Oh well, whatever, nevermind

Twenty years ago Nirvana's Nevermind came out. The album sold less than Creed, N'Sync, and a lot of other shitty albums, but it changed so much. Pre-Nevermind, rock was dominated by hair bands like Skid Row and Warrant. Mainstream, middle America didn't listen to cool or edgy music. We were still coming out of the Reagan 80s hangover.

Nirvana took the angst and ferocity and sincerity of punk and married it to chunky riffs and strong melodies. It was punk music your dad could listen to, Minor Threat by way of Fleetwood Mac.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" was their first big hit, and it perfectly captured the zietgeist of the era. Teenage boredom and frustration. An entire generation of kids grossed out by the materialism and commercialism of the times, not content to be mere customers anymore. As Fugazi howled on a song released at the same time, "You are not what you own."

I listened to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" over and over and over, until I could no longer listen to it. I still can't That song hasn't held up very well. The rest of the album has. "Lithium" is the perfect distillation of teen boredom and dissatisfaction. "Come As You Are" is a creepy pop song with ominous lyrics. My favorite track, and one of my favorite songs period, is "Drain You." Here Nirvana nails their melody, rage, noise, and  suggestive but obtuse lyrics.



After Nevermind, everything was different. You could no longer tell the hip kids by their record collection. All the effort I had put into defining myself by the music I listened to was negated. Jocks were rocking out to Fugazi and Nirvana. Punk became cool.

Cobain managed to last three years before he crashed and burned. "Grunge" lasted a little longer. Soon there were waves of shitty rock bands with distorted guitars riding the wave that Nirvana started. The sincerity and realness of Nirvana was cynically coopted by record execs and business men eager to sell gen x an identity. By 95, I was tired of being bummed out and started listening to Britpop. But from 91 to 94, grunge was kind and Nirvana were the rulers. I'm not sure any artist could shake things up so much in this fragmented media landscape, where even kids in the stix have access to everything ever made.

Ed Sheeran Review, aka I'm Sorry I Compared You to Justin Bieber

I reviewed Ed Sheeran's + for RapReviews this week. I compared him to Justin Bieber, which may be a little unfair. What I meant was that he did pop R&B in a style not too different from the Beebs. It wasn't meant as a harsh dis. There are a couple songs on the album I liked ok. Including "A Team."



I also reviewed Reggae Gone Country, which is covers of country songs by reggae singers. An odd but interesting CD.

Review Wrap Up

I did a few reviews in the past couple weeks that I forgot to post, including

The Ultimate Soca Gold Collection, which I liked more than I thought I would.

I also reviewed a reissue of one of the first dub albums, Java Java Java Java.

And Greneberg, a project between Oh No, the Alchemist, and Rocky Marciano.

Also bought No Age's last album, mostly on the strength of "Fever Dreaming."

The album so far is pretty incredible. Noisy but melodic at the same time.

The Other Shoe

Fucked Up released the second video from David Comes To Life, for "The Other Shoe." I don't like the video as much as the one for "Queen of Hearts," but it is one of my favorite songs off the album. Musically, it's got a chunky guitar riff that builds and builds into a melodic explosion. Lyrically, it taps into a sense of impending doom that resonates in these crazy times. "We can't be comfortable when the whole thing's about to fall!" screams singer Pink Eyes, followed by the chorus of "We're dying on the inside."

The album is a rock opera about a factory worker in 80s England who falls in love with a radical named Veronica, only to lose her to a bombing and....I'm not sure what else happens. I can't follow the story, in the same way I couldn't follow Tommy or Quadrophenia.  What I love about the album, and the first third especially, is how it channels the feeling of falling in love and losing love. Having your spouse die is one of the worst things you can imagine, and Fucked Up manage to convey that feeling on this album.

The other think I love about David Comes To Life is its mix of power and beauty. It's full of loud guitarists and a singer who sounds like he's gargling glass, but it also contains strong melodies and some moments of genuine tenderness, albeit delivered like a freight train. It's a trick first mastered by Husker Du - the sound and fury of punk backed with actual melodies and emotions that went deeper than wanting to fuck the system. I'm sure Fucked Up's hardcore fan base is upset that they are mellowing out, but they are better for it. I've listened to that album so much I'm starting to burn out on it, which rarely happens to me these days.

Gregory Isaacs and CSC Funk Band Reviews

I did two non-hip-hop reviews at RapReviews recently. The first was CSC Funk Band's debut. They are a funk band made up of people from varied backgrounds, including Gwar and noise rock. They are a little noisy at times, but no doubt great live.

I also reviewed a tribute to Gregory Isaacs. Here's a video of him playing live in 85.

Danny Brown Review

I reviewed Danny Brown's XXX for RapReviews this week. It's pretty amazing. Brown manages to be offensive and witty at the same time, and also drops some deep tracks later in the album. Not safe for mixed company, but definitely worth the download. 

Someone did a video for "Monopoly" using footage from "Repo Man." This has my favorite line in the album: "I'm a smart n%%a that does dumb shit."

Here he is performing the title track live.

Danny Brown - XXX - Die Like A Rock Star - BYOBBQ - BK NYC from Brook Bobbins on Vimeo.

Outside Lands

"Is this the way the future is meant to feel/Or just 20,000 people standing in a field?"

I went to Outside Lands last Sunday. It was my first time going. I am not a huge fan of outdoor festivals, but being as it is within walking distance of my house, I figured I should go.

We got there just in time to see Tune-Yard's set. I have been meaning to check out their stuff for a while, and I'm more convinced than ever. It was an amazing set, a mix of indie rock with heavy African rhythms and some serious vocal chops. The crowd was loving it, and a pit was started with a group of people doing interpretive dances. There were several thousand people watching her, and was great seeing so many people getting into it.

We sort of wandered around for the next couple hours, watching a few minutes of !!!'s set, seeing a little bit of Josh Ritter, a song or two of Little Dragon, before finally settling down to see Major Lazer at  4ish. I was really excited to see them, but instead of doing a Jamaican DJ set, ie toasting, they did an American DJ set, ie spinning MP3s and twiddling knobs on a laptop. Their was a huge crowd (larger than the crowd who came to see Girl Talk, the headliner from the night before). It was nice seeing the crowd jumping in one massive throng, but I wasn't close enough to get into it, and I ended up feeling let down by the whole experience.

Incidentally, Beyonce's new single "Girls Who Run The World" samples Major Lazer's "Pon tha Floor."


Next we headed to the main stage to watch the Decemberists. I am not a fan of them, but they were good live, and Colin Melloy had some good English professor stage banter. I went to check out Beirut at another stage during their set, but was so far back we couldn't really enjoy it. This was the major issue with the festival: it was so crowded that it was hard to get anywhere near the stages, so you ended up in the back surrounded by people talking and half paying attention. It wasn't optimum enjoying conditions, and there was no set we saw besides Tune-Yards that wouldn't have been much improved in a more intimate setting.

There were two headliners: Arcade Fire and Deadmau5. We opted to see the Arcade Fire, who put on a great show, although being so far away we missed a lot of the effect. When I saw them at the Greek a few years ago, a lot of the power of the show was seeing their ten-strong band interact. Instead, we saw whatever close ups the camera men chose to project on the giant screens above the stage. I saw clips of the Deadmau5 show, and it looked pretty amazing. I'm not a fan of his music, but in context, with the light show, it's killer.

We left twenty minutes before the encore, not wanting to fight our way out with sixty thousand people. We managed to catch a 71 that wasn't uncomfortably full, and got home fine. I don't have a burning desire to go to another festival anytime soon, but I'm glad I went.

Bad Brains/New Jim Jones

Two new reviews up this week at RapReviews.

First up, my take on the Bad Brains' self-titled debut.


And then, my take on Dre Dog/Andre Nickatina's debut, the New Jim Jones. My fellow critics thought my rating was too high.

Husker Du Take Two

Bob Mould, ex-Husker Du ex-Sugar, was on Sound Opinions recently, promoting his new book. I used to be a big Bob Mould and Husker Du fan, but lost my love for them in recent years. Underneath his Midwestern nice guy facade, Mould seems like an egotistical jerk. I really didn't like Sugar, and I've found his post-Husker Du output less than impressive.

 I wrote about Husker Due three years ago on this blog and called them bad rock.  I would like to correct that statement. I found a used copy of their 1983 double concept album Zen Arcade at Amoeba recently, and I was blown away by it. I owned a copy on cassette in the 80s, and I liked it, but I had begun to think of it as cheesy and underwhelming, something that wasn't very good taken outside of the context of the time.
Then I listened to the entire thing again for the first time in almost twenty years, and I realized how amazing the record is. It straddles hardcore punk, folk, psychedelic, and pop-infused songwriting in a way that works as a cohesive whole. Even more surprising, the whole thing was recorded in 40 hours, with almost all of the 22 songs being cut after just one take.

It starts off with "Something I Learned Today," a blast of negative energy that adds melody to the hardcore blast.



"Chartered Trips" is one the better pop songs that Husker Du recorded, and proved that they could operate at a slower speed without losing their power.




My favorite song on the album, and one of my favorite punk songs ever, is "I'll Never Forget You," one of the most emotional and passionate songs cut to vinyl.

Seeing them play it live, they almost match the intensity of their early hardcore days, before their music had any discernible notes, much less melodies.


I also found a cheap used copy of Husker Du's last album, Warehouse: Songs and Stories. I had remembered this album being kind of terrible, but it's held up better than I thought. By this point they had totally abandoned punk, going more for a second-rate REM sound, but there are some gems on the disc.


In my earlier post on Husker Du, I had criticized Grant Hart's drumming, which I said lacked a bottom. Seeing them play live made me realize that he plays like a jazz drummer. It's not my favorite sound, but it compliments the music perfectly.

So the point here is, the critics are right: Husker Du were an amazing band. I may not love Bob Mould's later output, but it's hard to argue with the records the Huskers put out.

Chosen Few Crew and Wugazi Reviews

I have two new reviews on RapReviews.

First up is the Chosen Few Crew's Scarlett Letter MCs. They are a positive crew from Las Vegas. On the border of being Christian rap focused enough on hip-hop to make them rappers first.

What won me over to them was the videos on YouTube of them performing live. There are all of these clips of them playing to apathetic audiences in less than optimum conditions with nothing but a prerecorded track and they are giving it their all. Those kids got moxie and I admire 'em for it. Definitely recommended if you are looking for positive, old-school leaning hip-hop.



I also reviewed the Wugazi album. It's worth a download for hip-hop fans who like Fugazi.

Fucked Up and Trash Talk at the Independent, San Francisco

Fucked Up
Trash Talk
The Independent
San Francisco
July 25, 2011

The last real punk show I went to was I think a Cripple Bastards show at a squat in Milan in 2001. It's been a while. But when I saw that Fucked Up were playing a short cab ride from my house, I decided to go by myself to experience them. I saw my financial adviser and hung out with a four year old before the show, which is pretty much the opposite of punk.

Trash Talk opened the set. They are a hardcore band from Sacramento who do the growly screamy thing. I was standing at the edge of the pit, and had just got my eight dollar Makers Mark and was about to take a sip when this big burly dude ran across the room and slammed into me, spilling my drink everywhere. At first I didn't understand what was happening. Why did that guy run into me? What's his problem? Then I remembered - riiiight, I'm at a punk show. Their were a handful of Trash Talk faithful doing their best to keep a ferocious pit going. The rest of the crowd backed off, which caused the lead singer to ask the moshers to drag people into the pit. I can appreciate Trash Talk's frustration with aloof SF crowds, but all I could think of was how uninviting a pit full of buff dudes hitting each other was. If I wanted to be surrounded by that many sweaty male bodies I'd go to a beer bust at the Midnight Sun. There was a nice moment at the end of their set when the singer said "I want you to rush the fucking bar as soon as this song starts! Those fuckers have just been standing there all night. Everyone rushed out of the path of harm. The singer also kept saying "If you know the words, help me the fuck out!" and then would proceed to sing songs that went "Blrallaawwrrrarrararrarar arjararrrraaaarrrra!!!!!!! Their fans dug it.

Fucked Up went on at 10:30. Three guitarists, a drummer, a (female) bassist, and Damien Abraham, a big, somewhat overweight, and very hairy dude. I've always liked him in interviews, and he was great that night. He came off as approachable, funny, and sincerely thankful that we were there. I watched the pit for the first song, realized that it was fully of other wimpy nerdy dudes, and decided, fuck it, I'm going in. So for only the second or third time of my life, I joined a mosh pit, pogoing and swinging into people and yelling into the mic when he raised it over the crowd. At one point he staged dived on me.

It was the most fun I've had at a show in years. It was so cathartic to be screaming and jumping along to the lyrics. When I listen to Fucked Up on my iPod on my way to work, I always want to start jumping up and down, and I got the opportunity to do so without looking like a tool. The crowd was friendly and into it, pulling me up when I fell, keeping stray feet from hitting peoples heads, and having a great time.

I left at 11:30 when they played their last song, missing the encore. I felt like I needed to get back home to sleep. One post script: I woke up the next morning feeling like I had been hit by a truck - my knee and hip and back were killing me. I ran six miles Sunday and felt great after. I pogoed for an hour Monday and felt like shit. What can I say, I'm an old, old man.

Here's them playing "The Other Shoe" live in Germany. A similar scene to what went on last night, only we were more lively. There was something really powerful to be screaming "We're dying on the inside!" along with a hundred other people.

If the 60s Were the 90s

That's the title of a Beautiful People song I've never heard, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. This September marks the 20 year anniversary of the release of Nirvana's Nevermind, for one thing. Spin released a collection of covers, and listening to them I was reminded how revolutionary that album felt at the time. A lot of the things they were singing about: feminism, atheism, questioning masculinity, kissing each other in public - those were simply not done in 1991. There weren't mainstream artists promoting gay rights or singing "Never met a wise man/if so it's a woman." Nirvana opened a lot of doors, and Nevermind remains a classic album. I don't listen to it much today, but "In Bloom" remains one of my favorite songs of all time.

My sister pointed out to me recently that the 90s are to kids today what the sixties were to us as kids: an era twenty years back that we felt no real connection to. Strange to think of it like that.

I've been listening to and writing a review for Wugazi, a mash-up Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy did of Fugazi instrumentals and Wu-Tang acappellas. Which made me go back into my Fugazi records. Especially Steady Diet of Nothing, their 1991 release. Also 20 years old. It was less punk and aggro than their earlier releases, and at the time I found it a little boring, but I love it now. "Reclamation" remains one of my favorite songs, presumably about the abortion debate. "You will carry out your noble actions - we will carry our noble scars."



I'll probably mention this in my review, but listening to the Wugazi album, I was struck by the different approaches each group took to making raw, aggressive music. The Wu took a "fuck all y'all" attitude, reacting, while Fugazi were much more empathetic and sensitive. The Fugazi vocals sound positively wimpy compared to the rough, rugged, and raw delivery of the Wu.

Exhibit A: "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'" (from whence the title of this blog comes):


And still, I relate more to Fugazi than to the Wu-Tang clan, at least in terms of the emotions they are delivering. No doubt because I have more in common with Fugazi than the Wu - middle class white guy and all.

Diplo Review/Dre Dog

I reviewed Diplo's reggae mix Riddimentary at RapReviews this week. It's a decent collection of 80s reggae. I was particularly into the dancehall tracks. Not as good as Diplo's Major Lazer stuff, though. Who I'm seeing later this summer.

I heard an interview with Noz from Cocaineblunts.com on  the Sidebar at Soul Sides  and learned where the name of his blog came from: Dre. Dog (now Andre Nickatina)'s 1993 song "Smoke Dope and Rap." I checked out his 1993 album The New Jim Jones, and it is crazy. It's all about doing drugs, having sex, and being as evil and anti-social as he can possibly be. Hard to defend, yet kind of amazing. He's from SF and still making music.

Babies

My new favorite album is the Babies self-titled debut. The Babies are a collab between a lady from the Vivian Girls and a dude from the Woods. It's jangly, distorted pop, circa 1994. Totally infectious, totally amazing. Sort of like Best Coast only rawer.  You can hear and download "Run Me Over" here.

I also picked up Lee Perry's Dub-Triptych last week. It collects Cloak and Dagger, Blackboard Jungle, and Revolution Dub. I'm most excited about Revolution Dub, which is a rare and amazing set from 1975. It's dub before the cliches of the genre became embedded. There's echo, there's reverb, there are instruments stripped out, but it's more melodic and interesting than a lot of what came later. Excellent studying music.



Oh yeah, I reviewed Daretta's Heavy Mental last week on RapReviews.

Oyoshe Review

I reviewed Oyoshe's Bring Da Noise 2 this week at RapReviews.com. He is a rapper/producer from Naples, Italy who teamed up with some of the East Coast's finest to deliver sixteen tracks of true school rap.

Here's the video for "Deal With It" with Blaq Poet, which is shot in bella Napoli.


I was intrigued enough by Oyoshe to check out some of his other projects, including the first volume of "Bring Da Noise," which is all in Italiano/Napolitano. I've only listened to a few tracks, but so far it is good.

I also ran across a crew from Florence who are doing Odd Future-esque stuff, meno lo stupro. I've given Daretta's "Heavy Mental" a few spins, and I'm liking it. I'm trying to bone up on my Italian, so perhaps listening to Italian rap is a good way to go!

Kreayshawn

There's an interesting article in the NY Magazine on Oakland rapper Kreayshawn. I hadn't paid any attention to her, but here's the short version: she's a skinny white girl with a hood pass who may or may not be bisexual, whose mom was in the punk band Trashwomen, and who has directed videos for some local Oakland street rappers. The controversy surrounding her has to do with whether or not she is authentic, and whether or not she used the n word (in a non-racist context). Part of this is that boring game that white people play where they try to say that other white people more racist and less authentic than they are. White people LOVE that game. It's fucking boring and hypocritical. I'm not saying that white people should go around dropping n bombs, even in non-racist ways, but I also think that black Americans who use the word need to realize that if you refer to black people as niggas ever other second, you can't be that offended when someone outside your race does it.

Frankly, I think the world needs more art-damaged bisexual rappers. Too bad her music is so awful and vapid.



And of course she gets signed to a major label, because what will sell is a cute, quirky white girl rapping. Sort of like a hip-hop Lady Gaga, with music about as interesting. Which is to say, not very.

In totally unrelated news, I saw Tree of Life last night. It's amazing. You should go see it.

Madlib/David Comes To Life

I reviewed Madlib's Medicine Show Vol. 11 this week at RapReviews. It's a collection of random beats and collaborations, many of which are pretty good, but that don't add up to a cohesive whole. One of my favorite tracks is Madlib's rap on this unreleased Jaylib track.



In unrelated news, Fucked Up just released the first video from their new album, with a children's choir singing instead of Pink Eyes. It makes you wonder what the band would be like if they had someone singing instead of shouting. It seems like it is part of a larger movie that the band is making for the album. Brilliance.



Bon Iver's self-titled album came out today. I'm not totally excited about it, mostly because I'm mellow folked-out right about now.

Applejaxx Review

I reviewed Christian rapper Applejaxx's new EP Glow In The Dark this week at RapReviews. If the idea of Christian club rap appeals to you, go seek this out.

Lil B and General Monks

I reviewed two albums last week for RapReviews. The first was General Monks' Each Step Becomes Elevated. It is a collaboration between Planet Asia and Tristate that is sort of a backpack version of the Wu-Tang's street/kung fu hybrid, only substituting Buddhism for the kung fu. The message wasn't totally coherent, but it's a solid disc. And free. Here's the video for "Trouble," one of the better tracks on the album:



I also reviewed Lil B's Red Flame mixtape. I've heard a lot of hype about Lil B, and I gotta say, while I understand why people like him, I'm not a fan. My new philosophy is that time is the most valuable commodity most Americans have, and wasting people's time is disrespectful. Lil B doesn't edit himself, records five songs  a day, and this mixtape is a waste of time. It's entertaining at times, though. Here's "I'm Miley Cyrus." You can actually hear him making up the words as he goes along.



I'm reviewing a Christian rap EP right now. Which makes me wonder: what if Paulie D found Jesus? This:

David Comes To Life

I was in a funk today, and I'm pretty sure it has to do with looking at old family pictures and listening to Fucked Up's new album, David Comes To Life. It's a rock opera about a British factory worker named David who hates his life until he falls in love with a women handing out Leftist leaflets named Veronica. They have a brief period of happiness, then she dies, and..I haven't made it that far into the album. The first few songs are killing me. Just read the lyrics to "Under My Nose."

The wind has changed and now it's brought all the sweetest smells he'd forgot. Not the faintest stench from the old days as it all finally drifts away. Damn those skeptics, harbingers of doom; negative epidemic, followers of Hume. He understands all her needs, and for that she loves him eternally. Syncretism is so natural and they're experiencing something so actual. "My sun is shining, how about yours? It's kind of blinding, burn my eyes pure." It's all been worth it. Now he looks forward to waking up, she's unstuck him from his rut. He couldn't wait to run off and go to sleep and let all his problems make their retreat. "Used to wake up screaming, stolen from our dreams; now I wake up beaming and the world just gleams." With a sense of impending doom that it's all going to end too soon, it's all too good to be true, where the fuck is the other shoe? It's all been worth it


The other shoe he is talking about is her imminent death, referenced in the next song, "the Other Shoe," which begins with Veronica singing "We're dying on the inside." Melodic post-punk, layers upon layers of sounds, and a vocalist who sounds like he's been gargling glass.  Listening to that, looking at pictures of my dead relatives...fuuuuck. 





There are two antidotes. One is garage rock by aging ex-junkies about sexual frustration.
Exhibit a:



The other is 70s reggae. Particularly the combination of wicked groove with pissed off lyrics. Exhibit B, I'm like a walking razor don't you cross my path I'm dangerous.

What I've Been Listening To

I'm back on a reggae kick after a few months of not listening to much reggae at all. I'm not sure what motivates these changes in the music I want to listen to. What does it say about my state of mind that I mostly want to listen to seventies dancehall and roots reggae? As always, it's a slippery slope to go down, because there are literally thousands of records from that era, which means a lot of gems to uncover. I downloaded Prince Alla's Only Love Can Conquer, which is great roots music.

I was sick two weeks ago, and had a sick dream in which Amoeba closed. That dream made me want to give the ailing record store some of my hard-earned scratch before it goes the way of 8-tracks and affordable health care. I bought the Abyssinian's Satta Massanga Deluxe Edition, which collects their debut album (which was not originally called Satta Massanga) and some other tracks. "Satta Massanga" the song was a massive hit, and has been called reggae's national anthem. They were essentially a Rastafari gospel group, and most of their songs are heavily religious and practically sacred. Most reggae artists in the seventies were Rastafarian, but the Abyssinians were the real deal. To be honest, I'm not a fan of "Satta Massanga," but the rest of the album is pretty good, mellow reggae. I'm actually not a massive fan of this vocal group style of reggae. I've had trouble really getting into the Congos, Culture, and Burning Spear for the same reason. Something about the vocal harmonies doesn't quite sit with me. Not to say they aren't geniuses, just that they aren't quite my thing.



What I'm more excited about is far less noble: dancehall. Basically, a dude chatting over a version of an album, usually in a patios that is totally incomprehensible and dropping references I wouldn't understand anyways. One of my favorites is General Echo, one of the original 70s DJs. I came across an album he did as Ranking Slackness called, appropriately, The Slackest LP. "Slackness" means dirty talk, and in the 80s and 90s this came to mean the dancehall equivalent of x-rated gangsta rap. In the seventies, it was more like songs about seeing your dad naked in the bathroom. It's potty humor to the extreme, super childish but also funny in a stupid way. I got a collection of his non-slack reggae called Teacher Fi De Class which is pretty great.

I've also been going back to Jessica Lea Mayfield's Tell Me, which has some incredible moments, and TV on the Radio's 9 Types of Light. Both are really heartbreaking and sad.

Speaking of, Gil Scott-Heron died this weekend. He was sixty-two. He had been struggling with drug addiction for years, and it got the best of him. Sad end to a great musician.

IAME and Scrilicon Reviews

I reviewed two albums for RapReviews this week. The first was Scrilicon's 2 Steps Left of Center. It's an indie release featuring Silicon Valley rappers Scrilla V and John?Doe. I wasn't feeling it, but you can check it out on their bandcamp page and see if it's more to your liking.

The second album I reviewed was IAME's Lame. Think of him as Portland's answer to Atmosphere. It's a solid, ambitious album, best summed up by the video for "Thy Will."



IAME - Thy Will from Wordsmithjr on Vimeo.

Acid Reign Review

I reviewed Acid Reign's Diversity last week for RapReviews. Positive hip-hop from Project Blowed alums. Not to be confused with THIS Acid Reign:



Or THIS "Acid Rain"

Mobb Deep

There is an excellent interview with Prodigy of Mobb Deep on the Sound of Young America this week. He just got out of jail on weapons charges (the downfall of so many rappers), and he talks about his upbringing, how his father was a jazz musician/heroin addict who would take him on heists, and how sickle cell anemia made him hate God.

Mobb Deep's 1995 album The Infamous is considered a classic. It's dark, cold-as-ice New York gangsta rap, sort of like a more realistic and cold-blooded Only Built For Cuban Linx. It's so dark and dreary and hopeless that I have a hard time listening to the whole thing, although it's powerful in small doses. It came out when they were 19, and they seem like babies rapping such sinister lyrics.

Vast Aire and the Aztext Reviews

I reviewed Vast Aire's OX 2010: A Street Odyssey this week on RapReviews. Vast Aire was/is one half of legendary underground NY crew Cannibal Ox, who released one classic album,a  few eps, and not much else. They've been threatening to make another record for five years. This disc is solid, and will please his fans.
Nomad is one of the better songs on the album.


I also reviewed the Aztext Who Cares If We're Dope Volume Three EP. This time the duo is working with XPL, and is trying out some slower jams.

Hole

I was obsessed with Hole's 1991 debut Pretty On The Inside when I was in high school. It was dirty, nasty, druggy, and nightmarish, a muddy wave of grinding guitars and Courtney Love's banshee howls. A tormented mix of ugly noise and tormented screams and hints of melody. Brilliant.





Love was ugly in a way that few females were in 1991. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth was tough and cool, but Courtney went one further, laying it all out there. While still being sort of sexy. Kate Bjelland of Babes in Toyland (terrible name, not much better band) accused her of stealing her babydoll style, but Courteny worked it better.


I liked Live Through This, the follow up, even though it lacked the edge of Pretty On The Inside. When punk loses its rawness, the result is often bad rock, which definitely showed its face on Live Through This. "Ms. World" seemed calculated to play on MTV, and it did, and Hole made it big.

Love has always wrestled with demons, and has often been a train wreck that everyone like to watch and laugh at. After melting down post Live Through This, she cleaned up, got made over, and got her shit together. The resulting album, Celebrity Skin, wasn't great, but the title track is one of my favorite songs.
She's rocking a new look, working the crowd like a pro, and seeming more like a rock star than a punker.



I stopped following Love at that point. She's released solo albums, Hole has reportedly rejoined, I don't care.
I briefly got excited about the Distillers six years ago, when it seemed like singer Brody Dalle was following in Hole's footsteps. Then I lost interest. I still dig out Coral Fang every once in a while. Like scratching a scab, in a good way.



All of this led me across a rare live video of seminal riot grrrl band Bikini Kill doing "Orange Julius" live in Nebraska. I love this song. Reject All American and their collection of singles are both pretty amazing. And they have some good song titles.


"I believe in the radical power of pleasure, babe, I do I do I do."

An old story

I wrote this seven years ago and just found it on an old blog I had. Some details have been changed and names omitted to protect the guilty.

My friend M had skin cancer that metastasized and spread all over his body, so he ended up in St. Mary’s Hospital on chemotherapy and all that and his friends decided to throw a benefit for him and for their other friend who had a brain tumor. It had a tumor theme and M designed the flyers, but didn’t make it to the party because he was too sick. When I was young and 21 and drinking too much and staying out too late, no one mentioned brain tumors or cancer. Our worst problems were hangovers, and even those weren’t as bad as they are now, and our idea of being broke still allowed us to go out three or four nights a week.

I had met M through my friend C at a party in the South of Market that we went to that was kind of disappointing, but we didn’t really care because we were all pretty drunk on booze and camaraderie and singing Judas Priest songs. Me and M had grown up on punk rock, and we would reminisce about seminal bands like X and the Minutemen, who on second thought weren’t really that seminal because no one really sounds like them because no one really listened to them, which is probably why we like them so much. M had this slow, staggered way of talking, and had kind of a California twang, because he was raised in Berkeley, and he would say things like “Wohl, fuckin’, like, Fear were like, fuckin’ the ultimate punk band.” Marcus also had dubious taste in movies and so I was suspicious about his recommendations of both the Fight Club and the Matrix, but I liked them both.

He did animation and dated a beautiful 19-year-old, even though he was 34, and once drew an anime chick on the message board of my old house during a party, next to notices to pay Shannon for the electricity bill. He had a lot of tattoos and used to have a drug problem so we forgave his overindulgence in the drink as the lesser of two evils.

He was all into Burning Man and had these friends who were part of a something called the Space Cowboys who put on an event called Space Lounge which I never went to because I wasn’t really into that kind of thing, I mean the bleep-bloop music and everyone being so fucking happy and the drugs. I was more into going to shows and complaining about how derivative and lame they were and how stupid scenesters were.

It was the Space Cowboys who threw the benefit party. It was in an old church in the Mission, right around Halloween 2001. I was still freaking out about September 11, and it was the first time I had really gone out since all that badness happened; The planes crashing into buildings and our reaction to it, Bush preaching biblical revenge, and the liberals being totally ineffectual and that horrible feeling that something really really bad was happening, and losing faith in my country and not being able to do anything about it.

The night of the party I was tired and felt lazy and didn’t want to spend the 20 bucks to get in, but I knew it would be worth checking out, and I had invited this cute Australian girl, so I dragged my sorry ass out. There was a live fire show out front, but we waited in line to get in.

I went for the retro look, wearing my rust colored plaid jacket and brown hat. I knew I didn’t have any appropriate clothes, and so opted to totally not fit in rather than try to and fail miserably. The crowd was typical of those kinds of events in those days; ecstasy-damaged graphic designers and computer programmers and webmasters who walked that fine line between artist and dork, yuppies with better taste in drugs and music than their khaki-wearing brethren clogging the bars of the Marina, foreign-exchange students, party girls, and aging hipsters, we being in the latter category. Girls dressed as sexy nurses sold cheap drink tickets, and all the organizers were dressed as mad doctors. Some of the crowd had decided to dress in theme. There were tons of dj’s playing house music, but both of us were more into dancing to rock or old soul, so we went outside to watch people smoke and be able to hear ourselves talk.

C and I were both in grad school as a way to put off getting a real job, he in the humanities and I in history, and we would talk about music like we were writing our graduate thesis on it. We couldn’t just think that, say, X’s “Los Angeles” was a great song. We had to deconstruct it and analyze it within the context of L.A. at the time and the racism there and the white flight. Which would lead us to Fear’s homophobia and Quentin Tarantino’s bogus use of the word “nigger” as if racism never happened. I think it scares the uninitiated, those people who have the audacity to just like the music they like without considering its past and future and its place in the history of popular music and youth culture and the politics of the time and take it all with a seriousness that probably belies some gnawing emptiness in our lives.

A friend of C’s from Berkeley was there, and he was married and had a kid, which was weird for us because neither of us were even self-sufficient, much less organized enough to take care of another sentient being. But it was also kind of cool, especially in the environment of the party, because we felt like we were part of a new, alternative generation, one full of nice, good people who weren’t part of the shitty, greedy, consumeristic and stupid mainstream who were plastering American flags on their cars and pouring out their French wines and eating freedom fries and voting on American Idol. It was a world miles apart from all the embarrassment and horror that greeted us when we watched the news.

In a lot of ways the party was a very punk rock thing, or at least was the kind of thing punk rockers would aspire to do, only if they did it the music would have been suckier and everyone would have had to pretend it was lame and there wouldn’t have been as many cute girls and they wouldn’t have been dressed as well and everyone would have been drunk on cheap beer or fucked up on speed rather than drunk on vodka tonics and fucked up on E.

 (I went to a hardcore show in Milan a few years ago, and all the crusty anarcho-punks [called “punkabestia” in Italian, literally “Punk animal”] were staggering drunk and dressed the same and had the same dreads and the same type of mutts on the same rope leashes and I asked myself, “so this is the revolution?”)

By two a.m. me and C were drunk and tired and wanted to go home. Both of us felt too old and too tired and we had things to do the next day for school. Which we wouldn’t end up doing anyways.

So I left as everyone else was just coming, and went home four hours before the event ended, to sleep fitfully and wake up feeling tired, elated, and a little disappointed, because something great could have happened to me that night but didn’t.

M died a year later, and I didn’t go to his informal wake, which was held at the Wherepad in the Mission, because I felt like I didn’t know him THAT well, and it would be fake, and C wasn’t around to go with me. I had only been to one wake in my life, and I didn’t like it. My reaction to being sad was to get angry at the rest of the mourners, and when I wasn’t doing that I was breaking down and spilling tears in my coke. But now I regret not going because even if M wasn’t my best friend, he was still a good guy, and I find myself missing him.

What I've Been Listening To

I have an 8 gig iPod mini, so what I choose to put on it says a lot about what I'm into at a particular moment. Right now hip-hop is winning out with 220 songs. I've been listening to a lot of hip-hop lately. I have the new Vast Aire (of Cannibal Ox fame) to review, and I'm also working on reviews of the new Aztext ep, and have been meaning to review Open Mike Eagle's Unapologetic Art Rap and Madlib's last album for about three months. I also got Pharaoh Monche's new album, which has convinced me that I respect him more than I like him. Maybe if I listen some more.

The album that has been getting heavy rotation is Has-Lo's In Case I don't Make It, which I reviewed last week. I complained in my review of how it was a downer and dragged towards the end, but it has stuck with me. He's a great if understated album, and it is a heartbreaking album. In the same vein, I bought OC's Word...Life. He was a contemporary of Big L and part of the Diggin in the Crates crew, only where Big L excelled at bravado and wicked one liners, OC is a much more thoughtful rapper. I've only given it a few spins, but already I love it.

I'm also loving Big L's Lifestylez Ov Da Poor and Dangerous. I wrote about it a while ago, but it has stayed on heavy rotation. It's classic 90s East Coast gangsta rap in the vein of the Notorious BIG or Nas, but without the remorse. Big L is rude, crude, and raps about robbing and killing people in the most creative way possible. Here are just a few choice lines:
"This ain't Cali, it's Harlem, nigga, we do walk bys"
"Me bein' a virgin, that's idiotic/cuz if Big L gots the AIDS every cutie in the city got it"
"I wasn't poor, I was Po'/I couldn't afford the O-R."

On a less offensive note, I have also been listening to the new TV on the Radio. I had decided I didn't like them that much after I lost interest in their last album, Dear Science. My problem with them is that they are too complex, and there is too much going on in their songs. Which is an idiotic thing to complain about. Nine Types of Light is a mellower album, but their instrumentation, songwriting, and sound is so rich and rewarding. I'm a fan.

Here's a video someone made for my favorite song on the album, "Keep Your Heart."

Deadverse Massive and Has-Lo Reviews

I reviewed Deadverse Massive's The Takeover for RapReviews this week. It's dalek's crew, an underground rapper I never messed with because I thought he was weirdo art rap. Instead, this is grimy East Coast circa 1995. I was into it. You can find a fan video for their first single here.

I also reviewed Has-Lo's In Case I Don't Make It. It's a heavy, somber record that drags in places but is totally worth it for tracks like "Everything Is."

J Rocc and King Louis Reviews

I reviewed King Louis's Hits In My Sleep mixtape for RapReviews this week. I'm not a big fan of these kinds of mixtapes, but I liked King Louis well enough to write about him.

Here's "Yo":



I also reviewed J Rocc's Some Cold Rock Stuf. It's a great instrumental hip hop album, mixing elements of trip-hop, electronica, old school, and latin funk into the mix.

Eric Dolphy

Madlib titled one of the tracks on his Advanced Jazz mixtape "Dolphy," which got me investigating just who this Dolphy character is.

Turns out he was a multi-instrumentalist who worked with Coltrane (among others) before branching out as a leader, producing several amazing albums, and then dying tragically young.

I got Out There, which I really enjoy, but it's Out To Lunch which is his true masterpiece. Take "Hat and Beard."


It's starts off as standard bouncy sixties jazz, complete with vibraphone. But something is off: the drums seem to be keeping their own beat, and the whole thing is off kilter. When his sax comes in, it's doing the scree thing that Ayler and Coltrane and Coleman and Sanders were experimenting with. The whole thing is accessible yet  freaky. No wonder a lot of traditionalists dismissed his music.

I can't tell you how much I love this album. I have been listening to it incessantly for the past two weeks. I got it at the same time I got Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, and I like Out To Lunch more.Not that Kind of Blue isn't genius in its own right, but Dolphy's avant weirdness is much more interesting to me than Miles's restrained cool.

The picture, by the way, is stolen from here, which has a great bio of the man.

Animal Farm and Quanstar

I did two new reviews for RapReviews last week. The first was for Animal Farm's Culture Shock. They are a positive hip-hop crew from Portland doing music in the vein of Ugly Duckling and Jurassic 5. I wasn't totally feeling it, but fans of the aforementioned bands should check them out.

The other review was for Quanstar's 4/11 ep.He''s an indie rapper who self-produces his stuff, and raps grown man raps over quiet storm beats. Interesting.

Kyle Rapps Review

I reviewed Kyle Rapps Re-Edutainment EP on RapReviews two weeks ago.

Good positive hip-hop, modeled somewhat after BDP's Edutainment album. Which I owned but sold.
Like this video, the album is colorful and a little corny.


"Love's Gonna Get You" from Edutainment:

Charles Mingus Review

Originally posted on RapReviews.com at http://www.rapreviews.com/archive/2011_04_blacksaintand.html


Charles Mingus, Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

 I came of age when music was still purchased in physical form at brick and mortar stores, and my relationship with music is different because of it. I used to go to record stores and sift through the bins looking for an album I wanted or one I didn't know I wanted. There was a thrill in finding a rare CD in the bargain bin, or finding a new record used, or coming across something I didn't even know existed.

I used to buy maybe four albums a month - I couldn't afford more. I'd go home, reading the liner notes on the bus, and listen to the albums back to front multiple times. I'd listen to an album for a week straight, catching every nuance and change. Some of my favorite albums were those that required multiple listens to truly appreciate and discover: "Fear of a Black Planet" by Public Enemy, "Sandanista!" by the Clash, "Paul's Boutique" by the Beastie Boys. I knew every inch of every album. To this day I'm still discovering songs that were sampled and referenced on early Ice Cube and Public Enemy records.

Then high-speed internet became more widespread and we entered an age where you can find almost any album ever made simply by searching for its name and "download" (Madlib's "Blunted in the Bombshelter" being one exception). I went from listening to four albums a month to four albums a week, and sometimes as many as ten. The trickle of information became a flood, something this gig as a reviewer only exacerbates.

I no longer listen to an album for a week straight. I'm lucky if I listen to it twice in a row before moving on to something else. Instead, albums go on steady rotation, and it might take weeks or months or years before they begin to click with me. I burned a copy of Coltrane's "Giant Steps" two years ago and only now am giving it a real listen, and I just went back to Percee P's "Perseverance" after forgetting about it for four years. I also never listen to the end of a song - I know how all 2,000 songs on my iPod start, but I don't have the patience to get to the end of any of them.

In some ways I love the fact that I can hear so much music. In the past few years, I've been able to explore and delve deep into African music, reggae, jazz, and hip-hop. If I'm in the mood to experience any genre, I go to Pandora and set up a "Salsa" or "Dirty South" radio station and get my fix. There are few albums so obscure or so rare that they aren't available somewhere online, either legally or illegally. Indie artists that have a decent computer can record, mix, and post their music online for a fraction of the time and cost that it used to take. Small labels can sell digital copies of their catalogue long after they've lost the resources to maintain physical copies.

We are losing some things with the death of the album and the death of the record store. One is the social element of buying records. I had friends and acquaintances that worked and still work at record stores: Asa at Record Finder on Noe (now a dry cleaner), Gabe and Galen at Streetlight on Market, David at Amoeba on Haight. I'd talk to them about music in the store and over beers when I ran into them at a bar. They'd turn me on to things, I'd turn them on to things, and it made the process of shopping a social experience sorely missing from clicking "Buy" on iTunes or Amazon.

Another thing we've lost in the transition away from the album is the context and the power of an artists complete, fleshed-out thought. I listen to music in snippets now, and it is rare that I take the time to experience the breadth of what an artist has to say at a particular moment in time. I listen to track two then track three then track five of a totally different album. Any intentionality in the arrangement of songs on an album is totally lost.

Which brings me to Charles Mingus' 1963 masterpiece "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady." I bought album five years ago, new, for $15,98 at the soon to be defunct Border's in downtown San Francisco. I had been told that it was a classic, a must-own record, so I decided to experience it first-hand. After an initial listen, I wasn't impressed. First of all, it's not an easy listen. It takes a while to build, and it is full of changes, contrasts, and discordant elements. It's not nice background music. No one will play it at their wedding reception, but then maybe that's the mark of good jazz. The album is four songs in about forty minutes, less music than I was used to paying so much money for. I later learned that the whole point of the Impulse label was to treat jazz as art and charge a premium for it. The records were expensive in the sixties and seventies when the label was active, and the reissues are expensive today.

Part of that money goes into the packaging, and for this reason you need to buy a physical copy vs. a download. It comes in a gatefold digipack like the original vinyl, with complete liner notes by Mingus himself and his psychologist. Mingus's liner notes set the context for the album: what he was trying to do, how he went about doing it, the fact that it is essentially a song cycle about himself. The notes open up the music in the same way that the description of a painting in a museum catalogue can open up a painting, giving you a sense of the time and place it was created, and why it matters. You wouldn't get the same experience from four lonely MP3s sitting in your iTunes playlist.

And the music? You need some time with that, too. This is an album that you can't enjoy in small bursts. You can't have this on shuffle. The songs all work together with themes and melodies and rhythms and ideas repeating themselves over the course of the disc. It's a symphony, albeit a funky, groovy symphony. There are wailing horns, flourishes of brass, even some Spanish guitar interludes. It is celebratory, mournful, angry, happy, and as complicated and conflicted as the man who composed it. For experienced jazz fans, the album contains a multitude of nuggets, gems, and unexpected compositional choices that have ensured its place among the canon of essential jazz albums. For the casual jazz fan like myself, it is just challenging enough to be interesting while still being enjoyable. It pushes the boundaries of what I am used to, but isn't so freaky or annoying or obtuse that I can't listen to it.

For hip-hop fans who are interested in exploring the background and back story of their favorite music, "Black Saint" is worth purchasing. This, along with Coltrane's "Love Supreme" and Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," was the pinnacle of African-American music fifty years ago. The ambition, creativity, and talent that went into "Black Saint" can be seen in later hip-hop masterpieces like "Fear of A Black Planet," "Speakerboxx/Love Below," and "Liquid Swords." "Black Saint" is an album that pushes both the artist's and the listener's comfort levels, aiming for greatness and largely succeeding.

New York's Alright If You Like Saxaphones

I'm in New York, staying in the East Village. It's my first time here - I've spent most of my 36 years avoiding/hating/being envious of New York. It always seemed to crazy, too busy, too big, too harsh, too full of itself. It's all of those things, but it also the Ur-city, the city that all others are modeled after and aspire to be. I've only been here twenty four hours and already I am overwhelmed and half want to move here and half want to take the next plane home. It's an intense, crowded, exciting place.

And I've had that Fear song in my head. Fear wrote it in their asshole West Coast way, mocking New York for being full of arty gays. I think it's funny because it doesn't seem like that much of an insult. As my friend's friend said to us today, "welcome to Chelsea, one of nine gay districts in Manhattan.

My impressions of New York are mostly from music and film, and are mostly out of date. The Lower East Side when it was dangerous. Manhattan when it was more working class. South Bronx when it was an abandoned, bombed-out war zone. Things have changed. From my limited view, it seems a lot less sleazy than it used to be, and a lot safer and more homogeneous. I joked with my wife that we could easily spend the entire time eating at chain restaurants and shopping at chain stores. But in between all that are hundreds upon hundreds of unique stores and restaurants, and millions and millions of people. Another telling sign - i've seen a ton of DVD places, but no record stores.

So maybe this is a better theme song for my trip:

Nirvana

Kurt Cobain shot himself seventeen years ago. I heard about it when I was at my friend/bandmate Matt's parents house in Roseville. I was sad but not surprised. There was so much misery in his music that it was obvious that he was deeply unhappy.

Kurt Cobain meant a lot to my friends and I. In some ways he was an idol: a sensitive freak who had made good, shown up all the jocks and gone on to transform the record industry and our culture. I tried to drum like Dave Grohl, my bandmates tried to sing like Kurt Cobain, and everyone aped their loud-quiet-loud aesthetic. Before Nirvana broke in '91, the music industry was DIRE. The only interesting music was coming out of hip-hop - mainstream rock music was all hair bands and garbage, with the exception of Guns and Roses. Nirvana took the rawness and realness of punk and made it melodic and palatable to the masses. Cobain's lyrics were obtuse, but any teenage kid recognized some of their own frustration and confusion in his tortured yowls.

His death marked the end of the grunge movement, and the decline of music. Most of the bands that came up with Nirvana were actually good: Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins. By 94, the second generation of grunge bands was coming, and they watered down the sound and turned it into generic rock. By 95 I had gotten totally bored of all of it - the dirty production, the downer vibe, the navel-gazing subject matter. I moved on to other things.

Luckily, Nirvana doesn't hit me the same way they did when I was 19. However, I still love many of their songs, and I think most of them hold up pretty well twenty years later.

Mobroder

Those wacky kids in Spank Rock have come up with a new side project, Mobroder. It's Italo-disco in the vein of Giorgio Moroder, who is perhaps best known for writing and producing Donna Summer's "Love To Love You Baby," Irene Cara's "Flashdance...What A Feeling," and Berlin's "Take My Breath Away."



And his epic mustache.



If you go to their website and give them your email address, they will send you an hour long mix. Some of it seems to be original, but a lot of it is older material. I recognize some songs from Miss Kittin's essential mix Radio Caroline. Man I love that album. I don't listen to very much electronica these days - partially because my partner doesn't like it and partially because it's not in tune with where I am at this moment, but I still like it in small doses.


Here's a video they did. It makes you either want to do coke with models in the bathroom of a neon lit club, or play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I'm opting for the latter.


Scion A/V Presents: Mobroder - Rush (Nile Delta Remix) from Scion A/V on Vimeo.

What's Wrong With Being Sexy?

In the two weeks since I wrote my Odd Future review, there has been several articles on the internet criticizing the crew's rampant misogyny. The Troy blog has a nice round-up. I've spent just about all the time I want to analyzing them, but I do want to say a couple things. One is something I learned too late in life: if you are an offensive asshole as a joke, you are still an offensive asshole. Just because you say you are joking doesn't mean it isn't funny, and if you have to have an elaborate explanation as to why you aren't really a total fuckhead, then it's not worth it. In short, if you are defending why it's ok to say you are a rapist, you've lost the argument already.

Second, it's ironic that as Odd Future was being lionized at SXSW while rapping about killing and raping women, Ben Weasel of Screeching Weasel saw his career basically end when he hit a woman who had thrown a beer at him (a description of the show and video can be found here). Sort of a double standard, although I suppose Odd Future haven't done anything to anyone (and there DJ is a woman, so it's all good, right?) .
I'm done.

Odd Future Rap About Rape, and I Don't Like It

I reviewed Tyler the Creator's Bastard for RapReviews this week. I was excited to hear it, given the rave reviews I had heard of Tyler and his crew, Odd Future. I had the title track on my iPod from someone's year-end list, and I enjoyed it. Tyler was creative, twisted, and dark, and his beats stood out.

And then the rape talk began. To quote my review quoting Tyler, he repeatedly brags about being a rapist, dropping lines like "When I rape a bitch, I hold her down and get my best nut" and "Leave a bitch breathless/ but what the bitch don't know /is that I'm a motherfucking sellout and a rapist" and "you call that shit rape but I think that rape's fun." Those are only three of many references.

In two words, fuck that. I'm not listening to that shit, I'm not giving it a pass, and I'm not signing off on it. I didn't fuck with Eminem when he was rapping about killing his baby momma, and I sure as fuck am not going to listen to a bunch of kids who grew up on Em and decided to go one worse.

It's ironic that the hipster community (coughPitchforkcough) have totally bought into Odd Future, with the standard disclaimer that, yah, it's disturbing, but isn't rap music, like, supposed to be shocking? It makes me question the relationship that us white fans have with hip-hop. What does it mean that we enjoy listening to young black men boast about being the worst stereotypes of their race? What does it mean that we will listen to a young black man rapping about subjects that we would find totally unacceptable if sung by a white artist? That we need the music to be gritty and grimey and ultraviolent in order to get off on it or feel that it is "real"?


And before people start saying, "it's a joke! Lighten up!" here's the deal: some things aren't funny, motherfucker. Imagine a male comedian coming on stage making jokes about raping women. It doesn't work. And it doesn't work because it is attached to a real threat, a real problem, real trauma, real pain. Women get raped all the time. According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, there were 250,000 sexual assault victims in the U.S. in 2007. That means that someone you know has been sexually assaulted. So making music that makes light of that, that encourages it, that brags about it, is totally unacceptable. It's a line you can't cross.

I don't expect popular musicians to have the same beliefs, morals, and ethics as myself. I don't demand that all artists I listen to share my liberal beliefs. I can accept that a lot of artists I like are probably assholes.But I also draw the line somewhere, and rapping about rape is one of those lines.

For the record, I also can't bring myself to listen to "The Chronic" because all the songs that aren't pathologically misogynistic are about black people killing other black people. I don't listen to much gangsta rap at all. Reading the daily homicide bulletins about young men of color gunned down on a daily basis has made gangsta braggadocio seem pretty unappetizing. I've been listening to Big L a lot lately, and the fact that he was gunned down makes his violent raps seem less palatable. It's like knowing that the guy who is singing about drinking died of liver failure. Only much more tragic.

Tyler and the Odd Future make interesting music, but they need to realize that some things are taboo for a reason, and being an unconscionable asshole isn't the same as being edgy.

R.I.P. Cadence Review

I reviewed R.I.P. Cadence's The Next Shade of Grey on RapReviews last week.  They are a hybrid hip-hop/R&B/pop group from Nashville. I'm not a fan of this style of music,which showed in my score, but they do it well. I recommend going to their bandcamp page and seeing if it is your style.

I'm working on a review of Tyler the Creator's Bastard mixtape. He's part of the Odd Future crew, who do inventive and twisted hip-hop. I'll get to the twisted part in my review. They did a crazy performance on Fallon, equal parts hip-hop and punk rock. See how they are yelling in the face of the women dressed as an escape mental patient? Just one example of the disturbing mysogyny that are part of this crew's persona.

Fucked Up on Jessica Lea Mayfield and the Stooges.

I'm in a fancy Hyatt hotel room for a conference for the professional association I belong to. I ate dinner by myself at a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, possibly the worst/most expensive meal I've had in some day. Thank God for expense accounts. Actually, let's leave him/her/it out of this - I'm sure the higher power has much, much better things to worry about than reimbursement policies.

All of which makes me feel old and square and like a tool. So here's a video of one of my favorite, most inspirational songs, complete with a shirtless fat guy singing. Yes, it's the magic of Fucked Up, who are releasing their follow up to 2008s The Chemistry of Modern Life this summer. I'm expecting nothing less than genius. And vocals by a guy who sounds like he is gargling gravel.



In an unrelated note, my new favorite song is Jessica Lea Mayfield's "Our Hearts Are Wrong." It's the single off of her latest album, produced by the Black Key's Dan Auerbach. Ima buy it when I get back to San Francisco. Here's a video of her playing it on Letterman. As a bonus, she is a pretty blonde instead of a fat guy with a beard. Although a fat guy with a beard is on keys.



And for something completely different, I've been listening to the Stooges' Fun House. It may be my favorite of their three albums. Raw, funky, and a walking just say no campaign.



They reformed a few years ago with one of my personal heroes, Mike Watt, on bass. I like clean Iggy better than so fucked up he's about to die Iggy, but I'm not convinced that they have the same fire forty years later.

Custom Made Review

I reviewed the latest album by Cali street rappers Custom Made this week on RapReviews. Solid, if not mind-blowing.

I've been listening to Open Mike Eagle's "Unapologetic Art Rap," which is one of the better albums from last year that I'm just now catching up with.

Live Music

My friend's band Winter's Fall played the Hotel Utah last night, and I didn't go. I also didn't attend a single night of the Noisepop 2011, even though I like a lot of the bands. RapReviews repeatedly sends me notices about hip-hop shows in the city, many with artists I'd love to see, but I never go. I'm realizing that I'm not that interested in seeing live music any more. 

There are a couple reasons for this. One is that I get up at six in the morning, which means I tend to go to bed by 11 every night, which is just about when a show starts popping. Week night shows are a total no-go, but even a Friday night show at Hotel Utah is pretty unrealistic. Winter's Fall were headlining, which meant a midnight start time, by which point I'd be totally done.

The other reason is that, since I got married, I don't have the same need to be out there and mingling with strangers as much. Not that I just want to hang out in my house with my wife, but I don't feel like I'm missing out on meeting somebody or being part of something by not being at a show. I also have different priorities now. I still love music, but it's not the main focus of my life. Work, school and spending time with my family are my big priorities, and I don't have much time or energy for other things.

That doesn't mean I don't still want to see live music, it just isn't the priority it used to be. And I'm ok with that. Part of me misses the days when I went out several times a week, but I was also broke and directionless during that part of my life. It seems like a fair trade off.

More Jazz

I'm still on a jazz kick, knee deep in an obsessive deep dive into it. I did the same thing with hip-hop five or six years ago and reggae two years ago: I'm trying to listen to and read about it as much as possible, discover every classic album, every hidden gem.

My one problem with jazz is that I don't have the musical background to really appreciate it. I can't tell the difference between different times or tones or chords or keys. I can appreciate technique somewhat, but since I've only ever played drums, it's hard for me to appreciate how skilled the musicians are. Still, you don't have to be a musician to know that John Coltrane was brilliant, or Charlie Parker, or Mingus.

I first got into jazz when I was in my teens, probably from reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and some of the early beat stuff. I listened to old Duke Ellington, Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holiday, who remains a favorite. I dipped into more experimental jazz a few years ago, listening to Coltrane and Mingus. I like how different and envelope-pushing some of the music is: for example, Coltrane's "Ascension" is like nothing I've ever heard, forty solid minutes of cacaphony that is still going somewhere. It's like looking at abstract art: it challenges your perceptions, and takes the art in a totally new and unexpected direction.

Like all abstract or avant-garde art, things like "Ascension," Albert Aylers "Holy Spirit," or Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz" are often more interesting conceptually than they are enjoyable. I'm listening to "Ascension" as I write it,and the shit is crazy and kind of annoying. No, really annoying. Yet it also fills the same niche for me that some of the noisier post-punk groups like Sonic Youth or Polvo fill - it's noisy and abrasive and beautiful in its chaotic, jagged ugliness.

Of course jazz, like rock, is a huge genre that encompasses a large range of different, many of which are incompatible. When you say you like jazz, you could mean the dance music that Ellington or Glenn Miller were turning out in the 30s and 40s, or the cool jazz of 50s Miles Davis, the swinging bachelor pad swing of a lot of sixties jazz, the freaky jazz-rock of 70s Miles, or smooth jazz artists like Kenny G (who plays the same instrument as Coltrane). Even Coltrane covered a lot of ground. Right after doing Ascension, he did an album of ballads, and also collaborated with Duke Ellington and Johnny Hartman.

Those are two of my favorite Coltrane records. "In A Sentimental Mood" is one of my favorite songs ever.
Ellington lays down a delicate and heartbreaking piano line, and Coltrane goes tastefully crazy over it. He pays homage to the earlier age of jazz while still adding an element of experimentation.


I bought Ascension this week at Amoeba, and I also downloaded both John Coltrane's albums with Ellington and Hartman. Clearly "Ascension" is more adventurous, but  I think I like the two albums of standards better. They are easier to listen to. I thought I wanted to explore the freakier side of jazz, but I'm thinking I might go in the opposite direction, looking at some of the more carefully composed pieces. What makes works like "Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" and "Love Supreme" so exciting and compelling isn't their experimental qualities, but the sheer ambition of them, the way that all the different pieces add up to one whole. That coherence is missing on free jazz pieces, and the free jazz pieces aren't nearly as fun to listen to because of it.

Incidentally, I stole the photo from a site called "Brilliant Corners," and they have a really good post on Coltrane. Many really good posts. With good comments from guys who clearly understand the music on a much deeper level than I ever will.

N.B.S. Review

I reviewed The Prelude, the debut by Boston duo N.B.S. (Natural Born Spitters) on RapReviews this week.

I wasn't really feeling it, but you might. Here's a video for "Ill Lyrical."

The Aztext and Generation Bass Reviews

I reviewed The Aztext second installment of their "Who Cares If We're Dope?" series this week at RapReviews. This time the group worked with with SF producer Touchphonics.


I also reviewed Generation Bass's Transnational Dubstep comp. It's a solid collection of dubstep containing elements of Indian, Latin American, and European folk music. I rated it a little low only because I have a limited capacity for dubstep.

What I'm Listening To

I've been studying a lot, which has changed the music I listen to. I can't study to hip-hop - it's too abrasive and distracting. Instead, I've been listening to a lot of jazz. A lot of jazz albums are cheap on Emusic, so I got a bunch recently, including Oliver Nelson's The Blues and The Abstract Truth.



I also got John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, which is brilliant. It's one of those amazing pieces of music that makes me feel alive. I just wish I knew more about music theory, because I'm sure Coltrane's work is a lot deeper than I'm able to digest.

I've also been listening to old hardcore punk. I put my old Minor Threat, Circle Jerks, and Germs records on my iPod so I can relive my adolescence on my bus ride home. I find 80s thrash oddly soothing.

I also found a Stitches album at Amoeba for five bucks. They were a trashy Heartbreakers-inspired band who I saw in the mid-nineties opening for the Workin' Stiffs at the Purple Onion. Their friend Dusty was sitting at our table with a box of seven inches to sell. He was drinking Old English from a can, ashing into it, and then taking swigs. They were a toxic, druggy band who had a decent song or two. The album is pretty terrible.


Finally, I've been listening to a lot of 70s deejay music. I went almost all of January without listening to any reggae, but the second school started up again I started listening to reggae again. It's soothing yet a little aggro. I found a used copy of Trinity's Shanty Town Determination at Amoeba, which I'm enjoying. He sounds a lot like Big Youth, but that's not a bad thing.

Serge Severe Review

I reviewed Serge Severe's new album Back On My Rhymes this week at RapReviews. He's a Portland MC whose sound is a throwback to the days when being a rapper meant having solid microphone skills and a dedicated DJ on the decks spinning vinyl. I liked it. A lot better than Busta Rhymes 2009 album Back On My Bullshit, which I bought last month, and which I don't like at all.

Here's "Can't Stop, Won't Stop, with Braille.

Maggot Mouf

I reviewed Maggot Mouf's You're All Ears this week on RapReviews.

It's Australian horror rap, using horror imagery to talk about the drama of everyday life. Much like a Burgermeister hamburger, it's done well, but not the kind of thing I'm into.

I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself

The White Stripes officially broke up this week. It's not surprising, and they had painted themselves into a corner, but I'm still a little sad. They haven't put out a new studio album since 2007's Icky Thump, and their last tour was canceled when their drummer Meg had a nervous breakdown. Jack White has been doing his own thing for a while now, both as a musician with the Dead Weather and Raconteurs, as a producer with Wanda Jackson, and as a label owner.

Realistically, there was nothing left for the White Stripes to do BUT break up. They formed in 1997 under a very different musical climate. The guiding philosophy was "more is more." The charts were dominated by manufactured pop and aspirational hip-hop. The rock world had deteriorated from the grunge days of the early 90s into self-indulgent emo and watered down alt rock like Nickelback. Advances in studio production and home recording capabilities meant that music was more synthesized and embellished. MTV was trying to convince us that electronica was the new rock.

Into that storm rode the White Stripes. Simply put, they peeled it the fuck down. Guitar and a not-very-good drummer. That's it. They developed a color scheme gimmick to match their stripped down sound - the band was only photographed wearing red, white, and black. Their first singles and album was noisy blues rock that hadn't quite found its way, but 2000's De Stijl, named after a Dutch minimalist art movement, hit home. The chaos and noisiness of their earlier work was gone, replaced by raw blues, Led Zepplin channeling Robert Johnson without the gongs and violin bows. Interspersed were Brit pop songs like "You're Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl)," that showed there was more to the band than Page licks and Plant yowls.



They perfected their pop licks on 2001's White Blood Cells, which contains their most perfect song, "Fell In Love With A Girl." The song, like much of the White Stripe's work, was deceptively simple, so dumb it was smart, pop music pared down to its bare essence.


In 2003 they released their most successful album, Elephant. From opening single "Seven Nation Army" it was evident that the band was reaching the end of what it could do under its original model of guitar-drums. "Seven Nation Army" featured a bass guitar, adding a new element into their mix. The album hit #6 on the Billboard charts, and went on to sell over four million copies worldwide. It also contained an amazing cover of Burt Bacharach's "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself." Jack White was evidently irritated with the video, directed by Sofia Coppola, in which Kate Moss writhed on a stripper's pole. He didn't see the connection. (I didn't mind.)


Something else had happened in that time period. Stripped-down indie rock had hit big. The Strokes had a hit record doing pared down Lower-East-Side junkie rock. The Shins were doing pared down West Coast rock. In the wake of the economic crash of 2000 and September 11, 2001, big dumb blingy music seemed gauche and outre. Garage rock was in.

The follow up, 2005's Get Behind Me Satan, showed that the band was getting tired of its own schtick. They continued to experiment with new sounds, and the production was fuller. Notice they've expanded their wardrobe colors as well.



2007's Icky Thump, went even further in the more is more direction. Both albums offered diminishingn returns, and the Stripes were starting to seem anachronistic. The machine they were raging against no longer existed. They had conquered the record industry, won a Grammy, and recorded about all the guitar-drum songs they could.

White started the Raconteurs, and then started the Dead Weather. Meg had a nervous breakdown and avoided the press. The record industry went down in flames. Arcade Fire, in a reaction against the navel gazing of early 2000s indie rock, went for a bigger, more ambitious sound. They won a Grammy.

I still love the early White Stripes, but I'm glad they called it quits. One thing I'm learning in my Nonprofit Administration program is you have to know when to abandon or shift your mission. Just because something was a good idea 13 years ago doesn't mean you have to keep doing it. Cheers to Meg and Jack for putting an end to it in style.

NYOIl

I reviewed a four-year-old mixtape from NYOil this week for RapReviews called 9 Wonders.  It showed up on my doorstep, so I reviewed it. I hadn't heard NYOil before, but I was into it. Sort of righteously angry ala Chuck D or KRS-One. Half the mixtape is NYOil rapping over 9th Wonder beats, the rest is outakes from his album and some exclusives. You can download it for free at DJ Trackstar's website, so go do so.

I just realized that the Carrie Brownstein in the new series Portlandia is the same Carrie Brownstein who writes for NPR's Monitor Mix and appears on All Songs Considered, red, and is also the same Carrie Brownstein who was in Sleater-Kinney. I kinda have a crush on her. Only she's gay. Which is fine, but it just makes the crush seem that much more pointless.

I've only heard Sleater-Kinney's 1997 album Dig Me Out. I liked it, but Corin Tucker's voice kinda got on my nerves, so I never invested in them after that. Somehow I downloaded "You're No Rock N'Roll Fun," which for whatever reason pops up every time I put my iPod on shuffle. I like that song. Maybe I should buy more of their albums. Carrie has a new band that is supposed to put out an album this year. Maybe I'll buy that. Maybe I'll check out Portlandia. Maybe I'll visit Portland.