May 14th, 2008
In truth, part of me wants to be like, “Yo, El, why don’t you just chill the fuck out, smoke a blunt, take a deep breath, even if it’s not going to be okay, why don’t you just pretend that it will.” I’m sure by now the guy’s been told this one or two or 34,566 times. Yeah, the oeuvre’s a razor’s-edge from being gimmicky. At this point, it seems like there’s no piece of smooth sheet metal that El-P couldn’t twist into a fun-house of apocalyptic contortion. No sunny personality he couldn’t glare into dyspepsia. No bright day he couldn’t murk. It’s a lot to handle, but ultimately, it’s none of my fucking business. Artists should be allowed to be artists and regardless of whether you love or hate the guy, it’s tough to deny that his paranoid, neo-Bomb Squad wall of noise is as sonically innovative as anyone in hip-hop, 2008. *
Currently, barnstorming the country with Dizzee Rascal, Kidz in the Hall and Busdriver on the Stuff White People Like Tour 2008, the Def Jux chieftain has been peddling the next installment of his limited edition 500-only Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx 2. The record sounds how you’d think it would sound. Think My Life in the Bush of Ghosts but done by someone convinced the Nazis could kick down the door at any moment. Maybe less original than the canonized Eno/Byrne collaboration, but no less awesome, and either way I’ll take this over a dude freestyling over the beat to “Xxplosive” anyday. (though Crooked I, pretty much killed Week 30).
Split between instrumentals, remixed tracks and original raps from El Producto, “Mike Douglas” stands out as my favorite of the bunch, with its savage uppercut at white music journalists who apparently play apologist for crack rap. (Who knew?) I’m not going to play the transcribe game, but it’s either this or Elzhi’s “Motown 25″ for my pick for this month’s imaginary Hip Hop Quotable. If you aren’t a fan, I don’t see something called Theweareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx 2 convincing you to join the Def Jux fan club**, but if you are, it will inevitably be vital for the next time you decide to have your next Blade Runner party. I call Edward James Olmos.
*Other correct answers can include Madlib, Black Milk and maybe one or two other producers I’m forgetting at the moment. Answering Timbaland results in a 10-year purgatory where you are forced to listen to Madonna’s Hard Candy ad infinitum.
**Def Jux fan club includes free Mr. Lif hair grooming kit and a chance to Win a Date with Rob Sonic
From Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx 2
MP3: El-P-”Fuck the Law”
MP3: El-P-”Mike Douglas”
From Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixx 1
MP3: El-P ft. Aesop Rock-”We’re Still Standin’ Here”
MP3: El-P-FunkDiscoChill
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 17 Comments »
May 13th, 2008
Questions to ponder about “Swang On ‘Em”
1. Isn’t this the beat for “Shut Up?”
2. What was the last song that Bun B didn’t crush? Conversely. Orange Crush> 22″ inch rims?
3. Why do I have the feeling II Trill is going to be twice as trill as Underground Kingz?. Why is impossible for me not to laugh when I type the word “trill?” (to say nothing of the words “gadzooks” and “flabbergasted.”)
4. When Lupe entered the recording booth did he get of look of glee in his eye and think, “man, this will really show all those bloggers who thought I liked Tribe Called Quest.” Or did he just creep everyone out by misinterpreting the meaning of the phrase “swang on ‘em.”
5. Best ignorant rap song of the year?
Download: (thanks to Nah Right)
MP3: Bun B ft. Lupe Fiasco-”Swang On ‘Em”
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 3 Comments »
May 13th, 2008
North Philly-raised 2ew Gunn Ciz’s Myspace reads: “2ew Gunn Ciz is like Visa. Everywhere You Wanna Be.” It’s not hyperbole either. According to Zilla, Ciz spends less time in the city of Brotherly Love than any other Illadelphian MC, and might be the most successful of the bunch. Indeed, over the past few years Ciz has built a strong subterranean buzz, complete with rumors of an imminent record deal.
Last month, Hip-Hop DX premiered “Crush Rock,” Ciz’s White Stripes-sampling posse cut with Reef the Lost Cauze, M.O.G. and Nico the Beast. Within days it had over 30,000 plays. His latest track, the Zilla Rocca produced “Alter Ego,” hasn’t yet yielded similarly sky-high numbers but I may like it even more. A tale of Ciz’s attempts to elude a persistent female stalker, think of it as more street version of Del or something on the “Strobelite Honey” tip. Put together, the pair of singles ensure that it might be first time I write about Ciz, but probably not the last. Unless, I just decide to write about his alter ego instead.
Download:
MP3: 2ew Gunn Ciz-”Alter Ego” (prod. by Zilla Rocca)
MP3: 2ew Gunn Ciz ft. Reef the Lost Cauze, M.O.G & Nico the Beast-”Crush Rock”
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 2 Comments »
May 13th, 2008
Last year when Sasha-Frere Jones wrote his now-infamous piece on the whiteness of indie rock, he repeatedly included the phrase “miscenegation” to describe the cross-pollination of sound between black and white music. The diction seemed deliberate, a molotov cocktail designed to rile up the chattering classes and leave them more discombobulated than someone with melanin at a Vampire Weekend concert. It was funny in a way. After all, few things are more comical than watching a bunch of white-guilt saddled liberals squirming with difficult topics like the intersection of race, class and music as though Al Sharpton had to vet every word beforehand.
Ultimately, it was a ballsy essay with some valid points and some not-so-valid ones. Despite their obvious talent, I’ve quite often found myself disinterested in the more vanilla “indie groups” like The Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie* and Sufjan Stevens, who Frere-Jones rightfully declared lack, “swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies-in other words, attributes of African-American popular music. “But as Carl Wilson’s excellent Slate rebuttal, pointed out, “indie-rockers” like “Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem and Spoon,” fuse indie-slanted guitar rock with soul, funk and R&B, to produce music so danceable that it conned my reverse-racist sense of rhythm into getting down. Not bad.
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May 12th, 2008
Sexuality sounds very much like what I’d expect to hear from American Apparel CEO Dov Charney were he ever to move to France and record a synth-pop album: sleazy, a little derivative yet surprisingly stylish. I’ve been enjoying this record for the past few months but haven’t been motivated to write about it, mainly because there are only so many jokes I can make about the Gallic appetite for sexual lecherousness (this is a total lie, I can make Marquis De Sade jokes all day long, don’t push me people). Luckily, my ex-Stylus colleague, the very tall and very technically precise Andrew Gaerig wrote a very good review of the record for Pitchfork today, contrasting Tellier to the G.O.A.T. of all French sexual deviants, Serge Gainsbourg. Read the review, download the tracks below and ruminate on the inevitability of the French coining a term as ubiquitous as, “menage a trois.”
Download:
MP3: Sebastian Tellier-”Roche” (Removed by Label Request)
Sebastian Tellier-”Kilometer” (Removed By Label Request)
MP3: Sebastian Tellier-”Divine (Midnight Juggernauts Remix)”
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | No Comments »
May 12th, 2008
Goals for the remainder of the year: Stop writing articles for the LA Weekly involving the phrase, [Random Band] is the Best [Insert Hyperbolic Superlative Here]. That said, I get hopelessly stannish when talk turns to Arthur Lee and Love, in particular their masterpiece, Forever Changes, which was just re-issued by Rhino last month complete with a new alternate mix and a few obsessives-only outtakes.
The article makes the case for Love as Los Angeles’ greatest band based on how perfectly they capture the way the city feels (no, not over-tanned and bloated with excess, that would be Ratt). If you haven’t heard Forever Changes, I can’t recommend anything more, save for possibly yoga on weed. So the morale of the story is probably to listen to Forever Changes while smoking a blunt and stretching. I think that last sentence indicates that I may need to move. Soon.
LA Weekly: The Doors? Black Flag? The Chili Peppers? Nope, LA’s Best Band Was Love
Buy Love-Forever Changes (Collector’s Edition)
Download:
MP3: Love-”Maybe the People Would Be the Times Or Between Clark and Hilldale”
MP3: Love-”Alone Again Or”
Bonus Track:
MP3: Love-”Your Mind And We Belong Together”
Posted in LA Weekly | 11 Comments »
May 9th, 2008
When ex-Just Blaze proteges, Kidz in the Hall released their debut album, School Was My Hustle on the newly revived Rawkus Records, I didn’t listen to it for a variety of reasons. Chief among them was the “Ivy League Rap” label critics ascribed to the duo of Nawledge and Double-O. Still scarred from having heard Brown grad MC Paul Barman, I figured Ivy League Rappers were the last thing the world needed, besides something seemed corny about Kidz in the Hall’s insistence on trumpeting their Penn degrees and posing for their album cover in letterman’s jackets.* And by all accounts, their debut seemed stuck in the “conscious” neo-Native Tongues albatross that has flapped over indie rap since Rawkus’ first-go-around. To say nothing of the fact that one of the Kidz’ had the audacity to bestow himself with a rap name as openly condescending as Nawledge.
But that was two years ago, an eternity in rap time. In the interim, something people persist on calling “hipster rap” has come into vogue, an inane classification that Kidz in the Hall have roundly rejected (like the Supreme Court and prior restraint.) But no matter how vehemently they deny such labels, there’s a bit of truth to them, as the retro-aesthetic dominates the very funny and very good video for “Drivin’ Down the Block,” the jump-off single from The In Crowd, the Kidz’ new record slated to drop next week on Duckdown Records. **
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May 8th, 2008
The other day, I received a phone call from official Passion of the Weiss, Secretary of Shadowboxin’, Barry “Disco Vietnam” Schwartz. In between Barry’s lectures on why the dumb are mostly intrigued by the drum and why I need to stop haranguing U-God, he asked me if I’d heard the new Busta Rhymes song.
I answered no, as other than “Goldmine,” his pretty great 2006 collabo with Raekwon, I haven’t taken Busta seriously since he decided to re-invent himself as a Pablo Escobar-like coke dealer, one who had apparently forgot the fact that he anchored “Scenario.” But when I finally heard, “Don’t Touch Me (Throw Da’ Water on ‘Em),” it was fairly clear that this is the best Busta cut since the days when he used to don dresses and bake brownies with Martha Stewart. To paraphrase Barry, sometimes an artist, even one as presumably washed-up as Busta hears the right beat, gets inspired and the next thing we know, he’s produced something comparable to his past glories.
So as long as Busta doesn’t ultimately reveal that “Don’t Touch Me” is a bizarre, anti-gay manifesto, its got a reasonably good shot at ending up as one of my top singles of the year. MP3’s are below, complete with instrumental, which means that one of the MC’s reading this (I know you’re out there), should hit it with your best shot like Pat Benatar. I promise this will be the first and last Pat Benatar joke I ever make. Good day.
Download:
MP3: Busta Rhymes-”Don’t Touch Me (Throw Da Water On Em)”
MP3: Busta Rhymes-”Don’t Touch Me Instrumental”
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 7 Comments »
May 8th, 2008
After Tuesday night’s Atmosphere show, I’m convinced that it’s high-time we retired the label, “underground hip-hop.” Like “indie rock,” before it, the term has ceased to have any real meaning. When the phrase first started to gain currency in the mid-to-late 90s, it actually referred to something specific: the Rawkus/Rhymesayers/Def Jux/Quannum/Fondle ‘Em stuff that outwardly bucked the mainstream, big Willie posturing. But in 2008 there’s no mainstream to speak of. Rappers that move units: Kanye, 50, Wayne, are as pop as they are hip-hop.* And when a guy like Slug can sell out every date of his West Coast Tour, be named MTV Artist of the Week and debut at #5 on the charts, it’s a sign that the lines have grown hopelessly hazy. A dub or a sendspace link to Black and White in Dub to the first person who thinks of a clever genre catch-phrase that I can co-opt. Act now while supplies last.
As for the show, it was solid. Slug’s always been an impressive rapper and even though he’s arguably past his prime, he still can bring it on-stage. Moreover, I was stunned by how rabid his fan base has gotten. I saw them in October but this time felt more triumphant, a victory lap with both crowd and artist semi-stunned by the group’s recent trajectory. And yes, in case you were wondering, Ant still looks eerily like Burt Reynolds on Celebrity Jeopardy.
*Don’t argue with me Wayne fanboys. Granted, I know that new cut with Bun B features dope rapping but still, this exists.
LA Times: Atmosphere Flying High
From When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold
MP3: Atmosphere-”Puppets”
MP3: Atmosphere-”Yesterday”
Posted in LA Times | 5 Comments »
May 7th, 2008
According to Portishead producer Geoff Barrow, the group’s latest jaunt was purely influenced by old hip-hop: “Public Enemy, Marley Marl, EPMD, Flying Lotus and Madlib. So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Zilla Rocca decided to go in over III’s lead single, “Machine Gun.” The result is dazzling, a fast and furious stab over the beat’s cold industrial drums and Beth Gibbon’s ethereal banshee wail. Or as Rae so aptly put it on “It’s Yourz: “machine gun raps for all my n—z in the back.” Y’know the kind of stuff to listen to while rocking a fly jersey in the summertime, god.
Download:
MP3: Zilla Rocca-”Machine Gun Remix”
MP3: Portishead-”Machine Gun”
Video: Portishead-”Machine Gun”
Posted in Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought? | 4 Comments »
