Posts Tagged 2012
Benedict Drew | Non-Musician Complex
This was a free download exclusive to The Wire magazine’s website in April 2012, but it still works. I probably seem like the kind of guy who reads the Wire, as I’ve spent more than a couple years making music that no one likes. But I can’t afford the thing. Yet, if I’m really dedicated to this weirdness, can I afford not to read it? Maybe I’m a poseur with this stuff. I like loud guitars all right? And drums? Beats, man. Verses, choruses. I enjoy them. I enjoy this stuff, too. But sometimes I think I’m not enjoying it enough. Should I be enjoying it? I’m not really getting it.
I feel like an album like this should come with some kind of artistic statement. If something’s not inherently enjoyable, then it must be trying to say something. And if we know what it’s trying to say, we can judge if it’s succeeding or failing. I don’t know what this guy is going for so I have no idea. People never thought of liner notes as artistic statements, but they often served that didn’t they? I think we fucked up giving up on liner notes.
The tracks are mostly the names of instruments or just objects he makes some sounds with in an unconventional, or perhaps conventionally unconventional way. On the last track he spells “various” wrong. On purpose? This track is pretty harsh. Spun this record a few times in the background and now I’m just sitting here through the whole thing seeing if there’s a punchline I missed. “varios lengths of wire vibrating” Sounds like a machine in need of service. I mean, I kinda dig it. I like how it winds down from the many vibrating wires or whatever it actually is, to just a couple, then one. But is it supposed to be a parody of this kind of music or not? It could just come to a %
V/A | Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap
In the 60s and 70s, Lou Reed was legit down with the streets. But by the 80s he was punning about the dangers of strange candy. (Which makes him perhaps an innovator of proto-Modern J-pop. But focus.) Crack had just hit the streets. Social programs were being cut. Thousands were dying of AIDS. Lou had lost touch.
Luckily non-white people were also rapping.
Hold on. This is only about what it is. That’s the beauty of Ice-T’s documentary:
It’s also beautifully photographed. And it’s even better than this trailer if that’s not selling you. I don’t think it sold that many people went it came out but it’s there forever so you should check it out. I haven’t been into Hip-hop much in the last few years but I’ll always respect it as an artform. This even makes me take some people seriously I didn’t before, like Kanye. No Jay-Z in this thing, but they got Kanye. Even his best lines used to seem like throwaway jokes to me, but he can pull off a convincing acapella (if not freestyle). And it was funny hearing different stories contradict each other, I always like to hear KRS-One’s version of things.
I should probably get the DVD. I just watched it on Netflix and got the soundtrack. You can enjoy the soundtrack itself as a good mixtape album with some exclusive freestyles, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an intro to or overview of Rap like I would recommend the movie. I feel like the movie is really made for people who do not take Rap or Hip-hop culture seriously, but there’s so many movies about “Hip-hop culture” that really gloss over the Rap part. The doc proves it’s point pretty thoroughly but this soundtrack is a little random. There’s no chronology at all and of course they are limited by rights issues and I assume it’s Ice-T personal taste here, but it doesn’t include all of the freestyles in the movie, I would say the best ones are left out. (Wiki has a complete list of all the songs.)
My personal favorite inclusions are It Takes Two which was so huge when I was a kid but people forget that one outside of the East Coast I think and it doesn’t sound like anything else so it doesn’t fit into most history retellings. And P.S.K. by Schoolly D. Ice-T’s early stuff ripped off Schoolly pretty hard I thought, but he stayed underground so most people don’t even know that. That was cool of him to include.
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Major Lazer | Get Free
I don’t love everything Diplo does and am not really a Dirty Projectors fan but when you combine this goofy Major Lazer project with psudo-serious (or I-don’t-know-what) singer Amber Coffman the result was pretty nice. I fell in love with the song after seeing the video and pretty soon it was stuck in my head 24/7.
This goes on for a while. I need a copy of the song before I lose my mind but the album is not out yet at that point and am I really going to go for a full Major Lazer album? Hell no, who am I trying to kid. I make the rare single purchase from Amazon before realizing I already had a copy of the song on my hard drive which I downloaded before they even made that video. So that happened. But I got the full release with the remixes. It turned out I had also downloaded them before too. Hell. Some impression they made, huh? I listened to them enough times now to feel like I got my money’s worth and I feel fine about it. Fine. According to wiki, Amazon gypped me a remix. I don’t know what that’s about but probably wouldn’t have noticed if I didn’t just check how many there were.
Don’t get me wrong, they’re fine remixes. It’s hard to screw up a song with a nice lilting melody like this one, but they’re all uptempo versions which undermines the slo-mo post-party mood of the original. I also like the low synth sound on the verses, the fake tuba bass line that is a direct stylistic lift from whatever but it sound good, man. None of that in the remixes. They just make up whole new backdrops for the vox, whatever. Nice, but not really revelatory. I’m sure they would sounds great in a club after you are sick of the slow version being played out. Weirdly (or not) the slow version is more uplifting emotionally if not adrenaline pump-inducing.
It’s a good little record first thing in the morning to slowly ramp up your mood into consciousness and some kind of physical activity. (If that’s your thing.) %
PS: I noticed there are some performances where Ms. Coffman omits what some have dubbed “the Tarzan yell”, probably because someone told her it was racist right before she went on stage or something. Dude? It’s a Morricone reference. Good the Bad and the Ugly? Are you ok, dude?
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