DiskJokke is the alter-ego of Norwegian producer Joachim Dyrdahl. To be totally honest, I don't know that much about him, except that he did an amazing remix of Metronomy's "Heartbreaker" last year, he makes songs with titles like "Cearadactylus," "Tungvekter" and "I Was Go to Morocco and I Don't See You," and he shares a country with Röyksopp, which almost counts as an endorsement in my books.
"Cearadactylus" is a good dance tune, but it's not a full-fledged freak-out stomper. Instead, it chugs along at a medium pace, with some nifty conga-type percussion thrown in for good measure. If I was DJing a party, this would definitely be something I'd play at the beginning of the evening to start lifting people's spirits.
If there's one thing that's remarkable about Kid Sister, it's how she's managed to be so successful with so little recorded material. It's that it's been almost three years since she first became indie-famous, two years since she released her first single, a year since she received mainstream recognition thanks to collaboration with Kanye on the single "Pro Nails," and she still has yet to release an album.
"Right Hand Hi" is the fourth single off her still-unreleased debut album Ultraviolet, which is now set to come out in October on Fool's Gold. If you expected Kid to come out with another song about drinking, fucking and destroying, you guessed right. While "Right Hand Hi" doesn't have the same level of lyricism as some of her other work, it makes up for it with an anthemic chorus, bouncy beats, and synth-riffs that get stuck in your head for days.
Guy J's trippy brand of electro-house has lead me to two conclusions.
One, I was born either ten years too early or ten years too late. Generation X had acid house, which I love. Even though I was entirely too young to be part of the dawn of the rave scene, "Move Any Mountain" is still one of my favourite songs ever. Generation Y, meanwhile, has all that Justice/Simian Mobile Disco blog house stuff, which I love, but I distinctly feel old any time I'm in a venue where they play it.
Two, Israelis are awesome. Far too many people only associate Israel with the country's ongoing political trouble, which is unfair. If I lived in a country that dispossessed hundreds of thousands of people of their land, denied them full citizenship rights, and stuck them in squalid, remote camps, I wouldn't want to be judged by my government's actions.
Wait, never mind.
But all political humour aside, pretty much every Israeli I've known has partied like it's their job, and only held a job to subsidize their party habit. These people know how to have a good time. They think nothing of not going out until 2 a.m., and not coming home until 7. On a Tuesday. I'm not saying the entire nation of Israel is like this, just that there's a significant contingent. It's no surprise, then, that when they make party music, it's well above average.
So, this blog's favourite fighter, Rampage Jackson, seems to have landed himself in the press again.
Thankfully, he managed not to hit anyone with his car this time.
It seems as if 'Page has beef with up-and-coming MMA star Muhammed "King Mo" Lawal. For those of you who don't know, Lawal is a young, flamboyant, America MMA light-heavyweight from Tennessee, with an amateur wrestling background, who's decided to kickstart his career by fighting in Japan, rather than suffering the slings and of smaller American promotions and UFC undercards. Stop me if this sounds at all familiar.
So, apparently Rampage and Mo were in a van a couple weeks ago, on their way to a Nevada Wal-Mart to do a signing for Cage Fighter, their mutual clothing sponsor. Then this happened.
Over the weekend, Rampage commented on the tiff in his blog, which can be read here. (My favourite part is the bit where he calls Mo "butthurt." I'm not even 100 per cent sure what that means, but I'm pretty sure it's a gay joke.)
Not one to back down from a fight, especially with someone who's way, way more famous -- and therefore press-worthy -- than him, Mo has snapped back, saying that Rampage started it, and that 'Page needs to stop picking out-of-octagon fights with youngsters like him and worry about his upcoming bout with former light-heavyweight champ Rashad Evans. He also questioned 'Page's tendency to take pot shots at other African-American fighters.
"He's playing himself. He keeps playing himself by talking down on other black fighters, and saying 'black-on-black crime.' It isn't funny. Black-on-black crime is so serious. He can joke about it to make a commercial, but it isn't funny. Vernon Forrest was shot to death this weekend. Black people are killing each other, and he's joking about that?"
(You can read the whole thing here. If this whole "black-on-black crime" thing has you confused, refer to my earlier post, here.)
My question is this, do Rampage and Mo not realize that they're basically the same dude? Right down to the shaved head and little beard? Of course they do, that's why they're beefing so hard. They occupy the exact same market space, and that's probably scarier than any rear naked choke.
Oh, that and Mo has his first fight on North American soil versus the 187 year-old Don Frye at the end of next month. I'm sure this little blowout has nothing to do with his desire to create a buzz around that.
Don't feel bad if you're not familiar with "Uptown Top Ranking." Like so many great reggae singles of the 1970s and '80s, it was a huge hit in Jamaica, obviously, and the UK, but was ignored in North America by everyone apart from Jamaican immigrants and record nerds.
The song is based around Alton Ellis' "Still in Love" riddim, which is such a classic in and of itself that modern reggae artists still trot it out occasionally. (See Sean Paul and Sasha's 2004 hit, also called "Still in Love.") Apparently it's meant as a ladies' response to Trinity's mack daddy anthem "Three Piece Suit," which uses the same riddim.
What's really remarkable about this song is how it's stood the test of time. Not only does it still sound pretty fresh today, but it's been covered by scores of artists, ranging from indie rockers Black Box Recorder, to Simon Cowell produced girl group Tight'n Up, to Sisters of Mercy. (No, seriously, here's evidence.)
I read a review that accused it of being the "Hit Me Baby One More Time" of '70s roots reggae, and maybe that's true. (In addition to being one hit wonders, Althea and Donna were thoroughly middle class by Jamaican standards, resulting in a severe lack of street cred in the reggae community.)
That said, when a song pops up in not one but two TV shows thirty years after it's original release -- it was played in both a 2008 episode of Skins and a 2007 episode of Entourage -- that says something.
2. "Ring the Alarm" - Tenor Saw (1985)
Despite dying in a traffic accident at the tender age of 22, Tenor Saw is, in my humble, white, Canadian, no-nothing opinion, one of the more influential reggae artists of the 1980s.
He was one of the artists who helped usher in the digital/dancehall era of reggae music, and while it's hard to prove this on a chart, one would have to assume that his half-sung vocal style made the transition from the singers of the 1970s to the hard rhymers of the late '80s and beyond a little smoother.
Those of you who are old enough may remember a period in the early '90s where dancehall reggae started getting some significant burn on American "urban" radio stations. Shabba Ranks and Chaka Demus and Pliers had chart hits and suddenly every rapper wanted a reggae singer, or barring that, some idiot with a faux-Jamaican accent, to rock a verse on their single.
Into this fray cam Super Cat, already a legend in Jamaica, Cat took the rap-reggae crossover bull by the horns at wrestled it into submission. In two years, he managed to collaborate with everyone from Kris Kross to Mary J. Blige to a then-unknown Notorious BIG. He started making multiple remixes of his songs, creating one version with a more traditional dancehall sound, intended for Jamaican audiences, and another over a hip-hop beat, meant for export.
Sadly, Super Cat is best known in North America for his pathetic attempt to re-capture the spotlight in 1997 with a guest appearance on Sugar Ray's fly, but we shouldn't let that bit of bad judgment overshadow the fact that, between 1990 and 1995, Super Cat made some of the hardest rudeboy anthems of all time.
Full confession, I'm starting this edition of "Get Fresh Tuesday" a little early, because my work schedule is going to be a little fucked up this week, so I don't know how much writing I'm going to be able to do on Tuesday.
1) Big Face Mike - "N da Hood wit It," from MySpace
I didn't go looking for this one, it came searching for me.
Big Face Mike, or his PR team, inexplicably sent an e-mail promoting his new single to my work inbox. I'm not sure why they thought it would be of interest to me, being as I work at a sports station and have had one rapper -- one-hit wonder Pittsburgh Slim -- on any of my shows in my two year tenure as a producer there.
Luckily for both me and Mike, I clicked on the link and dug what I heard, in spite of myself.
Memphis-based Big Face Mike is dedicated to proving that, to paraphrase The Exploited, crunk's not dead. He's out to serve all those people who loved the skittering drums and tales of brutal violence that were so popular in the first half of this decade, who now find themselves adrift in a hip-hop universe filled with skinny-jean wearing blipsters and adolescent half-wits like Soulja Boy.
If you're a big Crime Mob fan, and I am, Big Face Mike will pretty much make you pee your pants with joy.
I'd also like to congratulate Big Face for the best use of a Nextel/Boost/Telus-style push-to-talk sample since Maceo's 2005 hit "Nextel Chirp."
2) New Boyz - "You're a Jerk" (DJ Webstar Remix), from First Up!
Speaking of skinny jean wearing blipsters...
As a fashion icons -- which they aren't yet, but by God I bet they will be -- the New Boyz take that Cool Kids/Lupe Fiasco skatewear-meets-urban look, feed it a good sheet of acid and let it walk around the city tripping. It's as if someone took this LATFH classic and made a band about it.(The original caption on this said "Wait. Shit. Who's co-opting whom?")
All jokes aside, "You're a Jerk" may be most stupidly enjoyable song I've heard all summer. It's the nice weather party anthem we've been waiting for. It also acknowledges that one of the great things about having sex with a girl you're not emotionally attached to is that you can be a dick knowing that there's not a whole lot she can do about it.
(I only know this from what I've been told. I treat all my female partners, the few that I've had, with nothing but the utmost respect. Come to think of it, maybe the whole "respect" thing is reason I haven't been with too many women. I'm rambling. Never mind.)
The DJ Webstar remix takes the original and takes two notches higher on the danceability scale. (Yes, this is the same DJ Webstar who was responsible for "Chicken Noodle Soup" a few years back.)
Afrikan Boy is the stage name of Nigeria-born, UK-raised grime MC Olushola Ajose. If you're not familiar with AB, here's some background. He first started to get some press-burn in England about two years ago when he appeared on a remix MIA's "Paper Planes" along with the now-rapidly-blowing-up American wunderkind Rye Rye.
Since then, he's been toured with MIA, played a lot of medium-sized venues in the UK -- I understand he's a hot draw on the British Campus bar circuit -- and done the European festival loop a couple times. He has a few mixtapes under his belt, but no official, label-sanctioned releases. (Then again, I'm having a harder and harder time telling mixtapes from albums. Why was that new Cool Kids album considered a mixtape? Because there was a DJ yelling between songs? Because there was some rudimentary mixing? It sounded like an album to me.)
Somewhat surprisingly, AB is still at the stage where he fits his music in around his school schedule. He's currently an undergrad at Brunel University, majoring in sociology and psychology.
Unfortunately for AB, and more unfortunately for me, there's almost no chance of him becoming popular in North America. If cats like Dizzee Rascal and Kano can only manage cult followings on these shores, I can't imagine Afrikan Boy's version of grime, which has an even thicker accent and blends in a lot of afrobeat elements, making much sense to Americans.
"Lidl" is a song about shoplifting, and like Jane's Addiction's "Been Caught Stealing," it's so much fun that raiding your local mall starts to sound like a really good idea after repeated listenings. (Lidl is the name of a German Wal-Mart equivalent.)
OK, so this is the flip side of Get Fresh Tuesdays. Instead of searching for something new, I'm going to highlight some old favourites that have recently recaptured my attention.
1) Del the Funky Homosapien and El-P - "Offspring" (2000)
When I was about 19, I sort of "retired" from the punk rock scene. After five or so years of going to all ages shows, sewing band patches on my hoodies, and protesting something every weekend -- and getting blind-drunk afterward, I burned out. I was sick of being part of a subculture that claimed to be about "rebellion," but actually placed incredibly tight restrictions on what you could listen to, wear, and be interested in. Being a basketball fan was massively uncool, the only acceptable sport to watch was English soccer. If you listened to anything other than punk -- and no pop punk, you dirty sellout -- classic ska, and certain types of pre-dancehall reggae, people looked at you like you were insane.
Most of my friends in the scene were moving on to even more restrictive subsects of punk: skinhead, psychobilly, d-beat. Instead, I left.
I started listening to a bunch of different thing, particularly the Rawkus Records-style alt rap that was coming out at the time. (Truth be told, I'd been listening to that sort of stuff for a while and hiding it from my punk friends.)
I bought Del's Both Sides of the Brain in summer between my last year of high school and my first year of universtiy. This collabo between Del and El-P was my favourite song on the album. I would listen to it over and over again on the way to class. I'd sit in my res room and scream along with the lyrics.
This is song is like a time machine for me. It instantly makes me 19 again, and if there's one thing my life needs, it's more 19.
2) "Raspberry Beret" - Prince (as Prince and the Revolution) (1985)
So, I don't want to get to serious and maudlin on a blog dedicated to quality tunes and idiocy, but my Uncle Giles died about six weeks ago. He was my mum's younger brother, one of eight children, born in the UK and raised in Canada. He was both an athlete (rowing, rugby and football) and a musician (guitar, keyboard, bass, and vocals.) He had a few songs receive airplay on local alt-rock station CFNY in the late '80s and early '90s. He also struggled with substance abuse issues, which may have contributed to his death.
My inheritance from Uncle Giles consisted of about a dozen CDs, which have turned out to be a massive windfall of enjoyment. One of them was Prince's The Hits/The B-Sides compilation.
I've always liked Prince, but I never thought of myself as a full-fledged Prince fan until I got a hold of this album. The man is a genius, and some of his early material -- and The Hits/The B-Sides features only early-to-mid career material -- may be some of the best pop music of the last fifty years.
I feel like my words can't do justice to the greatness that is young Prince, so instead I'll just say thanks to Uncle Giles.
3) X - "Los Angeles" (1980)
I don't actually have a really in depth explanation as to why I chose this song. It's just one of my all-time favourite songs.
It's also the song that's gotten X accused of some rather unpleasant shit.
The first verse of the song features the line "She started to hate every nigger and Jew/ every Mexican that gave her a lot of shit/ every homosexual and the idol rich."
Rock critic Greil Marcus wrote about the song in 1981, as part of a bigger article on racism in the Los Angeles punk scene.
"The opening lines of X's searing 'Los Angeles' ('She had started to hate/ Every nigger and Jew/ Every Mexican that gave her lotta shit/ Every homosexual and the idle rich') tell us not that the subject of the song has her hangups but that the objects of her rage are types, not like us, deserving of the contempt they get: crimes against nature. The song has enough musical bite to make any nigger, Jew, Mexican, homosexual or idle rich want to hear the tune again, and then think 'That's not me, I'm not like that,' and that is the true black hole of the number, and of L.A. punk: attacked, one may side with one's attacker, and accept the terms of the attack."
Unfortunately for Greil, who's actually one of my bigger inspirations, he got it wrong. In We've Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of LA Punk, the members of X explain that the song was, more or less, about a girl who had a lot of hang-ups, and how her hang-ups were eating her alive.
The song was written about one of Exene's best friends, who was her road buddy in her move from Florida to LA. Unfortunately, the friend didn't take to LA nearly as well as Exene, and suffered a sort of breakdown. Part of that breakdown involved an ugly slide into racism.
This sort of shit is why X is one of the best bands of all time. They're able to write beautifully crafted, poetic lyrics about deep, complex shit, and then throw it over top of a rip-roaring rockabilly-punk hybrid.
Have I mentioned how I'm a total, unapologetic Anglophile yet? Well, here's yet another reason why I should just get my work visa in order and emigrate to the UK now. If Dave Jolicoeur from De La Soul and Sade had a daughter and raised her on a steady diet of early '80s British synthpop, she'd probably wind up sounding a lot like thecocknbullkid.
Britain has sent scores of female vocalists across the pond over the past half-decade -- Adele, Estelle, Duffy, Amy Winehouse -- but thecocknbullkid takes that vocal style and weds it to MIA's dancefloor-ready weirdness to create something that's next-level fun.
Apparently her debut EP has been out in the UK for a couple months now, but is due for a North American release early next month. Keep an eye out.
I'm not really sure what genre this is, the good folks at The Guardian seem to think it's some weird variant on dubstep, and they generally know more than me, so I'll accept that definition. I'm also not sure what "Hyph Mngo" means.
I am sure that this song makes me want to go to some dingy basement club, get lit up on bad drugs, and dance with my head in the speaker. It is, as they say in my native Scarborough, a blood claat big tune.
A lot of people front like they hate hipsters. I don't. I'm jealous of them
Truth be told, I'm half way to hipster myself. I just don't have the body type/level of bravery required to pull off the outfits or the time and energy to dedicate to cool hunting. Or the necessary level of ironic detachment. If I could be a hipster, I would. I'm just too old, fat, and lazy.
LMFAO may be the ultimate hipster band. Forget Chromeo, forget ARE Weapons, this is it. The Alpha and Omega of hipstertronica. Their whole look and sound seems to be one giant, funny ironic pose. If you've ever made anti-Semitic wisecracks while chilling with a group of friends that's 90 per cent Jewish, or walked around acting like a tremendous jock douche as a send-up of tremendous jock douches, you understand what LMFAO are all about. It's like those jokes took on a life of their own and decided to start a band.
Not surprisingly, LMFAO are dope in small doses, but I'm not beating down doors to cop their full length debut Party Rock. I feel like if I had to listen to an entire album, I'd need to spend the next six hours listening to Fugazi or something equally earnest to restore balance.
Not sure how much I'm going to drink tonight, may have to put the post off by a day. Not a promising start, I know. Here's some more footage of Rampage being awesome to make it up to you.
So, I wanted to do a weekly new music post, but I felt a little awkward just walking around jacking other music blogs for material.
Then I realized that that's how 90 per cent of music blogs operate, and I decided that if it's good enough for The Guardian Online, it's good enough for me. So, with no further ado, I present the inaugural edition of Get Fresh Tuesday.
I've only really started to "get" techno in the last three or four years. Before that, it was the electronic genre that I had the most trouble wrapping my head around. When I first got into electronic music in my late teens, techno just wasn't didn't have the same kick-your-ass visceral rush as drum n' bass, my genre of choice.
Now that I'm a little older, I can appreciate techno's less aggressive, less muscular vibe and get behind it's robot-funk.
"Huesca" is the newest output from Juan Atkins, one of techno's founding fathers. It's all sharp kicks, moody keys and squelching basslines. It's honestly got me so jacked that I can't breathe.
So, I found out about a band from Hamilton, Ontario, about 90 minutes from my house, via a blog from the UK. I don't know how I feel about this.
On one hand, it's always good to find out about fresh Canadian talent. On the other hand, I feel like sort of a chump that I found out abouty Dark Mean from them, and not the other way around.
Dark Mean play the sort of danceable indie rock that gets hipster kids dancing, but it's less The Rapture and more Joy Division. Like the almighty Division, Dark Mean manage to successfully parlay dancey, ass-shaking high hats, swirling guitars, and an overarching feeling of loneliness. Good stuff.
3) "Comme à la Télévision" - Omnikrom, from YouTube
This is the only one I didn't jack from another blog. Exclaim gave me a review copy of Comme à la Télévision, and not only was it the first unabashedly positive review I've written for them, it was one of the best albums I've heard in a long-ass time.
Omnikrom are in kind of weird spot right now. As far as I can tell, they're verging on mainstream popularity in Quebec, but don't even show up on the radar in the rest of North America. That's not entirely surprising, being as they only rhyme in French, but if English-speaking audience can manage to get behind Spanish-language reggaeton tracks, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to get into Omnikrom. If and when they tour English Canada, everybody needs to go see them.
So, I feel like a bit of a loser writing about a TV show that's been on the air for two years and acting like it's some rad new discovery, but I feel like I can be excused because I didn't have BBC Canada until recently.
It's also a little embarrassing to admit that I'm a 28 year-old man and have an inexplicable love of teen dramas, but I'd like to leave that on the shelf for a minute, if I could.
So, I've spent the last week watching the entire first season of E4's teen drama Skins. I'm now well into season two, and I have to say, it may be the best TV show I've come across in a long while. Don't get it twisted, it's not The Wire good, but only The Wire is The Wire.
If you've read anything about Skins, you're probably aware that British and Australian TV critics have raved about how "realistic" the show is. That's actually a little bit bullshit. When the critics say "realistic," they actually mean that it acknowledges that most teenagers have sex for the first time around age 15, that they smoke pot, take pills, and drink, and that more often than not the kids turn out OK, in spite of all their debauchery.
So it doesn't turn teenage experimentation into an after school special like 90210, or paint the kids who like to party as inherently evil (think Chuck in Gossip Girl.) That doesn't make it realistic. In fact, if anything, Skins is the most surreal teen drama I've ever seen.
Think back to your high school days. Did you and your friends ever drive a Mercedes into a harbour? Get felt up by a BBW Polish exchange student? Lose three ounces of dope that you purchased on credit from a sociopath named the Mad Twatter? No? Didn't think so. This is just what goes down in the FIRST EPISODE of Skins.
In short, it's a great show. And in terms of how it deals with things like eating disorders, sexual orientation, drugs, religion, and identity crises, it's pretty damn realistic, but the plot devices owe more to John Hughes and Monty Python than they do to Larry Clark.
Oh, also, it has some OUTSTANDING music in it, but apparently if you watch it on BBC Canada/BBC America, you don't get to hear any of it due to rights issues, so watch it illegally on the Internet instead.
Now, I'm going to put aside the fact that I think Soulja Boy may be the worst rapper in the history of the genre, and that he's so awful he should probably be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, for just a second.
Who was asleep at the switch here?
We all know that Soulja Boy is about as street credible as Wonder Bread, and that he's just as artificial and manufactured as The Backstreet Boys were. It stands to reason, then, that he has some sort of massive legal team behind him. They're probably the one's who had to vet his shoe deal. So why didn't any of his lawyers stop and make sure that the phone number in the song wasn't an actual phone number?
If that number rang up some Americans, as opposed to Brits, Soulja Boy would be getting the oversized pants sued off him.
Don't get me wrong, if I wrote a song and it needed a phone number, I'd just stick any old shit in there to. But then again, I wouldn't expect it to be a major hit, let alone the ringtone of choice for every fifteen year-old girl on the planet. Fact of the matter is, it's not like it was for Tommy Tutone in '80s, where he just implied that some slut named Jenny could be reached at 867-5309 and everyone was cool with it. For better or worse, this is a litigious age we're living in, and if you're as famous as Mr. Boy is, you need to have your wits about you.
In the immortal words of Chris Jericho, "Do your fucking job!"
