Soul Sides-Five Year Anniversary Party, Tonight
May 14th, 2009
All the cool kids are doing it.
In my quest to redeem that last lost post, let me invoke the name of half-Kenyan, half-American benga band, Extra Golden. Among the premier practioners of contemporary afro-beat, they’re living proof that the American legacy of Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, and D.O. Misiani, isn’t entirely the province of a bunch of pencil-necked geeks rocking Lacoste and loafers.
In advance of their show tonight at the Echo, I spoke with guitarist Alex Minoff about the band’s alternately uplifting and tragic history, African music, and the difficulty of getting an American visa. If you’re still looking for tickets, Duke at You Set the Scene still has a pair to give away. Extra Golden will be playing alongside reggae legends, The Meditations. If you don’t want to go, you deserve to watch comical cat videos for the duration of your existence.
LA Times: Extra Golden on African Music, Obstacles, and Obama
Download:
MP3: Extra Golden-”Anyango”
MP3: Extra Golden-”Ok-Oyot System” (Left-Click)
MP3: The Meditations-”There Must be a First Time”
Scrambling around on deadline, and cognizant that with this clip, the site is treading perilously into I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER territory, but I couldn’t resist.
Glenn Beck is the Toby Keith of journalism. Watching Fox News in 2009 is a perversely joyous experience, like watching the Washington Generals furiously flop to the Harlem Globetrotters. Although, I suppose that analogy would mean Harry Reid is Meadowlark Lemon and Nancy Pelosi is Curly Neal. In the meantime, LOL CATZ.
I’ll have another post up later this afternoon. The shark has not been jumped–I think.
Download
MP3: Beck-”Soul Suckin’ Jerk”
It’s playoff time–posting will be light. We will just have to accept this. Sure, I could’ve indulged my pretensions, but I was busy watching Phil Jackson finally break down and give Jordan Farmar and Shannon Brown the minutes they deserve. Winning by 40 is nice, but if you can’t beat an enervated Rockets squad sans McGrady and Yao, not only do you not deserve to win a championship, you don’t deserve to coach a team of seven year-olds at the local YMCA–probably the only players Fisher can guard right now.
Part celebration, part contrite offering, I present Magic Johnson, Norm Nixon, Don Cornelius, and the Soul Train dancers jiving to Earth Wind & Fire. Also attached are three outstanding neo-soul cuts currently earning burn around my solitary apartment, that may or may not contain a chicken. You’ll like them, I promise. Deep funky grooves that even Kurt Rambis could get down to (no Kool and the Gang.)
Download:
MP3: Phenomenal Handclap Band-”Baby”
MP3: Lee Fields-”Problems”
MP3: Myron & E-”Cold Game”
If this and the Dos Equis commercials don’t take home Clio’s, the world is an unholy place. 007-373-5963 better work on the new Punch-Out.
Via Great Scott
Download:
MP3: Emmmy Lou Harris-”The Boxer”
The Joker’s not the next big thing. He already was two years ago, as an 18-year old prodigy straight out of trip-hop mecca, Bristol. Even then, he was initially pegged as a savior of grime, then dubstep. Making beats on Fruity Loops at 14, spinning regularly at 15, always heavily hyped, as far as heavily hyped Anglo-centric dance music goes. But Joker doesn’t really make dance music. Whenever he’s asked, he usually rebuts the labels, explaining, “it’s just Joker, isn’t that enough.”It is.
What’s so thrilling about the Joker’s music isn’t merely the ease with which he flouts genre restraints. Successfully dissecting his beats would require an entire evening–think a skewed geometry of post-Timbaland space-hop, a narcotized successor to Detroit House, the rightful heir to Roll Deep’s throne, or Lee Perry given drum machines, grim weather, and a crop full of bitter British herb.
U-God, a.k.a. Baby Huey, a.ka. Mr. Xcitement, a.ka. the only member of Wu-Tang openly rocking the leather mask that Thora Birch/Enid sported in Ghost World. There is something unsavory about seeing the Clan in suits–like watching dogs play poker, and watching Degrassi High actors become the latest rap sensation. Oh wait.
Not sure what a trussle is. I imagine Mr. Portmanteau intended it to be a combination of a tiff, a tussle, and a truffle. Who doesn’t like Truffles? Who doesn’t like Ghostface? Who doesn’t like this song? I’m not holding my breath for Lamont Hawkins to drop a classic, but Dopium might be the best album title of the year.
Download:
MP3: U-God ft. Ghostface Killah-”Train Trussle”
Too young and initially obsessed with hip-hop to have seen The Dead when they were still Grateful, my communion with the skull and roses is primarily a personal one. The first Damuscus Moment tape: a battered bootleg temporarily loaned by an ex-girlfriend, but hoarded as break-up spoils–dubbed off a radio station in Provo, Utah. Studded with Dylan covers and a broken-down but beatific Jerry–vocals sounding like a man who’d just spent a decade in a desert, guitars glowing and gliding like a shooting star. A type of diseased soul music, simultaneously spiritually nourishing and entrancingly vacant.
This was in my early 20s, right at the moment that Andrew Gaerig once described as, “when [you] become secure enough with [your] music tastes to start buying albums that the kids [you] hated in high school enjoyed.” I never hated hippies–I just didn’t get the appeal beyond the shallow triumph of cheap drugs and a pre-packaged lifestyle. Just because you liked The Dead didn’t mean you had to like Phish and Dave Matthews, and that metal-mouthed kid with dreads who sold oregano to 8th graders and really liked whippets…
There are three albums I’d theoretically want to write a 33 1/3 about: Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit/He Miss Road, Ghostface’s Supreme Clientele, and Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus. 500 words clearly doesn’t cut it, but it’ll have to suffice.
LA Times: Company Flow-Funcrusher Plus Reissue
Download:
MP3: Company Flow-”Juvenile Technique”
MP3: Company Flow-”Simian Drugs”
Photo via The Fader
I know I’ve been scarce. There’s been an avalanche of deadlines, an undisclosed long-term writing project, playoff basketball, and sometimes, days just disappear. There’s too much good music to pay proper tribute. Wooden Shjips, the new Kid Cudi and Playboy Tre mixtapes, Belbury Poly’s From an Ancient Star, and anything Grateful Dead/Ethiopiques have been the soundtrack. During one 36-hour stretch, I seemingly did nothing but pad around a squalid apartment, dilated eyes, dirty coffee mug in hand, writing feverishly while Pig Pen hollered mournful, filthy blues. It was some kind of wonderful.
As is Boosie’s “Loaded,” from his latest, Thug Passion mixtape. Those of you just tuning in to Boosie can’t be blamed. I was a reasonably late convert too, the lamentable result of hearing “Wipe Me Down,” a few too many migraine-inducing times.* But judging Boosie off the strength of “Wipe Me Down,” is like evaluating Joe Buddens strictly from “Pump It Up.”
In the half-decade since coke superseded marijuana as rap’s drug du jour, the potheads of America have suffered from a deficiency of great weed tunes. “Loaded” is the best one since “Blow Treez,” the Red and Meth collabo from Red Gone Wild. Boosie smokes blunts of train wreck and purple kush. If you’ve smoked blunts of train wreck and purple kush, you understand. “Loaded” means too high, but it also means fueled–in the case of this song, it means both, the necessary smoke to get you through another session, and the wobbly feeling you get when you starting losing things and empathizing with Plaxico Burress. There’s a joyful resignation here, acknowledging a creative debt to a drug, but simultaneously singing its praises. At the very least, this will hold you down until Blackout 2 leaks.
* I’ve since come around on “Wipe Me Down,” which is either the result of an increased ability to appreciate a good catch phrase , or just the simple realization that spelling out “B-O-O-S-I-E” is the most entertaining thing in the world.
Download:
MP3: Lil Boosie-”Loaded”
MP3: Lil Boosie ft. Young Jeezy & Webbie-”Ain’t the Same No More”
ZIP: Lil Boosie-Thug Passion Mixtape (Left-Click)
You are currently browsing the Passion of the Weiss weblog archives for May, 2009.