January 19th, 2010
Almost two years ago, I visited San Francisco for the first time. With its ideal climate, friendly people, and easy access to hallucinogenic drugs (not to mention the two beautiful girls who admitted they were on acid while hitting on me outside of Rickshaw Stop), it quickly became one of my favorite cities in the world, and the one I would move to if I ever decided to leave the comfort and occasional weed of the Pacific-Northwest.
Judging from the Best Records of 2009 feature, you may have noticed that we’re all down with the psych-garage scene coming out of the city by the bay. Though psychedelic prom band Girls, San Francisco’s chief musical export of the moment, is easily the most divisive of the lot, there are a ton of bands agreed upon: Wooden Shjips. Ty Segall. Citay. Sic Alps. The Fresh and Onlys. The Mantles. Given the aforementioned access to controlled substances, it’s only appropriate that all of the acts mentioned, despite the approach being varied from band-to-band, employ a very “specific” sort of sound, the same specifics historically ascribed to Bay Area bands since the acid test days.
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October 19th, 2009
Are we all tired of lo-fi, yet? Has the practice of some asshole holing up in his garage or basement or parents’ summer house and piling distortion on top of a couple– and, if said lo-fi artist is a virtuoso, maybe even three– chords and a vocal melody so half-assed that it makes Stephen Malkmus sound like Mariah Carey finally reached its point of over-saturation? Perhaps it was Nathan Williams of Wavves basically turning Pitchfork into a hipster TMZ, Dum Dum Girls signing to Sub Pop, music fans over the age of 16 using the rather abhorrent term “shitgaze,“ or the audible slap on my forehead when a kid at the bar was schooling his friend on some really cool up-and-coming band called Sebadoh, but it’s totally understandable if you feel lo-fi has put on the Fonz’s leather coat with some swim trunks and jumped the shark. With the way things are going for the genre, you could very well anticipate Jay-Z showing up at a Wooden Shijps show, or Kanye bigging up Ganglians on his blog.
But then, something funny happened on lo-fi’s unlikely trip to the bank; the best band got lost in the shuffle.
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August 20th, 2009
The Next Spot is a recurring series dedicated to the albums that could’ve, would’ve, should’ve made the Decade Top 50.
Up in our merger, there’s foul murders
Turkeys to cow-burgers, the code of our murder
Child, if you style or a wild splurger
Stay away, okay? Mr. Giles will hurt ‘ya.
If there was ever a mission statement for The Diplomats, who– let’s not kid ourselves– pretty much ran New York during the early part of this turbulent decade, the opening bars of “DJ Enuff Freestyle” should be their butcher-shop mantra. Or maybe, “This is a movement, this is a union/This is more than what you people call ‘music’.” Diplomatic Immunity, less a double-disc album and more accurately a compilation of the best moments of Diplomats 1 & 2, which redefined rap bootleg culture by popularizing the single-artist mixtape. Carried by the record’s two star-players– one a longtime NYC rap underdog finally getting close enough to reach the city’s throne, the other a young gun-slinger given the opportunity to shoot from the front seat– Diplomatic Immunity was a coming-out party (I don’t think the term “no homo” has ever been more appropriate) for two of the most compelling rappers to come out of the city this decade.
The crew obviously starts with Mr. Giles himself, Killa Cam, a man whose joyous disregard for the conventional helped him become not only an enthralling lyricist (“Let‘s get lost in Camby/I got lobster in Boston, Austin/Floss in, of course, Miami“), but a trendsetter (let’s face it, nearly every black dude you know had at least one pair of Air Force 1’s with the pink swoosh). Coming off the heels of the platinum-selling Come Home with Me, for Cam’ron, Diplomatic Immunity was triumphant and celebratory. It was the sound of him sticking his tongue out at the wreckage of the Twin Towers and taking the elevator to the top of the Eifel. “You’ll get side-swiped, look at my life/First movie ever, murked out Mekhi Phife.“ Behind a cocky smirk and under an Osh-Kosh B’Gosh bucket hat(!), you can smell the champagne from the locker room celebration on his breath in almost every verse; two arms up, touchdown.
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August 14th, 2009
The Next Spot is a recurring series dedicated to the albums that could’ve, would’ve, should’ve made the Decade Top 50.
“My wife don’t like my album,” sneers Ryan Montgomery– better known as Royce da 5’9”– on the closing track on Death is Certain, “Something’s Wrong with Him”, “It’s way too dark for women, she say it sounds like I hold grudges. She’d rather listen to Joe Budden.”
Before Nickel-Nine would form Slaughterhouse with the target of the punch line immediately following his wife’s 75 or less review, he was all alone. Of course, D-Elite, his obligatory rap entourage, was lurking in the shadows, but Death is Certain is primarily the document of a preternaturally-talented rapper deserted by peers, fans, and friends (mainly longtime Bad Meets Evil partner Eminem and his D-12 crew)–Nas before he dropped “Ether.”
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June 30th, 2009
Over the next two days, we’ll be unleashing exactly what the word doesn’t need: more Michael Jackson tributes. First up, Douglas Martin will be starting something.
Sometime during either 1987 or 1988, I was standing on a playground. Clad in a black shirt, one of those plastic fedoras that came with an old Halloween costume, and high-water pants that showed a pair of white socks, I turned the boombox on. The drum fill at the beginning immediately turned every head within earshot as I did a little front-kick and started strutting around the blacktop. Halfway through the first verse, everyone on the playground stood three feet away from my stage. Parents off in the distance kept an eye and a safe distance away, but the idea of a four-or-five-year-old Douglas Martin lip-syncing, “I’ll pick you up in my car,” made them chuckle aloud.
I was at full-swing by the time the chorus came up, and was unexpectedly joined by a couple of new friends eager to sing backup during the call-and-response chorus. Upon the breakdown, I stomped my feet on every downbeat, screaming, “GO ON GIRL!” as six girls around my age strutted past me, waving their makeshift fans made of wide-ruled notebook paper, all shimmying to the drums. The thing I undoubtedly miss most about my prepubescent life is that I could nail those “hee-hee’s” every single fucking time. By the last note, the enraptured playground audience gave me a round of applause. I probably would have gotten a standing ovation if they, um, weren’t already standing.
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June 23rd, 2009
There’s no right way to write about your friends’ music. Gush effusively and you look like a fawning cheerleader. Ignore it and you do a disservice to the people that should matter the most. That said–conflict of interest aside–The Slow Twilight is not only one of the finest indie-rap records of recent vintage, but it’s a flat-out great record.
You probably know Zilla Rocca and Douglas Martin from their various blogs, their Clean Guns and Fresh Cherries from Yakima material, and occasional contributions to this website. They’re two of the most uniquely gifted talents I’ve encountered in my nearly four years of blogging, and The Slow Twilight is the finest manifestation yet of their prodigious talents.
In some small way, this site helped incubate The Slow Twilight, and I had the privilege of A&R’ing the project from start-to-finish. I’m still not sure exactly what that title entails, as no money was exchanged, and my entire creative input seemed to consist of little more than, “you need to re-do that hook.” However, I’m proud to have played even a small role in helping bringing this album to life.
Sach O will write a more comprehensive and un-biased review soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in an excellent album inspired in equal parts by Aesop Rock, the Gza and murky film noirs, I highly recommend downloading The Slow Twlight for free at Zilla Rocca’s Clap Cowards blog or from this link. For those interested, the hyperbolic but sincere one-sheet that I wrote for the album is below the jump.
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March 8th, 2009
For Smell Stans the world over (yes, that includes yours truly), 2009 was shaping up to be a really shitty year for the Los Angeles-based club and its core bands. As suggested in the well-written profile of the DIY performance space by LA Weekly’s Jessica Hopper, No Age has so thoroughly become the poster boys of the vegan sweatbox-diguised-as-a-venue, that even the dudes in the band wonder if their fame is hurting the club. In addition, fair-weather fans of scuzzy-but-infectious noise-punk have seemed to migrate south to San Diego, where a bedroom wunderkind named Nathan Williams (he of Wavves, a solo-project already dubbed “2009’s No Age”) rules the roost. It seems as though fans of The Smell and its effects-pedal-toting stage dwellers needed a boost of confidence over the last couple of months.
Now’s a good enough time as any for Abe Vigoda, the band of migrants from Chino, to step out of the dugout. With the HP ink still fresh on year-end lists rhapsodizing the merits of Skeleton, their fairly impressive debut, the quartet come skateboarding into 2009 with a five-song EP– titled Reviver– that, despite its brevity, offer more even more left-turns than their LP.
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February 5th, 2009
Douglas Martin is all-too-aware of the irony that if Run DMC emerged today in those pants, they’d be labeled hipsters.
Let’s take it back to 1989. I was living with my biological mother, a first-generation rap fan, who would blare Run DMC and LL Cool J cassette tapes upon my arrival home from school. I’d bob my head trying to figure out the differences between addition and subtraction, and life was good. 1991 is when shit started to get tricky.
That was the year I first saw the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and the explosion of compressed and distorted guitar was like an atom bomb going off on my head, layering a mushroom cloud over everything I’d listened to prior. That and “Lithium” had me hooked. For the next several years, one eye watched Kurt Cobain’s shadow, the other scoped Christopher Wallace’s. In the early 90’s, the idea of a scrawny black kid spending days skateboarding to “All Apologies” and nights bumping “The Warning,” elicited a fairly peculiar image. Figuring the kid would grow up to be an experimental-folk singer moonlighting as a hip-hop producer who flips samples from Catpower and The Unicorns, is probably similarly awkward.
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January 6th, 2009
Lyrically, Douglas Martin is Mario Andretti on the mo-mo, whether ludicrously speedy or infectious with the slow-mo.
2008 was a funny year, wasn’t it? We saw Jay-Z strum a guitar, Kanye West (sorta) get his Andre 3000 on, Eminem come out of a nearly-five-year hiatus with a fake accent, and the world’s highest selling record also managed to be weirdest mainstream rap album in recent memory. Of course, the aforementioned examples are merely the tip of the iceberg as far as music-related happenings over the past calendar year. Leave it to your boy Douglas Martin to round up the miscellany that might have whizzed past you over the last 365 with the first-annual (and possibly only-ever) 2008 Award Tour!
DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed herein are solely those of Douglas Martin and not necessarily representative of Jefferson Fitzgerald Weiss or any founding member of Team Passion.
Most Influential Artist: T-Pain
Of course, we could talk about 808’s and Heartbreak or “Lollipop” or the 554,832 R&B songs that featured Auto-Tune this year, but when you even have Bon Iver getting in on the act, too, then you ought to be considered a trailblazer in your field.
Best Song About Public Indecency: “So Everyone” by Bonnie “Prince” Billy
Runner Up: Usher’s “Love in this Club”
Best Punchline (Hip-Hop): “When off the purple and greens/I’m higher than the jeans on Urkel” - Elzhi (from “Motown 25″)
Best Punchline (Rock): “Romance is the douche of the bourgeoisie” - Silver Jews (from “San Francisco B.C.”)
The “Kwame and Them Fuckin’ Polka Dots” Rapper-As-Punchline Award: Yung Berg
Come on. Dude got clowned twice in “Slaughterhouse” alone!
Best Conflict-of-Interest of the Year: Zilla Rocca’s Bring Me the Head of Zilla Rocca
Yeah, yeah, yeah; Zilla’s our people. But do YOUR buddies make mixtapes that can reference both Sunset Park and high school Honors English reading staple Lord of the Flies? Can YOUR friends rhyme their ass off with as much gusto, charisma, and flat-out skill as Zilla? If so, we’d probably blog about him, too.
Best Band Name of 2008: Jay Reatard
Runner Up: Fucked Up
Best Way to Piss Off Your Neighbors: Times New Viking
Runner Up: “A Millie”
The “Let’s Be Like U2 Again” Award: Coldplay’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends
Runner Up: Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head
Download:
MP3: A Tribe Called Quest-”Award Tour”
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November 10th, 2008
Douglas Martin normally blogs at Fresh Cherries from Yakima. He has never been to Yakima, but he can do the Watusi.
Being the world’s foremost blipster sure is a thankless job. Ever since I was given the opening quote in that infamous January 2007 feature in the New York Times about that new, cutting-edge subculture that long before had merely been known as “Afropunk” or “Tight Pants Wearin’-Ass Negroes” or whatever, my life’s been a whirlwind of dust, from being a public representative of Pacific-Northwestern black kids who listen primarily to art-punk, to receiving potshots on Gawker about being 23 and recording a folk-rock album. Now, I’m 25, have graduated from “folk-rock” (which was erroneous even as it was being printed) to “avant folk-pop” (hipsters are nothing if not arty individuals, right?), and am still unsigned. Thanks for nothing, Gawker.
In the two years since I became a footnote in the bowels of American popular culture, there has been a wellspring of blipsters springing up all over the place, as well as one of the most divisive scenes in rap history, “Hipster-Hop,” which comes across as some sort of backwards-reverse-racism sort of thing, where rappers do crazy, unprecedented things like not wear baggy jeans and chains, essentially discounting the “blackness” of these groups for not adhering to racial stereotypes. As I’ve learned from the four sentences written about me in The New York Times which quickly read like a pitch for an ABC Afterschool Special, the basis of the term “Hipster-Hop,” just like the term “blipster,” proves that some journalists are so silly.
So, for my first of my (hopefully many) columns for Passion, I thought I’d do a service for the blogging community by comparing and contrasting the blipsterness of the leading artists in the Hipster-Hop scene. Lace up those dingy Chuck Taylor’s people. It’s go time:
EXHIBIT A: KIDZ IN THE HALL
PROS: Double-O and Naledge apparently met at the University of Pennsylvania after a talent show, forming Kidz in the Hall and recording an album called School Was My Hustle. The irony of being college-educated and having a phonetically-spelled group name has “hipster” written all over it. They released an album called The In Crowd, which has a bevy of early-90’s hip-hop nostalgia. No wonder critics latched these guys onto the Hipster-Hop scene; some things are just too calculated to make up.
CONS: School Was My Hustle was co-signed by Just Blaze and released by Rawkus Records. The In Crowd was released by Duck Down Records, founded by Boot Camp Clik. Hipsters may know of Just Blaze, from their rarely-listened-to copy of The Blueprint to prove that they do actually enjoy rap. There’s no way a hipster has heard of Boot Camp Clik, no matter how many ironic hip-hop-themed parties they’ve gone to. Plus, Kidz in the Hall’s style is more “Baby Boomer Douchebag Chic” than anything that resembles a hipster these days, but perhaps someone will take a wrong left turn towards Pitchfork and stumble on this post, and adopt this look at their next Williamsburg costume party appearance, in which the guys will get extra points for being ahead of their time.
HIPSTER SCORE: 7.2. The whole “hipster” angle they’re going for is sort of contrived, but being as though contrivance is sort of what the movement is based on, it comes across as weirdly well-played.
EXHIBIT B: THE COOL KIDS
PROS: In addition to opening for hipster icon M.I.A., Chuck Inglish and Mikey Rocks have been playing the retro-angle hard, sampling drums, melodies, and even vocals from golden-era hip-hop hits such as “My Posse’s on Broadway” (Seattle, stand up!), all while wearing acid-washed skinny jeans and retro sports gear and shouting out Starter jackets in their rhymes. Genius! Way to bring back Starter like the ill-fated Members Only craze of 2006!
CONS: You get the feeling that if The Cool Kids were an all-white rock band, they’d be touted as “saviors of rock ‘n roll” and all that jazz. But, because they’re a revivalist hip-hop group? Hipsters they are. Plus, they hopped on a track with Lil’ Wayne, and everyone knows that makes you REAL hip-hop!
HIPSTER SCORE: 3.9. However, if they were being solely judged on their fashion choices, they’d get an 8.8 and be inducted into the “Best New Hipster-Hop Music” category.
EXHIBIT C: THE KNUX.
PROS: A pair of Los Angeles-via-New Orleans brothers, Krispy Kream and Rah Al Millio play their own instruments (which includes guitars, people!), wear tight jackets and jeans proudly (namedropping American Apparel in their Passion of the Weiss interview, even), and, by their own admission, have been listening to TV on the Radio since the release of their Young Liars EP. And they have connections to hipster-dance scene demigod Steve Aoki! They have a background in jazz, played in their school’s marching band, and still managed to not get beaten up when they were kids. Their very promising debut, Remind Me in Three Days, is a genre-defying excursion into the world of scenester L.A., with guitars blaring over drum machines as girls snort lines like hypochondriacs drop Airborne in their water. Although they’ve vehemently denounced the term, this is the type of group hipsters could really get behind.
CONS: Not only do they rap very well (name one hipster than can even sorta rap, and Kanye West doesn’t count), but they play their instruments with a high level of technical proficiency. Hipsters that play music value amateurishness and obscure that behind the fact that you’re not “advanced enough” to engage in their art. Not only that, but they are from New Orleans, and both carry the main trait of the city’s natives: they don’t pull punches (once again, see their Passion of the Weiss interview).
HIPSTER SCORE: 7.8. Hipsters love things that are sonically progressive. And they love dudes who wear tight jeans, take it from me.
Download:
MP3: The Cool Kids- Oscar the Grouch (Left-Click)
MP3: Fresh Cherries from Yakima: Flood Party
MP3: The Knux-”Fire”
MP3: The Knux-”Bang Bang”
MP3: The Kidz in the Hall-”Drivin’ Down the Block Remix ft. Pusha-T, The Cool Kids & Bun B
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