Dive into the archives.
- Premo: Behind the music
The man pictured above is DJ Premier, legendary hip hop producer and DJ. From about 1992-1995 this man provided the soundtrack to my life. I realize that I’m somewhat prone to overstatement, and maybe I big up people too much on this blog, but in this case no superlative can capture the love I had for this man’s music as a teen or the hold it possessed over my adolescent eardrums. Perhaps only a barrage of statistics will do it: As of 1994, DJ Premier comprised 50% of my favorite group Gangstarr, had been responsible for about 50% of my favorite album Illmatic, and was 50% co-author of my favorite song Come clean. That is a triple crown championship, never to be matched again.
I bring all that up, because SEM my friend from those days just sent me a link to a great feature put together by Derezon & Tre two DJs from Berlin for their show Sound Scan Radio. It’s called 14 Deadly Secrets and in it Premier tells the stories behind 14 of his greatest productions. If you enjoy his music, this is a MUST…
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right-click + ’save link as’ (mac) / ’save target as’ (windows)At one point, Premier tells the story of how he came up with the sample for ‘Nas is like’, one of his most loved (and played out) songs. It’s a pretty funny story (’I found this old record that I was gonna throw away. It was an old 10 inch record from a Lutheran church, and it was pink with a black fish on it…’) but it’s way funnier if you hear the original song he’s talking about. Here it is…
John Rydgren - Cantata of New Life
DOWNLOAD(I wish I had the digging skills to have come up with that on my own, but I definitely do not. I got it from Kevin Nottingham’s great site.)
Anyway, if you doubt Premier’s genius or that sampling is in fact an artform, check that sample track against what it eventually became - the 5 star, Mount Olympus, still played at almost every hip hop party in The Netherlands to this very day jam Nas Is Like…
DOWNLOADPopularity: 1% [?]
- Tim Maia, Rational Culture, and Stupid Intelligence
A couple months ago, my homey Jeroen started a blog called stupidtelligent. This fact is exciting to me because, for all the nymphomaniac groupies and corporate endorsement deals that it has brought me, blogging is in my estimation some lonely shit. But it seems a little less so when you have friends to link with. Jeroen and I have worked together many times in the past and, though he does not share my neo-conservative political views, on issues of culture we share much in common. So now that he’s officially blogmatic, it might be cool every once in a while to split a topic between our sites. Who knows how or if that will work, but fuck it these are uncertain times…
Anyway, a couple of days ago he posted up some info and a bunch of awesome songs by Tim Maia, the legendary musician who helped bring soul music to Brazil in the late ’60s. The focus of the post was on a period in the mid ’70s when Tim was overwhelmed by, what is stupidtelligently described as ‘an infatuation with the religious/philosophical sect called Cultura Rational (Rational Culture)’. So anyway, the post is mostly about the (amazing) music he made during that period, but I figured to support I’d provide a little of the back story. Here’s what I found in an old issue of The Fader magazine:
Following a particularly heartbreaking parting with a girlfriend, Maia’s lyricist friend Tiberio Gaspar introduced him to Rational Culture, a marginal religious sect with beliefs that involve UFOs, extraterrestrials and more. His conversion was nearly instantaneous. Maia gave up his personal possessions, cut his Afro and stopped partaking in drugs and booze–an impressive move considering his talents as a world-class abuser. Nelson Motta, music impresario and friend, recalled the results on Tim Maia Vol 1 & 2 to Brazilian magazine Trip, “Tim was at the top of his game as a singer. Strong and healthy, without smoke in his lungs, nor cocaine or alcohol in his blood, he was colossal! His vocal performances on these two albums are some of the best of his career (and of Brazilian pop music).”
WTF is Rational Culture (bka Cultura Racional) you ask? In a review of Racional Vol 1, the first of 3 albums Tim made about Rational Culture, I found this little rundown:
Cultura Racional was founded by Manoel Jacinto Coelho. He was born in 1903 in the Tijuca quarter of Rio, and it is said that at the moment of his birth, a comet or cosmic mass landed in his neighborhood and entered his body, thus supplying him with knowledge heretofore hidden from the rest of mankind.
Despite his many messianic qualities, he never claimed that Cultura Racional was a religion or that he was a god, he was simply a bringer of the truth of truths which he outlined in his series of books, The Universe in Disenchantment. Among some of the truths he elucidated was that human beings are parasites and that the arrival of an extraterrestrial race of creatures on Earth was imminent. To that end he even built a motel for their lodging at his estate in the suburbs of Rio.
It all fell apart eventually - rumor is that after a couple of years watching the skies for aliens and after having converted his entire band to Cultural Racional Tim left the sect and never performed any of the songs he recorded about them ever again. They only started to see re-release after he died in 1998.
So there it is, for whatever it’s worth, a footnote to THIS POST that you should immediately check because it has many many great songs in it.
Here’s a sample to groove to:
Imunizacao Racional
Also, you can download all the Racional albums from Música pra quê?, an admirably random music blog from which I jacked the above photo. I strongly recommend this. I’ve been bumping Vol 1 all day. Haven’t even been able to get through to Vols 2 & 3….
Popularity: 1% [?]
- Miriam Makeba 1932-2008
[Photo by the great William Coupon]As you probably already know the legendary South African singer Miriam Makeba passed away this week. I am an enormous fan, and it’s times like this that I wish I had more time to really work on this blog, because there are many things I’d like to say about Ms Makeba and what her music has added to my life. But for now at least I’ll have to keep it brief and unoriginal. For some background, here’s a selection from the New York Times obituary:
Widely known as “Mama Africa,” Ms. Makeba was a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother’s funeral after touring in the United States…
As a singer, Ms. Makeba merged the ancient and the modern, tradition and individualism. Her 1960s hits “Qongqothwane,” known in English as “The Click Song,” and the dance song “Pata Pata,” which would be remade by many other performers in the next decades, used the tongue-clicking sound that is part of the Xhosa language her family spoke. Traditional African ululation was also one of her many vocal techniques.
But Ms. Makeba was also familiar with jazz and international pop and folk songs, and while South African songs would always be the core of her repertory, she built an ever-expanding repertory in many languages. Her voice was supremely flexible, and she could sound like a young girl or a craggy grandmother within the same song.
With tenderness, righteousness and playfulness, Ms. Makeba sang love songs, advice songs, spiritual songs, anti-apartheid songs and calls for unity. In bringing African music to other continents, she was a pioneer of what would be called world music, reworking her own heritage for listeners who might never hear it otherwise while creating fusions of her own.
Yet for all her internationalist hybrids, and through three decades as an exile, her music always made it clear that South Africa was her home.
As an exile Ms. Makeba lived variously in the United States, France, Guinea and Belgium. South Africa’s state broadcasters banned her music after she spoke out against apartheid at the United Nations.
“I never understood why I couldn’t come home,” Ms. Makeba said, as quoted by The Associated Press, during an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990 as the apartheid system began to crumble. “I never committed any crime.”
Here’s the earliest and latest clip I could find on youtube. This one is taken from Lionel Rogosin’s film Come Back, Africa:
This is from her performance on November 5, five days before her death:
Wouldn’t be right without some songs…
The first is Miriam’s first international hit and still probably her best known. Covered and sampled like crazy. This is the original…
Pata Pata (OG Version)
DOWNLOADNext is a wicked live version of maybe my favorite MM song…
Malaika (Live)
DOWNLOADLast here’s a more recent song made together with her countryman and husband Hugh Masekela. This one has a lot of sentimental value to me and I hope the person with whom I shared this song sees this post…
Vukani
DOWNLOADBut this is a weak selection really. If someone puts up a mix somewhere please let me know and I’ll include it.
UPDATE: Check this amazing interview conducted by Roger Steffens in 1988 to coincide with the release of Sangoma. (Thanks to Robin for hook up. XX)
Rest In Peace MM
Popularity: 2% [?]
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How sweet it is…
UPDATE: As I mentioned before, I’m in China these days and I can report that the citizens of Beijing give exactly 0% of a fuck about Obama’s victory. Things are very different in America of course. Based on the conversations I’ve had with my friends there, the mood is jubilant. If you’re looking for a visual, this seems about right…
Popularity: 3% [?]
- Rio Player
I’m back in NY now, feeling cold and understimulated after a week swirling around in the joy-misery-apathy-hedonism smoothie of Rio de Janeiro. I brought a lot of music back with me, and it’ll take a while to sort through it all. But just to put an end point on it I want to post some songs from the trip. I’ll start with the one I heard most of all…
MC Pojeta - MSN
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right-click + save link as (mac) / save target as (windows)MAN this riddim. I can’t even count the number of times I heard this shit. The thing I like about it is the fact that it combines a weird Bobby McFarenesque organic rhythm with sounds from our futuristic age of instant messaging and robot pets. Rio’s a place of harsh contrasts, so I guess that makes sense. Plus I’m into all the pornographic yelling - but that’s a given. There are so many versions on this track, this MC Pojeta one is as good as any.
Here’s a slightly different version over the same beat. Baile is notoriously sexual music, but if you don’t speak Portugese it’s hard to know just how horny/amused/offended/confused you should be. This song is good because it removes words for the most part and relies instead on the universal language of female orgasm. This is one of my favorites, and there is a very high probability that this joint will open my next mixtape.
Montgem - Aquecimento do tesao
DOWNLOADBut actually as baile funk goes, I’m more into the earlier electro-inspired version. So I also bought a bunch of old school compilations with names like ‘Funk Memories’ and ‘Clássicos de Montagens’. A lot of it is bailefied versions of US freestyle and bass music. Here’s a couple favorites from those…
Shy D - I’ve gotta be tough (baile rmx)
DOWNLOADLisa Lisa & Cult Jam - Can you feel the beat (baile rmx)
DOWNLOADWhich reminds me, one of the pleasant surprises of the trip was my re-discovery of old freestyle songs from my youth. This Stevie B song is STILL getting regular play in Rio. Anyone who grew up in my hometown in 80s with even the vaguest interest in dancing and/or rollerskating knows and loves this joint.
Stevie B - Spring love
DOWNLOADOn the subject of classics, here is a funky masterpiece by the late Tim Maia, an artist who I’m just beginning to check out. He covered a lot of genres in his four decades as a musician, and this is from his soul period. This is a where-have-you-been-all-my-life type record for me.
Tim Maia - Ela Partiu
We also heard some really good samba one night at a huge dancehall outside of which you could buy coke & weed from friendly, very heavily armed teenagers under a little tent. Here’s one of the big samba songs right now…
Exaltasamba - Eu chorei
DOWNLOADWhile I’m at it, it might be nice to put up some other non-Brazilian songs that I was exposed to during the trip. My friends and I had a couple very potent music exchanges down there, so in that spirit I’d like to, as Barry O would say, ’spread the wealth’.
Wu-Tang Clan - Life changes
DOWNLOADThis song is dedicated to the late Ol Dirty Bastard. I’ve always thought about Wu-Tang as something more than just a musical group. They share so much in common that sometimes listening to a posse cut by Wu-Tang feels like hearing the ravings a single schizophrenic person. I feel that especially on this song where everyone is talking about the same subject and after a while it starts to sound like a catalog of grief.
Jaheim - Like a DJ
DOWNLOADAAAAND on a totally different tip, here’s a smoothed-out club ballad by Jaheim. I’m a fan of Jaheim and in this case I give him special props for coming up with an original metaphor to describe the much discussed subject of love loss. I’m not sure why this song never hit.
And on the subject of love, I want to send out special birthday vibrations to my man Barend, who is currently the most loved up person I know. In celebration, here’s ‘Love is all around’ by King Tubby, a genius over whose music Barend and I bonded a decade ago and who is still ruling.
King Tubby - Love is all around dub
DOWNLOADFrom Barend’s lady love Aura, I got this jam (and others)…
Bonobo - Nightlite
DOWNLOADAnd to finally wrap it up, here’s one of the sweetest songs I’ve heard in a long while. It comes from Angola and is a good example of the Kizomba sound coming from there. Love to my man Jeru for this and so many of the amazing songs I got hipped to in Rio…
Kizomba - Cre Voltar
DOWNLOADLight your lighter…
Popularity: 4% [?]
- DJ Spinna Appreciation
Last night I had the unhappy experience of seeing the great DJ Spinna play to a crowd of about 12 people at an overpriced bar in the Meatpacking District.
I understand that these are uncertain times - we are living in a ‘world on edge’ (according to the Economist), the stock market is ‘cratering’ (according to the New York Times), and even crazy ass Jim Cramer is pleading for fiscal conservatism. But there is something fundamentally wrong with a society in which an artist of DJ Spinna’s quality can’t get more than a handful of people to pay to see him. As the kids say, SMH.
So I think it’s high time for an appreciation post. I don’t have the time to go into a full breakdown of Spinna’s long career, but there’s a pretty good bio on his site www.djspinna.com.
I personally became aware of him while I was living in NY in the late ’90s. That was the golden age of independent hip hop here, and Spinna was probably the scene’s most influential producer, and I saw him play many, many times back then. It’s sort of sad to think about how little ultimately came of that movement, but it felt good at the time, launched a few careers (Mos Def, Kweli, even Eminem in a way), and produced some excellent, timeless (in my opinion) music.
So here’s one of my DJ Spinna jams from back then. The vocal featured Kweli & Apani B, but somehow I think the instrumental captures the vibe of that time better…
DJ Spinna - Timezone (instrumental)
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right-click + save link as [mac] / save target as [windows]
It’s taken from Spinna’s 1999 album Heavy Beats Vol. 1 and since the label it was released on folded, I’m pretty sure it’s out of print. So feel free to download the whole thing here… If I’m wrong about the out of print thing, let me know and I’ll take it down…
But Spinna never stuck to strictly underground hip hop. His beats were sourced from lots of places and over the year’s he’s produced a lot of great remixes for old soul, jazz, and R&B. I think there’s perhaps no better example than his epic remix of J5’s ‘We’re almost there’. A summertime cookout staple to this very day.
Jackson 5 - “We’re almost there” (DJ Spinna Remix)
DOWNLOADAll that is ancient history though. These days Spinna is best known as a producer of soulful house. He's ruling at this too, applying the same gentle touch to um-tiss-um-tiss-um-tiss that he once did to boom-bap. Here's his masterpiece, 'Days like this', a ray of sunshine for a dark age and the song I used to convince my friends Charlie & Adrian to come to club.
Shawn Escoffery - “Days Like This”
DOWNLOADAnd last but definitely not least, here’s a live set from a couple of summers ago. This probably gives a better view to Spinna’s landscape than anything else. There’s a couple of janky moments at the beginning where the audio cuts out, but after that it’s good.
DJ Spinna - Live at Plan B July 2006
DOWNLOADCheck out:
Spinna on Myspace
This interview with Spinna & Bobbito on their ongoing Stevie tribute Wonder-full. Here’s a sample:Why do you think the parties are so highly regarded?
Bobbito: We’ve had people faint in the crowd. We’ve had people have orgasms in the crowd.
(DCist chuckles)
I’m dead ass. I’m not even joking. Spinna and I have cried in the deejay booth. It’s a very deep and emotional party.Spinna: It may not be the man himself but you’ll capture the same type of emotions as you would at his show.
Support great music.
Popularity: 7% [?]
- Recordnize
Paul Mawhinney is a former paper salesman from Pittsburg. He is also the world’s most off the chain record collector. He currently maintains the largest record archive in the world - over 3 MILLION pieces, including thousands and thousands of albums and singles that were never transferred to CD/MP3. He popped up in the int’l press earlier this year when he announced that he needs to sell his beloved collection to the highest bidder. An e-bay auction took place, but the eventual winner (who’s high bid was (only) $3,002,150) couldn’t actually come up with the money, so it was ultimately voided.
Filmmaker Sean Dunne visited Paul at his meticulously organized record cave and made this. Amazing and sad.
Thanks to Jeremy for the tip. See you soon dude…
Popularity: 7% [?]
- Back on the grime
If you’re anything like me, you’re an irritating American hipster. Like so many of your kind, you were all excited about grime music around 2004-05. You heard Dizzee Rascal and bought into the hype, especially the hype emanating from your British friends who observed his mainstream success and assured you that there were “loads” better MCs than him. Then you heard Lethal B’s “Pow” and decided to go all in. Perhaps you ordered some records from uptownrecords.com or even made the trip to London to buy from the actual store and maybe make polite small talk with Cameo, your favorite grime DJ, who through the magic of the internet you could listen to every week on 1Xtra. You may have bought Lord of the Mics or another of the grime DVDs that were coming out like 80 a week at that point. If you were DJing at the time you probably tried to incorporate some grime into your sets, mostly instrumentals though since the MCing was usually too aggro and put the girls off. At the time it felt exciting and new. Hip hop was stumbling between the codeine-fueled lethargy of Houston screw and red bull-ecstasy-coke-whatever those dudes were on hyperactivity of Atlanta crunk. Grime felt like a breath of fresh air, the first fully-fledged foreign rapform.
Overtime, though, the thrill sort of went. Dizzee kept rocking, but all the guys who were supposedly so much better than him - Kano, Lethal Bizzle, Wiley, etc. - never managed to do what he did, i.e. make a coherent, complete album that takes risks and contains hits. Then there were just so many other kids making records and it was hard to tell them apart. And then the sound started splintering into subgenres like Dubstep and Sublow or maybe these were all still part of grime, did it even matter? Then all the gimmicky beef started and the gun talk started popping up in every record and the whole thing just kind of lost its appeal. And then, if you were a for real deal irritating American hipster like me, you just kind of tossed it off and moved on to other trendy sounds like baile funk, Baltimore club, cumbia, hyphy, etc…
But even though the fair weather friends may have abandoned ship, grime is still in effect and still moving forward (no pun intended). I mention all this, because today a friend who turned me onto grime way back when and never left hipped me to Grimepedia, an amazing site that operates like Wikipedia, but is dedicated exclusively to grime music. It is the shit and perfect if you’re a regretful American hipster like me and want to quickly catch up on what you’ve been fronting on the last couple years. Plus they have lots and lots and lots of downloadable audio. Radio rips, mixtapes, shit you cannot find elsewhere. Crazy.
So, anyway, here’s a track that I just downloaded off the site:
Mohammed Ali (ripped from Logan Sama’s show on KISS FM)
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right-click + save link as (mac) / save targe as (windows)It’s by Chipmunk - a teenager from Norf Lunden who’s actually the reason I started checking for grime again. I was roaming around youtube and found this clip of a 16 year old Chipmunk holding it way down with Wiley and Ice Kid on Westwood (verse kicks off at 2:00):
Much more at grimepedia.
Popularity: 8% [?]
- The Making of The Miseducation of
It’s hard to believe, but this week marks 10 years since the release of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the first (and only so far) solo album by New Jersey’s favorite rapper, musician, songwriter, producer, and film actress, Ms. Lauryn Hill. It was a worldwide smash, selling 8 million copies and winning almost as many awards. It proved she could thrive without her group the Fugees and secured Lauryn’s position in the pantheon of American music gods and goddesses.
I consider this album a masterpiece and a milestone record - not in Lauryn’s career (although it obviously is) but in my own life. Its release coincided with a period of intense happiness and open-heartedness for me. It was the soundtrack to Fall 98 in New York City and anyone who was there knows what I’m talking about. I usually resent people who try to possess music by tying it to a specific time and place. Truly great music speaks to experiences and emotions that transcend any single city or season (cliché I know but still true), and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill demonstrates that as well as any album ever made. But still, for me, at that time in that place, Miseducation was a much an album as a manifesto - a call to passion and fun and self-defense for people in a city that was stuggling to maintain its vitality against the stunting influences of city hall and free market. It was a struggle that, I recognize now, was more vital (and inadequate) than I realized at the time. So I’ll always feel a tinge of sadness when I hear Lauryn Hill’s music. But I’ll also always remember the love and the communication. And I’ll remember all the people from that time, friends and non-friends, who shared Lauryn Hill’s vision and answered her call to live life heart first.
Rolling Stone has a fantastic feature up now, on oral history of Miseducation made from the testimony of most of its creators. Check it here.
Here’s a sample, the telling of the song “To Zion”:
Jayson Jackson (former manager, Lauryn Hill): She called me and sang a verse of “Zion” and I was literally in tears. I went through that with her as a friend, Wendy Williams blowing her spot about her pregnancy on the radio. No one knew! It was definitely a Where’s Waldo moment ’cause no one knew who Lauryn was dating.
Rohan Marley (Bob Marley’s son/father of Hill’s five children): She ended up having a child from myself and ones telling her she need to abort the child. Those songs, it’s all her experience.
Che Vicious (formerly Che Guevera; producer): I’d gotten into a bunch of Spanish records. I lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn and there was this little studio apartment on the top floor that didn’t have air conditioning. I could only go in there for 20 minutes at a time to make tracks because it was too hot. And one of those 20 minutes is when I made “Zion.” I came in with the track and Lauryn teared up and said, “I have this idea to do a song about my baby and I didn’t know what the music should sound like until I heard that track.”
Nobles (producer/programmer): Out of all the records, “Zion” was her baby because it was about her child. Can’t nobody interfere with that right there. That drum roll inspired Kanye’s “Jesus Walks,” I know it did!
Commissioner Gordon: I remember the first time she sang “To Zion” to me I almost started crying on the spot. Che put together a drum loop and she came over right next to me at the board and started singing “Zion” in my ear. These circumstances she’s singing about I know first hand. I’m at the label hearing everybody say, “How’s this girl gonna get pregnant now?!” Then Carlos played his guitar in Miami at Circle House Studios. It was a swap. She wanted Carlos to play “Zion” and she did a song for Supernatural.
Here’s the song:
Lauryn Hill - To Zion
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right-click + save link as (mac) / save target as (windows)But I don’t really believe in hanging too fiercely to the music of the past, even it is charged with as many auxiliary pleasures as this one. Lauryn sort of retreated from music and celebrity after Miseducation, and it’s not clear if she’ll ever fully come back. Towards the end of the Rolling Stone piece, a couple of very unnecessary shots are taken at Jazmine Sullivan, a 21-year-old singer out of Philadelphia whose style is clearly influenced by Lauryn’s but who I think shows a lot of potential and deserves support. So here is the song that a couple of Lauryn’s collaborators refer to as eerily Hillesqe. I agree that it’s no “To Zion”, but I think if there’s any message to take from Miseducation it’s that we have to take pleasure from where we can, according to our own needs and definitions. And the beat bangs so…..
Jazmine Sullivan - Need u bad
DOWNLOADUpdate: A new Lauryn song is out and circulating. As they say in Japan, LET’S ENJOY!
Lauryn Hill - The world is a hustle
DOWNLOADPopularity: 7% [?]
- My President Is Black (the VP is not)
I was planning to lay off the Obama posts til I finish my O-inspired mixtape, but then I got up a couple of days ago and found in my inbox the photo above and the mp3 of Young Jeezy’s Barack tribute “My President is Black”. The combined force of these two things made me rethink the policy. Then I went to dinner with my father tonight and he mentioned that one of the best things about the Olympics is that it distracts us from obsessing over the Presidential election. And I agreed, then I got home and opened up Google News and saw the great question of who will serve as Obama’s Vice President has been answered, and I figured it’s time to put the medals in the cabinet and get back into obsession mode. So here it is…
Word of warning: There are several aspects of this song that are going to make want to ignore the lyrics. That would be a mistake.
Young Jeezy feat. Nas - My President is black
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right-click + save link as [mac] / save target as [windows]Heartfelt thanks to Amelia for the pic and Jimmy for the track. Fuck the naysayers, yes we can.
Popularity: 6% [?]
- Jamdown moving
Well, to quote my man 80, What Usain?
Jamaica is running everybody out of the Bird’s Nest. They’ve even managed to interrupt the relentless stream of Chinese Olympic highlights that currently constitutes 80% of CCTV’s programming. Men and women of Jamaica, VERY FEEL feels you.
So to celebrate here’s “On the go” by Mavado, my favorite dancehall artist. He recorded it before the Olympics to hype people up (and sell sneakers) back on the rock. Seemed a little over the top to me originally. No more.
Mavado - On the go (faster than bullet)
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right-click + save link as (mac) / save target as (windows)Oh shit update - I was just watching a replay of the 200M and realized Bolt’s theme song is Untouched by The Veronicas. That shit is hilarious to me. I’ve got to put that up for posterity.
DOWNLOADPopularity: 5% [?]
- In Memory of Moses
I realize I’m way late on this, but I’ve been coach-ridden with Olympic Fever and just found out today that the legend Isaac Hayes passed away. I’m a huge fan of his work, both as an artist and as a songwriter for so many of the great Stax artists of the 1960’s.
It’s a little bit spooky for me, because I was just thinking about Isaac earlier today, when I was going through a hard drive and stumbled on this picture from my old apartment in Rotterdam, where the epic fold-out from his Black Moses album was basically the only decoration we had…
Anyway let’s celebrate the man’s amazing music, today and forever.
Here’s a clip of Isaac in his prime performing Burt Bacharach’s timeless lover’s pitch ‘The look of love’
Here’s the beginning of his performance at Wattstax (the rest of it’s on youtube). I think this one shows not only the man’s superhuman soulfulness, but also the sense of showmanship and humor that led to his later incarnation as Chef on South Park.
And here’s a highlight from that era - Chef’s chocolate salty balls:
Yup. Check out more at the South Park Studios site.
Music-wise it’s so hard to choose, but here’s a personal favorite: the full-on nineteen minute version of ‘By the time I get to Pheonix’ from Hot Buttered Soul , an historic album and essential listening for anyone who enjoys pleasure.
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right-click + save link as [mac] / save target as [windows]The Isaac Hayes song everybody knows is Theme from Shaft of course, so I’m not gonna bother putting that up. But check out Versions Galore, a cool new cover song blog, for a crazy selection of Theme of Shaft covers.
Isaac was also one of the most sampled artists around, and the Jamsbio blog has put up a nice little overview of a few of the most famous ones. Check it here.
*Serious Update* - DJ Wonder made a very thorough mix of original and sampled tracks for Shade45. It’s available on his site. Download this shit.
**Serious Update #2** - Producers Cookin Soul out of Valencia, Spain have just released Hot Buttered Soul: Isaac Hayes Instrumental Tribute via Nah Right. And man, it is good. Art in tribute to art. Get it now, get it here.
We’ll miss you.
Popularity: 5% [?]
- Recession Roundelays
As part of an ongoing effort to avoid all China and/or Olympic news stories, today I read an article on the state of the British economy. It’s mostly conjecture and graph interpretation, but I was touched by the following passage:
Denmark has the dubious distinction of being the first developed country to move into recession and the latest figures from Germany suggest that the economy may have declined in the second quarter. It is possible that the eurozone economy as a whole will have contracted during the quarter.
Having just been in the States, where all anyone is talking about is job cuts and gas prices, I think it’s clear that a large chunk of the world is heading for hard times. The music there has already started to reflect this, so I thought why not assemble a few recent recession-inspired songs in the hopes that they might soothe us or at least distract us. I’ll try to add more as new ones pop up. It’d be cool to get some from elsewhere. Share em if you got em…
Young Jeezy feat. Kanye West - Put on
This one is more about the video than the content of the song, but the video is strong and Jeezy’s new album is even called The Recession so….Big Boi feat. Mary J Blidge - Something’s gotta give
Two of my favorite artists speaking on the problems of the material world. Good beat, Obama shout out and everything. Love this song.Janelle Monáe - Mr. President
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No video for this one yet, but this is actually my favorite song of the three. I can not say enough about Ms. Janelle Monáe. I’m gonna make a tribute post to her one of these days. She is a true original, and I strongly urge you to check her shit out. She’s released a couple of EPs that are floating around cyberspace, but she signed to Bad Boy a little while ago, so hopefully she’ll take off properly soon. Her new album METROPOLIS: THE CHASE SUITE (SPECIAL EDITION) is dropping on August 12, according to her website….Popularity: 4% [?]
- Fan Up New Orleans
“You know like I know, ain’t no city like N.O.” - Free Agents Brass Band
As I mentioned last time, I spent most of last week in New Orleans with my man Josh. It was a great experience and as a kind of recap I want to string together a few images and observations from the trip. I did something like this during my visits to Dubai and Inner Mongolia and it worked pretty well, but I’m a little hesitant this time, just because New Orleans is complex and, as George W likes to say, misunderestimated. Still, this blog is about bigging up things that I love, so better to just dive in…
This is the New Orleans most of us know, the New Orleans of postcards and shot glasses and novelty T-shirts that say things like “I got Bourbon Faced on Shit Street”. It’s the New Orleans I visited with my family as part of a two-day detour on the way to our much more hotly anticipated final destination, Sunny Orlando. This New Orleans is alive and well. Most of the French Quarter survived Katrina with relatively little damage, and even in late July, when most of the rest of city is abandoned due to the heat, Bourbon Street was packed every night with students, parents, soldiers, middle managers, and fun-loving people of all kinds trying to live their Mardi Gras fantasy on the cheap.
We didn’t spend much time around there so I don’t really want to dwell on it, but I do think it’s worth saying that without a doubt the best thing we saw in the French Quarter was Big Al Carson & The Blue Masters performing at a spot called The Funky Pirate. Big Al is a giant (mO_Om) in the NO music scene. He started out playing tuba in brass bands and eventually migrated to the mic. He is a great singer, a great performer, and for my money the sexiest morbidly obese man around. Here’s a short clip that captures a some of the vibe…
But, as I said, we didn’t go to New Orleans to see this side of it. To me the French Quarter is interesting mostly because of how successfully it collects, structures, and Disneyfies the messy cultural production of New Orleans’s other neighorhoods. The problem is that, now more than ever, NO is two cities - one for tourists and another one for its people - and most visitors don’t ever get to see culture behind the caricature. In normal circumstances this wouldn’t be so bad, just another case of American comparmentalization and binary thinking, but Katrina showed us the perils of this sort of disconnect and what happens when government allows it determine policy or division of resources. So I think it’s more important than ever to emphasize some other parts of New Orleans, starting with its most vulnerable, the Lower Ninth Ward.
We arrived in the Lower Ninth Ward on our second day in New Orleans. I’d heard of the neighborhood mostly because of the horrors that took place there after Katrina. The Lower Nine was the site of the city’s worst flooding and the backdrop for some of its darkest images - swollen bodies bobbing for days in oily brown water, people waving “HELP US” signs at news crews, toddlers in cages swaying in the wind as they were raised into helicopters… I’d heard that clean-up and reconstruction had taken longer in this neighborhood than any other, so when we showed up I half expected to see the same wreckage I’d seen in magazines.
But when we finally got there and started walking around, the atmosphere was completely different. The images I had in my head were now nearly three years old. The clean-up was done, but the place still remained empty. Empty and spooky.
And I guess this is the second, less obvious tragedy wrought by Katrina - after the failures of planning and response, now the failure to rebuild. In the years since it flooded, nature has reclaimed a large part of the the Lower Nine. A neighborhood that a few years before was emblematic of American inner city life now feels more like a village in the backwoods.
The few houses that did survive are still abandoned for the most part.
Their insides have been gutted, but I saw very little restoration happening anywhere. It’s hard to imagine their owners don’t want to return, but between the elongated clean-up period, the trauma of starting over, lingering suspicions about the levees, epic injustices at the hands of insurance companies, ongoing FEMA fuckery, and the enormous difficulty of living life in a community that didn’t have a supermarket or bank before Katrina and now has almost no social support system or basic infrastructure at all, there are too many reasons for them to stay away.
Pre-Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward was a sort of melting pot for all that is admirable and horrific in New Orleans. Its crime was legendary, but so was its sense of community. 60 percent of Lower Nine residents owned their homes, including Fats Domino, who never evacuated and had to be air lifted from his roof by the coast guard.
After the flood, the Lower Ninth Ward became a battleground for the many conflicting visions of New Orleans’s future. This is a very complicated and emotionally fraught topic, one that extends way beyond the scope of this little slideshow here, but if you want to know more check this New Yorker article by Dan Baum. A lot of good info on the Lower Nine in there.
Stories of people having their houses bulldozed without permission, predatory real estate companies buying up plots for below value, government schemes to turn the area into condos or golf courses or vague (program to be determined later) “green spaces” can still be heard, but it seems like most of the immediate threats evaporated with the billions the Bush administration promised but never delivered.
Long-term is something else though, because even if the New Orleans government’s enormous capacity for dysfunction and dereliction of duty makes any large scale development in the Lower Nine impossible, these same qualities may very well lead to the area simply atrophying and falling off the map.
But I don’t mean to be 100% gloom and doom. There are signs of revitalization in the Lower Nine. Construction is taking place, people are returning home. Brad Pitt’s Make It Right project is already bearing fruit in the form of some very, very easily identifiable eco-friendly homes on stilts. Former residents have returned and built their own homes in the native shotgun style.
One of the people leading the trickle back to the Lower Nine is Ronald Lewis.
Ronald is an activist and Founder, Curator, and Director of The House of Dance and Feathers, a museum dedicated to Mardi Gras Indian culture that he maintains in his back yard. We met with him on the visit and had a good conversation. I’ll post that up a little later. For now, the main thing that I want to emphasize about Robert (and this holds for almost everyone we met down there) is that he is a person who demands and accepts no pity. He is doing everything he can to get his community back together with the full knowledge there will probably never been any real help from the local or federal government. I think that his is representative of a heroic mentality that, for good or bad, New Orleans has instilled in its citizens through years of corruption and neglect.
To me this house says it all. It’s broken down, unlivable, whatever. But the message is: AMERICA NEEDS HELP. We’re going to be ok. We are survivors. America, you need to check yourself out.
Most of the rest of the trip we spent in and around the Bywater section of New Orleans. Most of it was spared from the worst of the flooding, but parts were still pretty badly damaged and today the area is a weird mixture of paralysis and rehabilitation.
Since so many of the structures survived, the marks left on them give a view to the frantic nature of the recovery efforts.
Not to mention the terror that preceded them.
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- Greetings from Lilweezyana
I’m on my way back from a long weekend in New Orleans, and I’m sorry to go. I was there with my friend Josh who’s working on the next issue of his magazine Habitus, which will be devoted entirely to N.O. We did a lot of running around and I’ll definitely be putting up a lot of photos and music and maybe an interview in the next few days, but until I get everything organized, I thought it appropriate to start off by acknowledging one my favorite artists and the current king of the town, New Orlean’s own Lil Wayne.
Believe it or not, even though the song is months old and they probably had it before anyone else, the New Orleanians are STILL bumping “Lollipop”, a song that I thought was a joke the first time I heard it but went on to become the #1 song in America. You really hear it everywhere in N.O. - from cars, in clubs, gas stations, at ATM machines… it’s amazing actually. So for posterity’s sake, I figured why not post it…
Lil Wayne - Lollipop
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right-click + save link as (mac) / save target as (windows)While I’m at it, here’s a cool electro remix by Nasty Ways out of San Francisco
DOWNLOADWhen I left NY all you heard was the Jay-Z “A Billie” freestyle over Wayne’s “A Millie” beat, so here’s that + Wayne’s original verses
DOWNLOADAnd now that I think of it, Lollipop doesn’t really do justice to Weezy’s genius. I’d hate anyone to turn off prematurely, so here’s The Dedication 2, in my opinion one of the best mixtapes ever made. Please check this.
PS - The image above is by Lionel Deluy, a French photographer with a slick, dark style that I like a lot. Check his stuff out here.
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