I was supposed to have an article on Steinski run today in the OC Weekly and I was going to link to it and everyone was going to have a lovely day discussing old-school hip-hop mix-masters who paved the way for DJ Shadow and The Avalanches and that Girl Talk guy who gets naked and presses play on his Frankenstein mash-ups and people are like “whoah…it’s ADD…in music form. Far out.” Sadly, it didn’t run. These are the vagaries of journalism and blogging. One moment, you’re attempting to foist off work that you did for an alternative weekly and slapping a few MP3s along with it to grease the palms of your blog readers (it’s not what you think). The next, you’re discover that the article hasn’t run yet and it’s 12:43 a.m. and you just watched the Celtics pwn the Lakers despite Paul Pierce having a gimp knee and Kendrick Perkins getting knocked out the box the way you would expect a guy named “Kendrick” to get knocked out the box.

So here we are Internet, you and me and a whole lot of Nigerian Funk that I’m playing to console myself over the Game 1 loss, desperately trying to quell my thoughts about why in god’s name Lamar Odom was sitting on the bench with four minutes to play and why Sasha Vujacic thinks its acceptable to shoot every time he touches the ball* and more importantly why he thinks its okay to wear that retarded hair net at all times. The guy’s like a cross between Drazen Petrovic and Lunch Lady Doris and 83 percent of the time, I’m convinced that Lunch Lady Doris could play better D.

But I digress. We were talking about Nigerian afro-beat music and I was going to tell you how good the Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump compilation is. It was released on Strut last month and like everything else the label has done over the past few years, the latest installation of the Nigeria 70 series is tremendous. I know I say that about every 1970s funk compilation that I write about but I’m pretty sure that across the globe, the me decade was just an incredibly fertile period for music. I suspect this is because they had access to better drugs. I’m only technically allowed to post one track from the album, but as a special bonus in penance for the laziness of this post, I’m giving away the dazzling 18 minutes of “2000 Blacks Got to Be Free,” one of my favorite cuts from godbody Nigerian funk lord, Fela Kuti. One time only. Needless to say, if I were Obama, I would promptly make this my campaign song. Sure, it might freak out the squares, but fuck it.

Happy Friday.

*I assume this is a Slovenian thing?

Stream Nigeria 70

Download:
MP3: Sir Shina Peters and His International Stars-”Yabis”
MP3: Fela Kuti-”2000 Blacks Got To Be Free” (left-click)

Stumble It!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 1:34 am and is filed under Are You From the Lester Bangs School of Thought?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.