Sunday, September 30, 2012

sunday jamz iii

rock the boat, rock the boat, continue the rocking of the boat



Aaliyah - Rock The Boat (Shigeto Remix)

Shigeto comin through with this hauntingly beautiful chillibration of a tribute to Detroitian gone-to-soons Aaliyah and J Dilla. There's something about the shuffle of this one. As I am huge a sucker off kilter rhodes chords, pitch shifted ghost choruses, weird synth horns, and sustained string notes and reverb getting sucked in and out up by fat, sidechained kicks,

In fact, so inspired was I that I am now making a mix of songs with similar qualities, which I will share with you, dear internet, later today, so stay tuned!

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

not canon, but a nice ass gun: on Strong Arm Steady and keepin it classic


"Classic" - Strong Arm Steady & Statik Skeltah

Strong Arm Steady & Statik Selektah come correct with some classic cruisin in convertibles with your crew on those hot summer afternoons bumpin boom-bap shit. What is there to say about a song like this? Just three veteran MC's who know exactly what they're doing; 
Mitchy Slick's blunt slickness, Krondon's burning gravel throat, and Phil Da Agony's scattershot shout, complementing each other perfectly as the smooth, stringy beat. Neither genre-defying nor overly defined; not overly derivative, but still pretty precedented; not an apex, but one of many quiet little everyday pinnacles, not GoAT but just... damn good. And while that praise can sound faint it is anything but; as much we like to talk about the ruthless, reckless innovators blazing their boundary-shattering trails throughout the turbulent yet stagnated world of music/art/the actual world, how we sometimes forget: exploring familiar grounds need not diminish their value or enjoyment. Especially when its this shit. Aw yeah. Dude comin' in hard on the third verse. Have we heard it all before? Sure, kind of. But who gives a fuck? It's all in the title.

Monday, September 24, 2012

mathy mondays iii

mathy mondays wasn't scared of the shogun, but the shogun was scared of them...


"Living In The World Today (GZA transcription)" - Steve Lehman Octet

Adders, subtracters, multipliers, and dividers, witness the Steve Lehman Octet, explorers of spectral harmony, which is not a thing I totally understand other than that it sounds hella cool, injecting scalene subdivisions into the dance of the Liquid Swords on their crystalline cover of the GZA's "Living In The World Today". Transmuting the RZA's weirdly truncated flute/vibes sample into actual vibraphone and this crazy hitch-of-a-beat thing that, lead on by drumming leviathan Tyshawn Sorey's 5th dimensional clock-tick hihat "timekeeping", threatens to give your neck some seriously confusing repetitive strain injuries. Replace rap with arabesque sax, stir, and run the hell away before it explodes. 

Do you want more?!!!??! Check the album. Even more? Check Fieldwork, the Cream (ie supergroup, also featuring Sorey) of modern jazz
If rappers had any balls, they would rap over the groove at the end. If you think jazz is dead, then know that at least it lives on a fucking flesh eating zombie. And not those lumbering fleshheads, but the James Gunn, 2004, Dawn of The Dead remake kind of zombie. 

The ones that can chase you until you die.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

sunday jamz ii

Ayo calm the fuck down already, it's Sunday Jamz!



Youloveme - Musiq (aka Musiq Soulchild)

Not the trillest shit, but definitely in the running for the chillest shit!

...err sorry. But this was my go to song for when I couldn't pick another sunday jam. Making great use of that Dilla knock on the beat, muzak-of-the-coolest-elevator-in-the-world strings and guitars, a kickass neck swaying bridge at 2:18 that somehow makes , and those smoov, smoov vocals that somehow make the often awkward, almost R. Kelly-esque lyrics totally work. Now go bump this shit 'til love starts getting made.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

balls to the wall (of funk) - 777-9311



I have basically been looping this song all week, because 777-9311, by The Time, is one of the ballsiest pieces of funk--and maybe song--ever. First, you've got the one, or the absence of it. Where most funk draws its, uh, funk from the first downbeat of the bar, but here we just have this batshit crazy linndrum thing, which hits on like every other beat to create one of the most unique, syncopated grooves out there. 

Then stemmping from that, we got some faintly kaleidoscopic guitar strumming (I dunno what chords those are but they are sweet), a rubbery baseline that, if you sat there for an hour trying to learn like I did it before giving in and looking it up, you'll find is actually two basslines, one slap, one synth, which, voiced really close together, but actually totally different, and some classic Prince synth stabs. Plus, the chorus , instead of just dividing up the beats evenly across the lyrics "seven seven seven nine three one one", holds the three extra long, then sings the more awkward, three syllable "eleven", because that is just a little weirder and more awesome. And, Prince even manages to shred it up at the with a three minute guitar solo. Would any hit song ever have that now? (or be 8 minutes long, for that matter?). Also, all the parts of this song, are written, produced, and played by Prince--with the sole exception of Morris Day on lead vocals--so, all non-Prince musicians, good luck with your life.


Yet despite all this, it's not in that "wooooamg weird beat" mathy kind of way that you feel or move to this song--it's just 100% pure funk. If only more musicians were exploring this kind of shit (or were secretly Prince), the world would be  better, funkier place.


Also, as a bonus, here is another ballsy ass Prince protege song that is actually written/produced by Prince (though with other musicians): the extended version of "Glamorous Life" by Shiela E. Ok it's mostly just great, and really the only particularly ballsy parts are the absolutely wacko (for a pop song at least) sax solos (credited to Larry Williams, a dude who clearly knew what was up in the 80's) but you kinda gotta love it.



...


Also: are these youtube embeds working for people? or are they too awkward/slowing the page down too much? I could always try to find some other way to embed audio


Thursday, September 20, 2012

on videos, movement, and the unlocking of songs

Prologue

(song at 0:26 if you're not up for Rick Ross and/or Ciroc):


1

Humans argue all the time about the value of music videos, and whether or not a good video can ever truly become part, and ultimately alter the fabric of the song itself (well, at least the kind of humans who read blogs all time). Like, without its inseparable and fucktastically amazing video, would anyone really give a shit about some Korean rapper? More importantly, should they? (...if you were still wondering the answer is yes).


But regardless of all that shit, this reporter would like to put us on a totally different track of internetified zeitgeistotronic-arguo-discussion as to exactly what a music video has the power to do.


2


Music videos,and the shots in them, exist on a spectrum. One one end, you have music videos that is pretty much just a bunch of shots of the musician/band. Closer to those old school promotional videos bands would sometimes makein the 60's and 70's. [1] Often these will just be footage of them performing live, or in a studio, or just a room or something.




On the other, you got the crazy "music video-y" shit. What. Don't give me that; you fuckers all know what I mean. And while I didn't exactly research this claim, I would say this probably grew out of the explosion of resources and popularity of the music video world that started in the 80's. Sometimes these are just absolutely spastic malarky, but generally they tell some kind of story that is somehow tangentially related to the song. [2]


3

Oh god that got tangenty. Anyway, I just want to talk about the stuff on the former side of the spectrum. The most basic, and perhaps important aspect of the music video. The thing a standalone song actually cannot do. And that is to show you what the damn band actually looks like.

And it shows you how they move.

4

The Gunplay video up there is, minus some, uh, funky editing, is pretty simple. Dude standing there rapping. But it's the way that dude is standing there rapping that makes him, well, Gunplay. The sneer, the hilarious way he rolls his eyes and looks up to see how gods grace is--hell, I could write you a fucking essay just charting the positons and movements of his hands (double barrel gunz at 1:32 ftw)--him losing his shit on the molly lines and then coming back down to name drop fucking Amar'e Stoudemire (which leads me to believe Gunplay hasn't seen a Knicks game in the last year)


5

Most rap videos (especially from the 90's [3]) are like this. Pretty basic. Which really works for the genre, and not just for budgetary reasons, since the charisma/perceivable swag of the rapper is often the most important aspect of the music.

After all, there's a reason that even with with all the money he's been gettin' from the fuckin start that could conceivably be blown on some crazy Hype Williams shit, Rick Ross still makes videos where he just stands around rapping (okay and sits a lot, but it is Rick Ross we're talkng about.)

6

We'll get off rap in a second, but here's just a few more examples. Ab-Soul's hilarious manifesto "Gone Insane" generally makes me dance around, shake my hands, make silly faces, and just generally bob around all drunken master-style. But when I played it for a friend, I could see he just wasn't feeling it--wasn't moving to the weird, fun, funky rhythms of Ab-Soul himself. [4]

"It's better if you see the video" I found myself saying. And that's when I realized, all that weird shit I do when I hear this song listed above? You know who else does that? Fucking Ab-Soul himself:




It's not that the song is actually made better by the video, or that it's worse with out it, but that by allowing us to see how Ab-Soul himself is physically affected by the music, we can just gain a different and maybe better understanding of the song that we wouldn't have had otherwise.

Cause look, we don't always appreciate a song right away. Sometimes its just not to our tastes, but sometimes you're just missing something. And Movement such an innate part of music (cue faux-anthropological bullshit about dancing around fires or whatever) that often, you'll find, just seeing the artist flopping around to the music coming from inside them is what ultimately unlocks whatever its going to do inside you. [5] Like, maybe you find Danny Brown kind of annoying. But when you see the dude, you might realize, oh, this dude is entertaining as fuck.

7

But actually, onto the non-rap! Take for example, this Shiina Ringo song, "Yattsuke Shigoto" (which apparently translates to: half-assed job). Just casually listening to it, you might get a pretty standard RAWK vibe, albeit with a pretty interesting bassline and some good singing. But watching the video:


The song title translates, from what I can tell, to "half-assed job", which makes sense. Here is a badass badass mofo rocking the kimono, wailing away, but all through that impenetrable air of not giving a fuuuuuck, so that when some sort of emotion/energy does break through--peep the crazy eyes at 1:30--it punctuates the feeling/attitude of the song in a constantly developing way, leading up to those brief flashes of crazy at 2:28 and 2:33, and culminating with the creepy whites-of-the-eyes-only-stare at 2:40. Oh, and not to mention breaking out the fucking fan at 1:57?

The point of all this is not that I am kind of in love with Shiina Ringo [6], but simply that the way musicians movements and expressions develop over the course of a song can tell us its story in a different, kind of primal way we couldn't have experienced otherwise.

8

Not to belabor the point here, but the same kind of thing happened to me with Swedish pop-gician Robyn. I wasn't a huge fan of this song, that all the other hamsters were constantly bumpin, but then I saw the video, and well:


CALLLLL YOUR GIIIIRLFRIEEEEEND

9

Ultimately, I guess, what I am trying to say is while you can't judge a book by it's cover, sometimes a cover can help you find a new way of understanding book. And it's not even just videos--some things that have made me understand and even love music I hadn't been into at all before include: the album cover, an interview with the artists, seeing it used in a movie, blasting on a highway, hearing it headphones in the rain, listening in a different city, watching people dance it in a club, hearing it LOUD, watching a friend react to parts of it I'd never noticed, hearing a cover, actually playing on an instrument myself, hearing a live version, and most of all, reading what others have to say about it. Reading reviews, reading criticism; traveling back in the day with reading Ellen Willis, Studs Turkel, and Lester Bangs, an interneting it up today with AMG, Dark Forces Swing, or Passion of The Weiss.

My point is this: whether you like something or don't, look around. Discover about it. [7] Unlock as much as you can.

'cause, why not?


--h.s.t.

___


[1] to awkwardly hilarious results

[2] Or, y'know, there was that time Michael Bay directs a music video for Meatloaf. Which feels like it really explains... something.
[3] When they also all seemed to take place in the exact same grimey ass warehouse,* but that's a story for another day.
*yeah peep that early Jay-Z

[4] okay in fairness he was also driving at the time, but still
[5] feel free to crush that one
[6] although that is also true
[7] LIKE BY READING THIS BLOG FOR EXAMPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Monday, September 17, 2012

mathy mondays ii

Nod your head pretentiously--it's mathy monday!



Herbie Hancock - Ostinato (Suite For Angela)

Math: it ain't just that rock shit. Before the more oddly metered parts Fusion became, well, this, bands like Herbie's Mwandishi Sextet were coming up with weirdly funky planetscapes like the above. Built around the repeating bassline/bass clarinet riff in god-knows-what-time signature, these dudes stir up some seriously cosmic shit--which, maybe I'm just weird, but listening to anyone funk it up in like 15/8 or whatever (wikipedia says 15/8) for 13 minutes straight, complete with requisite weirdo analog synth blasts, is just fucking fantastic. It's too bad everyone stopped exploring this kind of sound after like a year, but I guess it must have been pretty difficult to sustain. But you know what? Fuck that--music is definitely long overdue for a mathy ass Kozmigroov revival.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

sunday jamz i

I done kicked 'em out!



Slipped Disc - Lizzy Mercier Descloux

Dat bass! I just heard this shit for the first time last night, very loudly, and having that blasting gyroscope of a bassline churning beneath a rotating cavalcade of strings, weird little guitar jibberings, oohs, ahhs, and, of course, french accented singing was enough to send any hamster scurrying off to the internets to hear it again, and again, and again... The song was apparently written by the bassist, Phillipe Lemongne, who unfortunately seems to be on nothing else, much to the detriment of funk. Now I am going to check out the rest of this album, Mambo Nassau, 'cause that shit was recorded in the Bahamas.

EDIT: Also, does that crazy ass skittery drumbeat not prefigure that Low End Theory skittery drum steez? (and contemporaneous craziness like this)

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Who is Captain Murphy: a scathing expose by Hamtaro S. Thompson

UPDATE: in the wake of shocking new revelations, we have issued a follow up report, which you can read here.

...

Since bursting onto the scene a couple months ago with this blistering  Flying Lotus + Earl Sweatshirt
collabo, Captain Murphy has left the mouths of the collective hip hop blogosphere have been agog with one question: just who is the purveyor of this new brand of deep throated, well-animated madvillainy? A rapper with the balls to literally descend into gibberish in the middle of a verse, but beyond that, Captain Murphy is also really fucking good. But while most peoples theories seem to just end with "it's probably Tyler, The Creator," this reporter is a fucking journalist, and, idle speculation be damned, intends to do his fucking job.

So, without further ado, here are some potential true identities of Captain Murphy:




Lil B

It's not Lil B.


Malice of the Clipse 
(on right, AKA not Pusha-T)

While Pusha-T was busy infiltrating the p4k editorial staff and submarine racing Kanye to the next man-made coke-volcano island, perhaps one Gene Thornton merely bid his time before unleashing a villainous and piratey assault of verbiage over similarly lurky production from some potential next-Neptunes. Apparently he's also changed his name to No Malice--and isn't that kind of 180 away from such emotion just a little too convenient for someone who is hiding said supervillain status?


MIMS

HAS ANYONE EVER SEEN MIMS AND CAPTAIN MURPHY IN THE SAME ROOM I ASK YOU?!?!?!?!?!?! Actually has anyone seen MIMS in the last five years at all? Plus, how much of a coup would it be if he had actually been some hard-talking, baritoned garble-master the entire time? It would certainly go to great lengths to demystify the apparent reflexivity of his hotness.


(I don't actually don't know which one he is)

You know, actually this one kind of makes sense. He even has the Flying Lotus connection


Glenn Danzig

Whether sacrificing Tipper Gore's favorite chicken or providing us with images of an alternate universe in which not only is Glenn Danzig a movie star but in which Glenn Danzig is a movie star starring the film X-Men (2000), in which movie star Glenn Danzig is playing the part of the character Wolverine, only, compared to our fey little Hugh Jackman-Wolverine-playing-based universe, Glenn Danzig: singer, songwriter, comic author, punk-legend, entrepreneur, alternate universe movie star, Misfit, Samhainian, and, uh, Danzig is playing him less gay. So why not Captain Murphy as well.



Aphex Twin

In the world of electronic music, there seems to be like a ten percent chance that anything new is actually some new alias of Aphex Twin. I see no reason not to extend that theory here.



Burial

Kind of similar; no one seems to know who Burial is, even when they know who he is.

*Wooooogity woogity woogity...*

But actually, perhaps we are looking at this wrong. In fact, much of the proof may just be in the lyrics. To wit:


Mechagodzilla

It's all there: "I'm Gojira in the mirror on some nonstop chop." Who else would see themselves in the mirror as such but what is essentially a Godzilla made in variously Alien and Japanese government Kaiju chop shops?



Damian Wayne 

Batman's crazy ass League of Shadows-trained son, no doubt "lives his life like [he's] Bruce Wayne, in bittersweet pain ... and guilt..." just as does the new Robin as he attempts outgrow his childhood as an assassin in order to became a hero and good person. With all those Batman samples, you might be asking, "but is he not then more likely to be The Batman himself?" to which I would only say "um, Batman isn't real, dumbass."

But after putting myself through the (proverbial) ringer, unearthing mass conspiracies, and pouring a literal metric fuckton of liquid adrenaline into my brain, this reporter can proudly say that here is the big one, the exclusive, the huge-ass-motherfucking-scoop-de-la-scoop to end all internet-hip-hop-blogs-looking-for-the-identies-of-anonymous-rappers-who-everyone-thinks-is-Tyler-The-Creator-for-some-reason scoops. Because my friends, the answer all along, was right under our noses. Verbose? Good with words? A phenomenon, yet somehow able to remain unseen by the public. Ye gods, and stay back, my friends. For Captain Murphy, quite obviously, now that you think about it, none other, than... 



Thomas Pynchon

Captain Murphy is Thomas Pynchon.

This has been a scathing investigative report.

Hamtaro S. Thompson. Signing out.

(You're welcome.)

Monday, September 10, 2012

mathy mondays I

Flail your arms in crazy meters on your way to work--it's mathy monday!



How does Hella write a song? I always figured they just covered all the frets they wanted to use in honey, unleashed a swarm of bees, wound up Zach Hill, and let everything do its magic. Or maybe they just sit around the campfire, figuring out with some percussion and the trusty ol' acoustic geetar? ...I guess that's why I don't play this stuff.

(also, you gotta love that shit at :57.)

Sunday, September 9, 2012

little hamsters, big indentures

Running around on a wheel going nowhere. Not a metaphor; that's what my family did for fun. Poor fuckers probably didn't realize they weren't going anywhere. That one's a metaphor.

But sitting in poop, sipping water through a straw, and the aforementioned Sisyphian task did not bring me the physical or spiritual or whatever-the-fucksical fulfillment it seemed to bestow upon the rest of the denizens of the store. No, give me the arts any day, and not just to nibble on--not with my actual teeth anyway.

Anyone who's ever read a music or film or lit or some specialized thing blog of their own volition is a nerd. I know I am. The Oxford English Dictionary defines nerd as--just kidding, I'm not gonna pull out any of that word-defining bullshit. A nerd is just someone who cares about stuff, a lot. Or, someone who cares about stuff maybe a lot more than most other people. Which means, a lot of the time, you're gonna like, love, fucking WORSHIP all over some stuff or subculture or region of stuff that, you'll realize, in the real world, no one actually likes.

And it's gonna look a lot like this:


The I don't get it. The feigned interest. The hollow laugh. Every music nerd has had this moment. Many, fucking, times. And at least with music the song is over quickly. Ever sat through the entirety of a favorite movie, trying to laugh or otherwise react in just the right amount to clue the rest of the nonplussed audience that they should, in fact, be very plussed right now?

Even for a thick-furred, cigar-chomping, balls-trippin rodent like me, that shit can be fucking trying. In fact, this hamster once found himself a hair's length away gouging out a friend's eyeball from because he'd said Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots was "pretty lame" before he'd even realized his claws were out--and that album is catchy as fuck. Just try turning anyone onto anything belonging to a subgenre beginning with the word "prog". Or, you know, anything sub-anything at all.

But gut twisting as they are, those negative reactions are pretty rare, and, perhaps actually more tolerable than the usual, because at least  that means the person was reacting to the damn thing. Most often? You just get kind of a blank stare, or blank nod, or blank sentence, or, shudder, the internet-pacisfying, all-encompassing, mind-numbedly engulfing "meh."

And after your life's work (and make no mistake, for we nerds our relationships with the objects of our nerddom is just that) has finally had its canonically-foundationed back broken by the last of the "eh"s it can possibly take, it's easy to become what people call a "snob".

And from here we must make a decision.

On the one paw:

Look down on the fools who can't appreciate it. Who bask in the--skip the hyphenated hyperbole--generic; who hum nakedly commercial bullshit and think it's some great art thing; who only experience new movements or genres via same's most trend-fucking carpetbaggers and money-grubbing sellouts and think that that's a thing to do that is fucking okay; whose radio dial is permanently welded to whatever clear-channel station is broadcast generic "classic rock block: your source for Sweet Home Alabama every hour on the air, and only the Bob Dylan songs that couldn't possibly be construed as controversial (oh and also now a bunch of stuff from the 90's for some reason)," that might be good but not for the reasons they think it is; and, worst of all, who would dare utter the the phrase "dude, it's only a ______ <song/movie/computer game/shirt/steak/hamster-based anime/whatever>" and not do so tragically, self-deprecatingly, but actually have the audacity to believe it. Who don't fucking care, and wouldn't seem to care to try either.

But on the other:

Attempt tolerance. Sure, they might not get your more unusual tastes, but remember, they don't have the same vast, enormously researched artistic context as you. It's hard to recognize and appreciate innovation when you don't know what developments are actually being innovated upon. And, hey, no they're not as dedicated to this shit as you, but, you probably know deep down inside, most people have this thing called shit to do, and simply lack whatever you had that facilitated the countless hours you spent tracking down a rip of some Masahiko Togashi LP on some mysterious Czech blog. And just because you haven't explored the foundational texts of grunge doesn't mean you can't still enjoy Smells Like Teen Spirit. And, as head-bashingly fucktarded as the very phrase "classic rock" may be, there is a good reason that long dead boomer horse continues to beat down the airwaves to this very day. Because sharing the love is generally a better experience than being a dick about it, right?

via xkcd

It's a beautiful notion--one that, I'm not afraid to admit, brings a tear to my freakishly giant eye. I mean, what's the point of being a king of cultural nerddom when you just spend every day stuck on the throne alone (even if the throneroom is decked out with a sweet projector ready to render the planets in Tree of Life in their full, "ZOMG 20 MINUTES OF PICTURES OF SPACE AND THEN A DINOSAUR" glory)? In an age of hyper-connected, instant mass media fetish-culture, how can the nerd afford not to develop critical faculties that aim not just at his fellow, distant high priest critics and bloggers and--*shudder*--commenters, but at his increasingly culturally fragmented, actual, far less involved friends? Because what could be better than that moment of vindication you feel when you step into a friends car and he's head-knocking to the Slum Village album you burned for him two months ago and forgot about? (a lot of things, yes, but, like, context.)

And if you really care about art, think about the artist for a second? Do you really think they would rather that you the converted, instead of spreading the gospel, elect to keep their magic to yourself? (and yes, if the answer is "yes," it's probably okay not to try) Take the risk! Expose thine loins of taste! It's not just about you, it's about humanity! Art blah blah bladee blah!

Help a creator out!

But.

But, on the other, other paw...

You just want to keep the greatness for yourself. Because sometimes: fuck the plebes. The reason you think they don't understand like you do is that they don't. After all, if they did, they wouldn't need you to explain why good shit is good to them, now would they? And no, they aren't going to like all of that weird great shit you like, because they just don't have the same capacity for seeking out and comprehending greatness that you do. And when they give you the look, the eyebrow, the smirk, the meh, you just give em the ol devil horns and crazyface and be content with how awesome you are at being learned and appreciating good art or whatever. 

Just remember, no one gives a fuck. And if you want them to, you gotta show them why they should. Preferably without making them think that you're crazy--er, that is, preferably without revealing that you're crazy. Or, actually, you know what? A little crazy is okay. 'cause in the real world, The Mars Volta are pretty popular?

And besides, its only a  ______.


(...haha. Yeah right.)

...

UPDATE: Coincidentally,  this podcast with John Hodgman and special guest/badass John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats examines this very same theme