So have you noticed the commenter named "oointgroov"?
Back in 1998 (I think) I was working at BBC America, painstakingly cutting out the swear words and nudity from British programming to make it palatable for American audiences. We would also cut up their programs and put in breaks for commercials. It was early days for BBCA and they didn’t really know how long it would take an editor to cut an hour of programming down, so they would give us tons of time for not much work. Which was great.
So I had all this time there. I would crank out my work for the week, and then parcel out delivering it, made sure I looked busy, and worked on all sorts of personal projects — mix CD’s, party flyers, personal films. I would hang out a bunch with one of my best pals, MR, who was working there at the time. We’d take these 2-hour lunch breaks and watch series that weren’t assigned, and just generally ahve a good rockin time.
The drummer for my band in college was working on a solo project called T Groove. He did this thing where he posted a bunch of solo split tracks for one his pieces, called "Robot Dance Party", and invited people to remix it. So MR and I spent some time remixing it on the AVID editing system I was using. This was kind of painstaking. I would put in the tracks from T Groove, and then download drum samples from the drum machine museum (site since taken down). Since we couldn’t control the speed of any of the audio, I would have to try each sample out individually, and then use the ones that just happened to be at the same tempo as the original track. Took a while, but damn fun.
Then we went to AT&T Labs’ text to speech demo and put in a bunch of lines for the speech synthesizer to rap over the track. This part was a blast. Something about the way "he" would read the lines, emphasize weird syllables, stretch sounds out in odd ways. Awesome. We made the chorus the refrain of "who put the ‘oo’ in T Groove". MR posts as commentator oointgroov. A while ago, I asked T Groove if he still had the remix but he said he didn’t.
Then out of the blue last week, he found it! I listened to it one morning, and it was the best part of my day/week. It gives me a good good feeling even now to listen to it.
"The beats T kicks are funkity fresh/ kicking the shit out of old John Tesh."
if this is your thing, you should grab Clipse’s new mixtape over here. I don’t know why I like Clipse so much, something about their flow, the way they rap about drug dealing like it’s international playboy stuff, the spare but tough beats? Dunno, but it works.
I don’t care how your Monday morning has been going so far. I don’t care where your energy level is. I don’t care if you work in an open-plan office-space cubicle. I don’t care if you hate electronic, dance-y music. I command you to play this vid and crank the volume up. Then dants your pants off.
Chicken. Moose. Rhino. Monkey. What more could you want?
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.
