My Car,” “Carpool Pimpin’,” “Cardio is Overrated,” “What’s Wrong with a Couple of Guys Goin’ for a Ride on an Emotional Journey?”
4. “I Miss My N*gga/Soldier/Homie/Dog/Weedcarrier”
There’s nothing wrong with penning a song for a fallen friend, but just like “My Life,” it begins to lose credibility when everyone is lazily using the same song title. A good way to write this song is what Bone Thugs did with “Crossroads.” That video had the bad-ass angel of death who was taking people under like Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. We even got to experience probably the most touching, yet un-rhyming, rap of all time when Wishbone said, “Why’d they kill my dog, and man I miss my Uncle Charrrrlllles, y’all”
WHAT TO EXPECT: R&B hook from a male singer, strings/keys, just enough humanity to conjure actual emotions, some random cursing to keep it “real.”
ALTERNATE TITLES: “Tears in Mothafuckin’ Heaven,” “I’ve Been Meaning to Get Another Tattoo,” “If I was White, They’d Call me Emo For This One.”
5. “Fuck You”
This is tricky, because this song title either announces a gangster rapper’s displeasure with someone or it’s a declaration of what said gangster rapper is planning on doing to a woman who is clearly not trained in martial arts. See, it’s the former when Cam’ron is saying it on Confessions of Fire and the latter when Dr. Dre and Devin the Dude are letting it out on 2001. Either way, it’s the opposite of subtle, which is the definition of gangster rap. And Sauce Money once made an entire album with this theme; he bitched out though and called it Middle Finger U. Fuck him.
WHAT TO EXPECT: For the ladies, some sweet nothings whispered into your ear over a nice thick 808 sprinkled with some TV-MA talk from T-Pain/R.Kelly/Akon on the hook. For the fellas, an adrenaline rush and the hip hop equivalent of watching Twisted Sisters’ video for “We’re Not Gonna Take It” for the first time circa 1986.
ALTERNATE TITLES: For the guys: “There’s Only 7 Nuggets in This Box, Potna!,” “KOCH Ain’t Returnin’ My Calls,” “SERENITY NOW!”. For the ladies: “Let’s Have Some Intercourse in This Mothafucka,” “I’m a Grower, Not a Shower,” “Let’s Do It Before 50 Needs More Yogurt.”
And there you have it. Are there better song titles on most gangster rap albums? You betcha. But these mainstays have graced CD’s from the bus-pass totin’ east coast thugs, to the pen-n-pixeled dope boyz in the dirty-dirty, all the way out to the west coast loc’s with Easter Sunday hair.
MP3: Zilla Rocca-”I Never Loved Her”
Posted in The Beat Generation | 15 Comments »
