Regulate the Voice

The comeback was short lived

2009-01-19T14:49:00.001+11:00

I'm now tumbling.

I'm the black Branch Rickey

2008-12-12T11:01:00.002+11:00

Quick Kanye et al. recap:

KiD CuDi (gotta get the capitalisations right) was on first and he played before roughly 13 people, including me. Cudi's got talent and tunes (and an incredible Crookers remix) behind him but seemed lost on the big stage before an empty arena. I'm a big supporter of the dude but his live show was obviously designed for packed, drunk clubs. "Day 'n' Night" was pretty good though.Consequence followed with a "professional emcee" type performance. Played all his good tracks, displayed good energy, let DJ Craze scratch a fair bit and entertained.

I seem to accidentally see New Zealand's Scribe at every one of his Melbourne shows. He's got like one or two good tracks, which he played pretty much right away after a brief "A Milli" freestyle and little else. He's still better than every Australian emcee (by far) and he filled his mostly decent 45 minutes pretty nicely.

Accompanied by a full live band for some reason, NAS came on stage and stole the damn show. He ran through most of Illmatic, dropped all his hits, played some rarities and the best tracks off Untitled. He even played my favourite unheralded Nas track, "You're da man." Perfect energy, crisp clear delivery and he generally played as if he was the headliner. Pretty much a perfect set really.

The show was advertised as a Glow in the Dark show but instead it was a "new" show, sort of a mix of the GitD light set up with a new set list and the band actually on stage. Kanye played for like over 2 hours and ran though every damn song you could hope for plus assorted extended autotune freestyles (see above). I loved his charisma, egomania, freestyled temper tantrum after a dude through a "penny" at him and an epic first encore of Jesus Walks and Stronger. Honestly, he played for way too long and his rants about the media and telling us to "eat shit and die" (again see above) was a bit much. We left before his second, even more extended encore since there was no way he could top his seemingly 20 minute version of "Stronger".

All in all, a pretty great Arena show which almost justified the price.

Call it a comeback

2008-11-27T15:07:00.001+11:00

The blog is back. More soon.

Feel like I'm the one doin' dope

2007-12-24T05:12:00.000+11:00

boxer

Don't call it a comeback...

Top 25 Albums of the Year

1. The National - Boxer
2. M.I.A. - Kala
3. Daft Punk - Alive 2007
4. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
5. Prodigy - Return of the Mac
6. El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead
7. Justice - †
8. Burial - Untrue
9. Muscles - Guns, Babes, Lemonade
10. Jay-Z - American Gangster
11. Midnight Juggernauts - Dystopia
12. Panda Bear - Person Pitch
13. Battles - Mirrored
14. Black Milk - Popular Demand
15. Frog Eyes - Tears of the Valedictorian
16. Jens Lekman - Nights Falls Over Kortedala
17. Wu-Tang Clan - 8 Diagrams
18. Beirut - The Flying Cup Club
19. Kevin Drew - Spirit If...
20. Too Short - Get Off The Stage
21. Sean Price - Jesus Price Supastar
22. R. Kelly - Double Up
23. Brother Ali - The Undisuputed Truth
24. No Age - Weirdo Rippers
25. UGK - Underground Kingz

Top Shows of the Year

Peter Bjorn & John / The Walkmen / Midnight Juggernauts / Love Is All / et al. @ St. Jerome's Laneway Festival, Febuary

2manydjs/Soulwax/New Young Pony Club/Gildas & Masaya (Kitsuné)/Rub 'n' Tug/Bang Gang Deejays/Valentinos @ the Metro, March 30th

Brother Ali & BK One @ the Espy, June

Bob Dylan @ Rod Laver Arena, August 17th

Justin Timberlake @ Rod Laver Arena, Nov. 17th

Daft Punk / The Presets / Cut Copy / SebastiAn & Kavinsky / Bang Gang Deejays / Muscles @ Myer Music Bowl, Dec 13th

Daft Punk @ Myer Music Bowl, Dec. 14th

Listening to: UGK - Cocaine in the Back of the Ride

AMG is the machine

2007-07-14T10:12:00.000+10:00

DJ Drama funds terrorism

The symposium went down yesterday and, for the most part, went amazingly well with everything basically on schedule, OK attendance and a pretty high quality of papers. There were no major fuckups and it almost seemed as if we had a clue to what we're doing. Running a conference has been a pretty great experience as you don't appreicate all the little details that are involved until you actually get down and try to think through every point. Shout-outs to everyone on the collective, all the speakers (including keynotes), and the random people who showed up including Lawson, another Melbourne blogger who found out about it through this very blog - Regulate the Voice's pull is (still) massive, yo.

I did a paper DJ Drama too. It came together over the past week and goes some places that I didn't think it would or could. I don't know if it's really any good. I'm quite unsure about my use of the law in this paper. It's journalistic and polemic (especially near the end) and it's also much more of a close-reading-free cultural studies essay than anything I really have done before. I should also say here the citations and shit are a bit fucked - I didn't have time in the past few days to properly MLA cite everything so don't look down it for those reasons. Anyways, enjoy:

Mixtape Drama: Piracy, the RIAA and the Case Against DJ Drama

Feds takin’ pictures of me
Still snitchin’ on me
-Young Jeezy on DJ Drama’s “Takin’ Pictures” (from the forthcoming Gangsta Grillz album on Atlantic Records)

On January 16th, 2007, a news report by Stacey Elgin aired on Fox5 News, the Atlanta area’s local newscast from its Fox affiliate. Elgin stands on a poorly lit and seemingly empty street in front of 147 Walker Street in “Downtown Atlanta” – the recording studio of DJ Drama (Tyree Simmons), a famous hip-hop turntablist, entrepreneur and mixtape producer who is the creative force behind the acclaimed Gangsta Grillz series, and the office of the Aphilliates Music Group, DJ Drama’s company that he co-owns with Don Cannon and DJ Sense. In Elgin’s words, earlier that night, “agents came here, SWAT teams raided the business” and “confiscated everything.” “Agents” here refers both to Fulton County police but also members of the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) Anti Piracy Unit. Her story follows and announces the detention of “17 individuals” (later reported by the New York Times to be “mostly interns from local colleges”) and the arrests of DJ Drama and his associate and fellow mixtape DJ Don Cannon for the production and distribution of, to use the words of Matthew Kilgo who is the RIAA spokesman who is interviewed during the segment, “illegal CDs.” Kilgo also refers to the mixtapes as “counterfeit CDs” although the CDs shown on the news report are clearly not bootlegged versions of artist albums but mixtapes. In this context, mixtapes are album-length collections of songs (both new and old), “freestyles” and skits that usually feature one artist or group. The tracks are mixed together using traditional techniques of turntablism and often “hosted” by the featured rapper or one of his or the DJ’s associates. DJ Drama’s mixtapes are notable for their penchant for breaking quality songs, the trademark Gangsta Grillz sound effects, the vocal drops from DJ Drama and the skill of DJ Drama’s turntablism and track sequencing. While Kilgo comments that the CDs have “no stigma attached to [them],” DJ Drama’s mixtapes are instead revered in a number of commercial and critical settings. DJ Drama and Lil Wayne’s Dedication 2 mixtape, for example, was named one of the top recordings of 2006 by influential critical sources such as Pitchforkmedia.com and the New York Times.

In any case, with a hint of strained judgment in his voice, Kilgo notes, “[t]hese guys are actively advertising online. They’ve got a website that they’re advertising from. That’s where you place your order and that’s how the order is shipped out.” Elgin also tells us that the police confiscated the company’s CDs (figures vary from 25,000 to 81,000 individual units), computer equipment, recording gear, money, bank statements, assorted promotional material and “even their cars” but did not find any other “illegal activity” such as drugs or weapons. Elgin and Kilgo though do not tell the audience that DJ Drama and Don Cannon were specifically arrested on charges of criminal racketeering under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The RICO Act, to quote G. Robert Blakey, one of the major and original architects of the bill, “covers violence, the provision of illegal goods and services, corruption in labor or management relations, corruption in government, and criminal fraud” (451). Originally intended to fight organized crime by reaching both the legitimate and illegitimate commercial enterprises of criminal organizations such as the Mafia, RICO has also successfully tracked and attacked the criminal infiltration of legitimate organizations such as the American Labor Movement.

This paper thinks through a few cultural resonances of piracy through an investigation of the arrest of and charges against DJ Drama. This incident opens up critical space to interrogate the role of piracy in popular music and specifically hip-hop culture as well as the response against piratical traditions in rap by organizations such as the RIAA. That is, the importance of the case against DJ Drama is due to the DJ’s prominence and popularity (in turn due to his Gangsta Grillz mixtapes) which is evidenced by his responsibility in part for the rise of platinum selling artists such as T.I., Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy. (Stacey Elgin’s news report, for example, features a brief shot of a framed platinum record – King by T.I.) Additionally, DJ Drama himself is set to release an album that will be structured and sonically similar to a mixtape (albeit with cleared and thus legal musical samples) on Atlantic Records in late 2007. I argue that this incident reveals two important valences of piracy in the music industry of the United States. First, piracy itself can be an important economic driver in the industry and the arrest exposes an incoherence in the RIAA’s war against digital piracy. DJ Drama’s mixtapes work as promotional tools for the artists’ “official” albums released by transnational corporations, related concert tours and ventures like the film ATL which starred T.I. and featured contributions from DJ Drama. Thus, while the arrest of DJ Drama is an attack on piracy itself, it simultaneously works against the interests of the music industry to market artists, sell records and make profits. Second, the fact that DJ Drama has been charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act suggests that DJ Drama’s mixtapes have been defined and policed as tools of organized crime rather than as artistic commodities and documents. The arrest of DJ Drama marks a major and novel articulation in the industry’s war against musical piracy – from attacks against consumer to those against a producer.

But, first, I think I should briefly discuss the RICO Act and racketeering itself before turning towards a discussion of the case against DJ Drama. Finding the preexisting anti-racketeering laws to be “unnecessarily limited in scope and impact” (qtd in Blakey 451), Congress passed the RICO Act in 1970 by margins of 73 to 1 in the Senate and 431 to 26 in the House. RICO makes it “unlawful for any person who has received any income derived, directly and indirectly, from a pattern of racketeering activity […] to use or invest, directly and indirectly, any part of such income, or the proceeds of such income, in acquisition of any interest in, or the establishment or operation of, any enterprise which is engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce” (18.I.96.1962). The Act defines “racketeering activity” in roughly 55 different ways but, in interest to this paper, are related acts indictable to section 2318 of title 18, United States Code which prohibits the “trafficking in counterfeit labels phonorecrords, computer programs or computer program documentation or packaging and copies of motion pictures or other audiovisual works” (18.I.96.1961). In order for a product to be considered to be a counterfeit, the “identifying label or container […] appears genuine, but is not” (18.I.113.2318) and these counterfeit copies must be reproduced and distributed “during any 180-day period, [and] of at least 10 copies or phonorecords” (18.I.113.2318).

The charges against DJ Drama then rest upon the assertion that his mixtapes can and should be defined as counterfeit. Using this logic, the labels of DJ Drama’s mixtapes thus intentionally mislead and confuse customers due to the supposed resemblance of unofficial mixtape to the official album. The profits made from mixtape sales (Matthew Kilgo puts the ratio at “900%”) are then funneled by DJ Drama and Don Cannon into an organization such as the Aphilliates Music Group, which, through the sales of the mixtapes, disrupts the interstate (and foreign) commerce of the recording industry. We should think back here to Matthew Kilgo’s emphasis on DJ Drama’s active advertisement on the internet and the mechanisms of ordering (and paying for) the mixtapes. Kilgo’s statements thus at least attempt to establish that DJ Drama’s activities meet the criteria of RICO in relation to counterfeiting since (a) the quantity of mixtapes seized easily exceeds the set standard, (b) his tapes are both illegal and counterfeit which is the essential point to make a RICO case against DJ Drama, (c) the products are marketed across borders through their website and (d) the money made from these sales is turned into “legitimate” capital.

Criminal RICO charges against artists signed to one of their member companies have not typically been the modus operandi of the RIAA in its fight against piracy. Instead, the RIAA has focused its efforts upon the elimination of the production of actual counterfeit CDs, shutting down websites and peer-to-peer file sharing programs such as Napster (through, among many tactics, civil RICO proceedings) and lobbying congress for stricter laws and greater enforcement of existing statues such as section 2318. In the case of the latter, the RIAA has deployed its Executive Vice President of Anti-Piracy, Brad Buckles, to appear before the judiciary committees of both the House and the Senate. On February 12, 2003, Buckles, a former director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (commonly known as the ATF), appeared before the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property of the Committee on the Judiciary alongside representatives from Microsoft and the Motion Picture Association of America to petition the American government on piracy. Perhaps surprisingly, instead of speaking against internet based peer-to-peer piracy, Buckles emphasizes the need to effectively police the production and dissemination of increasingly sophisticated counterfeit CDs that exhibit “a more expensive CD pressing technology, high quality graphics and packaging, and make the final product appear to look like the real one” (31). He claims that this type of piracy costs the industry “hundreds of millions of dollars […] every year” (31) before explicitly linking piracy to “sophisticated syndicates, including organized crime and international money-laundering rings” (35). When looking at these statements in retrospect, one is struck by the degree to which they anticipate the use of criminal RICO in their linkage of the production of counterfeit CDs to centres of racketeering activity.

As a means of emphasizing the importance of piracy, the RIAA argues that it ultimately connects to much larger issues such as American culture and terrorism. Buckles notes that piracy is “threatening to the bedrock of our American institutions, our American culture and our American economy” (33). Furthermore: “[t]]he creative industries demonstrate one area where American exports are booming, and in many countries epitomizes their experience of what it means to ‘be American’” (34). This emphasis on American values and identity must be understood within its historical context: namely, the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Buckles himself makes this connection explicit earlier in his testimony when he commends the subcommittee for investigating “the involvement of crime syndicate and terrorist groups with CD and DVD piracy, which provides quick and untraceable cash to carry out nefarious activities” (31). In testimony to the Senate judiciary committee on March 23, 2004, Buckles goes further when he claims that “[s]ome intelligence has been obtained to indicate that these [terrorist] groups are involved in the fabrication, distribution and sale of counterfeit music […] to raise funds for their operation.” Buckles lists 6 examples of tangential links between piracy and terrorism such as street hawkers in Mauritius selling videos of 9/11, Pakistanis in South Africa who ran a piracy syndicate and professed sympathies to Osama bin Laden, and discs with images of bin Laden in Paraguay. As evidence for the latter, Buckles offers, “[t]here is a large population of middle-eastern origin in Ciudad del Este.” I have quoted Buckles testimony at such length to indicate the level and style of rhetoric that the RIAA has employed to paint piracy as an operation that threatens both American culture and security, while simultaneously framing some forms of piracy, most notably the counterfeit CD, as enforceable by provisions of the RICO Act.

One of the most important aspects of the case against DJ Drama though is how different it is in many ways from the international examples that Buckles highlights in his committee testimony. That is, DJ Drama has no known links to terrorism. Instead of being “anti-American,” one of DJ Drama’s aliases is Mr. Thanksgiving, a name that explicitly alludes back to and celebrates, to use Buckles own words, “our American institutions, our American culture and our American economy.” The most important difference is that DJ Drama is a signed recording artist who, through his supposedly “counterfeit CDs,” has probably led to more sales of RIAA sanctioned albums. For example, Kalefa Sanneh notes that Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter II (Cash Money/Universal) “sold more than a million copies, though none of its singles climbed higher than No. 32 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart” (Sanneh). These incredible sales without a true hit single are “hard to imagine […] without help from a friendly pirate” (Sanneh) such as DJ Drama who, prior to the release of Tha Carter II, dropped the mixtape Dedication 2 to great critical acclaim. In 2004, DJ Drama was hired by Def Jam to produce Tha Streetz Iz Watchin’, a mixtape for Young Jeezy. Jeezy’s subsequent album was a RIAA certified platinum record. T.I., a rapper who employs DJ Drama as his touring DJ in addition to the production of various mixtapes, sold 522,000 copies of his album King in the first week alone (Haster).

The classification of mixtapes as “counterfeit CDs” is crucial and misleading. It is true that DJ Drama’s mixtapes exist in “a legal grey area” (Shapiro) in terms of their uses of unlicensed samples, songs and practices of distribution that exist outside and counter to RIAA certified avenues. But, mixtapes are not “counterfeit CDs” in the strictest sense since they are not merely copies of albums. A cursory examination of a mixtape cover like Lil Wayne’s Dedication 2 in comparison to an album such as Tha Carter II would bear this point out. The classification rests on the somewhat credible assertion that the Gangsta Grillz mixtapes successively mimic album covers in order to deceive the customer. Even this point is complicated by a general trend that has blurred the boundaries between the illegal mixtape and the official album. Even after the raid on DJ Drama and the Aphilliates Music Group, Dedication 2 was available at major chains such as Best Buy and FYE, as well as on the iTunes Store (Shapiro); all of those outlets would not deal in clearly counterfeit CDs due to their preexisting relationships with record companies. Also, Lil Wayne will also release Dedication 3 as an official album on Universal Records in 2008. Additionally, albums that are structured like and explicitly thought of as mixtapes such as Prodigy’s Return of the Mac or Eminem’s The Re-Up have been released by record companies like Koch and Interscope. Finally, DJ Drama himself has signed to Atlantic Records and will release the official Gangsta Grillz album in late 2007.

What I have been gesturing towards is that a number of record companies have both sold more records due to piratical mixtapes and have started to subtly shift the role and prominence of the mixtape from supplement to primary text. In other words, piracy can be and already is an important financial driver in the industry. Journalist and hip-hop historian Jeff Chang notes, “[t]he whole industry shifted to massive economies of scale, and mixtapes are a natural outgrowth and responses to that” (qtd in Shapiro). Thus, the RIAA led raid and prosecution of DJ Drama reveals a fundamental incoherence in the American recording industry’s strategies which employ DJ Drama’s piracy as a means to sell official records, concert tickets and non-music related ventures like fashion or cinema (T.I.’s starring role in ATL, for example) while deploying legal means like criminal RICO prosecution to take back control of the music industry. While Brad Buckles tells congress he lobbies on behalf of artists first and foremost, his organization makes it possible for local police to charge one of those artists with a felony. The DJ Drama incident ultimately reveals a sort of cannibalization of the music industry where one hand attacks what the other is doing to evolve its business models in accordance with the wider changes in hip-hop and in the music industry itself.

Finally, the case against DJ Drama defines mixtapes as tools of organized crime and evidence of racketeering activity instead of as artistic works or musical commodities. The shift is significant because one of its wider cultural resonances is perhaps a modulation of what Brad Buckles calls “the value of music in America.” That is, perhaps Buckles conception of what it is to “be American” (his value of music) is challenged directly by mixtapes which redraw American values both through their lyrical and musical content, which I have not had time to discuss in this paper but also the production techniques and economies of scale that are essential to mixtape producers like DJ Drama and increasingly the recording industry of America. It would then seem to be entirely appropriate to use an outmoded and awkward tool like RICO (a law born of a different age for much different purposes) to try to reclaim past models that make the RIAA possible if not necessary.

----

Discuss.

Listening to: Willie the Kid - Get You A Gun (Produced by Don Cannon)

Feds takin' pictures

2007-06-26T19:45:00.000+10:00

piracy

Sorry for the near total silence for the past month or so (or more). I've been (a) working on (too) many projects, (b) uninspired, (c) losing passion for blogging (the death of the blogeur?) or (d) found something better to do with my time. Take your pick because they're all true to some extent.

So, along with the rest of the antiTHESIS collective, I'm organizing a conference on piracy hilariously entitled "Rum, Sodomy and the Lash." (Apparently, I've been put in charge of the "sodomy" portion of the title, for some reason.) The event's going down on July 13th and is totally free to attend (in fact, free drinks and food are to be had throughout the day). Tony Mitchell (University of Technology, Sydney) is doing one of the keynote addresses. Mitchell is one of the premier transnational hip-hop scholars in the world (check out his book Global Noise) and he'll be speaking about musical piracy, cultural citizenship and a flea market in Mexico City. If that's not enough, I'll be "DJing" the after party so good tunes are guaranteed (I've got some mu'fuckin' heat lined up, no doubt). More information will be here sometime soon.

In another of my 18 billion projects, I'll also be doing a paper (and chairing the music session). I'm going to speak about Mr. Thanksgiving, the iPod King, etc. etc. etc., my boy DJ Drama. Abstract:

Mixtape Drama: Piracy, the RIAA and the Case Against DJ Drama

This paper thinks through the cultural resonances of piracy through an investigation of the recent arrest of DJ Drama who is a well known hip-hop DJ, entrepreneur and mixtape producer responsible in part for the rise of platinum selling artists such as T.I., Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy. On January 16th, 2007, acting upon a tip supplied by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Fulton County, Georgia police officers and SWAT teams raided the recording studio and office of DJ Drama. The police confiscated over 81,000 CDs, computer equipment, recording gear, four automobiles and assorted promotional material. DJ Drama and his associate DJ Don Cannon were arrested on racketeering charges related to the allegedly piratical aspects of the production and dissemination of mixtapes. I argue that this incident reveals two important valences of piracy in the music industry of the United States. First, piracy itself can be an important economic driver in the industry and the arrest exposes an incoherence in the RIAA’s war against digital piracy. That is, DJ Drama’s mixtapes work as promotional tools for the artists’ “official” albums released by transnational corporations, related concert tours and ventures like the film ATL which starred T.I. and featured contributions from DJ Drama. Thus, while the arrest of DJ Drama is an attack on piracy itself, it simultaneously works against the interests of the music industry to market artists, sell records and make profits. Second, the fact that DJ Drama has been charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act suggests that DJ Drama’s mixtapes have been defined and policed as tools of organized crime rather than as artistic documents.

In a first for me, this paper basically follows directly from a previous blog post on the subject. The rest of the conference should be good or at least interesting enough to get you through to the party. We've got panels on the law, feminism, new media, transnationalism, literature, music and "creative arts" with contributions from people at the University of Melbourne, RMIT, University of Queensland, University of New South Wales, Fordham Law School (NYC!), Charles University (Prague!) Australian Catholic University and a couple other places. Keynotes by the aforementioned Tony Mitchell and C.R. Pennell (University of Melbourne). Anyone in Melbourne should make an effort to come out and say hey. So, to recap:

Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: A Symposium on Piracy
Graduate Centre, University of Melbourne
July 13th, 2007
9 AM to LATE

Drinks/party at about 5 PM in the John Medley Building's 5th Floor Function Room.

Listening to: Notorious B.I.G. - Ready to Die

Human after all

2007-06-12T09:12:00.000+10:00

human

It's been a couple days and I still don't really know what to say about Daft Punk's Electroma - the new film written and directed by DP, which tracks two "Hero Robots" in their quest to become human in Inyo County, California. On one hand, it's exquisitely and somewhat imaginatively shot with memorable imagery, a promising concept and a stylishly deployed aesthetic that I really sympathize with. But, on the other hand, it's slow, pretentious and, worst of all, boring as fuck at times. You really couldn't shake the feeling through the entire film that it was the ultimate vanity project with the omnipresent Daft Punk leather jackets (designed by Dior Homme, of course), robot masks aplenty and the heroic trajectory of the robots.

Despite the wank, there are some moments of undeniable quality. The long sequence of sweeping desert and sand dune shots ending with an image of two dunes connected at a 45 degree angle, complete with a silhouette of a large bush at the apex was truly vulvosophic. The scenes set in the town were consistently engaging and clever. Finally, the whole film was filmed beautifully, especially the smashingly effective concluding sequence, complete with its robot suicide, smashed helmets, and spectacular fire related ending which brought together much of the film's imagery into one statement.

The film's pacing though seemed to invite tedium, particulaly during the neverending hike through the desert in the second half of the flick. After the town scene's relative activity, visual interest and humour, the desert trek (two robots walking at basically a steady clip over blank desert for 45 or so minutes) front loaded the film and left the awesome ending to be more of a relief than epiphany. Comparisons to Van Sant's Gerry or Gallo's Brown Bunny are inevitable but I found Electroma, on the whole, to be much more immediately likeable (maybe due to the lack of Vincent Gallo) than either and probably worth another viewing. Oh, I should also mention that the soundtrack features absolutely no Daft Punk but instead an interesting mix of Curtis Mayfield, Brian Eno, Chopin, Haydn, Todd Rundgren and a lot of white noise.

Also: Late pass, but Dizzee Rascal's Maths & English leaked a week or so ago. The first five or so tracks are pure hot fire - the type of material that makes almost everyone so excited by Dizzee. The rest of the album falls off a bit (especially he nonsensical and terrible Lily Allen collabo) but it's still basically decent if not good. The undisputed highlight of the album is the long awaited track (rumours of which have been swirling since 2005) featuring the mighty UGK. The whirly beat perfectly sets the table for all the emcees, nicely straddling a border between grime and dirty south. Dizzee starts and delivers a slower than usual verse taunting an unnamed fake gangster and then Bun B follows with his usual generic standout verse seemingly about nothing. But, it's Pimp C who confidently owns the track by casually adapting his flow to drop a heap of quotables, non-sequitors and name-drops ("Bitch, I've got a lot of names"). This transatlantic creative partnership is, in a word, dope and it must continue.

Download Dizzee Rascal's "Where Da G's (featuring UGK)" here.

Addendum: R.I.P. Stack Bundles.

Listening to: Dizzee Rascal - Sirens

I go chop your dollar

2007-05-31T17:17:00.000+10:00

419

Song of the mu'fuckin' year.

Listening to: Nkem Owoh - I Go Chop Your Dollar

Man, you know we got the chicks in the pool skinny dippin

2007-05-30T11:16:00.000+10:00

ridiculous

Like hip-hop, I'm not dead. Just busy, too busy. Anyways:

Double Up is probably the most ridiculous rekkid of 2007. And maybe the best. Kells is a prophet.

Download R. Kelly's "Get Dirty (feat. Chamillionaire)" here.

Also: Check out Kells' "The Zoo" here. Sex related Jurassic Park metaphors are truth.

Listening to: R. Kelly - Freaky in the Club

Where I can dream

2007-05-22T09:33:00.000+10:00

blogday

So, yeah, the 3rd blogday of this here site passed by without mention 10 or 12 days ago. I think I was in Tasmania or something, which like the blogdays 1 and 2 somehow summarized an entire year in one day's activities. In any case, ~~here's Adult Swim's video of a TV on the Radio track from their OK Calculator demo~~ from the halcyon days of 2002 and 2003 when only indie geeks were into this great band. Actually, a still from the video is above and you can watch it and download a bunch of songs here. Upwards, onwards and so on and so forth.

Listening to: Battles - Atlas

We will be here forever

2007-05-19T14:31:00.000+10:00

nostalgic polemics

I have to comment on the recently leaked KRS-One & Marley Marl rekkid, Hip Hop Lives (the title track's video is above). In many ways, it's a deeply embarassing release with its nostalgic polemics, pre-cambrian beats and ultimately pointless content. (Nas was being ironic in the title of his last release!) But, on the other hand, it's (the non-religious) Kris rapping over Marley fuckin Marl tracks. 20 years ago, that shit would have been incredible and maybe even in the late 90s, we could have been excited about such a collaborative project. But, now, the shit is beyond played and the neverending "we are the Golden Age and new rap sucks" sentiment is enough to wear down even the most dedicated KRS fan. Especially when you consider E-40's hyphy fuelled resurgence, this record - which seems to be the hip-hop equivalent of any of the albums that the Stones or the Who put out in the 80s and 90s - is dull, lame and tragic. The way to take back hip-hop is to produce some good and innovative music, mu'fuckers!

Download KRS One & Marley Marl's "The Victory (feat. Blaq Poet and DJ Premier)" here.

Listening to: KRS One & Marley Marl - Tribute to Nas

Let's get drunk and freaky fly

2007-05-15T15:53:00.000+10:00

blatant banality

Back when I was young(er), like in high school, most of my friends were in (bad) punk bands. I wasn't really into punk back then (that was my Joy Division/French house phase) but I went to their shows to support them and hope they got better with each gig. The shows were never good but they still hold meaning for me. That's basically why I've always had a bit of a soft spot for all ages punk shows and their accompanying youthful, somewhat priveledged and luxurious angst. Rock on dudes before you go back to your suburban house!

So, I was in Launceston, Tasmania a week or so ago. My travel partner wanted a quiet night in the hotel but I wanted to check out the town and its scene. Unfortunately, there didn't appear to be much of one as Launceston reminded me of a place like Peterborough ("Peterbrahh") minus the Pig's Ear. I was faced with the choice between the "R&B Superclub" night with one "DJ Def Rok" or an all ages show at the Polish Hall featuring roughly 18 billion local bands. Needless to say, I went for the latter.

I rolled in late thinking that a 10 PM arrival would be well within reason. The band on stage (pictured above) thrashed around while the crowd either formed into either buffalo stances or overenthusiastic spastic dancing formations. I kept my distance, preferring to stay in the shadows and eventually I found a place in the back in between the all-pop-no-beer bar and the merch table. Watching the band's blatant banality, earnest conviction and unrehearsed incompetence was better than their screams and attempts at wails but it was still quite fun. I skipped out during the break to grab a slice but returned in time for the next band who, although technically better, lacked the previous band's spirit. The kids knew it and headed for the doors for a smoke or two (seemingly cigarettes only, there was a distinct lack of j's for an all ages gig).

I followed them out the door and realized that I had become the "creepy old guy" who hung out at the back of the hall at the shows of my youth. So, instead of returning from the bottle shop with my beers, I continued onwards to the cinema and took in the travesty that was Spiderman 3. I should have stayed at the Polish Hall: it was the worst film of the year. It turned out it was better to be creepy old guy than to subject oneself to Tobey Maguire's Bright Eyes-ish interpretation of emo-Spiderman.

Listening to: Justice feat. Uffie - The Party

The gun bring you more gifts than Kris Kringle

2007-04-28T14:25:00.000+10:00

sound the alarm

Personally, the last month has been crazy. Transpacific flights, whirlwind trips across North America, and the like (you can read more on that below) were followed by intense periods of teaching (on sports-as-cultural-narrative and McLuhan), marking entirely too many papers on television programs and other personal victories and failures. (Just check the shabby state of my office space pictured above.) Yesterday I realized that I have slowly and without realizing it somehow become the dude in the movie line in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. You know: "I happen to teach a class at Columbia called 'TV, Media and Culture.'" How did this all happen? What went wrong? What went right? Anyways:

Current Listening, or, Music To Mark A Paper or Thirty To

Cadence Weapon vs. Final Fantasy - Live on CBC

Compared to other national outlets, despite taking away our Brave New Waves, eliminating the major operational branch of CBC Radio 3, and its blasé attitude towards most hip-hop, the CBC really is quite a decent public broadcaster. They recently (?) put Roland "Cadence Weapon" Pemberton (pictured above, formerly a target of much of this blog's love/hate, aka Rollie) and Owen "Final Fantasy" Pallett together in front of an audience and the pair banged out 6 tracks -- a couple covers (Lou Reed, Chad Van Gaalen) and a couple versions each of their own material. To be expected, some tracks (notably "Sharks," "Mini TVs" and "What Do You Think Will Happen Next?") work better than others (including a glitchyish "This is the Dream of Win and Regine" and a boom-bap deficient "Grim Fandago"). But, it's clear that this is a partnership has massive potential. I, for one, am calling on Owen and Rollie to team up to do a Canadian version of Jaylib except nerdier, whiter and better. Call it "Cadence Fantasy," record it in a few days while holed up in a shitty studio in Toronto with breaks only for liquor, record purchases and maybe drugs (if necessary) and put it out on, say, Blocks. But make it happen, friends.

Download Cadence Fantasy's "Sharks" here.

Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Massage LP (CBS Records, 1968?)

I randomly came across this bizarre, beguiling and crazy rekkid while researching McLuhan. Basically, it's a lecture by McLuhan but cut up and put back together with bad/generic '60s incidental music and random interviews with people that are definitely not McLuhan patched and spliced in all over the place. Numerous passages are subjected to charmingly quaint manipulations; for example, there are points that render McLuhan's deadly serious monotone in falsetto. On the whole, using strict standards (whatever that means), it's not very good and it's pretty obvious that Columbia put this out so hippies could put it on while they smoked a J and pretend to be intelligent. But, whatever, nowadays, this is an album that deserves to be appreciated.

Download Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage here.

Björk - Volta

I seem to be the only person in the world who actually liked Medulla (especially the contributions from Rahzel and Matmos) although even I will admit that I haven't listened to the whole thing in over a year. But, then again, I was never a die-hard mid-90s Björk fan (I preferred the dark stoned schizophrenia of Pre Millennium Tension era Tricky) so maybe you should disregard my opinion here. Anyways, Volta comes out on Tuesday and it leaked um sometime a few days ago or so (although in an imperfect 128 kpbs version). The album carries ridiculous expectations with the should-kill-my-skull-with-its-ridiculous-amazingness collabos with Timbaland and Antony. Antony is actually kind of superflous in his duets with Björk as he neither really adds or detracts much from the tracks.

The Timbaland tracks, on the other hand, are pretty decent but disappointing in that "decent" wasn't what we really expected or wanted from putting together one of the greatest producers of all time with one of the best singers on the planet. I'm left thinking that Timbaland should have produced the entire fucking album and then we could have gotten a real picture of what this creative partnership could actually yield. The residues though (in the 3 album tracks) are just pretty good. In the end, Volta seems to me to be a "grower" record that will come together and make sense of my life in a couple months.

Download Björk's "Innocence (Co-Produced by Timbaland)" here.

Styles P - various mixtapes

Slowly and without anyone really noticing, if we're going to rank the Lox, Styles P became better than Jadakiss. Maybe he always had the lyrical edge but, while languishing in label hell, he certainly somehow turned into an interesting rapper. I've been listening to probably too much Styles Paniro for months now. His last album was criminally underrated (maybe even un-rated since it dropped when nobody would notice on December 19th) but his mixtapes for DJ Drama/Don Cannon and Big Mike are the releases that have been really dominating my headphones. Of course, in this era of hip-hop nobody really cares about lyricism but P's got all that and more.

Download Styles P's "Hard Liquor" here and his "He Old From The New" here.

Joanna Newsom - Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band EP

A friend of mine made an interesting point at the pub yesterday: Newsom should have re-recorded the entire Ys record using arrangements like the ones on this EP. I loved Van Dyke Parks' strings but the more spare, more traditionally folky band could have been a productive if repetitive exercise. In any case, if you're not a fan already, this EP is unlikely to convince you to come over to the Newsom bandwagon but fans will find some interest in the Deadwood-ish sound of this band and the new track "Colleen." Otherwise, despite its sorta witty title, it's a throwaway, make a few bucks quick type release.

Download Joanna Newsom's "Colleen" here.

Black Milk - Popular Demand

Put aside his slightly retarded name (surely a Massive Attack allusion?) and the probably misguided J Dilla comparisons, and Popular Demand is still quite an exciting little record. The beats are straight up good (and sometimes great), the guest appearances from dudes like Guilty Simpson, Phat Kat, Slum Village, Baatin and One Be Lo (!) are handled well and Black Milk can actually flow pretty decently. When I was in NYC, every head I talked to was really into Milk and for good reason. He could be the most interesting rapper/producer coming out of the "underground" right now. Come to think of it, I really should have bought the dude's t-shirt.

Download Black Milk's "Sound the Alarm (feat. Guilty Simpson)" here.

I'll be back in a week or two. A friend of mine is coming into town (all the way from Vancouver) and I'm going to show her the city and maybe go to Tasmania for good measure and for no apparent reason.

Listening to: Tokyo Police Club - Citizens of Tomorrow

If you can't stand the pressure: slam dance

2007-04-21T11:37:00.000+10:00

gimmick

After a series of mostly incompetent DJs and dull emcees, J-Zone hit the stage at about half past midnight. His schtick of sub-porno/pseudo-misogynistic raps over top of pretty good beats is best in small doses but Zone does his best to make his somewhat thin material more dynamic and exciting than his records might indicate. Dressed in a "half emu, half dinosaur" furcoat, J-Zone rapped, ran around, danced, dribbled a basketball, paid tribute to the Geto Boys and beat down a drunk moron who jumped on stage and stole a 5 dollar bill that was tucked under Zone's bandana. It was pretty clear that J-Zone could rock a crowd, unlike many emcee/producers that I've seen play, but the longer his show went on (and with each successive exortation for the crowd to chant something like "fuck you bitch"), the more the gimmick grated. Still though, it was a fun if ultimately kinda bullshit show. I bounced before J-Zone got back on stage to spin an apparently all gangsta rap set. Public transit beckoned.

Listening to: Joe Budden & Redman - New Jersey Drive

Guzzle the whole bottle, that's a New York sip

2007-04-13T08:35:00.000+10:00

New York shit

So, I'm back. Jetlagged, conflicted about leaving Nor'America again, but back nonetheless. The last 2ish weeks were fun, dope and tiring and, to all those who came out or were party to my whirlwind travels, sincere thanks and a hearty "Let's do it again, son." I was going to do a big I-did-this-I-did-that type post but I don't really have the energy or time to write that now or ever. Anecdotes will be confined to sticky tables and jugs of beer rather than the way too public blogosphere. It's better that they're confined there anyways.

To give you a taste, here's the sorts of things that I've been up to for the past couple weeks: soul-draining-blod-clot-inducing (nojamaican) trans-Pacific flights, a nearly missed connection in Hong Kong, Foucault's Madness and Civilization, too many too small thimbles of liquids, lost luggage in Vancouver, lunch and conversation at Vancouver aiport with Jenna, a snow storm to welcome me back to Edmonton, a 20 car pileup on Highway 2, no time for jetlag, beers and substances with the old crew, the laughingly bad Edmonton Oilers (what happened?), outrageous and stupid "security" regulations at the airports, running into Tim Yu at O'Hare airport, free accomodations at the fuckin' Grand Hyatt on 42nd street, the all too typical tourist walk around the neighbourhood (Chrysler building, Grand Central, Empire State building, Macy's and its mind numbingly intense flower show, Times Square, etc.), too much New York slice, Chinatown, a session or two of the conference I was there for, trips to the Village, rekkid shopping at Fat Beats NYC, being hustled by Creature (thanks for the CD), accidentally tracking down the sites of random Salinger stories, the Park, Yankee Stadium, sitting for 4 hours in 30 degree (F) weather for a game, A-Rod choking/striking out on 3 pitches with 2 on and no out down by 3, way too much Prodigy and Styles P on the headphones in the subway, a paper that bombed, the iconic and well required I heart NY shirt for a dollar, midnight beers with a few of the U of T crew, later night substances with A.D., accompanying discussions about (in no order) Young Jeezy, Emily Dickenson, rekkids, mixtapes, hip-hop, poetics, Aphra Behn, Walt Whitman and ridiculous subwoolfer purchases, requisite visits to Soudscapes, Rotate This and Play de Record, a decent hamburger, Toronto's best shawarma, the Blue Jays home opener (go Jays), "Free Justin Huber," beer and baseball with Max Fawcett, coffee with Rob, Steve Coll's Ghost Wars (holy fuck), half empoty flights on the way back and new headphones.

Listening to: Prodigy - Return of the Mac (New York Shit)

It's not you, it's the E talking

2007-04-01T11:52:00.000+10:00

we are your friends

Since moving down here (or under, you might say), I don't really go to as many shows (or gigs) with international touring artists as I used to due to the price. Gigs are twice as expensive here, as the costs of flying the band or DJ across the Pacific and then trying to make an economically viable tour in a country where vans or buses are useless for touring and there are only maybe 5 major cities (6 if you include the Gold Coast) to hit and only 3 of those that you'd even want to throw a party in. Thus, there's no way that, say, I'm going to spend $70+ on the Roots. So, if I'm going to pay more, it better be more of an event and, somehow, the good folks at Modular (an Australian equivalent to maybe Last Gang Records except they also throw massive happenings) keep on delivering.

On Friday night (and into Saturday morning), the Radio Soulwax party (the Sydney version is pictured above) defied all expectations and blew me away. I wasn't sure if I was going to actually pony up the cash for a ticket until I found myself at a Ticketmaster outlet in the top floor of the Myer Department Store on Tuesday afternoon but I am now so happy that I did. After a few adventures in Melbourne's city centre involving drunken corporate types and watching trippy (see below) videos in an artist's studio, we arrived at the Metro (one of Melbs' resident superclubs) in good spirits. We walked in just as, I think, the Valentinos were coming on. If I had paid attention more, I'd probably think they were pretty decent dancepunk although, based on my few glances between conversations, I thought they could definitely work on like stage presence and stuff like that.

The club seemed to fill up just after we arrived and in time for New Young Pony Club, an English band out of the New Rave scene (they toured with the Klaxons) that has been signed by Modular. I paid closer attention to them than the Valentinos and was promptly bored out of my skull. They were horrifically generic down to the guitarist's moustache, as if they had distilled all the good elements out of the scene and then reconstituted them in a vacuum losing all the charm and grit in the process. I went up to the second room during the set break to check out the Rub-n-Tug DJs who were surprisingly dull and predictable. Things were not going so well musically so far.

We waded into the now packed dancefloor just as Riot in Belgium had sufficiently kept it heaving during the break. And, with barely a word, four sorta bookish Belgian dudes in all white clothing (what is this? an Islands show?) walked on stage: this was the Nite Versions edition of Soulwax. They started with their awesome Daft Punk cover "Teachers" and then proceeded to, in scientific terms, kill that shit dead. The set flowed from song to song without a break. The ebb and flow of their perfomance from buildup to climax back to buildup and on again was mesmerizing enough to make us forget about their lack of charisma or showmanship. Highlights were the euphorious version of "E Talking" (and it was definitely talking) and the set closing epic version of "NY Excuse." Somehow in the chaos, I had lost my friends and after Soulwax finished I blindly looked around the crowded and cavernous club, finding one of them in the second room, calmly sitting and smoking to the DJing of Gildas and Masaya from Kitsuné (a record and fashion label from Paris). I only heard them for a couple minutes but it wasn't impressive.

We went back downstairs and eventually found another one of our group and waited for 2manydjs (aka the Dewaele brothers from Soulwax) to come on. It seemed like everyone thought they were going to set up their decks on stage so when they slipped into the DJ booth and started to play it was somewhat surprising for everyone but soon absolute insanity ensued. They began at around 3 AM, beginning with The Gossip's "Something in the Way of Control" and only played for an hour (it seemed as if they were told to stop as the club was stopped selling liquor at 4) but they made almost every second count. Eschewing mashups, they just set out to rock the party rather than playing a set that put themselves in front of the end goal to get the dancefloor heaving. Indeed, I think they only slipped in one of two mashups (a Nirvana one that had the crowd singing and something else that escapes me a couple days later).

In any case, the undisputed highlights of their mix was a five or six minute section when they started with the Incredible Bongo Band's classic "Apache' and somehow mixed in Justice's massive "Waters of Nazareth" as well as when they dropped "Never Be Alone" and we yelled along to every word. After they finished, the crowd wouldn't let them go away without a short encore. And so they played for another 5 minutes (dropping the Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" of all things) and then they packed up and everyone, stunned and not ready to go home at 4:20 AM, just stood around ready to pary until the sun came up. Eventually, we shuffled out of the club and I found my way to bed at around 6 AM. After waking up to teach on Friday morning, I had been up for 24 straight hours.

Also: I'm coming back to North America tomorrow for a couple weeks ostensibly to go to a conference in NYC but also to visit friends and family in Edmonton and Toronto. Blogging could be sporadic or, alternately, more of a I-did-this-I-did-that nature. (You've been warned.) To all the people I'll be seeing in the next couple weeks, I can't wait as it should be an amazing time. New York: look out. I'm coming.

Listening to: Justice vs. Simian - Never Be Alone

I wish I would've listened everytime he told me

2007-03-27T12:36:00.000+10:00

maths and english

A second piece of Dizzee Rascal's forthcoming Maths and English record has been deployed ("leaked") thanks to Diplo. It's hilariously called "Pussyhole" and, despite its suggestive title, it's basically a track about snitches and how much snitches suck (an English entry into the "stop snitchin'" subgenre?). So, to sum up, we have Dizzee rapping at Warp 9 overtop of a beat cribbed from Rob Base. Of course, it's good: Dizzee sounds as confident and commanding a he's ever been, the beat is pure fire, and, best of all, Dizzee is really at home overtop of "old school" tracks (see "Fix Up Look Sharp"). But, it's also sort of generically good and could be seen as a return to a previous successful formula rather a step forwards. In a sense, that's been the dilemna of grime ever since it comparatively blew up. We can maybe see dubstep as an attempt to move forward by leaving behind the good times (dubstep's almost pedantic seriousness) while Dizzee, grime's first real star, points a different path with his move towards commercial (and American) success in the forms of collabs with artists like UGK (fuck yes!) or Lily Allen (oh no). The question really boils down to whether Dizzee is still a vital artist. The rest of Maths and English (coming out in June) should provide some answers.

Download Dizzee Rascal's "Pussyhole" here.

Listening to: Timbaland feat. Nelly Furtado & Justin Timberlake - Give It To Me

Oh you mad 'cause I'm stylin' on you

2007-03-21T14:15:00.000+11:00

broad strokes of rumour and stereotype

We now have a candidate for the worst record of the year. I'm not talking about the records you know are going to be shit; the pro-tooled, overpolished studio tripe that major labels push out with not so alarming regularity. But, instead, I'm thinking about the type of record that's produced by obviously talented musicians with some greater purpose or concept in mind. I'm referring here to Wynton Marsalis' From The Plantation to the Penitentiary, the most undauntingly pedantic, shrill and ultimately snooze inducing listening experience of the year.

Wynton Marsalis has long been one of my least favourite figures in modern music and especially jazz. His uber-conservative views on jazz (couched from Stanley Crouch, if one wants to be honest) have held the genre down from its artistic possibilities, limiting it to the now-pat configurations of genre, form and band that Marsalis claims as real jazz. His work on Ken Burns' jazz explicitly and sickeningly sought to lessen the importance and interesting qualities of much jazz post say 1965 (with the exception of his own work which, in Burns' narrative, saves jazz) and especially the fusion of Miles. Also, for much of his career, Marsalis has constantly rallied against hip-hop, tarnishing it with broad strokes of rumour and stereotype, while isolating jazz from hip-hop's influence. In the end, Marsalis might have made the new Jazz at Lincoln Center facility (see below) a possibility but he has ossified jazz by turning it into "America's classical music" - in a museum, under glass and out of the grasp of anyone with ideas that question Marsalis' jazz canon.

And, now we have From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, a political jazz record if there was ever one. The thing is that it, and especially the supposedly "renown" (according to wikipedia) track "Where Ya'll At?," is constantly undermined by itself. That is, Marsalis' set in stone views about jazz (and "black music" in general) handicap his larger project from the start. Instead of angry, forceful and powerful music, we get lifeless rehashes of a style that Duke Ellington perfected, well, 60+ years ago although Marsalis adds his own little flourishes to seperate his work from mere mimicry. In other words, the music's dullness derives from its own myopic, canonic and tedious views on what jazz is (what jazz is = what jazz was, to use a simple equation).

I'm not even mentioning Marsalis' shockingly bad "rap" which neither works as a form of either (a) lyrics, (b) poetry or (c) rap. Marsalis' whinging is so tired that I think he must have said all these things eighteen billion times before. Few of his phrases are original or insightful, instead he just speaks in clichés rehearsing solidly liberal arguments that are neither novel nor necessary. His pleas against "supercapitalists" sounds especially hollow considering his financial situation, deals and dealings with various corporations and nearly one million dollar salary at Jazz at Lincoln Center. As for his shots at hip-hop, I probably don't need to go through them. Just listening to them exposes their idiocy. Like, check this out:

You got to speak the language the people are speaking
'specially when you see the havoc it's wreaking
Even the rap game started out critiquing
Now it's all about killing and freaking

There are a number of things wrong in these first four lines but chief amongst them is perhaps the assertion that hip-hop "started out critiquing" which, you know if you follow the history of hip-hop, is patently false. The first records and most music (save a Message or White Lines here or there) for the first decade was not about critiquing the system explicitly but more to do with having a good time, partying and dancing. You know, all the things that Marsalis has forgotten that jazz should be about. In any case, Marsalis' criticisms of hip-hop are so tiresome because he really doesn't have a clue about the culture. He acknowledges he doesn't really listen to any hip-hop and proceeds to tear it down anyways. Forget about listening through the entire album, as Jay-Z famously told his critics on "The Ruler's Back," he doesn't even take the time to lend his ear to songs or even verses.

This is all not to deny that hip-hop is not as stupid, regressive and frustrating music at times. Far from it, this is one of the fundamental issues that heads go through from time to time (see: the underground vs. mainstream dichotomy, backpacker phenomenon, the Native Tongues movement, Jay-Z signing the Roots to Def Jam, etc. etc. etc.) I'm saying here that there are certainly more productive and, importantly, actually interesting ways to approach these issues. If you're going to try to "speak the language that people are speaking," you should at least try to comprehend those codes and the issues that extend beyond the latest, say, Weezy single.

To sum up: Nas' "Where Y'all At" was way better.

Download Wynton Marsalis' "Where Y'all At?" here.

Listening to: Joe Budden - Freestyle on DJ Green Lantern's Sirius Invasion, March 20, 2007

All my heroes are weirdos

2007-03-14T14:46:00.000+11:00

Murda

I've been really busy lately; heaps and heaps of stuff going on right now. Let's get to it:

[G1, 1]

After passing on a Dudley "Declaime" Perkins and Georgia Anne Muldrow show on Sunday, I decided to check out !!! the next night. The setlist's order and omissions were puzzling as they seemed to load up the front with new tracks (including the excellent "Heart of Hearts") and then end with slightly less than you'd think versions of old classics like "Pardon My Freedom." This is not to say that the gig was bad or even just average - it was a good time had by all - but it was, to me at least, less than the great and amazing time that people have told me that !!! are capable of. All that said, there were moments of the show where the band seemed to lock into place, when the groove finally was established and really sat in and these were the points in the set that inspired a bit of a riot on the dancefloor. In the end though there were too few of these highlights to push the set beyond just a fun night.

[G2, 1]

I'm probably getting to this late but I'm really getting into Uncle Murda (pictured above with the 44) who apparently just signed to the Roc. (In actual terms, this probably means that he might do a verse on the next Bleek rekkid and then never release his LP until he gets dropped from the Roc and signed to Koch.) He seems to only have one speed and approach - fast and I-really-want-to-kill-you - but he seems really intent, like every New York based emcee since the early 90s maybe if not before, on bringing NYC back. But, still, although overplayed and certainly clichéd, I still think it's a laudable goal and Murda fits roughly into the same category of dudes like Saigon and Papoose (though with less buzz). Instead of Papoose's I-can-really-rap ethos or Sai's proclivities to get stabbed in the temple and still drop crazy knowledge, Uncle Murda relies on yelling and outward passion to deliver his message. I'm not sure if it works all the time but it's more inspiring (what it might inspire is another question) than, say, Tru Life.

Download Uncle Murda's "Running the City" here.

[G3, 1]

So, Sage Francis' new album leaked a couple weeks ago and it's actually quite good ... if you're into that sort of thing. Sage is a polarizing figure in hip-hop but also in my own listening. He's got some sort of skills (is it rap or spoken word or slam poetry?) and he's aligned with the right sorts of producers for what he does but most of his rekkids (outside of Hope, the one he did with Joe Beats as Non-Prophets) are unlistenable messes of too many syllables and confessional sub-emo raps. I say all this as a guy who still thinks Atmosphere has the ability to put out a great album (Lucy Ford notwithstanding) and that the core Def Jux artists are still important and viable in 2007. In other words, I condemn Sage as a self confessed "backpacker."

Part of my hate-on for Sage definitely grows out of my distaste for most of his fans (and especially the online forum devoted to all things Francis) and, also, what Sage Francis represents - the apotheosis of the underground (in the very negative sense of the underground). But, if you put all that aside, Human The Death Dance is a really good LP which combines perfectly good and appropriate beats with a less annoying Sage Francis (the spoken word emo shit is mostly edited out). The improbable guest shots from Jolie Holland are highlights, especially the Buck 65 produced "Got Up This Morning." It's Sage though; I shouldn't admit that I like it let alone listen to it in public.

Download Sage Francis' "Got Up This Morning (feat. Jolie Holland, produced by Buck 65)" here.

[G4, 1]

Daft Punk are undoubtedly one of my favourite "bands" (whether they can be considered a band is something that I've had many arguments about with various people) of the 90s, if not of all time. Homework remains probably one of the top 3 or 4 "dance" albums ever released and Discovery keeps becoming a increasingly important touchstone for all the music that has come after it. (You can tie it to any number of movements in music from dancepunk to indie pop to certain forms of hip-hop, not to mention its immediate influence on house.) Like most people, I found Human After All to be a deeply disappointing release but after downloading Daft Punk's amazing set at Coachella 2006, where the robots make every track that they play off of HAL sound astounding, I'm forced to rethink the album.

Perhaps it represents a more concrete, productive and interesting way of introducing the human to dance music with the album's reliance on and featured use of guitars ("All guitars by Daft Punk" as the liner notes have it, if I recall correctly). The guitars are then combined with the group's usual use and mastery of samples and beats. I'm thinking of this method in opposition to say a group like the Klaxons (any new rave or dancepunk band could stand in here) who try to just reproduce dance music in band form. (K-Punk, ew, hates that sort of shit.)

Or, maybe not and Human After All still stinks. My main point here is that you should follow that link to Daft Punk's set at Coachella and download/listen to it while imaging robots and a crazy light show (see above) and thousands of people on pills dancing around you.

[G5, 1]

Speaking of pills, I should mention the new and fantastic Panda Bear LP. It's so much better than his first album that it's almost shocking. Sunny Brian Wilson-ish melodies, subtle rhythms and copious use of delay mingle to create a drug soaked 45 minutes. It's all very blissful and nice throughout (in the best sense of "nice"). Clearly, Animal Collective's talent for quickly creating and sustaining moods spills over to Panda Bear.

Download Panda Bear's "Bros" here.

[G6, 1]

I geeked out more than just a little bit when I found out that, at the AAAS conference in NYC in a few weeks, I'm presenting on the same panel as Oliver Wang aka O-Dub from the mighty Soul-Sides blog, probably the best rap blog out there. Apparently, he's also an academic in sociology at CSU - Long Beach. (Somehow, despite reading his blog off and on for a while, I missed this fact.) He's talking about Joe Bataan and I'm speaking on Charles Mingus (see above, the whole concert from Oslo is up on youtube!). We're on at 3:30 PM on Saturday April 7 somewhere in the Grand Hyatt Hotel opposite Grand Central Station.

[G7, 1]

Don't push me cuz I'm close to the edge / I'm tryin' not to lose my head / Huh huh huh / It's like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under

Congrats go out to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five for becoming the first hip-hop group to crack the not so hallowed halls of the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame. Entirely appropriate first selection. Who's next? Kurtis Blow? More likely: Run-DMC. Check out 3 of the 5 (with Flash on the wheels of steel) on Rap City:

Rahiem's still got it (or is closest to still having it); the others not so much. Melle Mel should bring back the denim and leather of "The Message." The muscles are messing with his flow.

Listening to: Uncle Murda - Bullet Bullet

The truth is speaking, you should listen

2007-03-07T14:07:00.000+11:00

death of the author

Jean Baudrillard is dead. He passed away yesterday at the age of 77 (1929-2007) apparently after a long illness. Although my interest has waned in the past couple years, I remain a big Baudrillard supporter and fan, although it would probably be best to think of him more as a writer of creative non-fiction than philosophy. That is, it's easier to square the gaps and disruptions in his thought if you take him as a stylist, as an author, (one of the best of the last quarter of the 20th century, probably) first - especially in his later days - and theorist and philosopher second. That said, his work still has a strange dystopic allure to it (the concepts of simulacra and simulations can be seen everywhere) as a sort of postmodern balance to McLuhan's techno-hope/enthusiasm.

Outside of the very early solidly Marxist stuff, I'd recommend almost all of Baudrillard as he's perhaps the most purely enjoyable and readable French philosopher-type dude, especially his work that was translated by Chris Turner and published by Verso. The big canonical texts are Simulacra and Simulations, probably The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, The System of Objects, maybe America and so on. Other interesting little books (since he only seemed to publish little books) are Forget Foucault, Fragments, the Passwords one and the whole Cool Memories series which reads like Baudrillard's thoughts while on the toilet.

Jean Baudrillard
Uploaded by mounsone

I suppose I should drop a few random quotes:

When one talks so much about power, it's because it can no longer be found anywhere. The same goes for God: the stage in which he was everywhere came just before the stage in which he was dead. Even the death of God no doubt came before the stage in which he was everywhere. The same goes for power, and if one speaks abot it so much and so well, that's because it's deceased, a ghost, a puppet; such is also the meaning of Kafka's words: the Messiah of the day after is only a God resucitated from among the dead, a zombi[e]. (from Forget Foucault)

When I refer to New York as the epicenter of the end of the world, I'm referring to the apocalypse. At the same time, it's a way of looking at it as a realized utopia. This is the paradox of reality. We can dream about apocalypse, but it's a perspective, something unrealizable, whose power lies in the fact that it isn't realized. New York provides the kind of stupefaction characterized by a world that is already accomplished, an absolutely apocalyptic world, but one that is replete in its verticality - and in this sense, ultimately, it engenders a form of deception because it is embodied, because it's already there, and we can no longer destroy it. It's indestructable. (from The Singular Objects of Architecture, an interview with architect Jean Nouvel)

OK, we have Beaubourg. So what does it express? Culture, communication? No, I don't think so. Beaubourg expresses flux, storage, redistribution, and Piano and Rogers's architecture expresses those things literally. What it expresses literally is almost the reverse of the message it supposedly expresses. Beaubourg represents both the fact of culture and the thing that killed culture, the thing it succumbed to, in other words, the confusion of signs, the excess, the profusion. It's this internal contradiction that translates Beaubourg's architecture, which I call its "literality." (from The Singular Objects of Architecture)

The mute orgasm of the smile. (from one of the Cool Memories books)

RIP Baudrillard.

Back to regular programing soon...

Addendum, PS: RIP Bad News Allen aka Bad News Brown! You will be missed too...

Listening to: Juelz Santana - The Second Coming (Produced by Just Blaze)

Money in the bank, it's a perfect world

2007-03-03T11:40:00.000+11:00

Smyth

Professional sports is undeniably a pretty ridiculous enterprise. Grown men playing games with balls or pucks for millions of dollars while thousands of more regular folk cheer them on. The thing is, it matters. That much was plain enough during last spring's Stanley Cup playoffs when my hometown Oilers somehow charged to the finals and almost won the Cup, coming within one goal in the late stages of Game 7. That hurt. But, this Ryan Smyth trade might hurt more.

Smyth, Smytty of the Mullett, was the face of the franchise. An ugly dude and not a very slick player but without boundless grit and work ethic, he embodied what the Oilers came to become after the glory years of the 80s and early 90s. Perhaps the best Oilers draft pick of the 90s, he arrived in town as a young, one dimensional sidekick to Doug Weight, Bill Guerin and Jason Arnott but along the way he became the type of player that the fans and the city latched onto his faults and his shortcomings as their own. He was a hometown kid (sort of), a stick boy during the glory years (during preseason), and he actually really loved living and playing in Edmonton (unlike so many others).

And now: he's an Islander. It turns out that the difference in negotiations between Smyth and the Oilers brass was less than $500,000 over 5 years, which is less than chump change in the economics of hockey. It should have never come to this: he should have been an Oiler for life but like say Trevor Linden before him he was traded for pretty much no reason whatsoever. I guess we're rebuilding again. Farewell Ryan.

Listening to: DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince - Live at Union Square (November 1986)

You can't take the street out of the street person

2007-02-27T09:45:00.000+11:00

lanewaylaid

Usually, when you think of who might hang out in an alleyway all day, your mind wanders to images of street people, drug addicts, prostitutes, overly amourous couples, drunk punters who need release and so on and so forth instead of indie rock kids and bands. Melbourne's laneway culture (perhaps a postindustrial return to the arcade?) inverts some of these assumptions - there are still the alleyways for the street people but also ones for fine dining or hard drinking - and, following from that, it's only somewhat logical to locate a music festival with some of our favourite indie bands in one of those spaces.

Like a lot of things at uber-hip bar St. Jerome's, the idea is better than the reality: over-crowding, claustrophobia and the realization that you're going to have to spend 10 hours with ironic hipsters are all possible detriments to a good experience. I heard that at last year's festival all of these possibilities occured; it was ridiculously oversold (and heaps of people snuck in) and nobody had a decent time. With all these things in mind, I approached the festival with some trepidation, expecting to have a terrible day of overpriced beer, bad sausage and, oh yeah, some bands too. Surprisingly and refreshingly, I was lanewaylaid by the great time it turned out to be. It was crowded but not too packed, had a good vibe and it was entirely possible to see all the bands that I wanted to.

After delicious pre-festival pho, I got into the laneway just as Curse ov Dialect was coming on. I was ridiculously early and only 30 people or so were inside the gates, and nobody, inlcuding myself, paying attention to the dudes on stage. They were the token local and somewhat mediocre rappers of the festival who rapped, danced and sang to no one in particular and left to only a smattering of golf claps. Next up was the Archie Bronson Outfit who played a sort of swampy, dirty blues-rock in the vein of, say, the Kills. (Hotel from the Kills apparently produced their first record.) It probably would have been fantastic late at night in a booze soaked club but during a sunny sunday afternoon, it was only somewhat interesting until I realized that every song was basically the same. I liked this shit better when they called it the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

I had heard either great or terrible things about the live Camera Obscura experience. On one hand, the band's delicate melodies and studio-polished pop seems readymade for intense on stage treatment (heavier guitars, impassioned vocals) but, on the other end of the spectrum, they could flop and be, to quote Kendall, "piss poor." The latter was decidedly true although it became only passable by the end of their set. Live, instead of pop sublimity, the songs lacked any urgency, played with such languid boredom (excluding the trumpeter/percussion dude Nigel) that it was hard to get into their show. The band's stage presence and charisma (or lack there of) was laughably bad.

Love Is All washed the bad taste of Camera Obscura out of our mouths with stylish Swedish aplomb. Apparently, they were partying until 6:30 AM the night/day before but - somehow - they managed to get up in time and rock the spot. Starting with a blistering version of "Talk Talk Talk Talk," the band bulldozed through their set, ratcheting up the fervor with each song. They were the first group to get the crowd dancing and actually into their show. When they slinked off stage, it seemed as if they hadn't played for long enough but, refecting now, it was probably the perfect amount. Not enough to wear out their welcome and enough to keep everyone into it. Unlike most of the sunglasses that the kids in the crowd were sporting, the singer's shades were actually rad.

If there's one thing that has been the best and worst thing to happen to so-called indie rock, it has got to be The OC (RIP). Counting against Seth Cohen's show has got to be the presence (and relative prominence) of the alternaindieschlock of groups like Youth Group. Looking like they were dressed by a stylist who was trying to dress them as if they hadn't been dressed by a stylist, the band took the stage and proceeded to play the worst set (by far) of the day. Totally generic, boring music and the singer/guitarist dude had the air of someone who Took Their Music Very Seriously, grabbing the mic stand and singing with his eyes to the sky with all the sincerity of a haircut band. We bailed halfway through to go to the other (indoor) stage and check out the inoffensive pop of the Crayon Fields. It was neither good nor bad but miles better than Youth Group.

Australian music needed to be redeemed now and The Sleepy Jackson were there to oblige. I don't think I'd ever really want to listen to them on my own accord but they sure know how to put on a live show. Starting with a dual laptop noise-ish intro, the band launched into an undeniably great show full of epic guitar hooks and plenty of noodling for those into that sort of thing. Or, at least, the first two thirds, brimming full of intensity and on stage charisma, were stellar. They seemed to loose their way for a couple of ill advised slower tunes but found it again for a raucous closing song. The end of show collective bow was a bit much but I can overlook that for now.

Looking like they had just attended an all day seminar on A Thousand Plateaus, The Walkmen came on stage without the roadies, entrance music and lights that had welcomed the previous two bands. Instead, they just calmly and cooly walked on stage picked up their instruments and, without a word of introduction, started in on their first song. To put it simply, they killed that shit dead. Starting slowly, the group ramped up the ferocious rock as their time on stage went on. By the time they got to "The Rat," the band was pretty much amazing in their density, intensity and aloof passion. By far, the best band of the day.

Everybody seemed to be at the festival for the headliners Peter Bjorn and John (pictured above). After meeting up with a late arriving friend at the gate, we had to push our way to a decent vantage point and the crowd was definitely more packed than at any other point during the day. The anticipation in the crowd was palpable as their entrance music and the low rent light show announced their imminent arrival on stage. Greeted by the crowd as rockstars, it was more than a little disappointing that the first third to half of their set was plagued by bad sound (too much drums, not enough guitars). Disaster seemed imminent.

Fortunately, by the time they got to the festival stopping "Young Folks," the problems seemed to be sorted out. PB&J brought out Tracyanne from Camera Obscura to sub for Victoria Bergsman on "Young Folks," and the results were pretty great. The crowd went absolutely crazy, jumping around, dancing (or as much as we could) and finally singing and whistling along to every word. Everything after that song was pretty much amazing; underappreciated banger "Objects Of My Affection" nearly topped "the Rat" as the best song of the entire day and "Up Against the Wall" provided a suitable end to the madness giving Peter and Bjorn ample opportunities to rock out and pose like they were in the biggest band in the world.

Finally: Closing out the mainstage were locals Midnight Juggernauts who play a sort of dancepunk, fitting into the same Melbourne scene as groups like Cut Copy or the Avalanches. Their squeeling synths, big ass drums and anthemic vocals got the remainder of the crowd to dance like morons. Instead of perhaps being fatigued by a packed day, the crowd's energy was still high and the Juggernauts provided a more than suitable release for everyone. It was a perfect end to the festival.

Listening to: Bob Dylan - Shelter from the Storm

I can't give what I can't take

2007-02-20T11:07:00.000+11:00

Producto

Thanks to the idiocy of one Matthew Snider ("This promo belongs to Matthew Snider"), El-P's new album leaked about a week ago or so. I've waited a few days to make a post to see if it held up over repeated listens, to catch new elements in the mix, to filter out the initial aural orgasm, and to gather more info on the record. If you went by the number of guests (the dudes from the Mars Volta, Trent Reznor, Aesop Rock, Cage, Slug, Cat Power [!!!], Mr. Dibbs, Big Wiz, among many others), you'd probably think that the album was more a compilation album than solo opus but - thankfully or not - I'll Sleep When You're Dead is still very much an El-Producto solo project. El-P dominates the proceedings with his razor sharp beats and somewhat duller rapping pushed to the foreground throught the record.

Taken as a whole, it's really quite good and would probably be amazing with any other somewhat decent emcee on the mic. Aside from the blistering verse in Aesop Rock's "We're Famous," it's pretty much an accepted fact that El-P's always been a much better producer than rapper with his "futuristic," electro-dystopic beats pushing the boundaries further than his limited, flat and ultimately uninteresting flows and cadences. In Company Flow, this was somewhat ok since he had Big Juss by his side to do his entirely serviceable thing on most of the tracks while Fantastic Damage turned up the noise to maximum thresholds as if to drown out the rapping.

The production here sits somewhere in between the clearly electro-funkish crash-and-bang of his recent production work for, say, Cage and Mr. Lif and his earlier solo work. It's less jangly, less noisy at times but not strictly speaking a new direction although the beats seem to have more direction to them. That is, instead of just setting a mood or crushing heads, the beats go somewhere finally. With this slight change in the instrumentals, El-P's voice is pushed to the front and he does his best. He's not terrible but he's still not that good either so it feels as if the beats deserve the same complexity and quality in the lyrics. On the other hand, though, El-P's rapping works exactly in its simplicity which at times interfaces much better with these sorts of beats than, say, the density of Aesop Rock (think the ultra complex, at times unlistenable and obscurant classic Bazooka Tooth LP). There's only so much you can listen to after all.

Download El-P's "Smithereens (Stop Cryin')" here.

Also: Aesop Rock's latest release "All Day" just came out. It's a running mix that he put together for Nike, featuring his wife on guitar and Big Wiz on the ones and twos. In many ways, it's much more surprising than El-P's record, clearly marking a new direction in his music. Listening to it, I'm struck by how it sounds like Aesop Rock's take on dancepunk; there are moments when it sounds more like DFA Records than Def Jux, with its neck cracking bass line drops and disco drums. Aesop never even really raps instead there are brief, repeating vocal lines that recur throughout the 45 minutes. I'm not sure how successful it is as a workout mix but I don't really see who would ever want to run to Aesop Rock, in the first place. The big question though is how does All Day compare to his forthcoming record - is it a preview to the new sound or just a one-off diversion? I'm thinking the latter is more likely.

Listening to: El-P feat. Aesop Rock - Run the Numbers

Gun control means using both hands in my land

2007-02-17T12:38:00.000+11:00

overcompensating

I be back. After a week of travel and good and bad conferences and entirely too much time in hostels, Melbourne welcomed me back home on Wednesday. I think I realized on the trip how much I like Melbourne and how much it is my sort of city, despite its sometimes hellacious weather (38C today, meaning my room will be 45C by sunset) and occasional par for the course Australian racism.

Brisbane sucked. The town struck me as an Australian equivalent to, say, Calgary in its second class, newer money and shithouse downtown vibe although a sunnier and much warmer version of Cowtown. We were enthralled by the St. Lucia campus of the University of Queensland which was like a botanical garden with some university buildings spread throughout the lakes and trees. In a sense, it was UBCesque - cut off from the rest of the city's core and with wide expanses. We took the CityCat ferry back one night at 10 PM and, standing outside at the front of the cruising boat, it felt like we were chasing coke dealers in Miami Vice or something. The final night in town was supposed to be the Melbourne Massive's trademark Big Night Out but we were foiled by overly strict, overcompensating (talk about Calgary!) dress codes and the worst species known to man, the bouncer. We tried our hardest to get tanked but alas we had to settle for one Asahi at a street level bar in the city.

The Gold Coast was a simulation of reality. It also sucked. The last day of the conference, we skipped out early and were determined to get to a real beach (as Melbourne does not have these sorts of things) on the Gold Coast, an hour or so on a train away. The journey turned into a determined quest for sun and surf and, after trains and automobiles and walks, took much longer than estimated. We got to the beach and had our hour of bodysurfing fun before the sun started to set behind the massive condo towers that line the beach (see above). We soon left but not before waiting another half an hour for a bus and consuming an amazing bubble tea. The thing about the Gold Coast, and Surfer's Paradise specifically, was that it felt exactly like say suburban Southern California, down to the motels, fast food joints and huge fucking box stores and malls. Aside from driving on the other side of the road, the resemblance was uncanny and for a few hours I was magically transported back to Nor'America, or at least one part of it.

Sydney sucked but it was quite entertaining in how it sucked. Sydney is like Toronto with its bland relatively brutal yet strangely inoffensive downtown architecture, maddening freeways that cut off views of bodies of water and general vibe. There is also this sense that the bad neighbourhoods just aren't really that bad when compared to say Vancity's Downtown Eastside. Newtown would be like West Queen West, Kings Cross as Parkdale, the Sydney Tower as a poor man's CN Tower and the famous Opera House would be roughly equivalent to the SkyDome. I stayed in a backpackers hostel in Kings Cross, which could be a good 'hood if only there weren't so many fucking backpackers there. The worst form of backpacker is of course the English breed who are basically soccer hooligans with backpacks on. In any case, the backpacker culture in Sydney is so strong that the city has painted which way to look on the roads for the tourists ("Look Right->") - I found this social control to be insulting if helpful. Also, the dominance of rugby (zzz) in sports coverage was akin to Toronto's devotion to the Leafs. Like T.O., the dollar slice was neither (a) a dollar or (b) good. The entertainment value came from just the sheer magnitude of the suck and how most Sydneysiders were totally devoted to it. (As counterpoint, I should mention how great Sydney's Chinatown was, especially in comparison with Melbourne's gesture at a Chinatown.)

One of the first things I noticed when I got back to Meltopia was that everyone looked normal and real instead of the ungodly deep orange/brown of the overbeached Brisvegans/Brisbogans and Sydneysiders. I was back in civilisation.

Shout outs to Nate, Nicole, Claudia, Sean and, even though bouncers stopped us from meeting up, Mel G.

Also: The term begins in a couple weeks and I'm teaching my very first course. I just put together a reading package full of the good shit, and the exercise struck me as oddly reminiscent of constructing a mixtape, athough much more academic and scholarly in nature. Considerations for time and space, flow of the material and tone were all thought through. When I was done, I had to design a cover and, for no logical reason, I included the above photo of Ebbets Field, a cultural reference that no one here would likely understand or appreciate. Nostalgia or obscurantism?

Listening to: Aesop Rock - All Day: Nike+ Original Run (Continuous Mix)

It's time we all reach out 4 something new

2007-02-05T23:08:00.000+11:00

PRINCE!

Simply put, Prince killed the halftime show dead.

In more detail: he totally overshadowed a somewhat dreary game, a more than random Cirque de Soleil thing (what was that anyways?), Billy Joel and the endless hyperbole that's expected in the spectacle that is the Superbowl. I took the morning off to head to the only pub showing the game in the entire neighbourhood at 10 AM. The beer made the Bears' (or Rex Grossman's) choke-job somewhat better, or it at least served as a distraction until Prince (and his 3 guitars) came on his sign-stage to do his fuckin' thing. Taking this halftime show into account with his series stealing American Idol cameo, it's pretty much apparent that the Purple dude can, when he wants to, own any stage and steal any damn show he appears on. The closing - Purple Rain's epic solo in silhouette in front of that blowing sheet - was so ridiculous and amazing, striding the boundary between absolute self parody and immense genius, a fence that Prince has always seemingly toyed with. The press conference (see below) was also dope.

Also: I'm going to be out of town conferencing, beaching and exploring Brisbane and Sydney for the next week. I'll be likely away from steady internet access for a lot of the time so don't expect much in the way of updates or anything (not that I've been that prolific recently). See you in a week or so.

Addendum:You can download a paper I wrote for one of these conferences here. It's a critique of the Hip-Hop Studies Reader put out by Routledge and of so called hip-hop studies in general and I think it reads more as an op-ed (academic version) or even a piece of music criticism than the unpenetrateable, murky jargon of typical academia. Discuss here, I suppose.

Listening to: Rich Boy feat. Andre 3000, Jim Jones, Murphy Lee & The Game - Throw Some D's (Remix)

Tryin' to figure how we got from Whipper Whip to this silly bullshit

2007-01-31T15:21:00.000+11:00

truth

Apologies on the blog's recent turn towards shit. I've been busy watching way too much television, preparing to teach (!) my first course at Australian Catholic University and getting ready to go conferencing (see above pic) in about a week. I really don't have much material so let's get to this ole classic:

Current Listening

Brother Ali - The Undisputed Truth (Rhymesayers)

I've been into Ali (pictured above with Slug) ever since I first saw him stride on stage before a basically empty Commodore Ballroom in 2002 when he was opening for Guru from Gang Starr and Atmosphere. With no one paying attention, he proceeded to tear into his set as if every eyeball was locked on him. His intensity and drive was impressive and everytime I've seen him since that night, he's gotten even better. His first LP, Shadows on the Sun, was one of the best (if unappreciated) of 2003. And, now, four years later, The Undisputed Truth has landed (well, leaked) to universal (blog) acclaim. Underground rap has tended towards ossification in the past couple years (despite some bright spots) but Ali doesn't care about that. His only task, it seems, is to rap his albino ass off over top of some of Ant's best beats. The end result is pure genius at times, a touch didactic at other points and universally interesting. Ali's one of the best emcees working today.

Download Brother Ali's "Uncle Sam Goddamn" here.

Burial - s/t (Hyperdub)

Burial's debut is the best record of 2006 that I didn't get to until 2007. It's probably one of the best dubstep records yet. I was intrigued by the press copy that came out comparing it to some of Tricky's earlier work. The comparison isn't really valid for a number of reasons but Burial remains as one of the more interesting things to come out last year and it totally blew me away the frist time I listened to it.

Download Burial's "Distant Lights" here.

Animal Collective - People EP (Spunk!)

Borderline racist cover art aside, this little EP from Animal Collective pretty much crystallizes every debate swirling around the band right now. On one side, there are people who would use it as evidence of the band's recent lack of creativity in how really there's only one idea in the whole song but lengthened out to 6 minutes. Others would say that it's a perfect representation of the group's fall from the heights of Sung Tongs (or Here Comes the Indian, if you want to be contrary). And some others might hold it out as perfectly enjoyable minimalism. It falls somewhere in between, as if it's a lesser version of some of the Feels tracks ("People" would be a poor man's "Banshee Beat," "Tikwid" a subsitute for "Grass"). The band does have a knack and talent for creating and sustaining atmospheres quickly even if they go nowhere. In other words, wait for the next album for the full verdict.

Download Animal Collective's "People" here.

Various Artists - Chrome Children, Volume 2 (Stones Throw)

The good folks at Stones Throw continue bringing the free content! This time it's the second instalment of the recent Chrome Children comp. Almost every Stones Throw associate gets a track (Madlib gets 3) to show themselves off, while the usual rarities and forgotten funk classics are also included. Production is usually handled by the artists themselves although Four Tet, Dabrye (aka SK-1) and Decypher are involved. Sometimes I think Stones Throw is a label that only appeals to fans that are just like PB Wolf and Egon but if you're of the mind (like me) then almost everything they put out is gold. If not, then you probably won't care for most of these tracks.

Download Stones Throw's Chrome Children Volume 2 comp here.

O.C. - Word...Life (Crown)

After writing about rappers that should've made it a few weeks ago, I dug into the p2p ether and pulled out a classic record from O.C., also known on this blog for throwing down with security on stage. It's hard to understand how this guy didn't do more damage because at his peak, he was basically level with Big L in DITC (blasphemy?). He was that good.

Download OC's "Time's Up" here.

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (Merge)

After something as important and monumental as Funeral (probably the album of the 00s, indie rock wise, so far), it's hard to understand, apart from economic factors, why a band would venture another record. It's bound to be overshadowed. Neon Bible can't escape its predecessor but it could have been much worse if they just tried to do Funeral 2. Instead, it's denser, deeper and less easily enjoyable but still always worthwhile. The album is also noteably more slickly produced and recorded. In the end, Neon Bible works better as a full album than as a bunch of songs. The only major flaw is the baffling rerecording of the unfuckwitable original "No Cars Go" (which is so perfect that I basically listened to it on a loop on a bus to and from the Yukon a few summers ago). But even then, the new version of the classic still retains its power.

Download Arcade Fire's "No Cars Go" here.

Sean Price - Jesus Price Supastar (Duck Down)

I've mentioned this album a couple times already. But, it needs the press since Sean P "can't be the brokest rapper you know" anymore. The beats bang (for the most part) and Sean Price always brings the lyricism, swagger and quotables. Every verse on this rekkid is truth. How many rap LPs can you say that about nowadays?

Download Sean Price's "Stop!" here.

Listening to: Charles Mingus - Prayer for Passive Resistance

Use your head for more than a hat rack / 'fore I choose to use the lead to fuck up your hat rack

2007-01-25T11:31:00.000+11:00

computers and counter terrorism

With the start of the new season, there's been a lot of chatter about 24's politics, especially in regards to its outwardly gleeful use of torture. The typical charges label the show as solidly neoconservative as if it's blindly propagandistic for the White House. But, to me, 24's politics have always been much more complicated and nuanced than most liberal critics might have it. Sure there's a tonne of torture but it doesn't always work, sometimes yields bad intelligence and it's ultimately the thing that almost breaks Jack. If anything, 24 is classicly liberal (and not in the neoliberal sense) in its obsession with americana, its reverence of the presidency and its overriding concern about the relationship between natural rights and terrorism. While the West Wing never seemed to critique the Democrats, 24 cuts both ways - at those who would stand by while terrorism threatens the great country and also at others who would take it too far (see: Charles Logan, assorted "patriots," etc.).

The show is also consumed with technology, surveillance and seems to be less about agents like Jack shooting and torturing terrrorists but rather networking, opening sockets, servers, hacking into systems, etc. In other words, it turns the hacker idealizations of the 90s (Hackers, the Matrix) on their heads. The hackers now work for the government for the people. In a sense, this represents a liberalization (and maturation, some might say) of computer culture, especially when considered in concert with the show's overwhelmingly anti-youth bent (seriously, have there been any teenagers or young adults on the show who weren't sniffling, incessantly annoying wankers?). In other words, in addition to terrorism, 24 portrays a professionalization of unproductive cultures. The marriage here of computers and counter terrorism is fascinating. I should also say here that the show accomplishes something that few movies or TV shows have done: it makes typing by the computer to be exciting if not cinematic.

There's another more subtle thread to the show which I detect: its flattening out of race. No one seems to have race. In the first few seasons, an agent named Tom Baker (surely an allusion to the fourth Doctor) could be played by an obviously Korean-American actor, while Michelle Dessler's obvious hybridity never comes into play or at least consideration. The first season did though, to be honest, make a bit out of David Palmer as the first Black presidential nominee (and later as president) but it always seemed like a secondary concern. Terrrorists are of all stripes and usually are backed by white Americans trying to help America. In any case, the show seems to be pointing towards a future America where the nation itself trumps race, or, to put it another way, where the project of America has been finally attained only to be continually attacked by those who would want to tear it down.

The latest season is more than a bit ridiculous and it seems to me that the show jumped the shark sometime during the 5th season, most likely when it turned out that President ~~Richard Nixon~~ Charles Logan was behind the attacks. Jack's back but fucked up after being tortured by the somewhat evil Chinese, he still doesn't eat or shit but still kills motherfuckers like there's no tomorrow, nukes are in play, CTU most likely continues to be most porous organization in espionage ever, the terrorists want to kill us, et al. It's all enormously entertaining.

24 is also the defining TV series and perhaps artwork of our post 9/11 age, standing as our decade's counterbalance to (albeit amazing) trifles like Seinfeld, the Simpsons and Sex & the City in the 90s. I don't know why I didn't consider television when I wrote about post 9/11 books, cinema and Dylan but it's so obvious that this show sums up (however shrilly) many if not most of the issues that have dominated the 00s. It looks poised to do so for the rest of its run.

You can illegally stream every single episode of 24 here.

Also: After the post-Christmas lull, there are finally a lot of new shit either dropping or leaking. I'm thinking of the new Sean Price album Jesus Price Supastar which is an early contender for best rap record of the year. The new Klaxons LP is pretty good if you like nearly overproduced dancepunk and it's probably better than both the new LCD Soundsystem (All My Friends notwithstanding) or !!! albums. The latest CoNoR!!!1111<3!!!111, er Bright Eyes EP just leaked and it's both personally happier and politically angrier than previous work, as Oberst continues his trek to really become our generation's Dylan (one motorcycle crash and a badly conceived Christian phase to come?). The RZA's soundtrack to Afro Samurai is also available and, damn, I knew he still had some dope shit in his lab. RJD2's latest is unimagineably horrible.

Listening to: Burial - Distant Lights

I never say the same thing twice like Mike Jones

2007-01-20T10:41:00.000+11:00

Gangsta Grilled

Due to now completed work, I'm getting to this really late but in case you haven't heard, my boy* DJ Drama and Don Cannon were arrested a few days ago on piracy charges. The RIAA (possibly the most short sighted organization outside of the Bush administration) sent in the SWAT teams to descend upon Drama's studio and they discovered and confiscated 50,000 mixtapes, recording equipment, computers, and Drama's car, for some reason. The news report from the local Fox affiliate (see below) is hilarious as the spokesperson is totally indignant that these dudes have websites and they're selling their own product on it! He also notes that they usually recover drugs and guns in raids like this! (Neither was apparently found here though but, as he might say, still, rap, drugs, guns, black people, put it together!) The reporter helpfully adds that Atlanta is the distribution point for CDs in the Southeast and if you want CDs everyone knows you go to Atlanta, as if say Savannah doesn't have its own major stores, mom & pop operations or pirates.

The whole thing is so ridiculous, it should be a sublime satire of the RIAA's endless quest against ~~home taping~~ piracy. The best writers on the Colbert Report couldn't come up with shit as initially funny as that news report. But, once you get past the comedy, it's all so frustrating, outwardly idiotic and myopic that it's hard to believe that the braintrust at the RIAA (previous gambits include suing individual downloaders i.e. their customer base) could think that this was either a good idea or at all productive in their fight to maintain their economic empire.

As noted by anyone with an IQ over say 23, DJ Drama has helped sell more records for the industry than he has ever taken away from the record companies. His tapes were the major reasons why T.I. is the top selling rap artist of the year or the fact that Young Jeezy is a star, not to mention his role in Lil Wayne's ascension to the throne. Record labels are desperate to get Drama to make tapes for their artists because of his positive impact on their hype and ultimately sales. He's also signed to Atlantic Records and he's coming out with an album of his own in 2007. The tapes have such an impact, it should be said, because they are usually pretty great artistic documents on their own (see the Dedication tapes or the Saigon one or the Little Brother mixtape).

In short, tired of attacking the people that are supposed to be supporting them, the RIAA has turned on its artists, the men and women who make the product that makes the RIAA possible (if not necessary). The whole strategy is totally incoherent with the industry's reliance upon mixtapes in hip-hop culture in that labels are well known for condoning dudes like Drama and Cannon (and sometimes engaging in new media payola) because, well, it makes everyone shitloads of money. But, the RIAA isn't in the business of evolving the industry but instead they want to keep it reliant upon outmoded business models even if it means cannibalizing their own artists and ultimately the business itself. They neither care about or understand their customers or employees.

I guess mixtapes are technically illegal but they are so tied up with the gears of the hip-hop industry that it's self-destructive to attack them. Before and especially after the rise of 50 Cent, mixtapes have taken their place as both artistic work and an economic motor for rappers, producers and DJs. That is, their purpose is not to take money from artists or industry (in their best form such as the unfuckwitable Gangsta Grillz series) but to build the infrastructure, hype and buzz of an artist and/or his crew. All of this is so obvious and well-know that only the RIAA could look at this phenomena and conclude that Drama is hurting their business. It's the opposite and they're the ones who are killing music.

Finally: DJ Drama has been so successful (and so damn good) so there's no doubt that he will be back despite the loss of all his gear and merch. I'm hopeful that this could be one of those moments that only comes around every so often. A break, a schism, where the issues of hip-hop and of music production and consumption, in general, can be discussed in heated but honest ways. We shall see.

FREE DJ DRAMA & DON CANNON!

(*he did link to my blog once.)

Listening to: DJ Drama & Lil Wayne - Walk It Off

Play solos that sound like Coltrane high on cocaine

2007-01-15T17:36:00.000+11:00

RIP

Oh no. First James Brown and now the wife of Trane and a pretty awesome pianist in her own right.

RIP Alice Coltrane (1937-2007).

I'll probably be back with new content sometime next week. I'm writing an article right now on hip-hop, Nas, the NBA dress code, Wynton Marsalis, knowledge and hip-hop in academia and I need to have it done by Friday.

Listening to: Albert Ayler - For John Coltrane (Live at the Village Vanguard)

I hang on the edge of this universe singing off-key

2007-01-11T14:00:00.000+11:00

a cappella

[F1, 1]
This isn't an academic blog (zzzz) by any means but I think I should point you towards "media theorist and internet activist" (whatever the hell that means) Geert Lovinck's new article that attempts to theorize blogging. It's interesting and the idea of blogging as modern nihilism could be productive but one wonders about the phenomena of the superstar-blogger who becomes a demi-god for most of his readers. I'm thinking of people like K-Punk or Momus (talk about zzzz) or, in a Canadian context, Carl Wilson or maybe even Eskay. Blogging produces its own stars who don't stand for the decay of the message but rather the enhancement of it. Anyways, you should read it through as Lovinck's piece is productive and should lead to more conversations on what the hell we're all wasting our time on.

[F2, 1]
Another link of interest should be mu'fucking Jeff Chang's recent feature in The Nation on Jay-Z. I've praised and had issues with Chang before but undeniably he's the best hip-hop journalist working today. The article linked here is typically great but also somewhat frustrating as it spends as much time explaining Hov to Nation readers as getting to the deeper levels of Shawn Carter.

[F3, 1]
Apparently, Rollie aka Cadence Weapon is retiring from blogging to concentrate on his "b.i." That's unfortunate as Razorblade Runner was reallly quite great for awhile. It's been in a state of serious neglect for over a year so it's somewhat expected news. But, dude is currently posting his top 100 bangers of the year in 5 parts. Download that shit.

[F4, 1]
Oh Word takes me to task for, um, loving Ghostface so much. The funniest thing about all this is that everyone there is arguing about how Ghostface is so awesome. I will repeat here that the thing about GFK is that he gets appreciably better as he gets older (Supreme Clientele is a huge spike on the graph of Ghostface's career, admittedly) and Ironman really wasn't that great especially in comparison to what the other dudes in the Clan were putting out as their first solo albums. It's good, maybe even great, but better than Fishscale? Don't be ridiculous.

[F5, 1]
There's no real reason why a picture of Saigon on Entourage is up there. I had a vague plan to write about the best albums of 2008 with Saigon's The Best Story Never Told at #1 but that's a dumb idea. Whatever, if you haven't seen this already, check out this a cappella freestyle by Saigiddy on Rap City. He is the future. I hope.

[F6, 1]
Despite the annoying-as-fuck anti-piracy overdubs, how great is Sean P's new album?

Listening to: Sean Price - King Kong

Rap without me is the Source minus the quotable page

2007-01-05T12:19:00.000+11:00

the best?

Hip-hop history is littered with dudes who should have been huge but never got there for one reason or the other. Usually, to shamelessly drop a cliché, the cream rises to the top in rap but sometimes the cream curdles on the way up. I'm thinking of people like Grandmaster Caz (in that he was the one who should have been the first huge star and not Sugarhill), Canibus, Ras Kass, Last Emperor, Shyne and Talib Kweli (let's face it, he missed his shot). All of these rappers had the skills, the charisma and the pedigree to dominate but for various reasons (plagiarism, bad beats, label hell) never got to that point.

Another would probably be Royce da 5'9" who's currently serving time in a Michigan jail for a probation violation. The only emcee to ever easily outshine Eminem on a track, Royce is probably one of my favourite rappers and maybe, on skills alone, the best in the game when he wants or is given the chance to be (check the "freeestyle" on Rap City above or a live clip with Talib Kweli below for evidence). Just listen to the rad tracks he did with DJ Premier (Boom, Hip-Hop, etc.) or some of his classic D12 diss tracks like "Malcolm X"; he's pretty much amazing when in the right environment or frame of mind. Unfortunately though, his records have been filled with mediocre beats and/or filled with entirely too many songs and were consequently bloated.

In other words, what he's needed is a sort of overall focus to his tracks and direction from above. When word came out awhile ago that Primo was going to produce all of his next album (later scaled back to "executive produce" and contribute 5 or 6 beats himself), it looked like Royce would finally have his shot at putting out the undisputed classic that we all know he has in him. There were also rumours that Jay-Z was going to sign him to Def Jam and give him the promotion he's always lacked. And then Royce was busted and he landed back in jail for a year due to some overly agressive prosecution.

Apparently, he's been writing and sometimes recording in prison and just recently a "freestyle" (using the "not off the dome" definition) entitled "The Return of Malcolm" (a play on his previously mentioned Em diss "Malcolm X") has emerged. It's Royce over top of DJ Toomp's "I Luv It" beat on the new Jeezy album and the way he absolutely owns the beat is jaw dropping, as compared to Jeezy who (in his imicable fashion) can barely sustain his flow through an entire line let alone a verse. Royce shouts, whispers, philosophizes, drops knowledge and spits out quotables in almost every line. He barely wastes a syllable through the nearly five straight mintues that he raps his ass off, subtley flipping his flows and cadences whenever necessary. At a point, his voice almost breaks but he continues and the moment is turned from pathos to triumph. In this track, and during his best moments, like a more coherent Ghostface, Royce displays a passion for hip-hop (and, probably, for life too) that few rappers can match or even think about trying. (Consider the lack of emotion and nihilism in hipster-rap-album-of-the-year the Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury.) Also, the track has the best Kramer's meltdown reference in rap so far. I've put up both the new Royce and the Jeezy tracks below so you can compare and contrast.

Download Royce da 5'9"'s "The Return of Malcolm" here.

Download Young Jeezy's "I Luv It (Produced by Toomp)" here.

Finally: I'm sure a lot of people have already written Royce off, turning to dudes like Saigon (debut album forever forthcoming!) or Papoose to be the next great hopes for the return of lyricism. (Yeah, in a sense, me too: my entirely hetero love of Sai is well documented.) But what we need, above all, is his passion and precision that, on their own, drastically overshadow 99.9999999999% of rappers in the game. Hopefully, he'll make it through his bid and get to the level that he deserves.

Listening to: Royce da 5'9" - The Return of Malcolm (freestyle)

I've gotta go to sleep just to get home

2006-12-31T19:27:00.000+11:00

listamania

I'm determined this year to be done with rampant listamania before the new year, which explains why I'm wasting time before heading to a party by sitting at my desk, listening to sad country songs and banging hip-hop while writing in my blog on New Year's eve. Previously, I've wasted hours on an insanely detailed and well documented music post and it's now time to turn to a couple of my other loves, cinema and uh my blog (more on that later). Last year, I did a top 5 films list and somehow ranked Bewitched and Pride & Prejudice in the honourable mention category. I also did a top blog posts list too. I'd do a books list but it's a sad fact of my life that I don't really read anything new, or at least anything I'd reccomend, anymore. And I definitely don't read for pleasure anymore either. Onto less depressing shit:

Top 10 Films of 2006 (or: "The Top 10 Flicks That I Saw This Year That Were Released Locally in 2006")

1. Babel (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu)

I've spoken before on the lack of a true post-9/11 cinema in that, at that point, we hadn't experienced (that's the only applicable verb) a film that truly reflected the super-event of that morning. I think I spoke too soon. Babel effortlessly weaves together stories from Morocco, the United States, Mexico and Japan through the lens of the Babel myth. The Morocco story has the most obvious political focus, savagely denouncing all sides in the conflict, but there are shreds everywhere. Iñárritu makes the film about more than just terrorism (or possible terrorism) but about how we experience each other in the world (through languages, sexuality, violence, love, intolerance, drunkeness, drugs, immigration, etc. etc. etc.). The visual vocabulary of this film is astounding; the sequence in the club in Japan is probably the best and most realistic club scene ever filmed. The acting is off the charts with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett (pictured above) dominating but the best work belongs to Rinko Kikuchi as a deaf, mute and sexually frustrated Japanese teenager.

2. The Departed (dir. Martin Scorsese)

Of course, the whole thing is way too symetrical if you think about it for too long but that's the entire conceit (if not the point) of the flick. The body count gets to be ridiculous in the last minute but that's part of the reason why you're watching it in the first place. DiCaprio and Damon are great enough to hold their own against Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin and a surprisingly amazing Mark Wahlberg. But the thing about this film that struck me so much was its use of sound. Usually, film is thought to be first and foremost a visual medium and many if not all of the metaphors that are used to critique cinema are of a visual nature. But it's also an aural medium and, apart from a key scene near the beginning to establish the film and one very huge one at the end, Scorsese fills every second with some form of music (ranging from Nas to the Dropkick Murphys) so when the music drops out, the silence is shocking, contributing to a further deepening of emotion in the scene. Forget the shit about Scorsese losing it, he's still one of if not the best working today.

3. Caché (dir. Michael Haneke)

Here's another contender for a truly post-9/11 flick. The film works on so many levels because of the performances and writing, yes, but more because of its virtuosic pacing that makes one of its scenes shock you much more than the violence should. I wrote more about this film here.

4. Miami Vice (dir. Michael Mann)

Michael Mann makes action pictures for the avant-garde set (or vice versa, depending on your point of view). Putting aside Li Gong's interesting take on the English language, this film rules on so many levels it's sick. The cinematography is probably the best of the year, the writing's refreshingly underwritten (in the best sense) and holy fuck did Colin Farrell have some amazing hair. I haven't seen the "unrated version" that was released on DVD but I assume it just adds onto the awesomeness.

5. The Wind That Shakes The Barley (dir. Ken Loach)

This film won the Palme d'Or for a reason: it's simply one of the most devasting films of the year. Loach's class-dominant criticism works surprisingly well in the context of early twentieth century Ireland. I don't believe this has hit North America yet (a rare flick that played in Australia before Canada) but when it does, run to the theatre.

6. Little Miss Sunshine (dirs. Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Feris)

By far, the best comedy of the year. I'm wondering why this film isn't getting more love than it is right now.

7. L'Enfant (dirs. Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne)

Another film that uses all the vocabulary of film (images and sound) to great effect. But the real crux of the film is how unflinchingly heartbreaking the whole thing is as the film forces us to discover who the title is actually referring to.

8. Match Point (dir. Woody Allen)

There are definitely aspects here that might makes some scoff ("OH, SHIT, THERE ARE GHOSTS NOW!") but the drama here works like gangbusters. Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson fill the screen.

9. The New World (dir. Terrence Malick)

When I saw something like the Break Up, I think, someone in front of us was trashing the "Pochantas movie" they had seen the last time they were in a theatre. Keep in mind, this was in Edmonton, but their criticism seemed to amount to the fact that there wasn't much action through the whole thing. But, yes, that's the whole point. Malick creates a texture and an atmosphere and if you're not down with it from the start, you're going to hate the film. The texture of the New World is all about love and desperation and for some reason I really got into it.

10. Snakes on a Plane (dir. David R. Ellis)

The concept was so bad that it took off and became a cult film before it even hit the theatres. Samuel L. Jackson has the line of the year.

Honourable Mentions: Jindabyne, Borat, Brick, Nacho Libre, Casino Royale, Game 6, World Trade Center, 2:37, Dave Chappelle's Block Party, The Devil Wears Prada.

I've sorta done this for a couple years now but here's a few posts that were either the best things I wrote or somehow summed up the year:

Top 5 Blog Posts

1. I smoke blunts on the shitter (May 1)

Even though I don't really remember much of what actually happened, I'm pretty sure that Andrew's year end "gathering" (forcefully highjacked into a house party) was one of if not the most fun nights of the year. I still can't believe I downed 2 forties of St. Ide's (and assorted other stuff). Here's the photographic proof. (Title from Roc C's "Don't Stop.")

2. My whole movement is gangsta (Feb. 17)

Me (and Adam) versus the entire Torontopia movement. (Title from a Juelz Santana or Cam'ron song, I think?)

3. Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamp (April 8)

The best rap post I think I've ever done. (Title from, where else, Public Enemy's "Fight the Power.")

4. I'm not the kind that needs to tell you (June 20)

The Oilers come within one goal of somehow winning the Stanley Cup. Dudes cry on the street when they lose. I almost do too. (Title from New Order's "Age of Consent.")

5. God forgive me for my brash delivery / But I remember vividly what these streets did to me (Oct. 29)

Jay-Z touches down in Melbourne!!! Show (and gig review) of the mu'fucking year. I should add here that I got it wrong and Beyoncé did come on stage during the encore but she didn't sing. I thought it was just someone who looked a lot like her. (Title from Hov's "What More Can I Say.")

Looking through my archives, there's boatloads of shit that could be on this list (especially in January through May when everything I would post was somehow gold) which proves that 2006 was actually a really great if bewildering year. Here's to more of the same in 2007.

Listening to: Styles P - This Is How We Live (Produced by Havoc of Mobb Deep)

If I was Santa Claus

2006-12-25T19:58:00.000+11:00

White Christmas

Today, instead of the devilish sun and heat of a Christmas on the other side of the world, as I was walking to Christmas lunch, it hailed and the temperature was comparable to a slightly warm but still wet holiday season in Vancity. The hail was as close to a white Christmas as this city will ever get and I'd like to think it was harbinger of a(nother?) good year. To get you all in the Christmas (or Festivus or Kwanzaa or whatever) frame of mind, download these gems:

Jim Jones feat. Stack Bundles and JR - Ballin' on Xmas

Destroyer - Every Christmas

Atmosphere - If I Was Santa Claus

HOLD THE FUCK UP: JAMES MU'FUCKING BROWN IS DEAD. He was, undisputedly, one of the most important figures in the music of the 20th century and somebody who can claim (truthfully) to have changed the world with his sound. I'll be back to eulogize more soon. I don't know what to say right now but here's some classic JBs shit I just pulled from youtube:

Holy fuck.

Listening to: James Brown - Funky Drummer

Fa-la-la-la-la, it's a Dipset Christmas!

2006-12-21T09:53:00.000+11:00

X-mas

I just got word that my paper - on Charles Mingus, his "fictional autobiography" and Afro-Asian American raciness (race/sexuality) - has been accepted by the Association for Asian American Studies (the AAAS not to be confused with AAS) as part of their annual conference whose theme this year deals with interracial encounters and the city ("crosstown connections"). The conference is of course in the Mecca of Hip-Hop, NYC. And better yet the Yankees will be playing the Rays and Orioles at the House That Ruth Built when i should be in town. I know, fuck the Yankees (go Jays!) and the Mets are the more exciting New York team, but it's Yankee Stadium and the Mets will be on the road. The conference should be, um, interesting too.

I meant to post about this a while ago but I got caught up in my outrageous "professional blogging" (to use Jackie's words) exercise in listamania. But, anyways, your boy Thomas Pynchon sent in a letter to the Daily Telegraph awhile ago defending Ian McEwan for some reason, which you can read below:

Also: Also, I should have a special (and silly) Christmas Rap piece (on Run-DMC, Jim Jones and Bill O'Reilley) up on The Tyee at the end of this week but, until then, check out the DOOM promo above. The Supervillain is taking over. How long until he gets a major network Christmas special?

Listening to: Young Jeezy - Streets On Lock (Produced by Cool & Dre)

I used to give a damn but I never gave a fuck

2006-12-18T14:08:00.000+11:00

The Year In Music

By any reasonable standard, 2006 was a great year for music. There are people who may say otherwise but they are dead wrong. If I can draw some larger narrative out of music this year, it seems as if we're moving towards a breakdown of clearly defined aesthetics towards something else. I want to say "unified style" or "bricolage music" but that may be putting it either too strongly or way too PoMo. In any case, what I'm thinking about here can be traced in (a) the blurring between so called "serious music" (using Adorno's term, also known as classical music) and pop in examples such as Joanna Newsom or Final Fantasy or even perhaps Bob Dylan, (b) the almost paradoxical loss of distinct "sounds" in hip-hop with everyone sounding like they are from somewhere else and producers working with people from all over the map, and (c) the boundaries between rock and hip-hop (always more than somewhat artificial) losing their coherence and not just in the rap-metal way of the late 90s, as well as dedicated fans of each genre moving towards each other (even if this is more an indie thing e.g. how everyone's into the Clipse and Jeezy now). I don't mean to sound all utopian or anything but it's all very encouraging. We should be looking forward to the day when Joanna Newsom drops harp backing tracks for Just Blaze and vice versa, to pull a possible (and possibly terrible) example off the dome. The other major story through the year, of course, was J Dilla, his life, death and legacy. RIP.

Also, previously: My Best of 2005 and Best of 2004.

Top 25 Albums of the Year

1. J Dilla aka Jay Dee - Donuts (Stones Throw)

I've written heaps of material on this LP during the past year, from personal reflections to pseudo-academic pieces, so I'm unsure of what new insight I can come up with now. In short, though, this rekkid has been the soundtrack to 2006 for me. I picked it up a week before its actual release at the HMV on Yonge (they accidentally put it on the shelves early) and I remember listening to it for the first time on the subway, heading back to the University of Toronto for class. I was amazed and I could barely contain my absolute joy. I listened to it constantly for a week and then Dilla died abruptly. And it was then that, like the shirt says, I realized that J Dilla had changed my life. Donuts never left my headphones for the next half year and still, 10 months later, it holds a strange and incredible power due to its intricacy, virtuosity and heart.

Download J Dilla's "Two Can Win" here.

2. Joanna Newsom - Ys (Drag City)

I tried explaining the poetic conceit of "Monkey & Bear," while on a recent road trip, to my friends who were not down with Newsom and it didn't go well. They laughed and it all sounded so very ridiculous and lame. But the thing is this album is such a beguiling and strange and touching experience that the poetics or stylistics of the album seem deeply embarassing at times and seriously engaging at other moments. Ys' tendancy to toe this line (between lame and moving) is its greatest feature and, ultimately, the source of its triumph.

Download Joanna Newsom's "Sawdust & Diamonds" here.

3. The Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up/Jive)

I didn't believe in the Clipse for a long time. Lord Willin' had "Grindin'," one of the top singles of its era, but little else and then they were caught in serious label-hell for so long that I wrote Pusha and Malice off as "washed up." Oh, how I was wrong. Hell Hath No Fury is the very definition of an instant classic and it's one of the best street hip-hop LPs of all time, at a level probably just below Illmatic. The rhymes are the essence of dope with every syllable deployed for impact and Pusha dropping quotables in every verse and Malice doing his best to keep up. And the beats are the best work the Neptunes have pumped out in seemingly forever - so harsh, claustraphobic and stylish enough to nearly reinvent the genre.

Download the Clipse's "Ride Around Shining" here.

4. Ghostface Killah - Fishscale (Def Jam)

Scroll down an entry to read my thoughts on Ghostface's year but, as for Fishscale, it's probably his best album top to bottom he's put out (so far). The scariest (and best) thing about the Wally Champ is that he's getting better as he gets older. If he continues like this, he'll be the best 75 year old rapper ever.

Download Ghostface Killah's "Shakey Dog" here.

5. Liars - Drum's Not Dead (Mute)

Opinions are pretty divided on this rekkid and I tend to fluctuate between complete obsession and absolute disgust at it. But I'm back on the side of the former and I'm pretty sure that my positive gut reaction was probably more than true. Liars may be wankers or assholes or pretentious twats in real life and on stage but they sure do put out interesting albums. Drum's Not Dead is one of the best albums of the year on the strength of its drums and overall soundscape and not the concept or lyrics.

Download Liars' "Let's Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack" here.

6. Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies (Merge)

Quite simply, the best Destroyer album of all time (lyrically and musically). Basically, on Rubies, Dan Bejar (aka Destroyer) finally got around to hiring a band to match his poetry.

Download Destoyer's "Painter In Your Pocket" here.

7. The Game - Doctor's Advocate (Geffen)

The most surprising rekkid of the year from the most compulsively interesting rapper in the, er, game today. Who knew that the Game could come up with a better LP than the Documentary without Dr. Dre?

Download the Game's "Remedy (Produced by Just Blaze).

8. Bob Dylan - Modern Times (Columbia)

This album is perhaps Dylan's strongest material since Blood on the Tracks. Saint Bob lives up to his legacy.

Download Bob Dylan's "Thunder on the Mountain" here.

9. Nas - Hip-Hop Is Dead (Def Jam)

We need to accept that Nas will never make Illmatic again. Hip-Hop is Dead though is an impossibly ambitious album which attempts to recaptulate the entire history of the culture while simultaneously attempting to move rap further into the future. Lots of rappers talk about changing the game but only Nas would go out and singlehandedly correct the entire course of hip-hop history.

Download Nas' "Where Are They Now" here.

10. Lupe Fiasco - Food & Liquor (Atlantic)

Lupe is the dream of (a) any hip-hop head, (b) many lapsed hip-hop fans from the so called Golden Era, (c) any A&R man worth his or her salt, (d) skateboard kids who think Pharrell is a phony, (e) indie kids, (f) rap lyric nerds, (g) nerds, (h) the MySpace generation, (i) you, and (j) me.

Download Lupe Fiasco's "Kick, Push" here.

11. J Dilla - The Shining (BBE)

Even though it's really great, you wonder how J Dilla would've finished The Shining himself if he got the chance. Karriem Riggins (the producer who completed the project) and all the guests do Dilla proud.

Download J Dilla's "Won't Do" here.

12. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain (4AD/Interscope)

Personal reasons kept me from probably engaging in this album as much as I should have but, even so, it's pretty clear that TVOTR is one of (if not) the best bands working today and that this album is even more proof of that assertion. A great LP from a great group.

Download TVOTR's "Province" here.

13. Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds (Blocks Recording Club/Tomlab)

Despite its title, He Poos Clouds is so much better than the debut album.

Download Final Fantasy's "This Lamb Sells Condos" here.

14. T.I. - King (Atlantic)

Tip Harris finally makes the rekkid that lives up to his talent.

Download T.I.'s "I'm Talkin' To You (Produced by Just Blaze)" here.

15. Ghostface Killah - More Fish (Def Jam)

For a day or so, I thought that More Fish was actually better than Fishscale. I soon realized that I was wrong but More Fish is still pretty great. Producers are top notch and the rest of Theodore Unit are at least somewhat decent. GFK kills it as per usual.

Download Ghostface Killah's "Guns N Razors (Produced by MF DOOM).

16. Boot Camp Clik - The Last Stand (Duck Down Music)

Dope beats and lyrical darts from some of the best.

Download BCC's "Here We Come (Produced by 9th Wonder)

17. Soul Position - Things Go Better With RJ and Al (Rhymesayers)

Since RJD2 has apparently said "fuck you" to hip-hop, this album will probably be the last rap related thing he'll do until he realizes that his new material kinda sucks. Blueprint continues his development as an emcee, mixing the conscious shit with the funny material in a way that most rappers who do either cannot.

Download Soul Position's "Hand Me Downs" here.

18. Be Your Own Pet - s/t (Umvd)

The best album the Yeah Yeah Yeahs never made.

Download Be Your Own Pet's "Bunk Trunk Skunk" here.

19. Spank Rock - YoYoYoYoYoYoYo (Big Dada)

A fun if ultimately disposable synthesis of Baltimore bass, porno rap and electro.

Download Spank Rock's "Back Yard Betty" here.

20. Ladyhawk - s/t (Jagjagjuwar)

The return of the honest, hard working Canadian band.

Download Ladyhawk's "The Dugout".

21. Oh No - Exodus Into Unheard Rhythms (Stones Throw)

Oh No (Madlib's little brother) digs through Galt McDermot's extensive back catalogue to craft one of the most unnervingly inventive hip-hop albums of the year.

Download Oh No's "Keep Tryin' (featuring Roc C and Aloe Blacc)" here.

22. Sunset Rubdown - Shut Up I Am Dreaming (Absolutely Kosher)

Spencer Krug's a weird dude but, as Minister Faust once taught me, it's better to be weird than boring.

Download Sunset Rubdown's "Us Ones In Between" here.

23. Young Jeezy - The Inspiration (Def Jam)

Jeezy's not a rapper, as he tells us repeatedly, he's a motivational speaker. He can barely ride (or be dragged along by) a beat, his words aren't really all that new but he does everything with such conviction and spirit that he makes us believe in himself and ourselves. Young Jeezy has a 50/50 shot at either being the future or death of hip-hop as an artform.

Download Young Jeezy's "Still On It" here.

24. Peter Bjorn & John - Writer's Block (Wichita)

In the battle between Swedish pop bands, I'm From Barcelona might have the better song but punctuation-challenged Peter Bjorn & John definitely put out the better album. Plus, "Young Folks" is a pretty great pop number.

Download Peter Bjorn & John's "Young Folks (feat. Victoria Bergsman)" here.

25. Madlib - The Beat Konducta Vol. 1-2: Movie Scenes (Stones Throw)

Bound to be overshadowed by Dilla's Donuts, the Beat Konducta LPs (eventually collected and released as one CD) were pretty weird and great in their own right. The concept here is that each instrumental is supposed to be the score to a imaginary film.

Download Madlib's "Snake Charmer (Heads Up)" here

Worth At Least A Mention

Mastadon - Blood Mountain
Roc C - All Questions Answered
E-40 - My Ghetto Report Card
Styles P - Time Is Money
Psalm One - The Death of the Frequent Flyer
Thom Yorke - The Eraser
The Black Keys - Magic Potion
Cansei De Ser Sexy - CSS
Xiu Xiu - The Air Force
Swan Lake - Beast Moans
I'm From Barcelona - Let Me Introduce My Friends
Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
Islands - Return to the Sea
Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins - Rabbit Furcoat
Hot Chip - The Warning
Jolie Holland - Springtime Can Kill You
Mr. Lif - Mo' Mega
Masta Killa - Made In Brooklyn
P.O.S. - Audition
Prince - 3121
Georgia Anne Muldrow - Olesi: Fragments of the Earth
AZ - The Format

Biggest Disappointments, or, How to Underperform (Artistically)

Jay-Z - Kingdom Come
OutKast - Idlewild
Pimp C - Pimpalation
Pretty Girls Make Graves - Elan Vital
The Rapture - Pieces of the People We Love

Notable Omissions

These are the albums that got massive love from various people but did nothing (positive or negative) for me:

Beach House - s/t
Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
Grizzly Bear - Yellow House
The Roots - Game Theory
The Knife - Silent Shout

I Hate This Shit

Girl Talk - Night Ripper

Best EPs

Frog Eyes - The Future Is Inter-Disciplinary Or Not At All
Georgia Anne Muldrow - Worthnothings
Black Dice - Manoman/Gore/Toka Toka
J Dilla - Jay Love Japan (released in Japan in 2006, rest of the world in 2007)
Laura Barrett - Earth Sciences (if it counts for 2006)

Best Mixtape

Little Brother & DJ Drama - Separate But Equal

Best Reissue

Various Artists - Big Apple Rappin' (MU'FUCKING SOUL JAZZ RECORDS!)

Best Songs (Singles and Otherwise)

T.I. - What You Know
I'm From Barcelona - We're From Barcelona
Nas - Where Are They Now?
Rick Ross - Hustlin'
Clipse - Ride Around Shining
J Dilla - Two Can Win
J Dilla feat. Common - E=MC2
J Dilla - Nothing Like This (not new but rereleased on the Chrome Children comp)
J Dilla - U-Love
J Dilla - The Twister (Huh, What) (also, the version of this featuring Roc C & Oh No on the fan-club only 45)
Xiu Xiu - Hello From Eau Claire
Georgia Anne Muldrow - New Orleans
Mr. Lif feat. Murs - Murs Iz My Manager (produced by Edan)
Murs - Dark Skinned White Girls
Sunset Rubdown - Us Ones In Between
Swan Lake - The Freedom
Lupe Fiasco - Kick, Push
OutKast - Morris Brown
Saigon - Do Your Thang
OutKast - Life is like a Musical
Nas feat. Jay-Z - Black Republican
Jay-Z - Minority Report (Produced by Dr. Dre)
The Game - Remedy (Produced by Just Blaze)

Best or Most Memorable Shows

Jay-Z / Rihanna / Ne-Yo @ Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne

Jolie Holland @ Spanish Club, Melbourne

DJ Shadow / Mos Def / Lateef the Truthspeaker @ the Palace, Melbourne

Final Fantasy / Akron/Family / Great Lake Swimmers @ Great Hall, Toronto

Hot Chip / Cadence Weapon / Born Ruffians @ Lee's, Toronto

"Hot Chip were, by any standard, pretty fucking dope. As I said to former Hot Chipper and good dude Chris the next night, HC seem to be attempting to cross Kraftwerk and Prince. On record, for the most part, they lean towards the Kraftwerk but live they definitely emphasized the Prince. This approach is a great decision (I wish their records were like this too) and it made for such an energetic live show (or as energetic as a bunch of dudes behind a row of keys could be (see above)). With charm and earnest joy, supernerd Alexis and crew quickly got the dancefloor heaving. The show, halfway through, just turned from a headnodding, smile inducing good time into a giant dance party."

Jamie Liddell @ Lee's, Toronto

Spank Rock / Cadence Weapon @ Horseshoe, Toronto'

"this was a fucking Spank Rock show and when Naeem (aka Spank, pictured above rocking the 40) jumped up on stage when the BBC dropped "Backyard Betty" the crowd exploded. They ran through most of their best shit (although "What It Look Like" was strangely absent) and, instead of just a show, this night was more like a giant ass shaking dance party. Everyone, including myself, just danced our asses off and shouted/sang along to all of the songs which just absolutely kill live."

Def Jux All Stars @ Opera House, Toronto

Sloan Tribute Show @ the Boat, Toronto

"Unfortunately, the tribute night was the wankish equivalent of a Leah MacLaren book reading without the fawning 50 year old virgin high school English teachers to ask questions that would never end. Never had I seen such an ugly side of "Torontopia" which, for the most part, has acquitted itself well since I moved out here (emo complaining from late 2005 notwithstanding). This night though was like a circle jerk where after getting tugged and fucked by the stillepost hipstas [sic] before they would even play, the bands would then proceed to pat each other on their backs while making mockery of the corpus of Sloan and then turn around and proclaim how much fun we were all having because they were the best wankers of all fucking time."

Matthew Shipp @ Arraymusicspace, Toronto

"Shipp played one continuous hour long set without breaks which, I think, roughly divided into two sections with a slight transition between the two. The first was much more in the "serious"/"classical" vein and the final part was more jazz-ish. I should pause here to say that the division wasn't so black-and-white: Shipp would often throw in jazz phrases into his modernist improvisatory passages and vice versa. His performance was virtuosic, so technically demanding and intense. The music definitely did not fit with a sunny Sunday afternoon and most of the people there had, I think, their moment where they just about nodded off. In a sense, it was too much to handle. Shipp might have been better off taking slight breaks to warm up the crowd, give them chance to clap and get into his show. One of the most striking elements of Shipp's playing was his sheer ferocity, the cacophonous nature in which he would strike the piano as if he was doing punk-rock jazz with serious musical knowledge and expertise behind the agression."

Common / Shad K @ Kool Haus, Toronto

Animal Collective / First Nation / BARR @ Opera House, Toronto

RIP J Dilla aka Jay Dee aka James D. Yancey (1974-2006)

Listening to: T.I. - What You Know

If Lil Jon could ice his cup, I'd chop that shit and ice my nuts

2006-12-14T15:04:00.000+11:00

Man of the Year

It's pretty much an indisputable fact that Ghostface Killah is the man of the year. Who else rejected the design for his own doll? Who else released not one but two potentially classic albums? Who else makes random shit (see below) sound so damn great? (J Dilla might qualify, if you replace "doll" with "New Era cap," but dude, as I've eulogized so much before, is dead.) The way that Ghostface dominated this year (well, critically if not actually commerically) gave us all hope for the Future of Hip-Hop and, furthermore, the return of truly dope shit to the forefront of the culture. By "truly dope," I'm thinking of Pete Rock's production on "Be Easy" which should have been released as a summer and not fall/winter single or Just Blaze's ferocious and oh-so-confident stewardship of the NY Sound (tm) on "The Champ" or Dilla's posthumous involvement in Fishscale or the presence of Madlib and MF DOOM on More Fish and Fishscale.

In a sense, Ghostface represents a bridge from the so called underground to the mainstream. Those are nebulous (and perhaps meaningless) terms (like the old conscious-ignant divide) and, as so many people have said, the true dichotomy should be between dope and wack. (The dualities though still have currency in the discourse about hip-hop, both internal and external.) But, in any case, what I mean to say when I invoke those words is that Ghostface, through Def Jam, is bringing subterranean dudes like Madlib and DOOM and Dilla in touch with listeners who might otherwise ignore or avoid them, for whatever reason. And, it seems as if Ghostface is only doing this because the dude wants to make the dopest shit possible and stuff that needs to be heard - otherwise, why would he be putting out an album (tentatively, after hearing one song, I've already pencilled in as the best album of 2008) with MF DOOM on Lex (Warp Records' subsidiary)?

Of course, all this has been a trope running through much of the Wu-Tang Clan's decade-plus history. That is, sure they put out a bunch of hits and sold a lot of fucking rekkids in their prime, but their music was always anti-pop (and not in the Beans/Consortium manner) if you consider the RZA's claustrophobic, sample-heavy (and what weird samples too) textures and the 9 super-emcees climbing over each other to spit the best verses possible. We should think here about Ghostface's epic stuggle with Raekwon for lyrical supremacy in the mid 90s onwards, Inspectah Deck's curious penchant to consistently steal tracks, the GZA's impossibly great flow, Method Man's charisma and hunger at his peak, U-God's anger, Masta Killa's I'm-trying-really-hard-to-keep-up ethos, the RZA's off-time falling-behind-the-beat cadence, and ODB's absolute genius. All of these talents and drives battled each other in a sort of tangled fellowship of dope art that can be found in abundance on 36 Chambers, Wu-Tang Forever (yeah, dudes, this was the best double LP in hip-hop history) and even the supremely underrated The W.

Finally: Ghostface soldiers on in this tradition while the rest of the Wu either have disappeared (where the fuck is Rebel INS or the RZA's beats or U-God?) or died (RIP ODB) or lost confidence (Method Man) or are now working along the same path but in obscurity (Masta Killa, Cappadonna). Thus, Ghostface is the Man of the Year because he has taken on the legacy of the Wu without being weighted down by it. Instead, he has taken it further and carried it past its possible irrelevance and now into the future. Will 1993 ever come again? You would have to think that the RZA's disappearance (at least beat-wise) would seem to signify a return to the basement and perhaps the birth of a new and revolutionary sound. We can only hope he drops the revolution before snap (or whatever) develops into something meaningful.

Listening to: Ghostface Killah - Block Rock (Produced by Madlib)

Don't let the 9 mil riddle your wit, smarty pants

2006-12-10T18:24:00.000+11:00

Frow-glow

The conference is over and I'm back from Canberra. I don't really do "I-did-this-I-did-that" blogging anymore so I won't go through a play by play. But, overall, the trip was pretty fun involving (in no order) bad papers, good papers, wonderful keynote lectures, meh keynotes, a Six-Feet-Under-esque Irish bar in the mall that sells pitchers (nb: I still hate SFU), Canberra's cool bars, a somewhat mediocre bluegrass band, karaoke, a rad and quaint club called Toast, fries-and-gravy at 3 AM, bad donair, a restuarant straight out of Southeast Asia, drama, a near fight with the owner of the hotel, too many bacon and egg rolls, the Frow-glow, much Three Pillar Theory discussion, John Frow's wine, the Clipse on the stereo on the way there, an English collapse during the second test of the Ashes, cocktail parties at Parliament House and the National Museum, Joanna Newsom on the stereo the way back, late nights, huge fires in rural Victoria and the resulting smoke enveloping Melbs when we returned, early mornings and American Popular Lyric with Andrew DuBois class-esque dancing (I'm not sure if we got to that level, Andrew et al. but apparently photos are on the way). Oh, and I nearly lost my voice yelling along to mu'fucking Rick Ross' "Hustlin'" (see above) at the club on the dancefloor. Read takes from Melissa Gregg (aka Mel G) or Glen Fuller (aka Glen) for more details.

Also: Year end lists are coming but I think I should wait for Nas' Hip-Hop Is Dead which, from the 6 tracks I've heard so far, promises to be one of the best albums of the year. In the meantime, check Saelan's Top 50 albums list (and more) for a selection that is (a) shockingly throrough and (b) so very different than what I'll come up with eventually. Oh, and the new PYNCHON (see above) is also out and I'm actually going to pick that up tonight. It's nearly 1100 pages will either be a really functional doorstop or an amazing achievement. Either way it's pretty clear that Pynch needs an editor.

Listening to: The Clipse feat. Roscoe P. Coldchain - Chinese New Year

I philosophize about glocks and keys

2006-12-04T17:37:00.000+11:00

triumph

I'm off to Canberra (aka C-Town) for the (rest of the) week. We are officially going as the department's (postgrad) delegation at a big Cultural Studies conference but ostensibly most of us will be there for the road trip. I'm back on Saturday, hopefully in time to check out Edan, who I may miss even if I'm back home by then due to probable fatigue from the trip. You should probably download the new Young Jeezy, which is pretty much as great as Jeezy slowly weezing over epic-rad beats could be. (In other words, it's fucking dope.) Or buy the new Clipse because Pusha and Malice should outsell everybody not named J Dilla or Ghostface. Or, you can read about the triumphs of Stéphane Dion (HOLY FUCK) and Kevin Rudd (less surprising) in the progressive-party leadership contests in respectively Canada and Australia. Or you can read the latest SAIGON interview (less crazy than before but still unfuckwitable) and download the new Sai mixtape from Clinton Sparks and Kay Slay (dope!). Or, you can watch these clips of Michel Foucault debating Noam Chomsky in 1971, apparently in Holland. That's right, INTELLECTUAL BEEF!:

My heart wants Chomsky to be right and he's certainly got the the less nihilistic and more utilitarian position. In other words, Foucault may be right but Chomsky offers us a way to actually, you know, do something.

Blogging from C-Town is highly unlikely, so I'll be back next weekend probably with some enormous fucking year end list for you to destroy. If you've been reading me for more than 3 days, you probably know what my #1 album of the year will be. Later.

Listening to: Saigon - Saigon Sings The Blues (from the Return of the Yardfather mixtape)

Come with me, we'll travel into infinity

2006-11-30T15:48:00.000+11:00

hustle your way in

I know I'm getting to this late but the Summer 2006 (29.3) edition of Callaloo (easily, one of my favourite journals) is pretty much must-read stuff. There are interviews with Michael Eric Dyson (co-editor of the Hip-Hop Studies Reader), Touré, Jean Grae, Hi-Tek, Talib Kweli, Saul Williams and many others, as well as a bunch of interesting articles on Biggie, historicizing the Hip-Hop Nation, chicano hip-hop, money and rap and other topics. I haven't gotten through many of these pieces yet but I now know what I'm probably going to read this journal this weekend instead of going to see the Klaxons (you know, the "new rave" band that wrote a song about this blog). I'm sure you can find this journal at any decent university library and, also, through the above link or through your university library website. If none of the above work, um, hustle your way into a good library.

Also: Oh my God, Nas feat. The Game, Marsha Ambrosius - Hustlers (Produced by Dr. Dre):

I love Cape Cod and watchin' fly bitches with grey eyes
Wrestle in a tub of KY to get my day by
[...]
1995, 11 years from the day
I'm in the rekkid shop with choices to make
Illmatic on the top shelf, the Chronic on the left
Homie, wanna cop both but only got a twenty on me
So, fuck it, I stole both, spent the twenty on a dub sack
Ripped the package off Illmatic and bumped that
For my niggas, it was too complex when Nas rhymed
I was the only Compton nigga with a New York State of Mind
Inside the dope house, bottlin' up sherm, bangin' the Firm
Dre was king then, so I waited my turn
Fast forward, now, I'm making them burn
Endin' my peers' careers, hotter than Nas
A hard lesson was learned
So, I reconciled my differences like he did with Jigga
I stopped beefin' with niggas 'cause I ethered the niggas
Call the earth, there's no one left
If I ruled the world, I'd summon all you weak rap niggas to death

Listening to: T.I. - I'm Talkin' To You (Produced by Just Blaze)

Roll to every station, murder the DJ

2006-11-26T11:12:00.000+11:00

publicity stunt

The whole Michael Richards (aka Kramer) affair, to me, seems like some sort of mangled and managed publicity stunt designed to bring Cosmo K. back to the forefront of pop culture. Like the heckler in the club yells at him, Richards has had "no shows" or films or anything in his career except for Seinfeld (no, friends, UHF does not count). His Michael Richards Show tanked badly, not lasting, if I recall correctly, an entire season before it landed in the land of dead sitcoms. And, now, after a bizarre tirade during an atttempt at stand up, Richards is back in the public eye and on the tongues of everyone I know. He was even just on Letterman (well, he appeared during Jerry's segment) to apologize for his misdeed. When was the last time Richards was booked on Dave's show anyways?

The apology itself was quite weird with Jerry restraining the crowd from laughter at the spectacle and a tired, gaunt and lifeless Richards talking about his rage (but not race) problems and then not even, as in Mel Gibson's anti-semitic misogyny before him, pledging to do community work or volunteer. Meekly, he blamed his own anger problems and the hecklers. But he seems to rip into the lynching bit (and then the n-bombs) before the dudes yell out that it's all "uncalled for." In the apology, Kramer then brings up the spectre of Katrina and other comedians' efforts to help "afro-americans" and "the blacks" before pledging that the crazy thing is that he's not a racist in the first place (the sign of a racist, most definitely). In the end, the on-air apology does not close discussion but opens up further conversations about what the fuck he was trying to do during the segment. In other words, it doesn't diffuse the situation but expands it and keeps his name out there, all the while stealing the spotlight from the equally bizarre marriage of my (and your) favourite crazy scientologist couple TomKat.

I'm not belittling the racist tirade itself: what he said was (a) not funny, (b) stupid and (c) racist. The thing is, that's all very obvious and the more intriguing part of the event has been the reaction to and with it. The tirade is, to put it another way, just not interesting. Even if it wasn't planned (and it probably wasn't), the way that the original set has been disseminated (on the web and then youtube and finally network television) is a perfect reflection (and a very neat one at that) of what postmodern culture has wrought - non-stop flows of information throughout the world, a collapse of subculture (no longer can a group seperate itself from Kultur) and media's paradoxical supreme triviality. Network becomes documentary.

Listening to: UGK feat. Big Daddy Kane & Kool G Rap - Up Next (Produced by Marley Marl)

I'm wicked rad and I'm here to steal away your virginity!!!

2006-11-19T13:24:00.000+11:00

WORD

The oppresive heat of the cruel, Australian summer is fast approaching; I can feel it in my tendrils. Last night, we were out party-hopping and somehow got bogged down by the Johnstone Street Fiesta, a Montreal-esque street festival involving seemingly the entire hispanic community in ~~Meltopia~~ Melbs. (Apparently, there is one.) There were all sorts of food tents, an open air stage and all the bars on the street opened their doors for the thirsty punters. We found ourselves first at the Old Bar, downing tequila shots and catching some random Melbourne punk band alternately playing their tunes or lambasting "Sydney cunts" and celebrating the fact that "people in Melbourne still drink beer and wear t-shirts." (True, Sean?) We skipped over to the Spanish Club and caught the start of a set by LABJACD, a nine-piece outft who play latin tinged hip-hop. They were a quite decent and tight band, if somewhat unexciting, so I ducked out of the club after only a few songs in order to make it to another friend's birthday party and deliver her birthday present - a copy of Robert Service's Ballads of a Cheechako that was printed in 1917, which I found in a local used book store. I had a few cups of sangria and headed home to pass out while listening to the recently leaked and amazingly great new Clipse rekkid. (Seriously, that shit is maybe the best album of the year.)

Sorry for the lack of content in awhile but, besides the above events, I've been pretty busy getting ready for this conference. I'm basically doing my African-Canadian Literature paper from last year but somewhat rewritten and edited from its kinda shit-house version that I handed into George Elliott Clarke last December. (If I recall correctly, I wrote it while on the verge of a narrowly-averted mental breakdown. Ah, good times!) I'm actually a bit nervous about this one since (a) I can think of roughly 18 billion ways where my argument could be taken apart and spanked like the Vancouver Canucks, (b) the conference's theme is "Historicising Whiteness" and my paper isn't a history essay at all and it's only tangentially about whiteness, and (c) it's from my psychoanalysis phase and, worse than that, it's all Lacanian and I'm worried that someone in the audience is going to take me to task and cite something like, um, a letter that Lacan wrote to, say, Safouan on July 3rd, 1972, which explains everything. Oh well, judging from the abstracts, the panel I was slotted onto looks to suck mightily so maybe nobody will show up.

I didn't mention it at the time but a few weeks ago I did my Nas paper at my department's Joycean-titled Work In Progress day. It actually went really well and most of the comments (save for the usual "rap is misogynistic" type shit) were very positive, focusing on my apparently innovative reclamation of the new criticism and techniques of close reading. (I was told that in literary studies in Australia students are taught from their first year that close reading and the new criticism are to be avoided at all costs.) My supervisor was the panel's chair and he really liked the paper too; he later did a conference closing speech and mentioned the paper like 6 or 7 times in 10 minutes.

And the hustle continues: I'm hoping to participate in a pretty ambitious number of conferences in the next year or so. It's as if I'm going to be on tour like an academic rockstar. As in the past, I will have to come up with some sort of theme (probably Mingus related) and screen print a bunch of t-shirts for the occasion. A provisional schedule:

Nov. 22-24, 2006 - "Desiring Wholeness: The Shooting of Albert Johnson, the African-Canadian Literature of Dionne Brand and Whiteness" - Historicising Whiteness conference - University of Melbourne - Melbourne, VIC, AUSTRALIA

Feb. 8-9, 2007 - "'Mingus One, Two and Three': Race, Sexuality and Hybridized Afro-Asian American Identity in Charles Mingus's 'Beneath the Underdog'" - Rhizomes III: Different Becomings Postgraduate Conference - School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Queensland - Brisbane, QLD, AUSTRALIA

Feb. 12-14, 2007 - "'Most Intellectuals Will Only Half-Listen': Knowledge, Higher Education and Hip-Hop Studies" - The Value of Knowledge conference - Inter-Disciplinary.Net - Sydney, NSW, AUSTRALIA

April 4-8, 2007 - "'Mingus One, Two and Three': Race, Sexuality and Hybridized Afro-Asian American Identity in Charles Mingus's 'Beneath the Underdog'" - Crosstown Connections: Asian American Urbanism and Interracial Encounters conference - Association of Asian American Studies - New York, NY, USA

GREYHOUND ODDYSEY

April 13-14, 2007 - "'The Asian Delegation Choses [...] the Wu-Tang Clan!': The Construction of Asia and Asian-America in Hip-Hop Culture" - America's Asia, Asia's America: the 2007 Texas Tech Comparative Literature Symposium - Texas Tech University - Lubbock, TX, USA

either

June 25-29, 2007 - "Transnationalism, Globalization and Hip-Hop in Melbourne, Australia" - ¡Que Viva la Musica Popular! - International Association for the Study of Popular Music - Mexico City, MEXICO

or

August 2-5, 2007 - "'Mingus One, Two and Three': Race, Sexuality and Hybridized Afro-Asian American Identity in Charles Mingus's 'Beneath the Underdog'" - ICAS 5 - International Convention of Asia Scholars - Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA

and

September/October 2007 - TBA: Honours Talk From My Current Research, apparently to be billed as "An Honours Student Returns, or, the Return of the Unsuccessfully Repressed" - Honours Program, Department of English, University of British Columbia - Vancouver, BC, CANADA

Hopefully, I'll see some of you at some of these "events"?

Finally: The Game is my fucking hero!

Listening to: Joanna Newsom - Only Skin

So, in reality, I didn't give a dime or a damn

2006-11-13T12:07:00.000+11:00

Black Republican

So, on the weekend, the new Jay-Z leaked all over the web. It's everywhere; you should be able to find it pretty easily. I've had it for a few days now and I'm kind of sad to say that it's good but underwhelming, coming far short of the expectations for a true classic but it's somewhat better than say the Blueprint 2. The production is, for the most part, its primary strength with Just Blaze, Dr. Dre and even Swizz Beats delivering a bunch of pretty epic beats to rap over. (The Kanye West and Chris Martin, you know the Coldplay dude, tracks are another matter.) Jay's performance oddly fails to cohere over the course of the album. That is, he gets off plenty of interesting lines and his flows are as implicitly complex as ever but the whole doesn't come close to the simple power of the Blueprint, the lyrical gymnastics of Reasonable Doubt or the megalomania of the Black Album. There are highlights though like when he absolutely destroys Cam'ron in one verse during "Dig a Hole" (in response to this) and "Minority Report," a song where he critiques George W. Bush, Hurricane Katrina and his own response (or lack there of) to both. You can't really say it's a bad album (that it's like Jordan at his last all star game) but it's not the earth shattering, game changing rekkid we were ~~expecting~~ hoping for. Hopefully, that's what Nas's album (which features the long awaited collab with Jay-Z "Black Republican," a bad radio rip of which is now circulating on the net) will be.

Download Jay-Z's "Minority Report (feat. Ne-Yo, prod. by Dr. Dre)" here.

More later...

Listening to: Nas feat. Jay-Z - Black Republican

Keep white in the office; call it Jerry Heller

2006-11-08T14:27:00.000+11:00

every somewhat good and/or hot emcee today

Hip-hop's known for its sense of and reliance on the processes of collaboration. You can see this all the time in the numbers of "feature" spots on most rekkids, the fluidity of hip-hop producers (that is, in who they work with) and their beats, and the whole mixtape scene, among other examples. I suspect one could, if they wanted to, trace it back to (a) the prehistory of the culture in funk, disco and (using the old sense of the term) rhythm & blues and (b) the earliest days of the music and its formation in the block parties of the mid 1970s. At odds with collaboration is the battle itself -- which some say is the essence of hip-hop -- and the culture could be probably theorized through the constant pull between the battle and the posse cut. In other words, the desire to be the best and the need for an extended family, between the individual and the community, which, when thought through, are both attempts (although with different methods) to find the real.

To me, The Game is probably the most prominent artist today where this struggle plays out explicitly. He has been embroiled in beef for seemingly his entire career taking on 50 Cent, Ras Kass, Memphis Bleek, Tony Yayo, Jay-Z (probably), Spider Loc, Yukmouth, Lloyd Banks, Joe Budden, Olivia, M.O.P., Mobb Deep and Suge Knight at various points in the past couple years. But, at the same time, his songs are full of allusions, namedrops and references to other artists (not to mention his "I love Dr. Dre" raps) making it seem like his entire vocabulary and knowledge base comes out of hip-hop culture. I've said a bunch of times that, at least in his music and despite attempts to do otherwise, Game engages in hip-hop as a fan above all. He's never afraid to tell us that he actually likes the music. This sounds like not such a big thing but it's actually a quite rare thing to find in "mainstream" rap even if the artists are just repeating and shitting on paradigms developed by Biggie Smalls and 2Pac. Anyone attempting to show love for the past culture is usually denigrated (by both hip-hop heads and "indie" type internerds) as being overly nolstalgic and/or some underground cat that only 17 white dudes in Scarberia might like.

I mention all this because of the new and more than slightly ridiculous Game "One Blood" remix that landed in my inbox this morning. As is standard practice on a remix, the Game has enlisted a bunch of other rappers to do a verse. Usually, you would just get 2 or 3 other dudes and call it a day, but here the Game has drafted basically every somewhat good and/or hot emcee today (outside of Jay-Z, Jeezy and Kanye) to drop a few bars. Seriously he's got Jim Jones, Snoop Dogg, Nas, TI, Fat Joe, Lil' Wayne, NORE, Jadakiss, Styles P, Fabolous, Juelz Santana, Rick Ross, Twista, Kurupt, Daz Dillinger, WC (!), E-40, Bun B, Chamillionaire, Slim Thug, Young Dro, The Clipse and Ja Rule (?) and the whole thing takes nearly 12 minutes to get through.

With so many emcees on the track, it's a surprise that Rick Ross of all people has the hottest line, Nas sounds completely out of place, and TI probably delivers the best ~~verse~~ few bars. To be honest though, since there's almost 18 billion dudes rapping in 12 minutes, I could have gotten that completely wrong. In the end, this remix serves as Game's ultimate "I love rap" track as, instead of endless namedrops, it's filled with an almost infinite number of emcees including hall of famers like Nas, E-40, WC and Snoop, current kings like Lil Wayne and TI and sorta washed up dudes like Ja Rule, The Clipse and NORE. Game is, as it were, showing us his rekkid collection through cameo appearances rather than namedrops. And his ambition is nothing less than bringing back dope hip-hop to the forefront (at the cost of, one assumes, G Unit). As Game raps on his cameo, "Hip-hop ain't dead / It just took a couple shots / I'm bringing it back to life / Give it a couple shots / The king coming, no I'm not Jay-Z."

Download The Game feat. Jim Jones, Snoop Dogg, Nas, TI, Fat Joe, Lil' Wayne, NORE, Jadakiss, Styles P, Fabolous, Juelz Santana, Rick Ross, Twista, Kurupt, Daz Dillinger, WC, E-40, Bun B, Chamillionaire, Slim Thug, Young Dro, The Clipse and Ja Rule - It's OK (One Blood) REMIX here. Update: apparently this is down.

New link: click here.

Also: Shockingly, The Game's forthcoming sophmore album, the Doctor's Advocate, is really quite good. I think it might be even better than The Documentary, which is quite amazing considering there's no Dr. Dre production and no "help" from 50 Cent either. I don't have the energy to go through why right here but you should probably check Ketchums' take on it here, as he makes most of the points I probably would have and others that I wouldn't have thought of.

Addendum: The New York Times review of Doctor's Advocate is really quite awesome.

Listening to: Points Gray - Tonite You Sleep Alone

I can't be fucked like a lesbian

2006-11-05T12:56:00.000+11:00

pissing in [the] bath water

On Friday night, I saw Shortbus, the new flick from the dude who made Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The film has been labeled as controversial due to either (a) its unrelenting and relatively explicit sex scenes which feature penetration, auto-fellatio and all sorts of positions/acts/stuff or (b) the fact that Sook Yin Lee of all people is in the lead role as the sex therapist who has never had an orgasm. According to the press copy, the film tries to "demistify" sex and celebrate it through unsimilulated sex and a flimsy story revolving around Lee's character.

The thing is, it's not very good even taking the sex into consideration. The acting is, for the most part, shoddier than a Kevin Smith film; Sook Yin Lee is especially terrible, displaying a considerable lack of range and subtlety. The characterization is flinty, thin and - more to the point - laughably dull. And the story is, well, the worst part of the whole shambolic exercise with motivations reduced to mere gestures. ("This person wants to get off." "This person is sad." etc.) The most egregious element of the film is the Shortbus setting itself, a sort of club where New York hipsters get together to listen to psych folk, fuck and get fucked up, all seemingly for free. The scenes in the Shortbus (the bulk of the film) are collectively so boring that the biggest thrill comes at the arrival of an Animal Collective music cue. Worse than dullness, they'r totally derivative of "exploding plastic inevitable"-esque scenes in the now-so-dated films of the late 60s, early 70s (see: Midnight Cowboy for one of the most famous examples and countless other films that play at 2 AM on cable arts stations). And the film is completely aware of this fact, in fact, the Shortbus host/proprietor/drag queen Justin Bond tells Sook Yin that it's "like the 60s, with less hope." This statement cuts to the truth of the film - its distinct lack of inspiration and its backward-looking aesthetic - though I'm pretty sure it's not really meant to be taken this way.

As for the sex itself, it's not really very well done. By "done," I'm not judging the fucking as I would the drums on a Dr. Dre rekkid but in how it's shot, edited, put together, etc. I've spoken about sex in films before and most of my comments then still apply here (though in a pejorative sense for Shortbus). In short, to borrow from Lyotard, the locus of filmmaking is the directorial decision in what to put in or take out a shot. Shortbus doesn't seem to make any decisions though, instead attempting to put so much (and so much of it borrowed) into the scenes. By overloading the scenes, the film fails as erotic art and pornography, as well as a film itself. The only moment of inspiration is during the simply shot three way scene when one dude sings the American national anthem into another guy's ass and it's probably the only scene when real choices were made.

Finally: I'm not sure that I like the recent trend in cinema of explicit and real on screen sex (see: Baise-Moi, The Brown Bunny, Lie With Me, Romance, Intimacy, Ma Mere, Nine Songs, Ken Park, et al.). The rationale seems to be derived from the method, where authenticity in life leads to authenticity in performance, and the sense that hardcore sex is one of the last frontiers for filmmakers to cross in order to achieve the new. This trend signifies a sort of return of the real and a turn away (and a violent turn at that) from ideas of postmodernity and hyperreality from the late 80s, early 90s. It's not that I don't like it due to moral or ethical reasons but, to me, the whole point of cinema is its inherent artificiality and that narrative film is definitely not real. In the end, you could extend the real sex arguments into, say, violence on screen and get shit like this.

But the point of film is not reality (even in documentaries) but representations there of. In the end, I don't see how you get closer to truth by, as in Shortbus, showing some dude pissing in his bath water.

Listening to: The Game feat. Nas and Marsha from Floetry - Why You Hate The Game (Produced by Just Blaze)

He's my only friend who doesn't do cocaine

2006-11-02T09:59:00.000+11:00

top 5

Like last year (holy shit, scary evangelical christians, I almost forgot about that!), Matthew from I Heart Music has put together a list of the Hottest 33 Bands/Artists in Canada in 2006. Even though I've decamped off to Australia, he asked me to be part of the poll again (I was in the country until July ater all).

And, as in 2005, the list is quite good for the most part although, and this is probably unavoidable, geographically skewed towards central canada. Unlike last year with Cadence Weapon, in a blatant exercise in tastemaking and being ahead of the curve, Quinn and I didn't really conspire to get anyone off the map on the list. As it turns out, we would have needed a much larger conspiracy to do so with the much larger panel (apparently twice the size of last year). This year the rest of the country caught up with us and Rollie didn't really need our help to place in the top 5.

I was working from a definition of "hottest" that meant, to me, the bands/artists that I had been hearing about and also consciously loving at various points in the year. In other words, I went for the bands that seemed to have an impact on myself and my friends rather than the bands that should have had the effect. I should also note that I totally fucked up when I forgot to put either Ghislain Poirier or Nelly Furtado on the list ... and, for that matter, no hip-hop (outside of Rollie) either. (You should probably check Del F. Cowie's blog for his list of such picks although his list reads more like a selection of the best Toronto hip-hop and rap-related ["urban"] music.)

In any case, my list and comments follows with actual position on the master list in parantheses:

1. Cadence Weapon (#5)

I ran into Cadence Weapon (aka Rollie Pemberton) seemingly around every other corner during 2006. He opened almost every shit-hot show in the Toronto area, sharing the stage with Lady Sovereign, Hot Chip,Raekwon the Chef and Islands (among others) and his amazing record was constantly in the headphones and speakers of everyone I knew. Seeing him play every few weeks was a revelation: each show would feature a better version of Rollie, with more stage presence and ability to move the crowd ... in short, in 2006, I witnessed the growth of a once promising aritst into a veritable force.

2. Final Fantasy (#1)

The key moment in my appreciation of Owen Pallett's Final Fantasy happened at a show in January. Pallett was headlining the Over The Top Festival launch party and he was to follow Akron/Family who had played way over their allotted time and they whipped the crowd into a frenzy of singing and dancing. Accompanied by a string quartet, he proceeded to calm, charm and then amaze the crowd through the alchemy of his live performance. His Polaris-winning album He Poos Clouds wasn't too shabby either.

3. MSTRKRFT (#23)

In the space of a year, I've seen MSTRKRFT transform from playing small venues in Toronto full of curious indie kids to absolutely rocking 1500 dedicated clubers in Melbourne, Australia, who by the end of the night at nearly 5 AM, calmoured on stage to dance, sing and shout along with Al-P and Jesse F. Keeler. They have been the definition of hot.

4. Destroyer (#2)

Dan Bejar is one of if not the best lyricist working today. His words spill out like poetry and, finally on his Rubies record, he has the band to match the lyrics.

5. Islands (#9)

Islands not only match the output of the Unicorns but, for me, they surpass it, bringing in all sorts of new elements to their mix, discarding or trimming others and refining their sound with the spiritual guidance of Paul Simon's Graceland LP.

6. Ladyhawk (#21)

The return of the honest, hard working and purely enjoyable bar (in the best sense of the word) band. "The Dugout" is probably the best Canadian rock song of the year.

7. Laura Barrett (#31)

Laura is the best thing to come out of the whole "Torontopia" scene. Her music is sweet, powerful and carries a welcome sense of humour and she's probably the inventor of the kalimba-nerd-chic aesthetic.

8. Sunset Rubdown (#3)

Capable of bridging the languid soundscape with the intense rock out, Sunset Rubdown have put out one of the best albums of the year.

9. Swan Lake (#16)

Canada's penchant for indie rock "supergroups" continues. Expectations are high and their record mostly delivers.

10. Frog Eyes (#20)

The latest Frog Eyes EP is probably one of the most underrated releases of the year. Toning down the jangliness of their usual sound, Carey Mercer and crew instead delve into calmer pastures and quite successfully too. Their live show continues to be one of the best in the country too.

Also: The new AZ rekkid, the Format, is definitely one of the best releases of the year. It's more than slightly depressing that it took so long for AZ to put out a good LP (from top to bottom), let alone deliver on the promise of 1994. But, AZ sounds great here, absolutely ripping every track and holding his own with guests like M.O.P. and Little Brother. It's almost as if he's finally settled into his own voice, now knowing how to deploy it for maximum impact and power. The beats, for the most part, deliver and some of the them are undisputed bangers. DJ Premier's production on the title track is especially wonderful and it could mark the welcome return of Primo. Hip-hop needs the boom bap.

Listening to: AZ - I Am The Truth (from the forthcoming Format LP)

Who's your top 10? Is it MC Shan? Is it MC Ren?

2006-10-30T12:38:00.000+11:00

New York rap is dead

I completely realize that I've been giving Jay-Z entirely too much blogspace recently. The concert last night, the new tracks - I've been going on about Hov for seemingly every post in the past month. Instead, let's talk about GOD'S SON. No, not Jesus, but Nasir Jones better known as NAS. His forthcoming rekkid has received a pittance of hype and backing from Def Jam and I keep forgetting that it's coming out pretty soon. I woke up today to find a snippet (and a radio rip at that) from what I assume is the lead single and title track to Hip-Hop is Dead ... the 'N', to be released in December. And, it's a fucking banger, mixing together all sorts of samples (most of them previously used i.e. the Iron Butterfly sample in "Thief's Theme") as well as the "Apache" break for good measure, and totally blowing away the new Jay-Z. Nas is on fire here, displaying the trademark lyrical dexterity and not-really-all-that-dumbed-down flow that made him the King of New York (tm). In other words, Nas is back (Street's Disciple to be fair wasn't all that bad on the whole but just far too long) and it's probably the best Nas single since "Made You Look." If the rest of the rekkid is like this, it'll be amazing. For all those who say New York rap is dead, Nas is the ultimate rebuttal.

Download Nas' "Hip-Hop Is Dead" here.

(Also, holy shit, posts in back to back days! Dig the content.)

Listening to: Nas - Hip-Hop Is Dead

God forgive me for my brash delivery / But I remember vividly what these streets did to me

2006-10-29T14:19:00.000+11:00

poverty-inducing

There are shows, there are concerts and then there are events. Last night was definitely an event. Strangely, considering the performer and the price, I hadn't really been all that psyched for it for the week leading up to last night. Indeed, instead of Hov, Nas was in my headphones all week. It finally hit me that I was going to this event as I was heading to the arena. The reality then dawned in spades: this dude who I had heard and read about and watched on the television and on screen for so long was finally going to turn from just an image into an actual real person in front of me.

Upon arriving at Rod Laver Arena, normally the home of the Australian Open, I discovered that seemingly the entire Melbourne (and outer environs) hip-hop community was probably there, as well as an assortment of teens, kids with their grandparents (!) and probably every black person in town to boot. The scheme to get down to the floor - it involved ticket exchanges, lineups, wristbands and all sorts of fluff - was convoluted and inefficient but eventually the doors opened and the mad dash to the floor occured. I was sort of in the middle of the lineup so I missed most of the stampede but I still made my way down as fast as possible and eventually found a spot off to the left about 10 feet away from the stage.

After a pretty short wait, Tyree came on stage. He's some sort of rapper from New Zealand and he, unsurprisingly, wasn't very good. Actually, he was terrible. Luckily, he was only alotted 15 minutes but it still seemed interminable. I've complained about local rap before (and from a number of different cities) so I shouldn't go into to deeply. But, this performance only helped to underline my theory that live hip-hop can only be the greatest or the worst show. By the time, he brought his entire crew on stage to do his posse cut, everyone around me had begun to mockingly chant "Hova" at him. He stumbled off stage and hopefully back to New Zealand, never to be seen or heard from again.

Next up was Ne-Yo who was accompanied by four scantily dressed (either in bikinis or skin tight pleather) "special loves" (dancers). (Don't you wish sometimes that you could walk down the street with 4 girls dancing behind you?) His set was perversely awesome; he sang well, danced a lot, slapped his dancers' asses repeatedly and showed off his Prince-esque mic-stand-related dance moves. And he did all of this with a healthy dose of stage presence and (perhaps forced?) enthusiasm, which started from the moment he ran out onto stage. And, yeah, he can actually sing too. Ne-Yo was the perfect opener in that he got the crowd hyped, entertained us completely but wasn't good enough to overshadow the headliner.

Rihanna was another story. From the moment she stepped on stage, it was a mess. Her vocals were way too low in the mix, she was tentative on stage and seemed uncomfortable during anything remotely uptempo. She did a better job with her big hit, the so-ridiculous-it's-rad ballad "Unfaithful," and a passable cover of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." (When she announced she was going to do a song by one of the all time lost greats, some dude behind me yelled "Tupac Shakur!") The crowd though died way before then and there was a strange dynamic where she expected us to go crazy but most people just yawned. She's got a long way to go, at least in live performance.

And then it was time for An Event. After a shockingly quick set break, DJ Green Lantern (Eminem's ex-DJ) stepped up to the decks and did a short routine consisting of, as it became apparent later, the songs that Jay wouldn't play that night before dropping the beat for "What More Can I Say." With his jacket hood covering his face, Jay-Z appeared and it was ON. Seemingly breathlessly, Jay launched into the track and the crowd went wild, mouthing or shouting every word along with Hov. Finally, at the end of the track, he finally revealed his face (to more screaming of course) before launching directly into "PSA." He was joined by Memphis Bleek who may suck but is an amazing hypeman. Seriously, his on stage chemistry with Jay-Z is incredible; he's like a great Robin to Jay's Batman.

You don't realize how many hits and great songs that Jay has until you see him do almost everyone of them during a concert. It was hit after hit for 90 minutes and he sometimes didn't even do all the track either before moving onto the next banger. The setlist relied heavily on the Blueprint and the Black Album but he did material from all but his first two rekkids (the lack of Reasonable Doubt was surprising and disappointing). He mostly played what you would expect but he also did tracks like "Hovi Baby" (probably the most ridiculous beat he ever flowed to) which confounded most of the audience. Speaking of "Hovi Baby," mu'fucking Just Blaze was in the house and he spent most of the night camped out behind the decks with Green Lantern. I was almost as excited to see Blaze there as I was for Jay-Z. (How much of a rap geek does that make me?) A funny moment happened when he fucked up the third verse from "Song Cry." He accidentally repeated the second verse in place of the third but only realized half way through and he had to stop, laugh and then spit a different acapella to make up for it.

At certain points, Jay would launch into acapella "freestyles" (using the "a freestyle doesn't necessarily mean off the dome" meaning of the word) which were amazing, both technically and stylistically. Jay-Z's inevitable encore was pretty fun. He played "Encore" (of course) but also did a bit where he checked out what people in the crowd were wearing and he's shout them out. I probably could have warranted mention if I wore my Busy Bee t-shirt/tent/dress (size: XXXXL) since I had a sorta prime spot. I was basically within spitting distance of Young Hov and he looked in my general direction. (I would say our eyes locked for a second but that's probably a lie.)

Last night was actually the first stadium (or arena) show I've been to since the Beastie Boys and Talib Kweli played the Pacific Coliseum in September 2004 (!) and again the experience was actually pretty positive. Like the Beasties, it's pretty clear that Jay-Z is pretty experienced at the art of rocking an arena and he pretty much owned the stage. Jay-Z's not really the most athletic performer (he doesn't run around or even dance that much, which is how the Beasties did it) but instead he relies on crisp, nearly perfect vocals and the nebulous entity that is on stage charisma to get the job done.

To sum up: This concert was so dope that it was pretty much worth the poverty-inducing price.

(The above photo is actually something from his show in Sydney a couple nights before. I took a great shot with my cameraphone but cannot figure out how to upload it. The video is from Fade to Black and it features Jay-Z in the studio with Timbaland.)

Listening to: Jay-Z - My 1st Song

All I got is my word and my nuts

2006-10-27T15:06:00.000+10:00

space and aliens and shit

Possibly the most annoying aspect of life at the University of Melbourne is its library's classificatory system - the Dewey Decimal Classification. It's something that I haven't really confronted since elementary school. (My junior high and high schools might have used dewey but I cannot recall, which probably shows how much I used those libraries.) After years of use and eventual mastery of the relatively lovely Library of Congress system, my first couple months here in the libraries has been a mix of repressed memories (library related), tears and frustration. You really appreciate the elegance, grace and logic of the LoC mode after a few days of trying to find call numbers like 781.6408996 RAMS (which would be Guthrie P. Ramsay's Race Music of course) on a regular basis. Compounding the frustration is the size of the library itself, which is easily dwarved by the cushy, book utopia that is the University of Toronto's system (2nd largest in North America!). With an idiotic classification system and a shortage of books, the library becomes a war zone; books are hidden or stolen on a regular basis, you inevitable wind up in a "hold battle"* with someone else over the same text (for me it was for Anti-Oedipus), you horde everything that you can your hands on regardless if you already have 30 books to read ahead of it, etc.

(* A "hold battle" is when you and another person keep placing holds on the same book and you end up basically trading it back and forth for months on end.)

I mention all this because when you find something interesting or worthwhile, it's always quite a relief. Last week during my semi regular pillaging of the shelves, I stumbled across a gem while trying to find a Paul Gilroy book. Above is the cover for the recently published (Amazon says August 1st) The Wisdom of Sun-Ra, a new collection of a number of hitherto unreleased "polemical broadsheets" that Sun (mu'fucking) Ra wrote while in Chicago during the 1950s. The first half of the book are amazing pictures of the actual texts which are weathered, crumbling in parts, many annotated by Sun Ra himself in pen and the second half are letter for letter transcriptions of the work. They are, for the most part, fascinating documents from a relatively unremarked upon period of Sun Ra.

His subject matter is surprisingly not concerned with space and aliens and shit (that, and the Arkestra, would come later) but rather with religion, the Bible, Jesus and the place of the African American in all of those and America. (The conclusion is generally they don't fit.) Those expecting immaculately crafted prose will be disappointed but the writing has a strange presence and power in and of itself. It's especially fascinating when one thinks through its context (in Chicago, the 1950s, jazz and blues, etc.) and through the type of work that was coming out in African-America at this exact same time. Sun Ra also became quite good friends (and allies of a sort) with, who else, Amiri Baraka (see below) later in the 50s and 60s.

Also: I've been pretty busy the past couple weeks, working (read: cutting it down by half) on the Nas paper for the Joycean titled Work In Progress conference on Monday, a paper for a conference on Historicizing Whiteness in November, many grant applications (and the usual bullshit from UBC) and the always already of the thesis. Tomorrow, I'll be forgetting all this and going to see Jay-Z play the final date of his UN sponsored world tour for/about water shortages (seriously). Last dates on tours can either be dodgy (dude is exhausted after so many nights on the road) or incredible (dude is so happy to be done that he does a great show). Hopefully, it'll be the latter and I can scream and wave my arms in the air like I'm a little kid again. I've been waiting for this show for a decade. I'll be back on Sunday to report back.

Listening to: Jay-Z feat. Juvenile - Snoopy Track (Produced by Timbaland)

I'm a man who loves the one night stand / 'Cause after I do ya, I never knew ya

2006-10-17T12:20:00.000+10:00

I Broke Up

The I Hate You mixtape:

1. Swan Lake - The Freedom
2. Fiery Furnaces - Single Again
3. I'm From Barcelona - Chicken Pox
4. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone
5. Johnny Cash - Cry, Cry, Cry
6. Bright Eyes - I've Been Eating (For You)
7. Atmosphere - Fuck You Lucy
8. Cannibal Ox - F-Word (RJD2 remix)
9. Ice Cube feat. Yo-Yo - It's a Man's World
10. Bun B feat. Too $hort and Juvenile - Who Need a B
11. Jay-Z - Song Cry
12. J Dilla - Last Donut of the Night
13. Georgia Anne Muldrow - Larva
14. Lover's Choice - Joy & Pain
15. Al Green - How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
16. Neil Young - Love In Mind (Live at Massey Hall, Toronto, 1/19/71)
17. Xiu Xiu - I Broke Up (from Fag Patrol)
18. Destroyer - Certain Things You Ought To Know (Live on CBC Radio 3)
19. Frank Sinatra - Just One of Those Things
20. Charlie Parker - Just Friends (from Charlie Parker With Strings)

Download the mix (and read about it) here. And, no, it's not really about the ex.

Bonus points to whoever can spot what I jack from Deleuze & Guattari in the piece.

Listening to: Lou Reed - Street Hassle

The protege of D-R-E / Take a picture with him and you gotta fuck me

2006-10-13T10:21:00.000+10:00

revision

So, mid-October already. The weeks are racing by, the mercury is rising (~~32C~~ 36.6C (!!!) yesterday), I now have an office for the first time ever and I'm sick again. And not sick-wit-it but actually, you know, physically ill which has weakened me to the point where I spent the last few days watching all the Star Trek flicks (original cast) I could get my hands on - everything except Star Trek V for some reason. I'm constantly surprised when I revisit stuff (movies, music, sports, etc.) that I was really into when I was younger. Rewatching often leads to revisions of opinion. For example, in the past year, I realized that baseball really was the greatest game ever invented (just as I thought when I was the Tony Gwynn-esque five-hole-hitting second baseman for my little league team; picture that) while sitting in 500 level of SkyDome and this re-epiphany led me down a path that included a shitload of games (including watching the Jays destroy the god-forsaken Devil Rays 3 times in a month) as well as sitting down and viewing Ken Burns' mega-opus epic Baseball documentary (all 19 hours) in 5 days in the library here. In the case of Star Trek, I'm amazed how I missed so much (the whole Cold War subtext for example) when I was young and how the things I liked (Star Trek IV) don't hold up at all for the most part. The Wrath of Khan still kicks ass at least. Anyways, I haven't done this for a while, so let's get to it:

Current Listening:

Lupe Fiasco - Food and Liquor

Lupe Fiasco - the skateboard loving, conscious, muslim emcee's emcee - is like the dark fantasy of some A&R dude since he has the potential to appeal to so many different types of people. The album is pretty good though it's somewhat distressing that Lupe crafted it with Nas's It Was Written (the Trackmasters-helmed failure) as its inspiration. Nas may say it's "one of the most creative LPs to ever hit stores" (or someting along those lines) but that doesn't make it true. As for Food and Liquor though, it takes awhile for it to really get going but once it does ("Kick, Push," the fourth track) it doesn't really let up until the 13 minute outro where Lupe shouts out anyone and everyone. It's too early to tell if it's a classic but it's definitely one of the better rap rekkids of the year.

Georgia Anne Muldrow - Olesi: Fragments of an Earth

Muldrow is the first female artist on Stones Throw Records, the indie-rap / rekkid nerd label whose roster includes Madlib (and his 19 billion aliases), J Dilla, Oh No, Peanut Butter Wolf, Kashmere Stage Band, etc. She comes with the pedigree of a father who worked with Eddie Harris and a mother who played with Pharoahe Sanders and her music reflects the jazz heritage - her vocal style (especially on her excellent first EP) comes straight out of jazz and her production (she produces everything herself) on this LP mixes free jazz with more straight-up breakbeats (alongside Bjork-ish arrangements at times) to create an interesting fusion which thankfully never turns into Guru-esque "jazzmatazz" but instead fills its own niche. "New Orleans" is the album's highlight: it starts with Muldrow singing/screaming "Murderer" while discordant piano chords bang under neath her and then continues alon this vein, building up tension in its sheer density of sound for 5 minutes. Instead of releasing the tension at the end of the track, she amps it up even further. Density is something that has been lampooned (think Squid and the Whale) but it's something that I think is underused in pop music.

Girl Talk - Night Ripper

Holy fuck, this sucks. I go on for about 1200 words about why here. I think I should delete this soon but I can't. It's such a trainwreck of bad ideas and bad execution combined with critical hype. Or, in other words, the ever dangerous incompetence-with-pretention matrix.

Lady Sovereign - Public Warning

The album's leaked but even if you haven't downloaded it yet, it's very likely you've heard 3/4 of the thing already. The lack of new material is frustrating but at least the rekkid's coming out. (Jay-Z led labels seem to have trouble releasing albums from artists other than J-Hova; think M.O.P. or ODB.) I see only two possible things happening after the release of this LP, either (a) it becomes a huge success and sells millions upon millions of copies and SOV really becomes "feminem" or (b) the American market doesn't know how to take it, ignores it, and SOV becomes our generation's JJ Fad. The first option could occur since its grime-lite beats do share some characteristics with a lot of music coming out of the south (for example, Dizzee Rascal is apaprently going to be on the new UGK) but I think option 2 is much more likely.

I'm From Barcelona - Let Me Introduce My Friends

I usually like my Swedes either on the ice or full of dread. I'm From Barcelona are however a veritable glut/cult of amazingly happy Swedes who play happy songs (for the most part) and like to jump around a lot and smile. Somehow, this album is one of my favourite things I've heard all year and I do realize how I'm nearly off the team now. "We're From Barcelona" is a candidate for song of the year.

MSTRKRFT - The Looks

I saw these dudes play a week ago and it was fun if complete bullshit at the same time. That's also a good description for their album which is so endebted to Daft Punk (even the above video!) that it sometimes gets caught in the shadows of the legendary robots. Some tracks are BMPNG and all are definitely listenable but, and I've been listening to this LP for months now, I can't shake the feeling that it sounds 10 years old.

Pete Rock - Underground Classics

Pete Rock's been staging a bit of a comeback recently ("Be Easy" for one but also his work on the newish Boot Camp Clik was dope) and it's always refreshing to go back and listen to his true-classic work with CL Smooth (Return of the Mecca et al.). Rapster Records (the French import label) has collected a bunch of his mostly neglected work here and it's well worth the download. There's a shit load of INI tracks as well as the best material he did with Edo G., remix work and one track with CL. INI was the "lost group" featuring Pete's younger brother Grap Luva who should've been huge (they even had a mild hit single, "Fakin' Jax" which is included here) in the mid 90s. Their rekkid was eventually released in um 2002 or 2003 by BBE (definite must-buy since it came out packaged with another lost Pete Rock produced artist, Deda) but it was bootlegged extensively for years.

Black Dice - "Manoman" b/w "Gore" & "Toka Toka"

This 12 inch is probably the best music that Black Dice have put out for a few years. The A-side "Manoman" is pretty good with its chopped up vocal sample and typically annoying chugging along noise background, but the B-sides are really great. "Gore" is the closest thing to a straight up banger that they've ever done as it seems almost custom made for the dancefloor while "Toka Toka is the more subtle, bubbling out of the ether type effort that is perfect to listen to at 5 AM after a night out.

9th Wonder feat. Mos Def, Jean Grae & Memphis Bleek - "Brooklyn On My Mind (Crooklyn Dodgers Part III)"

Forget Peter Macia and motherfucking Pitchfork, who write as if their entire knowledge of the culture was gleamed from a random assortment of videos on BET. The frst two Crooklyn Dodgers singles are beyond comparison and 9th brings his most expansive, string laden beat to follow the classic production by DJ Premier and Q-Tip. Jean Grae is the obvious star here, as she continues her reputation as the cameo queen with her verse that balances an intricate flow (form) with understandable content. Mos Def shows up and does his usual dope thing that he could probably spit in his sleep and 9th gets the best out of Memphis Bleek who seems to always be at least somehwat good when 9th produces him. Another candidate for song of the year.

The Game - "Let's Ride (Strip Club)"/ "One Blood"

I have a soft spot for the Game. The Documentary was one of the best rekkids of the year with its combination of amazing production (Dr. Dre, Hi-Tek, etc.) and Game's own straight-ahead, more-on-beat-than-on-beat flow, not to mention the non stop name-drops which positioned Game as more fanboy than gangsta. Since those halcyon days, he's been dropped from G-Unit (good), done a bunch of awesome beef tracks (300 Bars and Running) and now dropped from Aftermath (bad). Without Dre, Game has enlisted some dude to do a Dre-alike beat for this, his lead single for his forthcoming sophmore release. By any objective standard, the song kind of sucks but I can't help but be charmed by Game's "I love you Dr. Dre" rap and the neverending name-drops. It's probably best to not think about the chorus very deeply. The same applies to the above new video, "One Blood." The new LP promises to be ... a mediocre guilty pleasure.

Listening to: 9th Wonder feat. Mos Def, Jean Grae & Memphis Bleek - Brooklyn On My Mind (Crooklyn Dodgers Part III)

All these dudes know is how to say gimme

2006-10-09T14:09:00.000+10:00

Blazettes

The first song from Jay-Z's "comeback" album has leaked. It's a certified banger produced by Just Blaze (or, as Hov calls him, "Justin Blaze and the Blazettes") who is probably the best producer working today (see above). It's sort of stylistically like "Hovi Baby" from the Blueprint in its crazy drums. Its sax line will bring back Public Enemy memories ("Show 'Em What You Got") for heads with memory and its horns should signify Shaft in Africa for blaxploitation types. The beat is ridiculous both in the sense of its overwhelming dopeness and the expectations that would seem to be built into it. That is, 99.9999% of emcees or singers would sound silly trying to fit in on this track: Hova is the only emcee megalomaniacal (in the good sense) enough to fill its space. (Can you imagine anyone else sounding at all comfortable let alone at home on this beat?) Jay brings his usual material (lecturing us on how to treat ladies, telling us how great he is, etc.) but his flow continues to be miles ahead of anyone else working today in the mainstream (and probably the underground...I think he could out-DoseOne Dose One if he wanted to). The best thing about this track is how it on first listen sounds like it doesn't fit together (due to how Jay's flow and the chorus) but upon repeated listens it all comes together and you realize it's hard as fuck. This all bodes extremely well for the new rekkid - that shit will be classic. Read here for Jay-Z and Just Blaze themselves on this song.

Download Jay-Z's "Show Me What You Got" here.

Also: I saw MSTRKRFT spin on the weekend. I ended up having to roll solo (I had bought a ticket) after a series of unfortunate coincidences and accidents. Jesse F. Keeler and Al-P (aka MSTRKRFT) took over the turntables around 2 AM and played until nearly 4:30. Although the rekkids they were playing were kind of meaningless bullshit (their own songs included although I like their album) and they aren't that great technically as DJs yet, I could still recognize that they totally rocked the party (and that's all that really matters when I see most DJs). The entire room (probably around 1200-1500 people or so) was caught up in their set and they turned the entire club (including the balcony where I was chilling and watching the action) into one huge dancefloor. At a couple points in their set, the dancefloor spilled up onto the stage and Keeler (and to a much lesser extent Al-P) danced with the revellers. MSTRKRFT also yelled "motherfucker" (or its derivative "motherfucking") a lot into their microphone and proclaimed that this was "Australian heaven."

There were literally 17 billion DJs and bands in support but I only saw a few. Midnight Juggernauts were a trio who played new wave inflected synth-dancepunk (more dance than punk though) and their set caught the attention and devotion of the dancefloor who reacted loudly to every track. I liked them a lot and though they did a great job of continuing the party. Coming on next was Darlin (aka Tim from Cut Copy) who spun for 45 minutes. His set was probably better technically than MSTRKRFT and his selection was definitely better but he came on in between the Juggernauts and Keeler/Al-P so it was kind of lost on the crowd at first but by the end he had got the dancefloor hevaing again.

I left the club at 4:30, walked home in the cold without a jacket, and eventually passed out at 5 AM. The next day was a waste.

Listening to: The Lafayette Afro Rock Band - Darkest Light

I ain't Cornel West / I am Cornel West Side, Chi-Town Guevera

2006-10-05T10:19:00.000+10:00

SK-1

Things continue to be pretty random down here. Expecting to do nothing more than trying to re-evaluate Star Trek: The Motion Picture last night, I tried to escape campus at around 3 PM but shared an elevator with some classmates and friends and was somehow roped into going to the postgraduate pub for "a drink." 10-12 ~~pitchers~~ jugs and 2 bars later, we were trashed. Since it seemed like a good enough idea, we headed down into the city (think: downtown) for an apparently free show at St. Jerome's put on by the good folks at Red Bull. Jerome's is sort of Melbourne's version of Vice Magazine in bar form. It's located in a slightly dank alleyway, it's very small and boasts a strangely shaped patio out back, a sort of concrete enclosure in the shape of an elongated C. Having a show there always seems to be a better on paper than in actual practice: it's too small for a dancefloor of any sort to break out and most of the people there usually can't be bothered to look up from their drinks.

In any case, we arrived really early and had to retreat to another pub for an hour or so before getting back to Jerome's just as SK-1 (aka Dabrye aka Tadd Mullinix) came on. He's out of Ann Arbor, Michigan and is probably best known under his Dabrye alias under which he produces a sort of hip-hop that seems to me to be a cross of Prefuse 73 (the good period) and someone like say J Dilla (and he's actually worked with Dilla too). His last Dabrye album has gotten all sorts of love and features tracks with, I think, MF DOOM, Guilty Simpson, Kadence (nb: not Cadence Weapon), and Vast Aire from CanOx.

As SK-1 though, he plays a kind of retro-jungle with a bit of dancehall and raggaton mixed in for good measure. That translates into head crushing all over the place drums, soul-smothering bass and a proudly retro (sounding more like jungle from when I was into it, all those years ago, than the more "current" material) selection of tracks. It started non-descript and then half an hour into it, he seemed to decide that it was time to make everyone there somewhat insane and pick the tempo up, layer more drums and pump out the even deeper bass lines, so much so that at times it bordered on noise (in the good sense of the word). For good measure, every so often, he would throw in some hip-hop breaks (or snippets of them) and then build on top of them, turning the breaks inside out and basically unrecognizable before returning to the original beat and then transititoning onto the next track. I had to duck out of there after an hour due to exhaustion (I wish I could've stayed for more but I was ready to pass out) but I was glad that I came out for this gig. It was pretty dope.

Also: Here's what I hope to complete in the next three or so years. I hope it's interesting enough and a not-too-big-not-too-small-but-just-right topic. And you read that correctly, I will be writing a chapter (~10,000 words) on Torontopia. Look out, Carl, Dylan, AH, Matt Collins, et al. uTOpia is going to hit academic discourse soon.

Listening to: Black Dice - Toka Toka

I've been waiting since birth to find a love that would look and sound like a movie

2006-10-02T11:52:00.000+10:00

UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929)

Above is Un chien andalou, the famous surrealist film by Luis Brunel and Salvador Dali. They made this landmark piece of art when they were in their twenties ... like our age basically. Theses have literally been written about its 15+ minutes so I'm not sure what I can add to the discussion. But, you should watch it and try to recall the Freud that you may or may not have skimmed (or plunged head first into, in my case, last year). Dreams, desires, sexuality, etc. It's still a somewhat shocking exercise in stylish filmmaking that has been mined and stolen from (I'm thinking Bjork-impregnator Matthew Barney and his 7 hour film cycle about his balls) for close to 80 years now. Maybe try to think of it also in the context of some of the poetry coming out then too.

Watch it and maybe we should discuss it in the comments?

Listening to: GhostDOOM (Ghostface Killah & MF DOOM) - Angeles (from the forthcoming Swift and Changeable LP)

This website's updated by witches

2006-09-28T12:02:00.002+10:00

no-flow rapping

OH SHIT SON! New Ryan Adams, motherfucker! This is like my favourite Ryan Adams track ever. Dude spits the hot fire and he's at least as good a rapper as Rick Ross if not Jim Jones. Fuckapitchfork, stop hating. The no-flow rapping, the shout-outs to New York City and the Shaolin, the random Kevin Bacon and Costner references (somebody make Waterworld 3!), the internerd critic disses, the 1980s-aping beat: all fall in the rad-because-it-ain't category (see: ALF's rap 12 inch, "Stuck on Earth"). Someone hook this fucker up with Kurtis Mantronik (if he's still alive) or Bambaataa already!!! Come to think of it, the way Adams does tours (as a drunk asshole, cancelling every second show) would fit in perfectly with most mainstream rappers.

Old school hip-hop is the new alt-country, obviously.

Listening to: Ryan Adams - Look Who Got A Website

Suck, suck, suck my art hole

2006-09-25T10:31:00.000+10:00

Fuck Home

Things have been slightly random here. On Friday, after coffee with a new freind ~~downtown~~ in the city, I dropped by the postgrad pub - where we drink in the dark, in the cold, without music or light or heat and get kicked out before 8 PM on Friday - on a whim to see if anyone was there. My plans that evening consisted of reading my old prof Michael Cobb's book God Hates Fags and maybe finally watching the graffiti-epic Bomb the System (featuring music by El-Producto) that I've had out from the library for a few weeks now. The end point of this plan was an early night in bed, sometime before midnight, a hilariously lame Friday night. But, no, of course, this was not to be: there were indeed a few people at the pub and I guess I had to drop by the table and drink a few pitchers with them.

As it has been here, you can never seem to escape after a few drinks like in, say, Toronto. In one sense, this has been a good thing as I have enjoyed not being the rockstar and instead relegating myself back to the comfortable ranks of those who follow. But, the downside of this has been the exact difficulty in flaking out before getting trashed. In any case, we rolled into the CBD (which I have begun to call "downtown") in search of food (eventually, after some debate, we had pho) and good times in the form of a fuckin' Neil Hamburger show.

We arrived at the metal club (named The Green Room though it shared little with the Torontopian alleyway bar) in time for The Record Boys, the first of two opening bands. These dudes were shirtless bogans who played a sort of good times heavy punk rock. The songs were all pretty much the same - subject matter was all about fucking ("sex genius" was the chorus of one of their tunes went), getting drunk and high-school-like angst. Their best songs were probably "Fuck Home" (with a refrain that goes "Fuuuuuuuuuccccccckkkk HOME!"- we sang along) and "Motorbike Blues" (not really a blues at all but about biking). They implored the mostly-talking crowd to "cut sick" (whatever the fuck that means) and we laughed at them thinking that they were maybe being ironic but no (after a few stares that indicated our laughs would translate into a beatdown) they were totally sincere. The Boys played a little bit too long ("Fuck Home" should've been the set-closer) but it really took me back to my spiritual home of bad high-school level punk rock.

Clagg were next and they did the sort of down tempo, slowly building, softLOUDsoftLOUDLOUDLOUD metal thing. Since I wasn't stoned off our tree, it didn't really work for me. We ducked out after the first song (due to one of our party's disavowal for the demonic metal) and headed off for an expensive Asahi at the ultra-asian bar Robot before making it back to the club in time for their last song. I didn't see enough of their set to make a real judgment but from what I could tell they were strictly pedestrian metal and the singer really had the whole generic "metal screaming voice" down.

We thought that Neil would be on next but instead we were treated to a magic/burlesque show curated by Dr. El Suavo who also served as the worst DJ ever for the night. Suavo dressed in an Elvis-esque white jumper and lucha libre mask and his tricks were somewhat terrible though that is apparently the point (he wants to be the worst magician ever). Undoubtedly the best thing about his act were his two assistants who dressed in corsets and nothing much else, danced for the crowd. And then one of them - who we deemed Firecrotch - pulled out an angle grinder and then applied it to a lead cod-piece and produced a shit load of sparks that appeared (well not really but work with me) to fly from her (or possibly his) crotch. She (he?) did this for about 10 minutes, with sparks flying from all angles. Tight.

Finally, America's Funnyman Neil Hamburger appeared on stage. Unbenownst to me, and this is kind of random, apparently he (or the dude who plays the Neil character) moved to Melbourne in the late 90s before returning to North America so he has continued to come back and do a disproportinate number of shows in Meltopia. We sat really close so we could heckle him and early on in his show, he responded by telling us to whisper our complaints in our assholes before returning to his usual material (sample: "What's the only thing worse than a new Red Hot Chilli Peppers album? A new double Red Hot Chilli Peppers album" etc.). The jokes make little sense, are rarely funny on paper but the delivery and presentation makes the sheer horrible-ness of Neil into the joke itself. He dissed the opening bands to start his set and it went quickly downhill from there before he ended with his nearly neverending encore. I'm told that his Friday show was actually pretty short but the crowd (due probably to the venue) wasn't nearly as good as they should have been with heckling but, whatever, it seemed hilarious at the time. We rolled out of there and drank whisky at Julian's apartment for a couple hours before heading home to pass out at 4 AM.

Also: I guess I should venture a brief discussion of Alain Badiou's (pictured above on the right with Zizek) paper that he delivered last Tuesday. Badiou's talk revolved around current events and it was an attempt to discern and then discuss the dominant "ideology" of today, which he named as "bodies and languages" (he also said, "bodies and cultures" although I'm not sure that languages and cultures are the same thing at all). This branched off into a discussion of bioethics but the main thrust and the most interesting thing he was going on about was his focus on time as a major determinant (and time is unique in our epoch) in how this ideology functions before he concluded with a few comments on the place of philosophy (as the night watchman of thought in contrast to the daylight excursions and interventions of politics).

The paper was quite good, all things considered, and relatively easy to follow (though it may be that I'm just getting better at following complex papers). He cut out nearly all discussion of the mind-numbingly dull mathematics that underpins his entire philosophical project (in short: mathematics is onotology). The strange thing about the paper was its relatively topical topic. Badiou himself has argued that philosophy goes astray when it tries to become the very situations that he tells us where Truth (capital T intended) arises (Art, Science, Love, Politics only). Thus, the paper straddled a boundary between philosophy and politics, actively trying to be the former while seemingly tilting (by the very nature of the material at hand) to the latter. By the end, I felt as if he had spoken the entire time around instead of about the subject of the event (9/11 or the Iraqi war or the Paris Riots last year would be the major candidates). I was left thinking I would rather have heard a talk about politics itself (or at least a reading of the culture that has come from this event but maybe I'm just showing my literary roots here), one where solutons were proposed instead of processes that may lead to solutions. In other words, the flaw of the paper was philosophy's very status as the somnambulistic night watchman.

Addendum: Yet another Tyee music piece. This time about something from the local Melbourne scene.

Listening to: Johnny Cash - Flesh and Blood

If you shoot, you ain't the real Pretty Tone

2006-09-19T14:38:00.000+10:00

give the man the cash

A fragment (picture Arcades Project but with rap) of criticism:

To me, it’s very simple: Cadence Weapon (aka Rollie Pemberton) should win the inaugural Polaris Prize if it is a fair and relatively objective contest. His album Breaking Kayfabe is brimming with both musical and lyrical ideas, consistently innovative and completely surprising. In short, Rollie has done in one album at the age of 19 what Canadian rap has been trying to do for 25 years: he has created his own niche. His self-produced beats are world class: they are blistering sample-heavy electro soundscapes that find their own place among noted producers like El-P or J-Zone or even the great Timbaland. Every song it seems on the rekkid features a profusion of musical ideas; “Turning on Your Sign,” for example, builds its momentum from within itself turning from the suspended nature of the beginning to a thrilling and triumphal climax all within 3 minutes and 44 seconds. Rollie’s raps have been critiqued in the past (including, I should note here, by myself) but he has cultivated his own unique persona already (a difficult task in and of itself for any emcee) and he has the charisma to pull off “Oliver Square,” a song that speaks about the streets of Edmonton as if it was the most exciting and cosmopolitan city ever. (Trust me, it isn’t.) Give the man the cash and the prize, Polaris Prize people, and watch him take over the world.

As-I-Post Update: The above is somewhat moot since - holy fuck - Owen "Final Fantasy" Pallett just won. This is more than somewhat surprising and a result I can endorse as dude was basically an equally deserving candidae. Congrats go out to Owen.

Now, I'm off to see Alain Badiou - apparently, according to some, France's greatest living philosopher - speak today. More later.

Listening to: Ghostface - Save Me Dear (Cadence Weapon AceRock remix)

Like Eric B. for prez, respect me in this bitch

2006-09-15T09:53:00.000+10:00

dead presidents

A couple days ago, I went momentarily insane and bought the most expensive ticket to a concert (really, this deserves the word 'concert' rather than show) that I have ever even dreamed of buying. The figure, I think, doubles the previous record. I was in a daze while and after I bought it. But, the bottom line is that I'm gonna be on the floor in the - ugh - "Bling Ring" (which is a bad Austalian-rap-slang-jacking utterance for "general admission floor") for mu'fucking Jay-Z aka J-Hova aka Jigga aka Young Hov aka Hova aka Jiggaman aka Jazzy aka S. Carter aka Shawn Carter, the current president of Def Jam Records and definite candidate for GOAT. (Did I miss any of his aliases?) This was one event that I could not miss despite the required allotment of dead presidents (see above youtube shit) or in the Austalian case, dead prime ministers.

I think I missed the only other opportunity I have ever had to see Jay when he was opening for Puff Daddy back in '97 and that tour (you know the one after Puff's big rekkid) somehow made its way to the E-Hole, but as I was militantly Wu-Tang at the time, I obviously did not go. In only 10 years, Jay-Z has transformed from a a joke of sorts (BIG and Jaz-O's hypeman) to his current hall-of-fame status, kind of amazing. Oh, and I find it hilarious that Rihanna and Ne-Yo (as well as "Australian rap sensation" Tyree?) are opening.

Listening to: Jay-Z feat. Dr. Dre, Rakim & Truth Hurts - The Watcher 2

I'm a symbol of sex, revolution and tecs

2006-09-11T10:00:00.000+10:00

post 9/11

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 that everyone remembers. (There, of course, was another 9/11 but I'll be amerocentric and forget that one for now.) Five years ago, I remember waking up in time to watch the second plane hit the World Trade Center on CNN. It was the second week of my first year university and I was only eighteen. And I remember thinking "here is the event that will define our times" even then as Aaron Brown stood on a rooftop near the WTC and attempted, in his earnest, pedantic and somehow completely appropriate manner, to make sense of what was happening. I watched the coverage for another 6 or 7 hours until I had to go to class (first year Canadian history of all things, I think). And then at school, 9/11 was everywhere, on everyone's tongues (Rutherdale in class made some mention about it even before launching into pre-colonial canadian history) and on every television screen. Giuliani erasing his past few years with a presidential performance as he provided the leadership for the nation. (Dubya was of course jetting around the country and hiding in bunkers in the midwest during the day.) For the first time in my memory, all the newspapers in town came out with afternoon editions which were passed out to commuters; instant encylopedias of the terrorist act.

Soon, the WTC was everywhere, in my reading and in the media, and eventually America broke out of national mourning and melancholia during the Greatest World Series Played Yet which had been delayed into November because of 9/11. (It was of course in baseball, that very wonderful American invention, where the nation, with Giuliani in the stands, was able to experience a pure cathartic release and the baseball, 7 great games with amazing pitching, hitting and defence, was up to the task at hand.) The usual sorts of pieces by theorists and philosophers emerged soon enough and DeLillo himself wrote a piece in Harper's (December 2001, I think) which at the time captured the event but has now come to read as short sighted, oddly hopeful and vengeful at the same time.

Of course, there has been all the historical events that have taken place because or since 9/11. Afghanistan, the Bush doctrine, the Axis of Evil, Weapons of Mass Destruction, IRAQ, New Orleans, Jack Abramoff, Abu Ghraib, the invasion of Lebanon, the collapse of Howard Dean's candidacy, et al. In retrospect, if you put it all together, the profusion of history in these five years is mind-boggling and something for historians and philosophers and theorists to put together for the next century. Baudrillard, who someone here in Meltopia told me "isn't even a philosopher," said that the 90s were the decade without event (Rwanda would perhaps be one though) and that 9/11 was the super-event which subsumes and anticipates all the evnets lost in the 90s and the events to come in the 00s. Reading through the decade so far would bear the point out, although I should caution here to say that you can read history like this in any number of ways: for example, you could say that everything now is descended from July 14, 1789 in that the French Revolution leads to Napolon and then onto 1830 to 1848 to 1870 to the Franco-Prussian War to WWI onwards to WWII and then through the Cold War and then onto the War on Terror (there are easy connections to make from all these points).

The other way to make sense of this era is through our great artists. The great post 9/11 novel seems to be still to come unfortunately. (I haven't read Updike's Terrorist but I heard it wasn't good?) DeLillo's latest novels (Don being the most likely candidate to write this project) have been explicitly pre-9/11 and not very good. Movies have been made (one even starred my former prof Jerry Wasserman!) but my sense is that they haven't come through on getting really into the matter at hands. Perhaps Haneke's Caché is the best film sorta on the subject yet.

Moving onto music, we find a veritable glut of 9/11 material to peruse. You've got Neil Young's schoolyard, 3rd grade "Let's impeach the president" rallying calls and Springsteen's retreats to more stripped down, personal material on his last two rekkids. Hip-hop has been strange in that you would think that perhaps a return of sorts of so called conscious rap would come to the fore but instead the opposite has occured, with stupider (think Rick Ross or Jeezy) and generally better rappers (think Lil Wayne) have emerged instead of someone like say Talib Kweli (who is permanently, to use a phrase from J-HOVA, "one hit away") to become more important and popular than ever. And, oh yeah, there's my (usually guilty) pleasure Bright Eyes (our generation's Dylan, the press copy tells us) is out there, wearing ridiculous costumes on Leno and singing his songs about the President, God and cocaine.

But of course there's now their generation's Dylan, Bob um Dylan himself, who just (well a few weeks ago but work with me here) put out his latest rekkid, MODERN TIMES. The title itself, a lift from Chaplin and Jefferson Starship (!), alerts us to Dylan's aims; to make music that reflect and speak to and (possibly) against our "modern times." I find it unavoidable to listen to this rekkid as anything else than a post 9/11 project, at least lyrically. Dylan took nearly the whole 5 years since 9/11 to put this one out after Love and Theft and his subject matter ranges from the usual (Dylan in love and hate, politics, the working man) to the bizarre (Alicia Keys) and all seem to be captions of Dylan's now aged mind (dude is 65 now, hardly the young dick in Eat the Document anymore) looking our at our modern world. But, yeah you say, is it good?

But before I get to that, the main question, I think, to resolve when dealing with Dylan: does he have a third act? That is, after the mis-steps and general malaise of the 1980s - when he fell off, in other words - does Dylan somehow find it again and tumble down to entual creative glory on a high note? The third act is a fixture in musical biopics - think Ray - and also later criticism about music. We see this in disparate figures as Beethoven (the late work's dissonance prefigures romanticism, etc.), Johnny Cash (the American recordings show Cash back at a creative peak) and even someone like say Cecil Taylor or Andrew Hill. This third-act has been perhaps read back on the career of Charlie Parker by some where the downslide (heroin caused mainly) has been retroactively taken ou of the dustbin and admired for its virtuosity; the Strings rekkids to some are elegant renditions by Parker, when they're really just weak shadows of what he was doing at his peak.

For Dylan, the third act comes in the late 90s, with Time Out of Mind and into Love and Theft from 2001. (NO Direction Home has a part ot play here too.) It is in these albums that Dylan shows that he still has it; that he can still make landmark tunes that mean something. The production of those rekkids - done, I think, by Daniel Lanois - is mostly overlooked (or at least underrated) but it's masterful and probably turns those albums from the realm of good to great (production should always try to do this, actually). Modern Times, I'm told, is marketed as a sort of finale to this trilogy of late-Dylan glory. But trilogies usually are weighted to the front end; there's a general downards-getting-shittier trend in them. Think the Matrix, Star Wars (yes, the holy trilogy (IV-VI) too dudes), Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois Coleurs, Lord of the Rings, et al.

But, to me and maybe I've gone insane in Australasia, Modern Times is instead the best out of all three of 'em. And, indeed, I wasn't entirely convinced of Dylan's third act until I got this album. I like all the songs: "Workingman's Blues #2" (if you get over that Dylan is ultra-rich now),"Thunder on the Mountain" (the Keys thing in it is so creepy-awesome), the Muddy Waters jacking "Rollin and Tumblin," "Nettie Moore," and "This Levee's Gonna Break" (speak about post 9/11) are all classics to add to the Dylan-canon and the rest are decent enough for his oevre of the past 30 years (it's been a LONG time since Blood on the Tracks).

The most surprising thing to me is that Dylan balances the lyrical themes of the rekkid with music mainly straight outta the first half of the 20th century. In a sense, here we have Bob retreating into the past and into the dynamic tradition of the blues in order to approach the future. This is hardly really an original approach but that's part of why it works so well. The blues, whether it's an "always already" of (Afro) American life and culture or not, offers the space for anyone to exploit and take into any direction, whether on politics, the future, love, whatever. When Dylan backs away from the blues, he goes to calypso, ragtime (sort of), 19th century traditionals and jazz - in other words, to other classic forms and genres. The blues however is paramount in importance to the rest of the rekkid in that the blues' "changing same" (to quote Baraka) is the very sort of dynamic which mirrors the larger project of Modern Times.

Those unconvinced by the linkage between this album and the post 9/11 world (i.e. those who might think of it as timeless) should note that the cover art is a photo by Ted Croner and its subject is, um what else, New York. (New York is the locus of modern times?)

Also: Because some anonymous dude warned against wasting blog space on Snakes on a Plane, I'm gonna talk about it right here, juxtaposed next to Dylan and 9/11. It is indeed a cinematic phenomenon, the most retarded film-idea to be made by mainstream Hollywood in years, perhaps decades. But the idea itself is so unresistable (who wouldn't want to see a movie about snakes on a muthafuckin' plane?) that it collapses back on itself. That is, the very fact that this film exists (and was number #1 at the box office during its first week!) suggests a cannibalistic Hollywood deconstructing itself. Snakes on a Plane then exposes and strips off the veneer of artistsic ambition that the studios put off for marketing purposes (think the Oscars) and it leaves us with pure hack-dom. Of course hacks are involved everywhere (even winning Best Picture last year: check Paul Haggis's filmography which includes Who's the Boss? and Diff'rent Strokes) but SOAP puts the hacks at the forefront. The central (perhaps) bathos here is that the writers came up with the pitch while brainstorming the worst idea ever and the film that sprung from those discussions is probably the best thing that they'll ever come up with.

Watching the film itself was a thrilling participatory experience: all the people in the theatre were united in fellowship of the Snakes on the Plane, reacting with aural pleasure, horror and above all laughter at all the contrivances and trials and tribulations that occur when snakes are put on planes by Korean (!!!! there's an Asian-American studies paper to be written here, fer'shur !!!!) gangsters. And when Samuel L. Jackson utters the famous line (you know the one), everyone applauded loudly and cheered. Snakes on a Plane is the new Rocky Horror Picture Show. Finally, the weird phenomenon before the film's release on the 'net is something of a revelation itself. The film became a cult film even before its release; the fanboys even forced changes (the title change was nixed, more snakes and sex and violence were added, the addition of a couple of key "muthafuckin" utterances) upon the studio. Perhaps Snakes on a Plane is a beginning of the democratization of cinema.

Oh: Here's the link to my piece on the new Madvillain.

And: props to the fuckin' Doggies yesterday who destroyed the hated Magpies yesterday in the footy finals ("playoffs" in Nor'American parlance) in front of an amazing crowd of 84,284 (!!!) including myself. Remember 1954!!!

Listening to: Kool G Rap & DJ Polo feat. Big Daddy Kane & Biz Markie - Erase Racism

Gleaming, dreaming, screaming, he be off the heezy soon

2006-08-31T19:11:00.000+10:00

drunk on 50

To me, the whole Torontopia movement can be best understood (or appreciated) by thinking through the Boat where there is a sort of stage but it's far too small so bands (bad, good, or otherwise) have to set up their gear on the dance floor. The crowd gathers literally around the band, eye to eye at times, mind and mind in spirit and our bodies jerking, thrusting, gyrating in concert with the group (or even more so). Barriers between performer and audience break down, and everyone goes home drunk on 50 (how I miss thee), sweaty as fuck and happy in the end. (See below pic.)

Or at least that's how it's supposed to go. I've been thinking about mighty T'topia again because various people have alerted me to Exclaim!'s This Is Torontopia piece and Carl's typically thoughtful and long response/clarification. Despite the fact that, as it usually is with Exclaim!, it came out months after this topic seemed fresh, Michael Barclay's article is not too bad, even if it relies perhaps a bit too heavily on Jonny Dovercourt. Digging up my friend Dave Ravensbergen's piece (note the n at the end of his last name) was particularly good. It's simply a good primer for those who are probably mystified as to all the discussion on the term, its usefulness, its past and its future that has taken place here, at Zoilus, on Stillepost, in bars and at house parties in Trawna over the past few years. The most prominent omission from the piece is any discussion of the role of blogs, etc. (mine and others) in the discussion and debate which took the lead in trying to bring down Torontopia, or at least question its assumptions and its aspirations.

But, maybe, other than the non-credited jacking of my "self-indulgent wank" phrase (that was my shit, I know!) for the header on this month's cover, I do make it somehow into the story however obscurely: "maybe it’s someone who thinks the whole idea is just the domain of middle-class white kids." This of course is a point that I think I made somewhere along the way and it's one that Carl takes up in his latest response i.e. whiteness and Torontopia or rather how Torontopia - and all the accompanying subscenes like bad bands, etc. - seems to be cocooned from the rest of T-Dot. Of course this point goes into larger conversations about the (a)political nature of the scene, which is a feature that could be its greatest failure.

Damn the talk about whether it exists or not: the real point - and this is something that I've eventually come around to - is that enough people think that it's there. You can't debate someone on a dance floor and, as I've said a few times before, the real test is in the praxis. The point then of the debate (which, although I'm now thousands upon thousands of kilometres away) is to focus, debate and dissent about what the scene does or does not do. So, if Torontopia is not a place but a mindet which can be seen from Victoria to Brantford and beyond, is this really a mindset that in the end helps artistic development, or, on a rather more elemental embodied level, can Torontopia-as-mindset move the crowd (in the long run)?

Perhaps we are beginning to see the results ... a circle the wagons at all costs approach, the with us or against us hoopla, the you can't understand us because you're not from here mentality. It's not that the scene, or Torontopia itself, becomes cliquey - after all cliques are everywhere - but that it strives often to stifle any dissent. When told that they're crap, other scenes take in the advice and try to come up with something better but Torontopia seems to lead to the same old bullshit but this time with a fiercer backing from the scene. (Bad bands would be thee example of a downward spiral of general shittiness, even if that seems to be the point.)

All that said, Toronto and Torontopia has indeed nurtured some pretty good (and getting great) artists and bands such as Final Fantasy (see youtube video above of a show I was at, I'm almost in the shot actually), Laura Barrett (my major crush circa January to February 2006), Hidden Cameras, Broken Social Scene (even if they're slightly out of the orbit of the scene), Three-Gut bands, the Bicylcles (who I still contend are a good band even if they are hated by some) and um maybe (read: definitely not) DJ Cyber-Rap (since I was the guy who taught 'Robert' how to flow, for real). There's more to come and the whole wavelength concept should be imported by all sorts of different cities since it is, simply put, fuckin' genius even if the bands that play there sometimes are not.

Also: Frank Chromewaves' post about this very topic is more than slightly head scratching. For someone who goes to as many shows in Toronto as Frank, to have missed Torontopia is a serious case of scenic myopia. I'm not even sure how it's possible. But, putting that aside, the point here is not that judging music for music's sake is the point or aim (that sort of criticism, obective standards, etc., is not even possible) but rather maybe the whole idea of being a part of a city's scene. That is, there is more to indie arts scenes in cities than the international acts that pass through them. This is true of all the cities that I have written from (5 and counting so far). (I should confess here that I haven't really talked about the Melbourne scene yet but that's coming soon as I adjust and orient myself in the indie subculture here.) To go further: in order to actually look at music (wherever it comes from) you have to have an anchor in the scene where you're reporting from. That sounds very old fashioned and conservative in our transnational world but what I'm talking about here is all about inwardness rather than outwardness (becoming over being, in more philosophical terms). The base (or bass) is essential for judging what passes by it.

And: I was going to write about the cinematic phenomenon that is SNAKES ON A PLANE as well as the new Dylan rekkid (both really fuckin' rad though for maybe different reasons) but, as usual, a Torontopia post was much longer than I expected. Maybe, I'll get to that a bit later. In other news, I've now somehow jumped on staff for Coke Machine Glow and I have a very edited (read: half not by me) Swollen Members (?!) track review up here. You can read the original (and much longer) version here on my old never really used LJ.

Finally: The new Madvillain track is also really good. I've got a Tyee piece on it that will be published in the next day or so. Link to come.

Listening to: MADVILLAIN - Monkey Suite

Now that I'm a graduate, she's still gotta have it

2006-08-22T08:23:00.000+10:00

ultra violence

As part as my ongoing assimilatory project, I have decided to become a fan of the footy. You know, aussie rules, ultra violence in short shorts. But to be a fan, you have to have a team to root for and, after consultation with a few footy fan friends, I am now a partisan for the WESTERN BULLDOGS aka the Footscray Football Club, a working class squad from the western suburbs of Meltopia who have only won the premiership once (1954) in their long history (established 1880). I guess they'd sort of be like the Cubs (complete with the same blue and red colours) though possibly without a goat related curse.

On Saturday, I took the tram down to the MCG, thee iconic Australian stadium. The Doggies were taking on the mighty Adelaide Crows, who are the top team in the AFL. I got in for the "concession" price of $12.50 since I'm a (pseudo) domestic student. I thought these general admission tickets would banish me to the far flung nosebleeds but instead I found myself in the lower bowl, off to the left of the goal, with a fine view of the field. The G is the largest stadium I have ever been to with a capacity of about 100,000. From what I can gleam from other sources and my experience there, the current state of the grounds - with seating and 3 upper decks circling the oval in a uniform manner - is the result of constant renovations and rebuilding throughout its long history. That is, even though it was begun in 1853, the grounds today bear no markers from those days or even through to perhaps the mid 1950s when it was used as the major Olympic venue in '56 (I was sitting in the "Olympic stand.") Thus, any subtle character of the stadium has been erased and instead replaced with a sort of SkyDome-like sterility. But still the place is pretty impressive.

The game itself was insane. I do not know all the intirciacies of the game or even many of the rules yet (I understand general concepts and practices), but the aussie rules game itself is so ridiculous and entertaining that my lack of tertiary knowledge could not disallow me from enjoying the spectacle. As I sat in the crowd before the game, I remarked that it reminded me of a football crowd back home - like pig skin, grid-iron football (which is itself a ridiculous and entertaining game) - in terms of the sorts of folk there, their general banter with one another and ethos. Footy though shares little with football; instead of the continual stop and start of the north american pastime, the australian version only stops for the quarters and it features a fluidity of play that is rarely found in the game I grew up with. It's almost as if the game is too fast at times like hockey -- the fan requires, I think, pauses during the live experience of a sport (which is what makes baseball the best spectator sport out there).

The Bulldogs took the lead in a low scoring first quarter characterized by a combination of the Doggies' hard work and lackadasical play from the Crows. Adelaide took over during the second quarter and started to dominate scoring goal after goal, and basically showing us their ferocious skill and tight defensive play thanks to the amazing play of Graham Johncock who has the best name ever. The bleeding didn't stop after halftime for the Bulldogs and by the mid point of the third quarter, they found themselves trailing by 31 points which is an almost unsurmountable lead. Almost. And then the Dogs somehow began to score goal after goal until they miraculously took the lead late in the 4th quarter! Every play they attempted worked as their hard work and hustle trumped the Crows' talent at every turn, culminating in an amazing catch by a Dog who has being tackled and ended up catching the ball (giving him a clear shot at the goal) on his back within 5 metres of the goal. And then the Crows came back and scored a couple goals to make the game 99-98 with just seconds to go. The Crows took the ball and then marched down the field but were stopped by our defence, which led to the final and clinching goal of the afternoon by the Dogs. We won!

The faithful there stayed for awhile to give the Doggies a big cheer and then sing the team song before filing out of the G with scarves proudly displayed. The Bulldogs are guaranteed now of a spot in the finals (read: playoffs), the first time they have reached them since 2000.

Also: Here's the only excerpt that's been released (in the Penguin Winter Catalogue) from the new Pynchon book. I don't think we should read too much into it since it's only a page or so from a 1000 page opus and may or many not even feature any of the main characters or be in the style of the novel. I've read it a couple times and I kinda like it:

Back in 1899, not long after the terrible cyclone that year which devastated the town, Young Willis Turnstone, freshly credentialed from the American School of Osteopathy, had set out westward from Kirksville, Missouri, with a small grip holding a change of personal linen, an extra shirt, a note of encouragement from Dr. A. T. Still, and an antiquated Colt in whose use he was far from practiced, arriving at length in Colorado, where one day riding across the Uncompahgre plateau he was set upon by a small band of pistoleros.“Hold it right there, Miss, let’s have a look at what’s in that attractive valise o’yours.”
“Not much,” said Willis.
“Hey, what’s this? Packing some iron here! Well, well, never let it be said Jimmy Drop and his gang denied a tender soul a fair shake now, little lady, you just grab ahold of your great big pistol and we'll get to it, shall we.” The others had cleared a space which Willis and Jimmy now found themselves alone at either end of, in classic throwdown posture. “Go on ahead, don’t be shy, I’ll give you ten seconds gratis, ’fore I draw. Promise.” Too dazed to share entirely the gang’s spirit of innocent fun, Willis slowly and inexpertly raised his revolver, trying to aim it as straight as a shaking pair of hands would allow. After a fair count of ten, true to his word and fast as a snake, Jimmy went for his own weapon, had it halfway up to working level before abruptly coming to a dead stop, frozen into an ungainly crouch. “Oh, pshaw!” the badman screamed, or words to that effect.
“Ay! Jefe, jefe,” cried his lieutenant Alfonsito, “tell us it ain’ your back again.”
“Damned idiot, o’ course it’s my back. Oh mother of all misfortune--and worst than last time too.”
“I can fix that,” offered Willis.
“Beg your pardon, what in hell business of any got-damn pinkinroller’d this be, again?”
“I know how to loosen that up for you. Trust me, I’m an osteopath.”
“It’s O.K., we’re open-minded, couple boys in the outfit are evangelicals, just watch where you’re putting them lilywhites now--yaaagghh--I mean, huh?”
“Feel better?”
“Holy Toledo,” straightening up, carefully but pain-free.
“Why, it’s a miracle.”
“Gracias a Dios!” screamed the dutiful Alfonsito.
“Obliged,” Jimmy guessed, sliding his pistol back in its holster.

Finally: Jay-Z is playing Melbourne on October 28th!!!!!!!11!!! I knew there was a reason why I came here.

Addendum: Very short movie review: GAME 6 was interesting though strictly minor DeLillo. Michael Keaton is a very good DeLillian (is that the right word?) hero. Lots of people talking but not really communicating. The Mets win.

Listening to: Outkast feat. Lil Wayne & Snoop Dogg - Hollywood Divorce

Why you waste so much money on rekkids and getting high?

2006-08-17T19:20:00.000+10:00

suspended energy

"Melbourne is the Havana of the first world."

"What does that mean?"

After a particularly unproductive day (I watched HEAT and pondered a thematic if not stylistic continuum between Peckinpah and Michael Mann), on a whim, I decided to walk over to Fitzroy's Spanish Club and check out the Jolie Holland show. My prior knowledge of her was limited to memories of the Be Good Tanyas (RIP?), various skimmed blog posts and the reccomendation of Quinn. The show was a bit pricey so I wasn't going to be there but, at the last minute, I had an uncontrollable urge to check out some new live music so I headed down to the shockingly packed club. I was astounded at the number of people that were already up in the relatively small art deco hall; elbow to elbow when I arrived and even more crowded by the time Holland took the stage.

Playing for almost two hours straight, Holland and her small and talented two-man backing band played an off the cuff set, which, judging from other interweb reports, is usually how she does things. By off the cuff, I mean that her set was (probably) unplanned and she just played song after song in an organic and fluid manner (meaning whatever struck her at the time as the most appropriate and logical song to play next), pausing briefly to banter with the crowd (see above), tell some short stories and - near the end of her time on stage - take requests. I was really surprised by her set as it was one of the most delightful (though, due to the nature of her songs, somewhat depressing at the same time) nights of music that I've experienced for awhile. Also surprising (to me but also seemingly to Holland herself) was the crowd's enraptured response to her set; they would erupt in applause of recognition at the start of almost every tune. The languidity (that's the best word I can think of to describe her sound) of her jazz-inflected blues-ish alt-country did more than hold up in live performance; the suspended energy of her recorded output was held up even more during performance, so that the focus was placed directly, uneasily and squarely at the considerable power of her own voice. Highest reccomendation.

ALSO: HOLY FUCK:

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

It's apparently 1040 pages and out on November 21st. I eagerly await this possible triumph / probable disaster from my blog's patron saint.

Finally: I received a cache of pirated DVDs today from my brother and included was Game 6, the 1986 Mets film (see above photo of MOOKIE and Buckner signing auographs!) written by none other than Don fucking DeLillo. I'll watch it tonight and report back later.

Listening to: Quasimoto - Jazz Cats Pt. 1

My gun is like Nelly / That motherfucker stay on some pop shit

2006-08-15T09:20:00.000+10:00

bardolatry

Let's talk some Shakespeare. For someone whose "formal" interests are what they are, my fascination with the Skake-scene is somewhat strange. I've done a lion's share of coursework on the Renaissance due to a combination of peer pressure, requirements and dope profs. But It's not like I unequivocally love the plays or his poetry. The comedies are, for the most part, unfunny parades of puns while the poems - I'm thinking Lucrece and Venus not the sonnets - are easily outpaced by say Marlowe. I still find the man himself so interesting because his life seems to be so dull - he was just a dude who liked to make money, it seems, and writing was the way to get the greenbacks. The whole authorship debate seems to arise from the fact of this boredom - we would want our writers, our great writers, to be you know people you'd want to sit down and have a beer with.

Instead of reading some Gramsci or Raymond Williams, I turned my attention to James Shapiro's 1599: A Year In the Life of William Shakespeare after finding Stephen Greenblatt's recent bio to be unreadable. Shapiro's concept - to focus on this one year as the fulcrum onto which Shakspere swings - is certainly novel though one questions the wisdom of it since most biographers find the documentary evidence of Shakespeare to be not enough to fill a book about his entrie life, let alone one year. So, instead of hard fact, Shapiro pads the tome out with historical background (new historicism, baby!) and extended close readings of the 4 plays that Will maybe sorta kinda probably wrote that year. I'm not slighting this approach since Shapiro successfully puts Shakespeare and is work into the historical (war in Ireland, possible invasion from Spain) as well as literary (books, publishing, writers like Spenser) contexts.

The book though goes off the rails when it submits to the usual bardolatry although Shapiro seems to envision his text as being almost antithetical to that tradition. That is, by placing Shakespeare into the context of 1599, Shapiro distances himself from the "he was of all times" vibe of earlier scholarship. Instead of being of all times, Shapiro's Shakespeare becomes the greatest thinker of HIS day. who stylistic innovations are quite incredible. To Shapiro, Shakespeare prefigures Hegel (?!) and John Gay (Beggar's Opera, father of the modern musical), among others. Over and over, Shapiro's stated larger project is defeated from within by this urge to read Shakespeare as the western corpus in flesh. In the end, you can read anything into Shakespeare if you want to so why not elevate Shakespeare from being an excellent playwright (surely the best of his era in his language) to one of the top philosophers of all time?

Oh: You can read my recent piece on the new Dan Bejar / Carey Mercer / Spencer Krug (omigod! internerd orgasm!) project, Swan Lake, here. Yeah, the song is pretty great.

Listening to: The Game - 360 Degrees

I come fully equipped / One rubber, one key to burn rubber, one rubber grip

2006-08-11T10:49:00.000+10:00

like a moron

I'm still not sure if the (strange) dream of a visitation from Nashville Skyline-era Bob Dylan was a good or bad sign. The dream in question came on the heels of an unexpected email from The Ex (who's apparently coming to Australia this week) but I'm not going to get into some emo type shit right now. Instead, Dylan came to me during the night, surely a strange sign for someone who has dissed the man so much in the past. But, there he was, classic Dylan, before the Christian period, before the full emergence of dylanology, in my mind's eye like a Tarkovsky film. I hope this is a good omen.

A few days later, I started to spot THE LOGO everywhere. Stickers in South Yarra, hoodies in the CBD, yoga pants at a, where else, yoga place in Fitzroy. Apparently, Melbourne is the Australian home of all things vulvosophic though I have yet to make it down to the store in question. But I can assume that it doesn't differ so much from the outlets that I have flanéd in previously. Vulvosophy comes to Australasia.

Ex and Dylan and LOGO, what could it mean?

I find myself walking through alleys at night. Laneway culture here is strong as Melbourne seems to invert the practice of the city, turning the main drags like Swanston into nothing more than ways to penetrate further into where it's really at. You go into an alley, and not a gentrified alley but a real piss-and-vomit graffiti-laced inner-shitter, and find a door ... it could lead to a tiny boutique or an interesting coffee shop or a bar, but there's something there.

I was supposed to go to one of these alley spaces to check out the ultra-hot (though perhaps only mildly talented) MySpace darling Lily Allen, who is in Australia for a whirlwind building-hype tour. I arrived well ahead of the time advertised but it was already sold out, turned aside from an opportunity to chill with buzzy type industry dudes. I later read that she only played for 40 minutes or so and she had little stage presence. I was disappointed anyways though I've started to think about why I was.

Previously in my life, I had prided myself on not caving into the hype (byproduct of listening to too much Public Enemy, probably) and to blast anything and everything (from McCartney to 2Pac) as "overrated." Surely, if anyone is overrated, it's someone like Lily Allen, who has used hype (and the magnifying power of the internet, and myspace specifically) to take her decent though not earth (or even booty) shaking pop songs to the top of the charts. The thing is, the emergence of our technology has simulataneously collapsed the borders, the distances of the world (transnationalism, globalization, whatever you want to call it) while leading us to a fundamental lack of perspective. It's as if there's a huge continuum of knowledge and product out there now but instead of stepping back to evaluate the whole, we are plunged, by our technology, right in front of it.

Last night, we could see an example of this perspective-less void staring in action. We walked into the Corner Hotel while the second local opener was on stage. After grabbing our "pots" of beer, we looked up to the stage where some dude in a swacket was rapping on stage, alongside a DJ and a live drummer. Australian rap. At one point, Aaron leaned over and said, "hey, the production is kind of good." Indeed, it was but, upon later set-break conversation, he qualified the endorsement by noting that it was a good approximation of another style without its own internal originality. That is, whenever rap scenes have emerged and become noteable, they've innovated beyond the then-boundries of hip-hop to carve out their own regional sound, usually in opposition to the New York (or, in a global sense, American) sound. Think of examples like the south, hyphy in the (B/Y)ay Area, grime in the UK, etc. Australian rap hasn't seemingly gotten to that point yet, instead, and this is just suspicion at this point since I haven't yet dug into the local scene more than a few cursorary listens, it has stared at the void and tried to reflect what it sees - that is, at what is transmitted, mediated. In other words, it's a simulacrum of the real.

We weren't there for the locals though; Def Jux and the Mo' Mega tour was in town after all. And they proceeded to show us how to do it correctly. First up was Yak Ballz from the Weathermen who's someone that's been on the edges of my radar forever but I hadn't cared to look into him deeper. But I may have to now. Yak's short set was energetic, more than competently delivered and just pure fun. There's nothing better than an emcee coming on stage by himself and holding or better yet winning the crowd just through the power of his words and delivery and, despite working through jet lag, Yak Ballz (forget his retarded name) was a prime example of this in action. (It should be noted here that the opposite, where an emcee flops, is conversely the worst shit ever.) His pinching, high nasal voice grated after awhile, as did his my-eyes-are-fucking-bugged-out-when-I-rap expression but not enough to ruin his set.

Cage then joined Yak. Before the show, I was probably most excited about seeing Cage again. The last time I saw him (see above for a youtube video of a song from that show, I'm also in the front row looking like a moron, spot me) was a revelation as he effortlessly translated the power of the Hell's Winter LP on stage for a insanely crowded and hyped crowd at CMJ. Last night was somewhat different. First, not burdened by the semi strict festival slot, Cage palyed a longer set which meant a lot more of his, as Aaron called them, earlier, spare "death" songs that he recorded when he was constantly fucked up on various drugs (read his bio for more about this). "Agent Orange" is perhaps his most "famous" example and it closed his show. Furthermore, the set list's order was strange as he loaded all the older, classic Cage Kennylz shit onto the second half which (a) somewhat deflated the crowd that was most familiar with Hell's Winter and (b) added a sort of tension as these songs were not the most happy or purely enjoyable tunes. Secondly, Cage was distinctly lacking energy on stage at points which can, I think, be chalked up to jet lag and, apparently, a really bad show the night before in Adelaide. (The sound system there was "rinky dink" which killed his voice and the crowd was small and unresponsive.) This is all not to say that Cage was terrible (he was probably more entertaining than Yak Ballz, his bad shows are better than a lot of rappers' good shows) but that I think Melbourne got him on a bit of an off night.

In contrast to Cage's on-and-off set, undisputedly, Mr. Lif fucking killed it. Despite a somewhat hoarse voice, his execution fo his flows and cadences was flawless, with the robo-Rakim of "Live from the Plantation" being as clear as the Bajan dancehall style of "Washitup." He began with some older, classic material before launching into the bulk of Mo' Mega, an album which seems to get better upon each subsequent listening. His set featured shit-hot a cappellas, actually funny skits (more acts need to do skits in their shows) about going to the club ("Treach is one of the greatest emcees of all time!"), costume changes (!), and all the Mr. Lif "hits." I've seen Lif a few times before this but he'd played as part of a group (as the Perceptionists with Akrobatik or alongside Aesop Rock and El-P) so this was the first show where he was the undisputed star (it's not like his hypeman Metro from S.A. Smash was going to take the mantle). Surprisingly, he seemed up for the task and displayed enough charisma and skill to fill the room. Fucking dope.

When I said "we're back," I didn't mean post every couple weeks. The blog may be at a bit of a crossroads right now. I don't especially want it to devolve back into a I-did-this-I-did-that format (zzzzzz) nor do I have the energy to make it an all out music or even culture blog, as it was from January through May (aka the heady days). Melbourne is the fifth city that I've lived in during the blog's 2 year existence (Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto being the others) so the blog has seen me through a helluva lot of movement, trials, tribulations, love, hate, praise, debate, good times, public humilation, departmental rockstar-ism, etc. It's not going anywhere.

The blog is (sorta) back. Stay tuned.

Listening to: Rick Ross feat. Young Jeezy and Jay-Z - Hustlin' (Remix)

It's been a long time / I shouldn't have left you / Without a strong rhyme to step to

2006-07-30T14:54:00.000+10:00

Black Dante

Aaannnnnndddd, we're back after, I think, the longest downtime in this blog's history.

I have indeed landed safely in Melbourne. During the past week, I have been recovering from jet lag, taking care of the essentials, being a flaneur around town, and trying not to freak out at the future. I have new contact info - well, actually a new number and mailing address - and I sent out a big email about it. If I forgot to include you (somewhat likely), send me an email at the address listed in my profile.

Oh, I also saw a show. The Melbourne rap crowd was surprisingly decent. There were drunk peeps, fer shur, but none (or very few) of the obnoxious, terrible drunks that afflict shows in Nor'America. Maybe I was a little tipsy off the terrible Victoria Bitter I had but I liked the general vibe of the show. The venue, the Palace Entertainment Complex, was located off in St. Kilda near the beach and right beside the Palais Theatre. The locale was somewhat English Bay like, except with palm trees and less people / urban density. The club itself was good for its purposes; relatively well laid out, with ok sound and fine sight lines.

First up was Black Dante himself, motherfucking MOS DEF who came on stage with two DJs. He sang and rapped his way through new songs (including a banger produced by Kanye West), classics and sheer exhilarating improvised portions. He came on stage with the charisma of 10 men; the dude really is a movie star after all! He played for about an hour, and for the entire time he was on stage, the dancefloor (or at least the front of it, where I found myself) was heaving. When he finally left the stage, I felt drained and somewhat shocked. I had experienced one of the best sets I had seen this year. He was amazing.

DJ SHADOW headlined. My enthusiasm for him has substantially dimmed in the past few years. Endtroducing... is, of course, one of the greatest rekkids ever (no overstatement) but I found the Private Press (and his subsequent production work as well) to be, lacking a better word, wack. I haven't downloaded the new one yet (and it's out there) since I've been having trouble getting my internet set up but, judging fromthis show, it looks to be a "return to form" of sorts. Shadow was about as good as a guy behind 3 tables of decks and FX gear could be. His track selection was tight, his cuts were fresh and his visuals were DJ Krush-esque (though not as mindfuckingly good). He brought out some British Jamie Lidell-esque dude Chris James to sing a couple songs at one point. Later, Lateef the Truthspeaker also made an appearance, as he bumped up the energy quotient of the experience at a time (late in the evening) when it was really needed. Earlier in the show, Mos Def also jumped on stage and was dope for a few minutes. After 5 minutes of cheering, Shadow finally came on stage to do an encore and it was here where he really crushed heads and sent us off reeling into the evening.

All in all, a great show by any measure. Mos Def totally upstaged DJ Shadow but it wasn't as if Shadow didn't bring his best - Dante was just that much better.

Finally: I'll post more about the city later when I get my internet sorted out. Hopefully, that will be sooner rather than later.

On endless repeat: Beirut - Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)

Only one way to do it and that's B.I.G.

2006-07-19T14:51:00.000+10:00

potential disaster

The plunging level (and quantity) of content here is solely the reflection of my attempts in the past few days to condense my life into two bags. Packing, ack-ing. I've been approaching the task as not so different than, say, moving to Toronto except without the need to take (much) winter clothing and the sheer fact that I'll be away from the E-hole, homebase, for quite some time. This is boring you, I'm sure. And, because I haven't been doing this too much or anything lately:

Current Listening:

The Black Keys - Magic Potion

The Keys are totally the best band to come out of Akron (aka the Locus of the Post-Industrial Collective Unconscious) since Devo. Totes! I've never been to Ak-ron but I feel like I know it intimately through my good friend and (former) Akronian, Allen (now hiding out in the bushes in Northern Alberta). Allen came through the E-hole a few weeks ago and as we were driving around, ostensibly on our way to, where else, THE MALL, he mentioned that it felt like he was back in Northern Ohio again. I knew it all along!! I knew our shared experiences in gritty, ugly, boring backwaters- er, excuse me, freshwaters was part of the reason why we became good friends in the first place ... a transcontinental brothers-from-other-mothers phenomena, if you will. Anyways, this is the forthcoming KEYS rekkid and I think it's better than their other releases even if they don't really stray from the recipe of rocked out blues all too much.

The Roots - Game Theory

My interest in the Legendary Roots Crew peaked at about the time that I saw them play the Commodore in early 2003. They were touring Phrenology, which is the album that I like the best in its mix of the so called experimental and the tried and true. (Things Fall Apart is great but I don't like it as much ... if that makes any sense.) Their next release, The Tipping Point, in my opinion, was terrible and I basically wrote them off around August 2004. Part of their slide was due to the lack of Malik B. Black Thought is a good emcee and all but I think I finally realized that he's one of the most boring dudes to ever pick up a mic, at least on rekkid. Live, BT has all sorts of personality but when it comes to recording it on wax, something is definitely lost. Game Theory doesn't really solve this inherent problem in the Roots but at least Malik B is back (on three tracks, I think)!!!! Weird thing though, the beats are all sorts of fresh recycles of tired samples which Rollie theorizes in a much more positive light than I might have. In the end, the first half of Game Theory is all "The Roots are back, mu'fucker!" and the second half is the same old wack dope shit.

Thom Yorke - The Eraser

To be honest, I never really was a big Radiohead fan. I could (and I do) appreciate their greatness and their innovation but for some reason I just didn't become a follower of Yorke et al. I think what really turned me off was Thom Yorke himself or, more accurately, his voice. It didn't work for me, for one reason or another. I approached the solo rekkid with some trepidation and skepticism but it's, uh, alright ... though it doesn't strike me as particularly adventurous or groundbreaking ... even derivative of Amnesiac/Kid A era Radiohead. But I can definitely hear the craft behind the songs and I am somehow enjoying it whenever I put it on. So take from that whatever you will.

Oh No - Exodus Into Unheard Rhythms

A potential disaster, part remix project and part excercise in hey-look-at-all-these-dudes-I-know, Exodus Into Unheard Rhythms is OH NO's attempt to turn the catalogue of Galt McDermot (the guy behind HAIR, the musical, and the dude in the background of the above pic) into credible hip-hop. And somehow it works like a mu'fucker. Guests include everyone from Roc C to Pos from De La Soul, but it's the tracks with Vast Aire and Murs that are the real highlights. A contender for album of the year.

Psalm One - Death of the Frequent Flyer

Following in the tradition of MC Lyte, Bahamadia and Jean Grae, chemist-turned-emcee Psalm One is better than a "girl who raps good for a girl." She can just straight up rap better than most dudes. Her newest rekkid, Death of the Frequent Flyer, is coming out on Rhymesayers, which should give Psalm One a built in audience. But she should transcend the indie-rap fanboys and become the next big thing to come out of Chicago.

Boot Camp Clik - The Last Stand

Ketchums talks about this rekkid and the lost art of the rap group in detail here. Everything you'd expect from BCC is here (good emceeing, good chemistry) and taken to the next level. They also have better beats this time around (from 9th Wonder, Illmind, Pete Rock, Marco Polo, and others) than any other previous album. I love Buckshot and he's his usual great self, although listening to the BDIMC brings back some bad memories: I'm probably the only dude who mentally associates Buckshot's flow with the lonely roads of Northern BC and the Yukon (I was listening to him obsessively on the Greyhound up there last summer). Sean Price continues to shine and the rest of the dudes are their usual more than competent selves.

Also: I probably won't update until I make it out to Australia. I'm in Vancity through Sunday afternoon but the best time to get in touch with me would be at my going away gathering/party. If you somehow escaped my emails, the plan is to start at the BOSMAN'S (1060 Howe, see above) at 8 PMish on Friday and then head somewhere else (to be determined) for random fun and probable dirty dancing. Come one, come all.

Listening to: Boot Camp Clik - Take a Look (In the Mirror) (Produced by 9th Wonder)

Never trust another woman when you're living in the fast lane

2006-07-13T16:42:00.000+10:00

the future is interdisciplinary

So, tomorrow, well later today now, I have a job interview for a position in the United Arab Emirates even though I'm definitely going off to Australia in less than a couple weeks. Transnationalism gone crazy, etc. In other news, I made a mixtape to express the coming joy and pain, terror and probable triumph, that I am experiencing with this move...

Ack! I'm Going To Australia! aka Emo Cinema Epic, Volume 2

1. Neil Young - Journey Through the Past (Live at Massey Hall, Toronto, 01/19/71)
2. Animal Collective - Banshee Beat
3. Bob Dylan - Desolation Row
4. Destroyer - Rubies
5. Frog Eyes - A Feeling: I Felt It (from the forthcoming The Future Is Inter-Disciplinary Or Not At All EP)
6. TV on the Radio - Staring at the Sun
7. New Order - Age of Consent
8. Fiery Furnaces - Oh Sweet Woods
9. Hot Chip - I Was a Boy From School
10. Madvillain feat. Viktor Vaughn - Fancy Clown
11. Roc C - Let's Get This Paper
12. J DILLA - U-Love
13. Al Green - Look What You Done For Me
14. Lover's Choice - Joy & Pain (b/w Roc C's OX SHIT white label)
15. Kashmere Stage Band - Ain't No Sunshine (Oh No remix)
16. Thom Yorke - The Eraser
17. Xiu Xiu - Sad Pony Guerrilla Girl
18. Johnny Cash with Bob Dylan - Girl from the North Country

Refresher courses in emo cinema are available here and here.

Also: I'm informed by a certain lead guitarist dude that Bend Sinister have a show on SATURDAY at the relatively huge (well, at least for them) Red Room. Lions In The Street are opening. The show will be done by 11 PM with the last band on at 10 PM, giving you plenty of time to head elsewhere or just go home and rest up for next week, my return to Vancity.

Listening to: Bob Dylan - Desolation Row

That's what the geese were all roaring about

2006-07-09T08:29:00.000+10:00

HOLY FUCK

The Roots's only great album, Things Fall Apart, opens with a bit of sampled dialogue from Mo' Better Blues between characters played by Denzel Washington (the greatest actor of his generation, etc. etc. etc.) and Wesley Snipes (Blade, etc. etc. etc.). They're talking music, black music, and Snipes comes down on the side of "if it ain't fresh, why should other black people support it?" while Denzel stresses the importance of jazz to African-American heritage - that this is "our music." In the liner notes, Roots leader and drummer and super-dude Ahmir '?uestlove' Thompson talks about this divide in terms of hip-hop first but also jazz, dance music (e.g. house), and of course rock 'n' roll. ?uestlove supports the Denzel point of view where African-Americans should be more in touch and supportive of arts movements that they have started especially when one looks ahead to the possible future of hip-hop. But, the Snipes argument is direct and simple. Why support shit for the sake of history? What's the point? And, furthermore, where are these good African-American rock bands anyway? Bad Brains had a run in the 70s which rocked but that's ancient history. Living Color, well, sucked. Ben Harper? Um, Lenny Kravitz??? Addendum: ESG kicked ass, to be honest.

And, then, rising out of the overhyped and frankly sometimes quite shitty NYC/Brooklyn/Billburg heap of the early 00s were a little band called TV on the Radio. Instead of just repeating a NYC sound from 20 years ago (the "We Sound Like Television" route taken by so many), they forged ahead with a truly bizarre and singular sound. I remember trying to explain this band to my friend Eugene back in the Spring 2004 when I was looking for someone to go to their upcoming show. I think I came up with something terrible like "electro-doo-wop punk" or some shit. The real crux of this band was in its cross of intricate, complex and almost clinically sterile production with layered hey-these-dudes-can-really-sing vocal harmonies. The first EP and then the proper debut rekkid both show this play between the soulful and the sterile in spades - Tunde Adepimbe's vocals grating beautifully against David Andrew Sitek's immaculately placed drum machines and guitar loops.

Going to their show at the Pic Pub, we were unaware of what we were going to hear. I had read up on reports of the band who only months previous had been just Adepimbe and Sitek singing and beatboxing and messing around in Billburg for their friends. In the meantime, they picked up integral vocalist/guitarist Kyp Malone and a mean, bruising rhythm section. Eugene and I had heard that the show was seriously overpacked and we got there really early to drink and wait. Eventually, the Pic swelled past its normal capacity and the band jumped on stage after talking to each other in the pisser about what they were going to do. The show was remarkably amazing, probably one of the best I've ever seen, and it has since passed into legend. Live, the tension between production and singing was completely released and the band had a manic, propulsive and addictive energy. Guitar strings broke and there were inevitable troubles with the sound but they just improvised around the difficulties of pulling off their immense sound on a seriously overtaxed sound system. Freedom, beauty and power.

One of the truly strange critical reactions to the band was a sort of racial myopia. Pitchfork, I think, went to great lengths in their review of their first rekkid to state that they are not, first, a black (meaning political) rock band in the vein of Living Color. I read a number of interviews which either skimmed past race or addressed it on very basic and idiotic terms ("how does being black influence your writing?"). The thing is, TV on the Radio put race on the table on the very first song of the first rekkid, "The Wrong Way," which explicitly ("magic nigger movie" as one lyric, for example) deals with portrayals of African-Americans in film. It's as if they wanted to say "yeah, we are a band of African-American guys and we're an African-American band too" right away, before singing their songs about love.

Other reviews have made mention that the band looks more like a group of rappers or "members of NWA" (which is kind of a ridiculously inaccurate thing to say) than indie rockers. This statement cuts to the heart of the racial myopia ... in the end, it's dominated by an active lack of knowledge in hip-hop culture and probably African-Americans too. Importantly, it is perhaps not a reaction to the band itself but more a reflection of what one could call the indie scene. Indie scenes are, for the most part, lily white, inward looking and middle class. (One might add "straight" to that list too.) I think this probably holds up for more indie inclined neighbourhoods too. You can just go to a show and look out in the crowd, especially in a multicultural city like say Toronto, and be surrounded by a sea of white faces with smatterings of east or south asians too.

You could also look around at the blogosphere like, say, Chromewaves and play the game of looking through all the pictures in Frank Chromewaves posts along with his daily entries looking for non-white artists. (There are~~n't any~~ four over a period of more than a year.) Other blogs will bear the point out too. Some people might respond by asking the eternal question, "so, what? I like this type of music. Race does not factor into it." All good points but one must recognize that race is always on the table and that a casual exclusion is not the same thing as active dismissal. There is more at play here than at first sight. Race matters even in indie rock.

(I'm not sure I completely like the way my argument is going here partly because I think I might be sounding a little too, excuse the pun, black-and-white. I only mean to emphasize that race (like sexuality) is something that indie scenes should not run away from but instead turn towards.)

I've been trying to sketch here an intersection of needs between the myopic white indie scene and a forgetful black musical scene and tradition. TV on the Radio, for all intents and purposes, fit the bill as much as any other band. They invest in and lay with African-American musical signifiers (the aforementioned "doo-wop" style vocal harmonies, the blues) while being one of the most forward looking and inventive bands in the nebulous genre of indie rock. One of the problems that I have sensed in indie rock is the "we are X meets Y" descriptor that every band comes up with to describe their sound. When you engage in these types of comparisons, the New Music cannot emerge; one gets caught in their own influences. This has hamstrung rock for far too long - it's the Denzel positon taken to the extreme - and instead of turning into something new, indie rock, which started in the 80s with such potential and vitality, has developed into a never ending circle of better-than-mediocrity-yet-not-truly-profound art. Indie rock needs the Snipes; it needs a more hip-hop aesthetic drive. This is not to say that every band needs to go out and buy some turntables and learn how to flow (christ no!) but bands need to look ahead and have the courage to say "we sound like us," mean it, and back it up on rekkid and on stage.

The new TV on the Radio rekkid, Return to Cookie Mountain, leaked a few months ago as a so called "unmastered" version. From what I can tell, the only thing truly unmastered were the song titles which, at least for the copy that Quinn sent me, was riddled with mistakes in the tracklisting. The true album has just come out in the rest of the World and perhaps in North American on Interscope (fuck Jimmy Iovinne, etc.) in a few weeks. In any case, the album is much stronger than their holy fuck debut. Now recording with a proper rhythm section, Sitek's production sounds a little less calculated but still incredibly dense. Adepimbe's singing is seemingly more assured and powerful, as if he has grown into his role as the band's nominal frontman. Malone's vocals deserve their own accolades; he's talented enough to lead his own band. (TV on the Radio are lucky enough to have two vocalists of a caliber that most bands would kill for.) And, hey, that really is David fucking Bowie singing on the chorus of a track. The rekkid begins slowly with "I Was a Lover" and then cascades into the dance riot of "Wolf Like Me" before settling into the catharsis of "Tonight" and "Wash the Day." They have somehow captured the energy of their live attack and bundled it together in an uneasy yet perfect marriage with the precise production.

As well as being a fanatastic African-American band, TV on the Radio are truly the first great band of the 21st century and probably the first since Radiohead.

I fucking love this band.

Also: Check out my Mr. Lif essay here. It's somewhere inside the latest Discorder so pick up a copy if you're in the Vancouver area. I wrote it on the fly, late at night, when an interview with Lif was no longer going to happen. Dig (and count) the endless namedrops! I was trying for something a bit more blog and real life just talking about music like but apparently it still sounds "scholarly" according to Ravensbergen. Shit.

Listening to: TV on the Radio - Poppy (Live in Toronto, 2/27/04)

I want a bitch that can rap like Jean Grae

2006-07-03T05:51:00.000+10:00

simply bananas

Apparently, midyear lists are the new year-end lists. If 2005 was the year of really-good-but-perhaps-not-classic rekkids, 2006 has seen a veritable glut of amazing platters on rekkid store shelves everywhere. Sometimes I think that I'll turn into one of those dudes who would say "It was so much better in [insert yer favourite year i.e. '63, '67, '77, '79, '88, '94 etc.]" (good christ!) but then I'm floored by a few releases and I'm back on the track away from lame geezerness. This list will probably be incomplete (as usual) due to (a) personal tastes and/or (b) I just haven't listened to everything I've even downloaded, let alone everything out there. So:

Year (So Far) In Review, Music-Wise

Top 12 Rekkids

1. J DILLA aka JAY DEE - Donuts (Stones Throw)

I've written scrolls on this rekkid over the past few months. To sum up, it came out officially 3 days before Dilla died. It is insanely dope; its treatment of samples, break beats, sequencing, hidden samples are all breath taking. It's as if Dilla wanted to put out a document of ALL his beat making skills before he passed away. Donuts is simply bananas. Best (instrumental) rekkid of the decade.

2. Liars - Drum's Not Dead (Mute)

Are these dudes complete wankers? Um, probably but they put out beguilling and fantastic albums. I really hated the witch one but, upon further review, it was actually quite decent. Drum's Not Dead takes the best ideas from that rekkid, ditches the shit, and adds 18 billion layers of drums everywhere. Putting aside if they can actually play these aforementioned drums or not, it's the sheer fact of the layering and, almost, sound collage-esque nature of the album that really strikes me. Perhaps it won't hold up in a few months let alone years, but, in the past couple months and right the fuck now, I think this is pretty great.

3. Ghostface Killah - Fishscale (Def Jam)

The fact that Ghostface is the only relevant member of the Wu nowadays is slightly shocking. Back say a decade ago, it was clear who the real stars of the Clan were (RZA’s production, GZA’s lyrical insanity, ODB’s insanity, Method Man’s charisma, Raekwon’s storytelling) and who were the underrated cats who should break out anyday now (Inspectah Deck’s shit hot verses about nothing that sounded nice, Cappadonna’s sidekick-ery to Rae). Ghostface, to me at least, was always the dude with the winy high pitched voice who rapped about nothing, used the same flow all the time and constantly needed Raekwon’s help on his solo shit. Ironman, for instance, was pretty much the worst original WTC solo album albeit it had to compete with Liquid Swords, Cuban Linx, etc. etc. etc. Since then it seems as if Ghostface has become much more comfortable with his own voice and also his vision as a rapper in that that he has succesfully outpaced Raekwon, who lorded over him for so many years, while still maintaining some sort of relevance to hip-hop culture as a whole. Fishscale is yet another example of Ghost in full effeck, and while it may not be as good as Pretty Toney, it still has its holy-shit moments (Kilo, Be Easy, the J Dilla tracks) to easily make it the best album put out by a rapper so far this year (sorry T.I.).

4. Destroyer- Destroyer’s Rubies (Merge)

I wrote about this album in detail earlier this year already. Rubies is, simply put Bejar's best album yet. After the shitty synths of Your Blues (admittedly charming at times but mostly cloying), Destroyer gets back to basics with a straight forward and rocking band and the results are magical. Bejar wails about "jewel encrusted roans" and "la la la"s to his heart's content as we finally observe an artist stepping back from the artifice that surrounded his earlier rekkids and articulating his larger project with the most clarity yet. And, yeah, the songs are really catchy and popy (I think AC Newman gets too much of the credit in the New Pornographers sometimes). Plus, it's Bejar's best vocal performance on wax ever.

5. Little Brother & DJ Drama - Separate But Equal (Gangsta Grillz)

Here's yet another recording that I have already written an entire entry on. I'm not sure if this should really count since it's a mixtape but the amount of new material that it includes makes it year-list worthy for sure. My praise of Separate But Equal, at the time, merited linkage from motherfucking DJ DRAMA himself on his XXL magazine blog. My thoughts on it haven't changed too much. It's still ridiculous to hear the "GANGSTA GRIZZILZ" shout-out over Little Brother tracks; the new songs are crazy good; Phonte and Big Pooh have stepped it up on the mic; the guests (BUN B, Mos Def, various producers) really add a lot to it. Oh, and you can (still!) download it here.

6. Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds (Blocks Recording Club)

Owen Pallett (aka Final Fantasy) steps away from the live gimmickry of relying on his own recorded loops and brings in a string quartet and various musicians to properly record with him on his second album. When it works (This Lamb Sells Condos), you can't deny it and when it doesn't (I'm Afraid of Japan) it's still interesting enough for Torontopia. (Photo stolen from Aviva.)

7. Soul Position - Things Go Better With RJ and AL (Rhymesayers)

Judging by his lacklustre collaboratory album with Aceyalone, RJD2 obviously saved his best beats for Blueprint, who positively raps the shit out of them. Printmatic brings some flexibility to his concepts so the conscious raps can mingle with the fucking songs and it all makes some sort of sense. His punchlines are hilarious as ever and his delivery keeps getting better. RJ's production is still about the same (although he says he's stepping away from so much sampling to more live instrumentation) and that is definitely a good thing (just listen to his drums and you'll observe his greatness in motion).

8. Roc C - All Questions Answered (Stones Throw)

All Questions Answered just came out a week ago so I'm probably overrating the shit out of it. Roc C is like the most promising emcee to come out of the Oxnard scene (sorry MED) in years if not the whole SoCal. I've been fiending for his proper full length since I first heard him on an OH NO track awhile back and it's finally arrived. Production (mostly by Oh No) is balls out fucking good and Roc um rocks the mic throughout, and he even holds his own with Chino XL on one track. Dope beats, fresh rhymes: what else could I ask for?

9. Spank Rock – YoYoYoYoYoYoYo (Big Dada)

Naeem (aka Spank Rock) is not really a great or even good emcee by any modern day standards but he takes the geeked out porno rap concept to its logical end overtop of banging beats (thanks to XXXchange) making us all shake our asses, fuck and go back for me later. "Bang it, bitch," indeed.

10. Ladyhawk – s/t (Storyboard/Jagjaguwar)

Quinn rated this as the best album this year so far and, while it's really fucking great at times, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. "The Dugout" rocks my face off, as do most of the other songs, but the 7 minute stinker that is "Long 'til the Morning" drags the rekkid down. Otherwise, a fantastic debut. (Photo stolen from Quinn.)

11. Sunset Rubdown – Shut Up I Am Dreaming (Absolutely Kosher)

This album is inconsistent and I don't really mean that all that derisively. "Us Ones In Between" is a beautiful, languid soundscape and "Stadiums and Shrines" hits you as hard as a Wolf Parade rock-out. It all seems to work (depending on your mood, of course) except for Spencer Krug's piercing voice which seems to demand a counterbalance (Dan in Wolf Parade, for example). But otherwise I really like this one. (Photo stolen from Saelan.)

12. E-40 - My Ghetto Report Card (Warner Brothers)

Hyphy is probably bullshit, to be honest. In a few years, we'll all wonder what we were thinking when the positively so-there-yet-so-not-there beats of Rick Rock were our soundtrack. On this rekkid, Rick Rock's production is so minimalist that it hardly exists, which is, at least to me, a problem shared by its cousin, crunk. This music then depends so much on the emcee to provide the interest, the rhythm and the drive of a song. In crunk, the emcees are mostly terrible, getting by less on skills but personality or just by sheer will of the production, But here in My Ghetto Report Card, old fucking geezer E-40 steps up to the mic and delivers his trademark blistering style of rapping. E-40 is good, really good, and he always has been, so it's nice to hear him back in such esteem. Really, this is the type of rekkid that KRS-One or Chuck D. should make to reach the masses again.

Some Dope Leaks (To Be Released Later)

J DILLA - The Shining (BBE)

The beats are so fantastic (again) and Dilla's guest emcees (Common, Pharoahe Monch, et al.) bring their best verses. Karriem Riggins does not fuck up the production (he apparently "put the finishing touches" on this album after Dilla died.)

Xiu Xiu - The Air Force (5RC)

Not to be released until September but more classic post-rock emo hard-on from Jamie Stewart.

MSTRKRFT - The Looks (Last Gang)

Al-P and Jesse Keeler will make you dance.

TV on the Radio - Return to ~~Chocalate~~ Cookie Mountain (Interscope)

I think this is what it's called. Based on the "unmastered" leak, this will be even better than the debut. Plus, David Bowie (!?!) sings on a track.

Memorable Shows

(in random order)

Addendum: check out some random and short youtube videos from the shows.

Jamie Lidell at Lee's Palace

I really wasn't expecting much but Lidell built tracks from the ground up, from say simple beat boxing to club bangers, right before our eyes. Holy shit.

Spank Rock / Cadence Weapon at the Horseshoe

The best dance party of the year. Rollie starts shit off right (and early) with the best set I've seen him do yet and then Spank Rock absolutely destroys the Horseshoe. The night ends with Ronnie Darko smashing his rekkids and yellling into the mic.

El-P / Aesop Rock / Mr. Lif / Cage / Camu Tao / DJ Big Wiz at the Opera House

3 hours with Def Jux on the stage in an overpacked Opera House. The best show at CMW.

Animal Collective at the Opera House / Common at the Kool Haus

Common's show was really spectacularly good. Backed by DJ Dumi, Karriem Riggins and Omar Edwards, Common reinterpreted his album (of the year) BE, turning the tracks inside out and displaying a passion that 99.9999999999% of emcees will never even approach. Animal Collective crush our heads with a couple hours of joy and noise.

FINAL FANTASY / AKRON/FAMILY / Great Lake Swimmers, the "exercise in ridiculum," at the Great Hall

This is the type of show that will probably go down in legendary terms. Akron/Family completely upstage Owen Pallett (despite what Carl said about it) by doing everything - including leading a singalong for the entire crowd - to put on a good show. Final Fantasy (with string quartet) follow and were really good, playing new and old songs before ending with covers of Bloc Party's This Modern Love and Laura Barrett's "Robot Ponies" (um, featuring Laura Barrett on vocals).

SLOAN TRIBUTE SHOW at the Boat

Looking back, I'm really not at all sure why the hell I was so pissed off about this. Despite my sociopathic kvetching, I really did have a tonne of fun here. This post merited mention and a response over on Zoilus too.

Also: R.I.P to Sleater-Kinney, the best punk band on the planet. They're pretty important to me because they were the only band to keep me at all interested in anything to do with guitar based rock during the late 90s. I only saw them once, last year, but I'm glad I got the chance. I completely rocked out while Kathryn sulked (as it was during most of our thing, come to think of it) but it was still one of the best shows I have ever seen. (Credit out to Quinn for the above photo of Carrie and Janet from S-K at the Commodre last year.) My completely arbitrary ranking of their rekkids:

1. Dig Me Out
2. The Woods
3. Call the Doctor
4. All Hands on the Bad One
5. One Beat
6. The Hot Rock
7. Selt-titled debut

Peace.

Listening to: Roc C - Let's Get This Paper

The distance is quite simply much too far for me to row

2006-06-28T10:46:00.000+10:00

transnationalism

After much humming and hawing / making plans and then changing them, I am actually going to do my doctorate at the University of Melbourne. This school is apparently the 19th best university in the world wedged in between Chicago (Mr. Chris fucking Dingwall still has me beat!) and Columbia; Toronto is 29th and UBC, 38th! (If anything this is a step up in the world of academe.) I'll be writing on cultural studies ... something about transnationalism and subcultural studies (the example would be hip-hop but that could and probably will change). I will be done in 3 years or less at the age of 26 (!) with enough time to be one of those ultra young profs or retrain in something more useful (law, journalism, pharmacology, whatevs). Oh, and I'm going in a month.

To prepare for the trip, I've been reading up on Melbourne. Everyone who has been has raved about it to the nth degree. The city seems fun, liveable, exciting, cosmopolitan and apparently has a really huge cricket stadium. For the first while, I'll be living at their version fo Graduate House and then in months, after I'm settled, moving elsewhere in the city. I have also been obsessively listening to the Lost In Translation soundtrack (talk about emo cinema!) and trying not to go mad in the E-hole, as well as repressing a feeing of sheer terror. If I can wreck Torontopia, I tell myself, I can make my mark in Mel-topia.

In terms of my interests in live music, I was looking through some listings and the talent that goes to Melbourne is pretty comparable to Vancouver but not Toronto (although most tour down there after North America and perhaps Europe too). The one thing that sucks though is that I will arrive in Melbourne just after TV on the Radio and Atmosphere (and possibly Sonic Youth) come through town. Oh well, there will be more.

Basic travel plans:

-Leave Edmonton on July 20 in the morning.
-3 FULL days in Vancity. (Make it special, friends!)
-Depart on the 23rd, routed through Hong Kong
-Arrive in Melbourne sometime on the 25th

-School forever and ever
-Fun too
-Possible trip back to North America in April for AAAS conference (if they accept my paper; if I can find funding for travel)

-Sometime next year, Melbourne to Hong Kong to Bangkok. 2 Days in Thailand.
-Bangkok to Hong Kong. 3 days in HK with probable side trip into China proper.
-Hong Kong to Vancouver (maybe a few hours in the airport) and then onto Edmonton
-Maybe a month or so here and then back to Melbourne for the duration of degree
-On job market by 2009 (!?)

Holy shit.

Year (so far) in review (music-wise) is coming up soon, mu'fuckers.

Embarassing addendum: some lame meme...I guess I should post this after I promised to do likewise in Quinn's super secret (well not really) LJ. fire away or ignore this, I don't really care...

Leave your name and:
1. I'll respond with something random about you
2. I'll challenge you to try something
3. I'll pick a color that I associate with you
4. I'll tell you something I like about you
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of
7. I'll ask you something I've always wanted to ask you
8. If I do this for you, you must post this on yours

Listening to: Ghostface Killah - Wildflower (from IRONMAN; Produced by The RZA)

You look good, smell bad, girl bye-bye

2006-06-23T13:43:00.000+10:00

I hate you

I hate Mr. Lif. Or more accurately his promo people. I'm pretty sure I won't be getting an interview in time for deadline. The questions went out a week and a half ago and they were only passed onto Lif a couple days ago. I'm now doing what I was dreading; writing an original feature review/essay. ~~Ack.~~ Now done, complete with as many name drops as possible (from Busy Bee to Jeezy to Carl Wilson [Zoilus not Beach Boy Carl] and as many points in between as possible). If this interview comes through, it'll probably just be blog-exclusive content. Look out; I'm taking over the game.

Also, GODDAM, J DILLA!!!!!! How the FUCK did you program/sample such amazing DRUMS all the fucking time? The new DILLA is the best yet, probably, based on the little that I've heard so far. Addendum: I GOTS THE ADVANCE! More later.

Jay-Z is perhaps touring Australia in the fall. If he plays Melbourne, despite whatever price, I will be there.

Be Jean Grae's DJ.

Finally: Rakim Allah is down with SAIGON:

You brought so much to rap with the stylistic advances you made, the complexities, the internal rhymes, the lyrics that you had to pick apart. Do you feel like there's anybody in rap right now who's carrying on what you started with that?

I say it all the time; the conscious level is kind of at zero, but slowly it's coming back. The so-called gangsta rap had its run. The young rappers, I can year it in the fight nights and I can hear it in the raps, in the streets, the new material that's coming out, rappers want to get a little more conscious and start speaking on something. Not just what's going on in the neighborhood but some of the things that we can fix in the neighborhood, why there be some of the problems with what's going on in the neighborhood. Rap is definitely getting a little more, you could call it, street-conscious. Street awareness will eventually bring awareness. The younger kids, man, the younger teenagers, a lot of people are talking about the difference between gangsta rap. Before that, it was a little more conscious, so the kids know they got a choice now. In order to be a complete rapper, they know they got to spit. At the same time, they know they got to get a point across, make a statement, and people will respect them as not only being a rapper but being a lyricist.

Is there anyone in particular who you feel is doing that?

You got Saigon; he kind of started the rage of the young conscious rapper, letting the game know that the conscious level is at zero. He came out with it, made a statement, because nobody wanted to do it two years ago.

Dope.

On endless repeat: J DILLA feat. Common - E=MC2 (from the forthcoming The Shining rekkid!!!!)