i wanna make a mixtape. i want this one to paint the image of my 2009 fall.
so far i've got Teengirl Fantasy - Portofino Washed Out - Feel It All Around Fuck Buttons - Phantom Limb Phaseone - Panda Jawn Pure Ecstasy - Pressure Drop Atlas Sound - Washington School Neon Indian - Psychic Chasms Cocteau Twins - Blind Dumb Deaf Ducktails - The Mall Matias Aguayo - Walter Neff Jacuzzi Boys - Island Ave Fucked Up - Police Jens Lekman - Jens Lekman's Farewell Song to Rocky Dennis
i don't live in New York. I live in Miami, Florida. I'm very well aware that New York City has some kind of speak-easy preservation agenda for hip-hop. "real hip-hop". What the fuck does that even mean anyway? That you have some basement-made beat with a 70's soul sample and a NY-born hip-hop MC that just shits on every other style of the genre?
All this frustration is coming out of the news I read today of NYC audience members booing OJ Da Juiceman last night at B.B. Kings for the 2009 CMJ Music Marathon. From what I read, too, OJ wasn't even bad. He was GOOD. That's something, too, because I understand OJ can be a bit ridiculous... but are people not allowed to like stuff like southern rap?
I read an article yesterday written by someone I know, in my school newspaper (I know, who cares?). he goes on to talk about MTV's top 10 artists to watch in hip-hop or something along those lines, and he said Gucci Mane was on there ahead of Raekwon. The article goes on to just trash the shit outta Gucci Mane saying stuff like he sucks or whatever. Then I see the photo of the writer next to his name and he's wearing a NY Yankees fitted baseball cap. ugh.
Let's just get things out of the way here. Since when was MTV even relevant? Uh... Never. So what if MTV puts out a list of their top 10 whatevers? it won't make any difference because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about to begin with. And so WHAT if Gucci Mane is ahead of Raekwon? I'm gonna just go out there and say that this whole list was about musicians most likely to be on frequent MTV video rotation, and I can confidently say I've never seen a Raekwon video on MTV... but I have seen a T.I. video. I've seen more than one, and a billion times.
Also, WHAT IS WRONG WITH GUCCI MANE? I mean besides that he's kinda a criminal. "yeah, he's a criminal-- he's robbing hip-hop!" SHUT UP.
The only thing Gucci mane does is rap. Sometimes he's good at it and sometimes he's bad at it. Back To The Traphouse, his first major release: Kinda fucking terrible. The Movie Pt 2, a mixtape released by him and DJ Drama: kinda fucking awesome.
If you like Gucci Mane, you like Gucci Mane. Hip-Hop is like film; you're allowed to love shitty movies. yknow the ones that are amazingly bad and full of cheese? Hip-Hop works like that. Music works like that. Everything works like that.
So this whole regional hate for anything that's not traditional East Coast-style hip-hop, or "real hip-hop" as they say, is just going overboard (somebody call a coast guard). Everyone is just a bit upset because for the past 10 years, the hip-hop blazing the radio comes from the south. Listen: Nas hasn't come out with anything good these past couple of years and I'm pretty sure he's going insane. Jay-Z is a bit hit-or-miss lately. The Wu-Tang have no mass radio appeal. Mos Def doesn't like the radio. Common is already there so I don't know what the complaint is here. Jadakiss kinda sucks. Yknow what I'm saying? Like accept it.
NY People equate the whole "hip-hop is dead" term with Southern rap's emergence. Oh I see... NY Hip-Hop is dead. Gotcha. Well good then. Enough with the east-coast rap nostalgia and on to some real 21st century verse.
fever ray has been dishing out the best music videos of the year... that's a fact, man. i posted her video for "when I grow up" a while back because of how it reminded me of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm mixed w/ exploding-watertechnic shamanism. She released a video, which you can definitely find on youtube, earlier this fall called "Seven". it's uh... fucking creepy. but AWESOME.
her new single "stranger than kindness" is a nick cave cover. fair to say, it's the most bizarre, rad nick cave cover ever. and the video... jeez it's sooo fucking cool. the whole fever ray aesthetic is just ethereal and original. like sometimes i want the artists i like to wear some really outlandish stuff and not always just plaid, silk-screened t-shit and jeans all the time *cough*vivian girls*cough*. fever ray and lady Gaga know what the fuck i'm talking about.
well it's around 12 a.m. and I'm sitting on my bedsheets taking a long-ass study break. see, i've been studying for my Contemporary International Problems mid-term since Friday night and i'm now going onto Monday morning. the test is on tuesday at 11 a.m.
Like I said before, I started studying friday night, but I took a well-deserved break and went to the cinema to watch a film. I drove to the Cosford Cinema at the University of Miami in Coral Gables to watch a film called Gomorra. It's a film that's been in some sort of distribution limbo. It came out earlier this year and it was screened in a couple of select theaters. I had been dying to watch this film ever since I saw its trailer.
I guess the film is about the Comorra crime family in Naples, Italy. But that's kind of like saying The Wire is about the Barksdale drug empire... it's really only scratching the surface of the entire picture. Gomorra is way more than just a film about the contemporary Italian mafia, whom btw look a lot like Seaside Heights, NJ natives.
First of all, Gomorra is kinda the most beautiful looking film I've seen all year. I think THEY call it Neo-Realism... which I guess means the camera is operated by hand, and the aesthetic is pretty void of any cinematic, or dramatic camera tricks. No music soundtrack... just the audio of the setting and the characters.
The beginning is a little boring and slow. It starts off on high notes with the murder of these thugs in a tanning salon. Then the film takes off by centering around 4 stories... all of which are a bit hard to follow. Some of the stories are clouded with bureaucratese and technical jargon that are somehow related to waste development, money management, and textile sweatshop complications. kinda boring material at first but they definitely apply to the grander scheme of things... very similar to how the initial irrelevance of the docks in season 2 of the wire became absolutely relevant mid-season.
the stories that catch your attention are the ones that deal with human emotion rather than corporate/official hoo-ha. there's a story of a little delivery boy who gets caught up in the Camorra business after finding and returning a gun and a bag of drugs. he goes through little man-proving initiations and what-not and the stuff is just brutal. think bar-mitzvahs but instead of reading the torrah to prove you're a man, you have to wear a homemade bulletproof vest and get shot in the chest. by the end of this kid's story he fuckin goes downhill and submits to the idea of criminal masculinity. deep shit, man.
there's another interesting story about these two teens who are REALLY REALLY into Scarface. they wanna kinda do their own thing in the city so they stick up drug dealers and steal weapons. Camorra pplz aren't happy about all the rumpus, so they tell them to stop or they will totes get killed. they keep doing it. you can see where that's headed. their story also inspired some pretty memorable scenes... one of which (as seen below) have the two idiots shooting automatic weapons in their underwear, lord of the flies-style.
what'sgreat about the film is, not only the illusion of authenticity, but the anxiety I got from watching it. everyone's getting shot here. and when someone gets shot, you better believe it's unexpected or totally subtle. there's no soundtrack... so I feel as if anyone is bound to just get shot outta nowhere, no warnings, no nothing. scarlett johannson shows up on the telly wearing a dress at an awards show... I legitimately thought she was gonna get shot by Woody Allen.
Then I do a bit of research on the film and find out it's based on this non-fiction research-based book. Apparently the author went undercover and wrote about his findings and research. It seems like the making of the book is perhaps a bit more interesting than the actual subject. I hear he's on some witness protection program because he saw A LOT of shit he was not supposed to see. then the dude writes a book about it and publishes it for everyone to see? uhhh is he fucking dead?? apparently not.
anyway, it's a great film and from what I read, it's coming on Criterion very very soon. So I can't wait for that.
Bradford Cox has evolved. His evolution from bedroom-rock pessimist to extroverted noise-popper was one that never saw the light of privacy. His blog, dedicated to the Atlas Sound moniker, as well as his proper band Deerhunter and Deerhunter guitarist Lockett Pundt’s solo project Lotus Plaza, is loaded with posts about rainwater cassettes, youtube videos and micromixes (one of which contained a pretty awesome Badlands score intro). Dude really put himself out there.
To make matters even more public, Cox made a record that acted as his ethereal music diary: Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel. It was a prototype Kranky record: spacious, ambient and dark. But Cox painted the album with pictures of a quarantined child dreaming of wide, open spaces. It stamped Cox's presence in the indie community as a noise-rock troubadour.
Logos, Cox's sophomore LP, couldn't be any more different. The record is a global and varied collection of songs and if it plays as a diary, it would belong to most of Cox's friends and influences. Cox stated in a recent Pitchfork interview that most of the songs on the album are non-autobiographical, and that in contrast with Let the Blind, Logos is less introverted because it simply just got too boring. To judge the first two tracks on the album, I would’ve thought he backed down on his statement.
The album begins with “The Light That Failed”, a folk song at heart laced with glitches and ticks that result in a pretty soft electro-acoustic track. Followed by “An Orchid”, which sounds like a post-Microcastle Deerhunter song. So far, the songs seem like typical Coxian noisy doo-wop.
But the standout third track, “Walkabout”, contains the much-talked-about collaboration with Animal Collective wonder-voice Panda Bear, who’s credited on the album as Noah Lennox. The song was officially released for online streaming mid-summer and acted as the best solution to summertime boredom. It’s a lighthearted, sunny song that builds upward from a Dovers sample and can stand on its own as being one of the best songs of the year. But I guess when you’re working with someone like Lennox who produced Person Pitch, a lush, smiley, loop-heavy album, you can’t expect anything less than high spirits.
“Sheila” reaffirms Cox’s transition from the obscure to poppy with a chorus that’ll stick to your head: “Sheila/You’ll be my wife/You’ll share my life.” “Quick Canal”, the album’s mid-hump clocking in at eight minutes, has Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab fame contributing main vocals and doing her best Thom Yorke croon, while Cox stands in the back. It’s really the album’s core track with a long minimal sound-wave looping over Sadier’s indecipherable voice.
The rest of the album goes through different rhythms with a slow acoustic recovery from the Sadier track (“My Halo”) to ambient-microhouse (“Washington School”), and to songs where Cox alters his voice to sound eerily similar to Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene (“Kid Klimax” and “Logos”).
Logos is some kind of brilliant mixtape without actually being a mixtape. An album that has really traveled around the community. An album that is above Cox’s personal and physical quarantines and under his new-found comfort.
so i was reading my google reader in class while my international relations professor lectured about population & security issues. i was searching for cool blogs to subscribe to on my rss feed. see, i had just discovered how awesome google reader was because it completely minimized the amount of website flow I do in a day.
so i visited gorilla vs bear and spotted a list of blogs the site follows and thought i'd take a look at some. I found some pretty neat ones, like Transparent Blog and The Old Kentucky Blog, and i added them to my feed. but i came across hipster runoff and thought it was pretty rad; kinda like a cheap and convenient VIce blog. i scanned the site looking through its pictures and blog post headlines when suddenly the guy sitting behind in class me taps me on my left shoulder. i turn around and he points at my screen and gives me a thumbs up... as in "hey man hipster runoff is a great website and you'll surely love it as much as i do... also i'm totally looking at your laptop screen and being ultra-creepy."
i gave him a thumbs up, for i totally saw eye to eye with him on this website suggestion game. But now this put me in an awkward position... it me under some pressure since this guy is totes looking at my laptop seeing what blogs and websites i visit on a daily basis. SHIT. now i gotta impress people? so i go on like Snacks and Shit & the Sartorialist (one is silly and one shows my serious side). but i never got any response from the guy again.
I always figured if you bring your laptop to class, people will definitely be looking at my screen. WEIRDZ.
