thoughts that occur to me while watching this Diplo video sampler:
1. when mashups work well I feel like I’m listening to the past and the future at the same time
2. who knew there was a cartoon of Swamp Thing?! Alan Moore’s run = one of the best comics ever. buy it now.
3. is that Shmoo or a proto-shmoo?
4. is that real 60’s era nudist stuff? or retro-filmed contemporary erotica? oh, also this clip nsfw.
5. how awesome were those GI Joe edits! I feel like that was back in the internet’s young teenage years, but wow, I think I laughed at the body massage one so hard I cried…
6. man, even though Diplo is pretty over-exposed with remixes and so on, this is pretty great
Another version (sorta) of Tom Waits’s "Way Down in the Hole", this time by Blaqstarr and M.I.A….this would work perfectly for the season 6 open of The Wire (sigh)…almost makes me want to do one of those crazy time-consuming fan-edits of the previous seasons to make a fake, fan-fic style season 6 episode…almost…
Gamera’s comment about Dave Kendall got me thinking about how much I didn’t like him when he was hosting 120 minutes. He always seemed smarmy and sycophantic, didn’t he? I remembered a bit where Sonic Youth were making fun of him, but I couldn’t find it on youtube (wha?!)…
a google search revealed it was from 1991: The Year Punk Broke, which I have a very fond memory of seeing at Grafton Stovall at JMU. A bit more hunting, and I couldn’t find the film anywhere…apparently Courtney Love is blocking them from releasing it on DVD for some reason…how can she do this? — they say it’s due to the fact that she has the rights (?) to K Cobain’s material? Maybe since she’s in it and would need to sign a new contract? Courtney = lame-o.
Anyway, thanks to the glory of the internet I was able to find someone’s upload of a VHS dub of it, so now you can check out the Dave Kendall bit, and a little ironic Courtney Love bit…
DK seems so nervous, and totally unable to handle Thurston’s vibe. Seeing him also makes me remember Matt Pinfield, 120 minutes’s brain (to DK’s heart)…and Lewis Largent, who I remember hating with a passion. One time he wore a shirt that said "Loser" (right around the debut of Beck) and Sean F and I referred to him as Loser Largent from that point on. I would tape 120 minutes and watch it the next day, so I could fast forward the vidz I didn’t care about, or that they had overplayed. And this was a good time, for a long time. But once Nirvana broke, and the rise of Alternative Nation took hold, they began to play the same tracks over and over and over. Even today if I see Green Day’s "Longview" I want to punch somebody (preferably Loser Largent). It got to the point where I was spending a half hour of fast forwarding to watch one or two videos. So I gave up. And then it went off the air.
It looks like MTV has put a big chunk of their music vid library online, with embedding capabilities…neat…and it looks like there are a fair few obscure vids on there too, like this random example, one of my favorite vids of all time, Yo La Tengo’s "Sugarcube" (they don’t have "Tom Courtney" yet, and I KNOW I saw that on 120 Minutes!)…
because I want to post something and this is amazing:
There’s something about youth and rock, the young energy, and the 60’s, there’s something happening, and it’s a war cry, a song in the new rock form about the new rock form, there’s postmodernism in there somewhere (or something) and there’s something simple about it and you can tell that these guys really don’t think they’re going to get old, or at least they hope like hell they won’t and shit Moony’s right! and Pete looks like every muso nerd’s fantasy come to life, the kid who always got called big nose but now he’s gonna get all the girls and there won’t be any left for you, jerk-face! I mean, at 2:27 where he goes all Sonic Youth on the mic stand? Unglaublich! These guys are birthing punk rock and it’s messy and violent and parents just won’t understand.
This made me laugh out loud a bunch of times…re-linked from Fluxtumblr…as he says, "this is wonderful". Stick it out through the intro where not much is happening, and then enjoy Take On Me (Literal Video Version)…
I know Kool Keith doesn’t get a lot of love out in the world, but I think he’s great. He’s so weird and off-kilter, I think a lot of people just don’t really know what to do with him. Cocaine Blunts just linked to an interview that he did with Kool Keith, and it is delightfully oddball. Like this:
"That’s why a lot of girls are born different. You seen the new jeans? They don’t fit on they butt right. Because they asses was made funny now, because of the genetics. They don’t have a curve no more. Some people got a square ass, and everything looks fucked up. The body parts are made different. The torso may be too long. Everything is fucked up genetically. It’s a chemical that went out. And it’s called “Ugly.” It’s bad. So you gotta impregnate a bunch of ugly women, make them have pretty babies, help them out, and their daughters will look beautiful. I’m glad I didn’t get caught up in that time zone that is the new generation."
No doubt.
This is my favorite Kool Keith track, "I’m Seein’ Robots":
best lyrics:
You say you married sewed your weave in, yo where’s your ring at?
Interscope records got your demo girl, where you sing at?
Pull out your masters, your dat’s, all you have is cats
Pet little turtles in your bedroom, enough for headroom
Usin your restroom when, company come, that’s your best room
a solid video for a solid track, featuring Joey D’s fave Nordic rapper/singer, The Promoe…the video uses 8-bit art, stop-motion tech, low-fi aesthetics, and this thing I’ve wanted to do for ages where you print out each frame of a video and then time-lapse it back into regular motion…and all those techniques are a few of my favorite things.
I don’t know what to think of Ratatat. On the one hand, great band name, and great use of 2-person instrumentation limitations, like The Kills, Morphine or The White Stripes. On the other hand, I don’t ever listen to their stuff more than once. For that one time, I kind of like it, but I don’t need it again.
This video, though, for "Shempi", is both strangely weird and weirdly strange. A sort of simple technique that is very effective in making things seem dreamlike and odd.
As far modern rock-ish psychedelia, I much prefer this video from Marnie Stern, "Transformer". Not only is she a knockout guitar player, but the video is sharp too. Culled from Fluxtumblr, who posts a million videos that don’t do anything for me, and every now and then posts one that knocks my socks off.
I don’t know what NHTVSN stands for (anyone?) but it’s a pretty great hip-hop online magazine/blog. The most recent post features a video of DJ Clark Kent — who I had never heard of — the guy who discovered Jay Z and is apparently responsible for a bunch of classic tracks. The video is really entertaining and it’s only part one, so check it out at your leisure. I cut it down to what I think is the best bit, about Jay Z. Check it out…
So NYT has this music blog where people like Andrew Bird and Peter Holsapple write about songwriting and being a musician. Pretty neat. I got there from waxy, who links to a fun and well-written entry by Suzanne Vega about writing "Tom’s Diner", being remixed, and having her voice be the test audio for the invention of the mp3(!). Cool stuff. My favorite bit is where she writes about all the remixes of Tom’s Diner she’s received over the years, and when she put out a compilation of some of her favorites:
"However, it was a logistical nightmare to administrate. I had to go back to all the people who had taken the song without permission, and ask their permission . . . to use their version of my song! This is the main reason we have not put out “Tom’s Albums” 2 and 3, which we certainly could, as now we are up to almost 30 remixes including (really good) ones from Danger Mouse and Tupac."
Tupac?!
That’s got Billboard #1 written all over it.
UPDATE
Hmmm, well the track was apparently released last year — youtube embed below — and I need to revise my predictions of #1 greatness. Vega is a little off when she calls it a remix — it’s more like a re-interpretation. The youtube comments on the various postings of this track are all over the map, with some fans saying it’s the "best soft pac ever" and others doubting it’s even him. It’s apparently a new(ish) track that showed up on The Best Of 2Pac Part 2: Life, a double CD set retrospective that came out last December (that allmusic calls "of poor quality", "hastily or indifferently assembled" and "another in a long line of posthumous cash-ins apparently overseen by 2Pac’s mother"). Sounds kind of weak to me.
First, MDvto sent me this great Quincy theme tune…
Then, while hunting for that basketball vid from below, I checked the history of this browser and searched keyword "youtube." There were a bunch of interesting vids that never made it to the blog…here they are, random and youtubey. Individually they didn’t seem to warrant a post, but collectively, it’s some pretty good stuff…
– saw a chimney sweep truck on my way to the subway — is that good luck like it used to be in Mary Poppins-era London?
– right after that I saw nuns, which I immediately took as another indicator of good luck, I’m not sure why
– reading this David Foster Wallace piece from Harper’s about proper usage of English and grammar I’m reminded of a time when a bunch of us in High School were trying to explain to someone what an ambiguous pronoun was…we came up with this scenario in which the dinosaurs somehow knew that a meteor was coming to impact earth so they scratched this graffiti that said "A meteor is going to destroy earth! We don’t like it! and that scientists would puzzle throughout the millennia as to whether by "it" the dinosaurs meant the meteor or the earth…we were drunk when we came up with this and just howled at the whole scenario…
– another bit from the DFW piece talks about how language usage follows the norms of a particular community…he makes this point with an analogy, explaining that even though it might make perfect sense for men to be able to wear skirts (cooler, more comfortable, less likely to cause sterility, etc.) in Western culture it would be looked on as some kind of statement. Then right as I’m about to go into my building at work I see a guy in a leather utility kilt! I mean, this is New York, so sure, but it’s the first kilt I’ve seen in the city…I gave him a broad smile, a thumbs up and said "I like your style."
– been toying with some samples and trying to get the whole thing to coalesce and it’s not really happening, but I thought you might get a kick out of hearing a mashup rough draft. Sometimes it’s taking me a million iterations to get something to the point where it’s working, so I had this thought that charting the evolution of the track might be fun…at this point there’s some good interaction between samples, but the flow of the track is a mess…
Sometimes I think if I got a Monome (shown below, played by Daedelus) I could totally rock it, sometimes I think it would be beyond me, sometimes I think it looks pretentious, sometimes I think it totally rocks it futureshock style.
I am kicking myself that I didn’t make it out to the Daedelus/Flying Lotus show at (le) poisson rouge two weeks ago…