I'm sure I could ramble on for a few thousand words about my trip to New York but something seems inherently retarded in that. Of course, there's something inherently retarded about blogging, so you'll just going to have to settle for a few half-baked observations about my trip through the Eastern Seaboard. Like that all-knowing oracle Howie Mandel once said, "deal or no deal." (Then again, Howie Mandel posed for this photograph, so in truth, he cannot be trusted). The thing about Los Angeles is that no matter how much you try to [...]
So it seems kinda bizarre and surreal to think I've been working on this project for a year already. One random Thursday in California 365 afternoons ago, I'd had the idea to typing up the contents of a mixtape I'd just compiled and blasting it into cyberspace. What began as a goof, a high-tech storehouse for whatever trivia happened to be pinballing through my brain, quickly evolved into a genuine passion. Tossed-off entries soon stretched into five- or six-hour writing sessions. Newly beholden to something, I'd leave parties early to toil over posts or curtail nights out to [...]
The mixtape is a vital part of hip hop culture. Analogous to the EP in indie rock, it's an extra opportunity for rappers to experiment, branch out their styles, collaborate with other musicians, and connect with fans on a more immediate basis. A great mixtape, increasingly appearing digitally rather than lining the tarps of Midtown street slingers, can also function as a welcome stopgap between formally marketed releases. But with the ease of delivery, the filler quotient frequently rises and raps unworthy of proper-album release clog an art form already fattened with skits and twenty-song tracklists. Leave it [...]
What the fuck is the Internet? The ramifications of the Internet and illegal downloading have yet to fully shake themselves out, but not even a full decade after the rise of Napster, it's safe to say that technology has simultaneously created a flat but two-tiered playing field in the world of hip-hop. The major labels have become increasingly risk-averse, delaying albums from left-of-center vets like Redman, Clipse and many other for years (and judging from their tepid sales you can't blame them). The days of an album like Muddy Waters going gold are long [...]
It's 1998—my friend Alex and I are listening to CD after CD. Jewel cases and upturned discs litter the floor all around us. We're taking turns at DJing, trying to one-up each other with every spin. And then at some point, he puts on Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star , and I lose automatically. The level of wordplay, the raucous double entendres, the confident but relaxed flows of the two eponymous MCs, their overwhelming respect for the genre and their hunger for greatness all hit me at once. It blows the mind of the fifteen-year-old rap [...]
Elvis Perkins: I don't normally write about up-and-coming musicians that much for one primary reason: most of them aren't very good. This isn't necessarily a knock at other bloggers that seem to keep up a steady drum-beat of hype for a bunch of no-name musicians. But as Jack White says in one of the essays in Chuck Klosterman IV: "Usually when somebody brings up something obscure, I assume its not very good, because--if it was--I would've heard it already. Music collectors are collecting. They're not really listening to music." Fair enough. But in the past [...]
Okay, so there weren't any beards at Bumbershoot and you'd have even been hard-pressed to find a cheap pair of black plastic spectacles on any of the festival-goers faces'. It seems the hipster/scenester/jeepster scene hasn't made it's way out to Seattle. Perhaps this is why I consider Seattle the most underrated of all major American cities. In fact, the crowd at Bumbershoot was markedly different than any show I've been to in a long time. First of all, it was young. Really young. As in if I were a betting man, I'd say that [...]
The Passion of the Weiss
Nerd Litter
Michael Jackson - Bad (Afrojack Remix) [Preview]
A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS – « You Are the One »
Mojo’s Free Yellow Submarine Covers Disk
Florence + The Machine - Spectrum (Calvin Harris Remix)
