Screw Rock 'n' Roll

What happened to that boy?

2011-05-30T18:54:00.002+10:00

So I'm not sure if you realize this, but Screw Rock 'n' Roll has not updated in many years. Not in its Blogspot form, anyway.

However! It continues bigger, better, and actually updated frequently in a Tumblr location, and has done so for more than two years. I probably should have mentioned this before. That said, i'm pretty sure anyone who cared about anything I wrote at Blogspot has found their way to the new location.

But, should you not know, Screw Rock 'n' Roll is no longer a Blogspot blog dedicated to chopped and screwed versions of rock songs. It is today a Tumblr in which I yap on about whatever I feel like, but mostly music, politics, America, cities, TV, music, America, politics. I kinda feel we were headed in that direction anyway.

This is the last Screw Rock 'n' Roll post at Blogspot. If you have not already, join me at Screw Rock 'n' Roll on Tumblr. Or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Thanks to all y'all who held me down since 2006.

I made you a post of bootlegs and B-Sides

2009-06-21T17:29:00.002+10:00

In case you haven't heard -- and if you haven't, now really, have you been hiding in an Internet cave? -- everybody's favorite single reviewing service is back from the dead like Pimp C. Yes, after extensive chats between Ed Okulicz, Will Swygart and I, and an even longer rounding up of the Internet's best music writers, we launched the thing, and it's been back running for, oh, a few months now. What, I didn't mention it? I'm so careless.

The Singles Jukebox: now more alive than Pimp C, still not as trill

Anyway, it's at The Singles Jukebox and I'm writing plenty, so check it out. It also has a Twitter, which you should follow.

And, as unusual as it may seem, there are times when even my blurbs are left on the cutting room floor. What follows is a selection of my out takes.

(Before we begin, however, I should point out a massive Asher Roth feature/j'accuse I wrote for the Passion of the Weiss and never mentioned. Now that Roth has flopped miserably and we can all be free of him, it's a lot less relevant, but I hope you'll take a look at me putting one more boot into one of white peoples' more useless contributions to hip-hop. Here: Putting Asher Roth on Double Secret Probation.)

Anyways. On to the single reviews:

Britney Spears - If You Seek Amy

The tune is as cheap as the title's entendre, but "If You Seek Amy" is far superior to, and less silly than, its melodic predecessor, "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite." Spears returns to some well worn tricks in an attempt to breathe some life into the thing, but her old stand-by interjection "Baby, baby" and the half-hearted and strangely inconsistent attempts to make Amy an actual character only go so far. Not actually unpleasant, but "Amy" is up there with songs about her spiritual sister Mary Jane in having the primary function of allowing teenagers to gigglingly ask one another "Do you get it?"
[4]

Demi Lovato - Don't Forget

So this starts off like some quirky indie chick along the lines of Regina Spektor or something, which was OK, but after talking coy and making eyes for a couple minutes, she suddenly blasts into a gigantic Paramore-via-Michelle Branch hook, which had me asking myself, "Hey Jonathan, what kind of quirky indie chick is stupid and awesome enough to shove an enormous and unexpected pop-punk bit into her already quite pleasant song?" And that sent me over to Wikipedia, which counts as research for lazy music writers, and it turns out she's some Disney girl in Camp Rock with the Jonas Brothers. And I'm all like, "Fuck this, I don't need to be going around liking another Miley Cyrus." But then Lovato finishes her noisy guitar section and she whispers "Don't forget" all hurt and sad like, and, OK, fine, I like it.
[8]

Pink - Please Don't Leave Me

I can't quite believe I'm saying this, but I think I actually sort of like this new Pink single. And because Pink and her always unpleasant tantrums usually prompt an instant [0] from me, I'll say it again: I actually sort of like this new Pink single. "Please Don't Leave Me" has the world's most tiresome chronicler of celeb-life (who isn't a white rapper from Detroit) sounding actually sweet, and sweetly confused. When she sings "How did I become so obnoxious?" I pretend she's apologizing for the most-extensive run of deeply irritating pop music this decade. Darn it, I almost want to give her a hug. But Pink, though I'd love to award you a clean slate, this cute little number can't make me simply forget about the depths you've plumbed with, say, "Stupid Girls," "Just Like a Pill" and "Dear Mr. President." Besides, you go way overboard on the "da da-da da da" bits.
[6]

Herman Dune - On A Saturday

Hey Herman, John Darnielle called. He wants his steez back.
[6]

Summer Jamz '09/Instant Gratification: We Did It 4 Cheap

2009-06-09T13:34:00.004+10:00

Hey guys, remember the magnificent Summer of 2008, when I took over Summer Jamz and made it, with some help from Jeff Weiss at The Passion of the Weiss, a Screw Rock 'n' Roll extravaganza? Well, if you haven't been checking out the Passion of late, I should let you know: Summer Jamz is back for 2009. It's going down over in Jeff's hood this time around, and I urge you to check it out; I'm still running things, and we've got some really great mixes coming up over the next few weeks.

But though everything else will be up over there, I thought I'd republish my mix here. This is a step up from my previous Instant Gratification mixes I reckon, so if you've enjoyed those, or even if you haven't, get this one into your life. And while you're doing so, take a look at these as well:

Alfred Soto & Tal Rosenberg – Risottoberg
Todd Burns - Crambe Repetita - Long
Sach O - The Summersault Mix
Dan Love - Summer Madness Mix

(And here is mine. Originally posted at The Passion of the Weiss.

Summer Jamz ’09: Instant Gratification: We Did It 4 Cheap
by Jonathan Bradley

Download

Summer’s a mess, this year more than ever. Not only do we have to cope with the usual mix of baking heat, overexcited crowds and a seemingly never-ending run of bad television, the warm months of 2009 come packaged with a recession swamping the globe, a Swine flu pandemic and Dick Cheney hanging around like he’s Fonzie and we’re Mr. C. Happy days indeed.

Thank god for Summer Jamz. Fresh off a Memorial Day honored by frequenting sketchy nightclubs, imbibing copious quantities of alcohol (etc.) and getting excited about being able to wear white again, we at the Passion of the Weiss have knuckled down to work and set about making sure your summer is accompanied by a steady stream of great music, even if it should also be accompanied by unemployment and your neighbors catching their death from a slight cold. We’ll be delivering a summer-themed mixtape over there for the next few weeks or so.

And in addition to our Passion regulars, I’ve rounded up the cream of the Internet’s music writers, and charged them with delivering you enough tunes to last until Thanksgiving. But should you, overcome by the heady stench of sunshine and sweat, find you’ve torn too quickly through their contributions, feel free to check out the deep Summer Jamz archive. The 2008 edition was hosted here at the Passion, and prior to that, the now defunct Stylus Magazine ran the feature in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. If you spend your summer inside reading, I’ll understand. But should you make it outdoors, stuff your iPod with these before you go.

01. [All the Money Interlude] (2:27)

Summer’s here and who has time for anything? The sun’s so bright you can’t go outside, but cooped up indoors you only feel sweaty and stuffy. The heat of the day makes people tetchy, and when the night arrives, the clubs are stuffed with sticky revelers partying too hard. It’s impossible to concentrate on anything for a long period of time, and yet you’re still expected to show up to work every day, like, why can’t your boss give you eight weeks off like they did when you were in school? Summer, more than any other season is utterly obnoxious. It has none of the soft decay of fall, the hushed chill of winter or the tentative awakening of spring. Summer is loud and hyperactive, a rush of novelty, mayhem and ever-shifting, always-fleeting moments of intense thrill. Instant Gratficiation: We Did It 4 Cheap is a mix for that kind of summer. It’s tacky and trashy and afflicted with a serious case of attention deficit disorder. As its title suggests, it’s a jumble of seemingly-thrown together pop tunes; a panoply of lurid synths, smacking beats and gratuitous repetition. It’s loud and rhythmic and opts for shouted catch phrases rather than things that require involved thought, like, you know, lyrics. This is a Summer Jam for those days when it’s too hot, and you’re too restless to concentrate on much of anything.

Kicking things off, the “All the Money” Interlude can’t decide whether it wants to get cash, get naked or just pump the bass. This mix presents strong arguments for doing all three.

02. New Young Pony Club – Ice Cream (2:52)
03. Bossman – Dance My Pain Away (2:29)

“I can give you what you want”: see why I called this Instant Gratification? “Ice Cream” is a little more tuneful than the bangers that follow, but it’s just as forthright. New Young Pony Club cropped up a few years ago as something like a non-Brazilian take on Cansei De Ser Sexy — a marketing own goal if I ever saw one —sounding like the sort of band that existed solely to soundtrack clothing commercials. But as American Apparel adverts demonstrate, sex and capitalism are a heady combination, and if done in just the right way, they’re downright delectable. If NYPC’s slick nouveau new wave reeks too much of fast money, turn instead to Bossman’s cut-rate solution. In “Dance My Pain Away” the Baltimore rapper details a litany of all too authentic hardships — bill collectors, rent payments, child support — but he also presents, in the title, a solution that on a warm summer night is not quite as unconvincing as might be suspected.

04. Ms. Dynamite – Bad Gyal (3:06)
05. Kidbass ft. Sincere – Good Girls Love Rude Boys (2:36)
06. Jimmy Jones – Watch Out for the Big Girl (3:11)

My copy of “Dance My Pain Away” is also credited to Baltimore DJ Rod Lee; any extra enjoyable mixing it features may safely be assumed to be his work rather than mine. In fact, you’ll find more than a few DJ tags strewn throughout this mix, including the “Radio One” stamp that graces Ms. Dynamite’s astoundingly good “Bad Gyal” —I can’t find a copy of this song without it. I know what you’re thinking, though: Ms. Dynamite? Well, she might have won a Mercury Prize, but her new single is actually thrilling, a feverish cocktail of thwacking dancehall beats, squealing violins and riled-up, combative toasting. Following it is a couple more meditations on one of dance music’s preferred subjects: girls. Kidbass bluntly declares the good ones like rude boys, while Jimmy Jones warns about the big ones. With the kind of beats these guys have, I’m inclined to believe anything they have to say on the matter; whatever else they know about girls, they seem to have a good idea about how to get them dancing.

07. Pink Dollaz – I'm Tasty (2:37)
08. Pitbull – Jealouso (4:03)

Pink Dollaz are apparently at the vanguard of some new Los Angeles dance trend known as “jerkin’,” my exposure to which consists entirely of mp3 downloads and YouTube videos. It seems to be typified by looped vocals and bass heavy drum machine beats, which means you can check off two items on your Regional Rap Bingo game (you can put a tick next to explicit sexual references, too, if you like). Given my cursory knowledge, I understand if you want to call me a cultural tourist, but in my defense — who has the money for real tourism these days? Even from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, however, I can tell you that the girls in Pink Dollaz sound like the type Dwayne “Pussy Monster” Carter would be into; “I’m Tasty” is not meant metaphorically. For those into less explicit chatter and tourism that doesn’t involve peer-to-peer traded zip files, Pitbull has a language lesson for you. In Spanish, you see, boys are “jealouso,” while girls are “jealousa.” Take notes; this will be in the exam.

09. Crystal Castles vs HEALTH – Crimewave (3:37)
10. Major Lazer ft. Santigold – Hold the Line (3:12)

I’ll tell you absolutely everything you need to know about “Crimewave” in seven words: “I first heard it on Gossip Girl.” Crystal Castles’ crumbling electro-pop is a polar opposite to the “Apache”-derived dancehall of “Hold the Line” but the two have in common a brutal directness that allows them to hammer their way directly through your eardrums and into your brain.

11. M.I.A. – Bird Flu (3:19)
12. [Swine Flu Interlude] (0:24)
13. Rollin' G – Swine Flu Skank (2:39)

”Bird Flu” isn’t called “Bird Flu” because it’s infectious or anything. Influenza, whatever the strain, is straight up repulsive, and everything about “Bird Flu” fits that description. Clattering drums, obnoxious squawks and M.I.A.’s chants are individually as uninviting as a deadly disease, but in combination they turn out to be thrillingly discombobulating. Swine Flu, the contemporary contagion, isn’t so inventive, but it’s even more deadly. Rollin’ G’s “Swine Flu” is a song created by the British marketing company Uproar, but it works as well as a dance craze as it does a public service announcement. Lyrics that rhyme “tissue” with “that’s the issue” would usually give the game away, but instead add to the verisimilitude; what’s a UK dance song without a suspect lyric or two?

14. BBU – Chi Don't Dance (3:22)
15. Rye Rye ft. M.I.A. – Bang (DJ Booman Remix) (3:11)

Back to mining local American dance trends: in this case, two house derivations. “Chi Don’t Dance” is oddly mournful for a juke song, and seems even post-apocalyptic coming on the heels of the literal emergency warning that is “Swine Flu Skank.” The sparseness doesn’t stop it being wildly catchy however, and Rye Rye’s “Bang” follows soon after to cheer up the proceedings. I favor the Booman remix of that song; it seems to make better use of its Baltimore Club components than the more frenetic original.

16. Wiley – Wearing My Rolex (2:12)
17. DJ Class ft. Kanye West – I'm the Shit (Remix) (4:17)
18. Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow/Black Eyed Peas ft. Gucci Mane & 50 Cent - Boom Boom Pow (Remix) (4:52)
19. K.I.G. – Head, Shoulders, Knees N Toes (4:11)

More Club music here, in the form of DJ Class’s “I’m the Shit.” The tune, with its autotune verses, had more than enough of a basis on its own for crossover status, but Kanye West’s appearance guaranteed its success. DJ Class boasts of having “Diamonds on my neck, Patron in my cup,” but musically, he seems the model of modesty in this company. Wiley and K.I.G. wield bright, blurting keyboard riffs and foolish refrains, but even they are restrained compared to the Black Eyed Peas’ near-guaranteed song of the summer. The popularity of “Boom Boom Pow” is no surprise, but its quality is; will.i.am., Fergie et al have always been unashamedly retarded, but they’ve never been this enjoyable. “Boom Boom Pow” is not so much music as it is fireworks: awesome display and a succession of loud noises. Don’t worry: in less than a millennium, all music will sound like this. B.E.P. is so three-thousand-and-eight, while the rest of us struggle to even be two-thousand-and-late.

20. Rich Boy – Drop (2:49)
21. No Age – Teen Creeps(3:23)

Two different approaches to aural assault: the monster truck bass/jackhammer vocal loop combination of “Drop”, or the bubblegum white noise of “Teen Creeps.” It’s an odd pairing of songs, but I think it works. On first exposure, both seem unlistenable, but soon each reveals itself to be indispensible. Polow Da Don’s “A Milli” rip is more distinctive than most regurgitations of the formula, while Rich Boy’s snarled suggestion that women appropriate cocaine as a crash dieting technique is as sordid and as memorable as No Age’s scuzzed-up guitar blast.

22. Turf Talk ft. E-40 & B-Legit – Doe Boy (3:08)
23. E-40 ft. The Federation – Go Hard or Go Home (3:03)
24. Young Buck ft. Lil' Scrappy – Money in the Bank (3:51)

And hip-hop’s love affair with the bass drum continues. First comes a pair of tunes from Bay Area rappers Turf Talk and E-40, typified by smacking drums and pleonastic verses. It’s the classic hyphy combination of left-field lyrics paired with maximalist low-end thump; in North California, going dumb is only half the story. “Dumb” is too kind a description for Young Buck’s “Money in the Bank,” however; with its brutalist, three note riff, and cash-register prelude, this hews closer to being irredeemably brain-dead. By that I mean it’s utterly irresistible, of course.

25. Nina Sky – On Some Bullshit (2:55)

This may be a little sweeter than the rest of this mix, but I like to think you deserve a little dessert after your main. And what could be sweeter? The return of Nina Sky comes with a less compelling tune than the Coolie Dance riddim of “Move Your Body,” but its chorus could not be more contagious. The Albino sisters discover something every elementary student understands: there is little more fun to be had than letting fly with a stream of unnecessary curse words. I hope your more wild summer nights end with this blaring out some nearby stereo so you can shout along, over and over: “I’m on some bullshit, fuck what you heard.” It’s even better than cake and ice cream.

26. [XOXO Interlude] (0:29)

As with all good things, even summer must come to an end. You know you love me.

DECLARE INDEPENDENCE

2009-06-08T23:49:00.005+10:00

Soundtrack the revolution: Björk - Declare Independence

I’ve got to tell you, Screw Rock ‘n’ Rollers, I’m getting a little impatient. This is the fourth Queen’s Birthday message I’ve posted on this blog, and though I don’t want to have to be posting many more of them, I fear I might have to. The first two posts, in 2006 and 2007 were, if you remember (and I’m sure you do), bitter and angry, weighed down with the hopelessness of the task of freeing Australia from the clutches of a foreign monarch our then-leader ardently admired. But my message last year was optimistic; we’d just elected a Republican Prime Minister, of a party who had the creation of an Australian Republic as part of its platform, and the Opposition was on the verge of electing as their leader Malcolm Turnbull, the former leader of the Australian Republican Movement (and subsequently did so). Sure, Kevin Rudd, the PM, had said a republic wasn’t a first term priority for him, and that was fair enough. It took some time to wake the country up from Howard-era futility.

But now? It’s seeming like we just hit our collective snooze button on the issue. Rudd seems as uninterested in bringing about change as his Monarchist predecessor, and Turnbull, in a genuine Judas moment, said he thinks we should wait until England’s Queen dies before we sever our ties with her institution. It is true that little would convince Australians to finally abandon our passion for apathy (well, on this issue, anyway) like the prospect of a King Charles as our sovereign; we’d probably feel compelled to give each other continuous wedgies until we all stopped looking like such dweebs.

But this is the wrong approach to take. Not only is it profoundly wrong for Australia to gain its maturity by default; not only would we be denying ourselves the opportunity to declare to a woman with a sense of entitlement so great that the sun does not set on it and who hasn’t done a single worthwhile thing in her entire life, that we are no longer willing to cling to the hem of her gown like some groveling pack of pseudo-Englishmen; we would be putting off a fundamentally important piece of governmental reform that needed to happen a long time ago.

Australians are a pragmatic people who do not like to change things unless we are forced to. We like to think our system works.

It does not work. We do have to change things.

We have had two Constitutional crises in the past four decades. The more famous of the two, the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by the Governor General John Kerr, is a clear systemic problem that remains a significant source of bitterness for much of the population more than thirty years later, and could easily be repeated again today. The problem in this case wasn’t, as many people believe, that Whitlam was dismissed, though that was a bad outcome to a difficult situation that should have been allowed to play itself out politically. No, the problem was that the man who chose to intervene had Constitutional authority without having popular authority. John Kerr was perfectly within his rights to dismiss the Prime Minister, just as every Governor General before or since has been. But by the 1970s, the Australian people no longer saw the Crown as a legitimate authority, and Kerr, in exercising power derived from an authority the people did not perceive as legitimate, demonstrated the weakness of our Constitution.

The Governor General is a part of our system, and as much as we wish to pretend otherwise, cannot be a mere figurehead. He or she has the role of intervening in disputes Parliament cannot solve for itself. We would hope these disputes were rare, but our system must be equipped for the emergencies our history has shown can occur. In those situations, only a Governor General who can claim to represent the interests of the people, whether because he or she has been directly elected by them, or appointed by their representatives, can properly resolve that situation. The creation of an Australian Republic will mark our final separation from our colonial masters, but it should not be about Great Britain. It should be about creating a system of Government that works for Australia.

The second constitutional crisis occurred when the Governor General Peter Hollingworth was accused of tolerating sexual abuse within the diocese he presided over while Archbishop of Brisbane. At that time he lost the support of the Australian people, but for many months refused to resign. Again, the problem derived from a disconnect between what the Constitution said on the Governor General and what the people thought of the Governor General.

Hollingworth, like all Governors General, did not represent the Australian people and had no responsibility to them. He represented the Queen, and, probably to maintain the pretence of non-interference (doing nothing is still interfering), the Queen did not recall him as her representative. By tradition, the Queen allows the Governor General to serve at the pleasure of the Prime Minister, but as the then Prime Minister Howard did not respond to the people’s displeasure with Hollingworth, Australians had no ability to engineer the dismissal of an official they had lost their trust in. This anti-democratic situation lasted until Hollingworth resigned; it could have lasted until the next election and beyond if he had not done so.

A President, on the other hand, even one with the limited duties of our current Governor General, would represent and be answerable to the people. An Australian Presidency would have safeguards designed to allow the Australian people to withdraw their endorsement of their President if need be, such as an impeachment procedure.

Ours is a system that has hung together through too much reliance on good fortune. It is time to change that. We should vote by plebiscite on an Australian Republic at the Federal election to be held next year, and move to hold a referendum at the election after that. I’ve written too many of these Queen’s Birthday posts already.

Girl Pop Saturdays #5: "You Belong With Me"

2009-05-24T05:48:00.002+10:00

The triumphant return of Girl Pop Saturdays! Thank you for waiting patiently while I bummed around spending my Saturdays not playing pop songs. While I've been away from y'all, I found out my Grandparents have been watching these videos I've put up. Seriously. Worlds colliding here.

ANZAC Day.

2009-04-26T07:09:00.001+10:00

April 25th is ANZAC Day, so Girl Pop Saturdays won't air this week. Enjoy the Pogues doing "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" instead, proving once again that no one sings songs about Australians like the Irish. I'll be sure practice real hard to give y'all something special next Saturday.

Girl Pop Saturdays #4: "Bleeding Love"

2009-04-19T05:30:00.002+10:00

Leona Lewis cover for y'all. As I said in the Youtube info, my apologies for the high note at the end of the bridge; no apologies for any other notes.

Girl Pop Saturdays #3: Lucky

2009-04-11T18:10:00.004+10:00

A brand new camera angle and me rocking a scarf. It couldn't be anything but Girl Pop Saturdays. This week is my cover of Britney Spears' "Lucky." It's quite possibly the best yet.

And do remember, I am happy to take requests for these. In the comment box, if you will, though my fulfilling of such requests is conditional on my ability to do a reasonable job of the song. So, nothing requiring a gigantic studio or astounding vocal gymnastics, please.

In other news, you might want to take a look over at my blogroll on the left side of your screen, where I've added a few new blogs. If your blog isn't on there and it should be, I promise I'm not dissing you on purpose. I'm just terrible with my blog roll. I only just added Alfred Soto's blog, and I should have done that about two years ago.

You also may see that I've got a link to The Singles Jukebox up. Yes, that's right, the Internet's favorite singles review column is back, with its own domain and better than ever. All your favorite writers are present (by which I mean me), dedicating to scoring every new single around the world to two decimal places. The Singles Jukebox: Like Taking Back Sunday, tell all your friends.

I've been doing some other stuff, too. Like things I have no business doing. Like writing about baseball. I know nothing about baseball, but the author of that there piece, Philly rapper Zilla Rocca made my comments look smart and well-informed. And over at Lost in Sea, my buddy Dan Weiss has put together a review out of an argument we had about Lily Allen. I'm right, of course (she's hot garbage), but I believe my definitive Allen ethering occured when I reviewed her single "Not Fair" at the Jukebox. If anything, I was too kind to her there.

Anyways, I'll try to get some original written, rather than musical content up here one of these days. Until then, you know you love me.
xoxo.

Girl Pop Saturdays #2: Be Mine!

2009-04-05T05:52:00.002+10:00

Here we go, Girl Pop Saturdays edition two. Well, it's still Saturday somewhere in the world.

This is my cover of Robyn's "Be Mine!" I mess up the lyrics and, at one point, the chords. Watching it back though, I think I manage to get into it along the way. Hopefully you'll agree. One thing, though? Who the fuck re-gifts a scarf? That's such a low thing to do, seriously.

Girl Pop Saturdays #1: 7 Things

2009-03-28T05:21:00.003+11:00

I've been playing this cover of Miley Cyrus' "7 Things," so I thought, hey, why not make my YouTube debut with it? Apologies for the clipping sound; I recorded it on my cell, so the quality level isn't the greatest. But I have decided to make it the first in a weekly series of me acoustically covering girly pop songs. Check back next Saturday for part II.

(Also, I must admit, I really failed to take advantage of the "When you mean it, I'll believe it/If you text it, I'll delete it" line, which is not only the best lyric in the song, but also one I usually deliver with a lot more pizazz.)

Redneck Women and American Gangsters

2009-03-18T00:54:00.005+11:00

It's been a long time... trill shit to go left to... etc.

I've actually had a quite good chopped and screwed remix ready to go for a long while, and there's really been no good reason for me not to have posted it. Come by tomorrow and I might have it up. Maybe.

For now, here's a piece of writing I finished last year, and thought you folks might enjoy. See, when I told y'all last August that I was moving to Sydney, it's because I was taking myself back to school. I'm not saying I did this because of Vampire Weekend and Animal House, but I'm not not saying that was the reason either. "Campus" and being on Double Secret Probation present a rather attractive portrait of college life. (Fortunately, I enrolled before Asher Roth's "I Love College" came out, because if i thought there were dudes like Roth involved in higher education, I would have had nothing to do with the venture.)

Anyways, I've been a grad student for a good six months or so now, and last semester I wrote this essay about America, hip-hop, and country music. You know, the stuff I write about on this blog anyway. I prefer journalism and blogging to academic writing for the most part — I feel the scholarly detachment required too often creates an inflated sense of objectivity but similtaneously requires too rigorous a standard to really have fun with some ideas — but I reckon this essay is pretty straightforward, easy to read and may even be enjoyable. So, enough prefacing:

Redneck Women and American Gangsters
The Outlaw Everyman in American Hip-hop and Country Music

by Jonathan Bradley

“I just came off the road driving from state to state out west, and in some towns you can’t even get radio driving through the mountains. You not getting anything but country, which is good. I listen to country music ... I write, man, so I appreciate all kinds of music. I’m not crazy about the instrumental parts of country, but lyrically there’s a lot of good shit out there.”
-GZA of Wu-Tang Clan (Quoted at HalftimeOnline.com 2006)

In 2004, while a deeply divided United States of America was in the depths of a fiercely fought Presidential campaign that saw the Republican President George W. Bush scrape into a second term, a video putting aside the turmoil of the culture wars crept on to cable broadcasts across the nation; it received airplay not only on the African American-targeted channel Black Entertainment Television (BET) but also Country Music Television (Sanneh 2005).

The video opened with a split screen diptych featuring two men from very different parts of the nation. The black man, clad in a stocking-cap and an oversized jacket branded with an American Football team, sing-rapped against an inner-urban backdrop, while the white man, dressed in jeans and a cowboy hat, crooned away in an upper-middle-class suburban house. Despite their differences, though, each man’s actions were identical. In perfect synchronisation, they buckled their belts — the rapper’s jewel-encrusted, the country singer’s big and brassy — they stepped into their vehicles of choice — either hotted-up hooptie or luxury SUV — and drove to an airport where they boarded a private plane — one man travelling through city streets, the other journeying along an empty highway. A country-tinged guitar wound its way over the track, and an airy hip hop beat ticked beneath. Throughout the clip, neither man met, but they had one thing in common: They each had lost a lover and both wanted her back.

The song, a wistful balled called “Over and Over,” was a collaboration between Nelly, a popular rapper from the Democrat-dominated city of St. Louis, and the highly successful country star Tim McGraw, from heavily Republican rural Louisiana. The track appeared on Nelly’s 2004 album Suit, as well as a McGraw greatest hits collection. For the rapper, it was a diversion from his usual, club-friendly sound, but McGraw by no means considered the collaboration to be a country song (Reid 2004). Fittingly, for a tune that split the difference between two distinct musical cultures, its greatest success was on the popular music charts; it reached Number Three on Billboard’s Hot 100 list (Billboard.com, n.d.).

The video’s treatment of the song made clear the differences between the genres caught up in this musical equivalent of a shotgun marriage, but it also highlighted the similarities. The performers, both highly successful and decidedly commercially-friendly stars within their field, perform the same actions and express the same emotions in the video; it is the presence of signifying elements such as McGraw’s cowboy hat or Nelly’s ostentatious jewellery that demarcate one man as a rapper and the other a country star. Disregarding these superficialities, the generic structures co-exist fairly comfortably. But equally apparent are the vast cultural differences revealed to separate the men; not just the respective accessories accompanying them or the environment in which each is filmed, but also the overt racial segregation. In one scene, for instance, both men interact with a young fan; an African-American boy in Nelly’s case and a white girl in McGraw’s. Indeed, there seems to be no racial intermingling whatsoever across the split screen’s barrier. In this video’s conception of the two musical genres, race is a crucial distinguishing factor. And yet the video’s treatment clearly recognises the shared experiences inherent to each genre, as does the popularity of the track. There are very few successful instances of country and hip hop music intermingling, and for that reason the naturalness alone of this collaboration is noteworthy (see, for instance, Breihan 2008 for an overview of the awkward and limited interaction between hip hop and country; or Sanneh 2005).

This essay will examine the commonalities shared by the genres of hip hop and country music, looking specifically at the ways in which they relate to the communities which they popularly represent. It will look specifically at the archetypes of the everyman and the outlaw within each genre, and compare the similarities in the way each is used to tell stories about the respective artists’ communities. In this way, it will demonstrate the shared concerns of the two genres and the means by which each speaks to vastly different audiences using similar methods.

“Ain’t about the races, the crying shame/To the fucking rich man all poor people look the same”
-The Drive-By Truckers, “Southern Thing”

“The comment Kanye made was damn near right/But Bush hate poor people be them black or white”
-Killer Mike, “That’s Life”

Both country and hip hop are genres with mainstream popularity that arose from distinct and, to some degree marginalised, American subcultures associated with the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Although their audience has expanded and diversified, both genres remain closely connected to their original cultural context, whether in the popular consciousness, or by the artists and fans actually invested in the music. Despite acknowledging the original and continuing multiracial influence and involvement on hip hop, Perry asserts definitively that it “is black American music” (2004: 10), and that:

“The manner in which the music became integrated into the fabric of American culture was as a black American cultural product, through an overwhelmingly black American audience (no longer the case) and using black American aesthetics as signature features of the music.”
(2004: 12)

Further, Morrison identifies hip hop as “a conversation among and between black youth from one part of the country to another” (in Dyson 2001: 115), and Forman says “[r]ap music takes the city and its multiple spaces as the foundation for its cultural production” (2000: 203). Hip hop, despite all manner of exceptions, remains identifiable as a cultural form that is African American, young, and urban.

Malone identifies a similar relationship between country music and white, working class Southerners: “Although commercial country music addresses longings that are universal, while speaking to an audience whose scope is international, the music was born in the rural South” (2002: 14). He notes that African Americans and poor whites created the music out of “a common crucible of poverty and pain” (2002: 14), but he also refers to country as, for instance, “the music of the white South” (2002:16). The genre’s Southern identity remains apparent today; its performers and their dialects, speech patterns, values and thematic concerns are predominantly Southern (Malone 2002:16).

Malone and Perry note that country and hip hop attracted mainstream audiences because of their distinct cultural origins. Malone says that even in its early days, country music attracted non-Southern fans “because of its presumed Southern traits, whether romantically or negatively expressed” (emphasis original; 2002: ix). Perry, meanwhile, notes that “[p]art of the seduction of rap for mainstream America, particularly white young people, lies in its iconoclasm in relation to white norms. It is Other, it is hard, and it is deviant” (2004: 136). In comparison, genres of popular music like rock or pop, or even subgenres such as metal or punk, cannot claim such cultural distinctiveness, and those that they do have (for instance, a connection to youth), is diluted and secondary in importance.
Since both hip hop and country are so strongly associated with specific, and specifically marginalised, sections of American society, the character of the everyman takes on a powerful role in speaking to, for and about the members of that particular section of society.

In hip-hop, according to Perry, the everyman is expressed through personal narrative and historical reflection (Perry 2004: 137-139). The shared African American experience, such as suffering racism regardless of economic success, or common cultural touchstones (for instance the funk samples used in West Coast gangsta rap, lyrics reminiscing about older rap icons, or mundane but distinct community experiences such as the workings of the underground economy or a family barbecue) ensure that even as a rapper uses his celebrity status to broadcast his message, he remains able to credibly depict the experiences of his community. “The duality of the black everyman/rap star is, of course, in large part born of the reality that many MCs morph from being regular brothers in the hood into celebrities” (Perry 2004: 137). Symbolic images also help to position the rapper as the everyman, and Perry lists such common hip-hop touchstones as cars, the penitentiary, blunts, or the struggle, as metonyms that “stand in for the experiences of black men” (Perry 2004: 130).

Dyson identifies rapper Tupac Shakur specifically as “the ghetto’s everyman, embodying in his art the horrors and pleasures that came to millions of others who were in many ways just like him — except they lacked his protean genius and a microphone to amplify tragedy and triumph” (2001: 107) The rapper Mos Def echoes this argument, saying of Shakur, “I’ll tell you why people loved him: because you knew him” (Dyson 2001: 107). Shakur’s influence on hip hop was extensive — Dyson describes him as perhaps the most influential rapper ever and his approach and style — and the large number of subgenres from which he drew (political, party, gangsta, and ghettocentric raps, for example) (2001: 107, 138) help propagate the notion of the rapper as the everyman. If Shakur is indeed the ghetto’s everyman, his descendants continue that tradition by re-using his narratives and themes.

“I’m influenced by the ghetto you ruined”
-Jay-Z, “Renegade”

Perry argues that historical American discourse positions materially successful African Americans as criminals or undeserving, and the poor as lazy, hypersexual and manipulative (2004: 137-138). By this reasoning, even successful rap stars living lifestyles far from the ghetto are made into outlaws and required to continue as hip-hop everymen. “Outlaw is being black and minority. Period,” argues West Coast rapper Big Syke (quoted in Dyson, 2001: 13). It would be deeply incorrect, of course, to assume all African Americans, or all poor African Americans have criminal tendencies, but the societal marginalisation involved in being black and poor often automatically renders rappers to being outside the American mainstream. Embracing that identity, “can undermine the stigma of poverty and social marginality” (Rose 1994: 12). See, for instance, how the Alabaman rapper Rich Boy, in the outro for his track “Let’s Get this Paper” begins with a personal narrative, and widens its scope into a political statement casting every black man in America as a potential outlaw:

“They gave my brother ten years, nigga/What the fuck are you supposed to with that, nigga? They gave my uncle twenty years, nigga. Matter of fact, they gave my cousin life, nigga. I can tell you how it feels, nigga, to be on that motherfucking stand, looking the motherfucking judge in their face, nigga, and he gon’ tell you some stupid shit like life, nigga. They’re sending niggas on vacation across the nation ... you guaranteed to go to motherfucking prison being black where I’m from.”

This helps to explain why the outlaw and the everyman easily conflate in hip-hop, when they could reasonably have been assumed to be antagonists (the outlaw, by definition, is exceptional, where the everyman is not), but the hip-hop outlaw also relates to wider cultural appreciation of the anti-hero. “The violent outlaw, living his life outside of dominant cultural constraints, through brute power and domination is a character-type with deep roots in American lore,” says Dimitriadis (1996: 430). The common hip-hop outlaw figure of the gangster embodies mainstream American values like rugged individualism, materialism, strength and masculinity, even while rejecting the legal structures that create that cultural mainstream (Dimitriadis 1996: 430). Perry identifies the gangster, as well as the hustler, the pimp and the scholar/intellectual as hip-hop archetypes (2004: 131-133); all four have the potential to be positioned as outlaws. And even disregarding lyrical themes, there nonetheless remains an element of the outlaw to the hip-hop everymen. The genre’s common production technique of sampling fits in awkwardly with traditional notions of legality and artistic achievement, meaning the aural product of rap music itself has transgressive qualities (Schumacher 1995).

“I live back in the woods, you see/ A woman and the kids, and the dogs and me/ I got a shotgun rifle and a 4-wheel drive/And a country boy can survive”
-Hank Williams Jr “A Country Boy Can Survive”

The outlaw has a similarly long history in country music; According to Malone, as early as the 1930s, Depression-era blues-influenced country singers “ventured into the rowdy underworld of sex, sin and bawdiness that was absent from much of the standard hillbilly fair” (2002a: 105). The blues allowed and inspired country singers to incorporate themes of sex, drinking and drug-use and masculine boastfulness into their work (Malone 2002a: 105). Rockabilly expanded on this history of social deviancy: “the rockabillies actually gave vent to impulses that had long been imbedded, if often dormant, in southern culture — a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or, in the case of women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness, and, strangely, a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as of the beer joint” (Malone 2002a: 250) The swagger and aggression of Hank Williams Jr, according to Malone “suggest[ed], among other things, that the old fundamentalist strain that had inhibited free expression while encouraging guilt was losing its force among rural southerners” (2002: 393), while Charlie Daniels “embodied southern good-old-boy traits almost to the point of caricature” (2002: 392). Though Malone describes the attempts of Williams Jr. to designate his father, Hank Williams Sr. as one of country’s original outlaws as “self-serving,” it is indicative of the consistent strain of rebellion coursing through country music’s history, even if it was implied rather than explicit at some times.

The cowboy image contributed more in the way of usable symbols to country than actual music (Malone 2002: 152), but these symbols created a powerful image of a man living outside of society. The standard ideology associated with the cowboy was a man who “loved roaming ... loved freedom; they were pioneers by instinct; an impulse set their faces from the east, put a tang for roaming in their veins and send them ever, ever westward” (Lomax in Peterson 1997: 82). These values are distinctly reminiscent of the resonant qualities of the gangster, although through the first half of the twentieth century, the cowboy remained a distinctly heroic figure (Peterson 1997). By the 1960s, however, the loose group of musicians known as the Outlaws had transformed the figure into an antihero.

While the Outlaws’ primary rebellion was against the country music industry rather than larger society, they found it commercially lucrative to promote a rebellious image. According to Malone, “[T]hey capitalised on the undying appeal of the cowboy (although in the guise of the desperado or badman) and of the rambler. They also profited, perhaps unconsciously, from a preoccupation with the antihero that has been manifested in American popular culture since World War II” (Malone 2002a: 250). Merle Haggard, for instance found that his criminal record could be commercially lucrative, and many of his hits were songs about outlaws and prison life (Malone 2002a: 250).

Malone suggests audiences sympathise with badmen as class heroes, recalling that “blue collar boys of all colo[u]rs get sent to prison more often than do white-collar criminals” (2002: 137), and relates this to a more universal empathy for the criminal:

“Country music tapped into ... the suggestion that we can see a little bit of ourselves in the sins and sufferings of convicts, and a hint of our own potential for evil in the actions of outlaws.”
(2002: 137)

This issue of class is important to understanding the relationship country has between its outlaws and its everymen. As with hip-hop, the rural, and particularly the Southern, culture at Country’s roots is marginalised from mainstream society, though their cultural disjuncture results not from race, but from class. Fox observes that “The rural and periurban working poor, in particular, are practically signified in the mass media by their talkative excessiveness as ‘rednecks’ and ‘trailer trash’ (2004: 42). Perry appears to concur with this, contrasting the notion of the black poor as criminals with the conception of the white poor as stupid (2004: 137-138).

Just as hip-hop adopts and renegotiates the stereotypes made about members of its culture, so too does country music. Merle Haggard’s songs of the white working class give voice to those on the wrong side of what Ching describes as “a painful class distinction” (2001: 34). Similarly, humour is used to skewer the “‘oppressive confidence’ of the professional, the intellectual and the technocrat,” finding pride in the simple everyman of songs like Cletus T. Judd’s “The First Redneck on the Internet” or George Jones’ “High-Tech Redneck” (Ching 2001: 34). Terms like “redneck” are redefined to neutralise their ability to denigrate, in an analogous but less radical way to the adoption of the word “nigger” by some African Americans. Gretchen Wilson’s signature tune “Redneck Woman” posits the country everywoman as a redneck by referring both to cultural signifiers and common musical history:

“Some people look down on me, but I don’t give a rip/I’ll stand bare-footed in my own front yard with a baby on my hip/ I’m a redneck woman, I ain’t no high-class broad/I’m just a product of my raisin’ I say ‘hey y’all’ and ‘yee-haw’/ ... I know all the words to every Charlie Daniels song/So here’s to all my sisters out there keeping it country”

Being “trashy” and “hardcore” is synonymous with being the epitome of ordinariness, “the girl next door” in Wilson’s conception, and by replacing “Charlie Daniels” with “Tanya Tucker” and “Ol’ Bocephus” she makes clear her re-definition is not limited to new country, but extends throughout the genre’s history.

It is a similar technique to that used by David Allan Coe in “If That Ain’t Country,” a song which has as its subject “life in one of those houses with junk cars rusting in the yard,” and a, “hardworking man [who is] always ‘mean,’ always ‘tired,’ always ‘drunk.’ His offspring end up in prison or walking the streets” (Ching 2001: 24). This lifestyle, says Ching can be “summed up in a term that’s often synonymous with “country” — “white trash” (2001: 24-25). However, while Wilson claims no desire to be anything but a redneck, the family in Coe’s song seems demoralised and dysfunctional; they have tried to live the American dream, and failed. As with “Redneck Woman,” Coe generalises by referring to country music history. Ching argues, “Coe concludes his family saga by alluding to a series of old songs, in order to suggest that his country music is for, by, and about white trash” (2001: 24).

The country music everyman’s working class roots lend him authenticity, and so the expression of this ordinariness is an important theme. This is a point of difference between country and hip-hop; the rapper, due to his race and his background, is cast as the everyman by larger society. Conversely, country singers make a point of defying social pressures to maintain connections to working class culture. Of course, rappers are also eager to emphasise the continued relationship they have with their own community, but this is expressed in conjunction with the contradictory desire to escape their marginalised circumstances. Nonetheless, even in regard to their use of the everyman, hip-hop and country share notable commonalities.

This is not to suggest that there is some kind of closeness between hip hop and country culture; indeed there seems to be less creative and fan base intermingling between the two than is found between most popular music genres. Yet the common approaches and ideas shared by these essentially folk musics suggests that the white rural poor and the black urban poor have, regardless of their stylistic differences, found remarkably similar ways to negotiate living on the margins of American life. The common archetypes of the outlaw and the everyman allow these communities to redefine and take ownership of the stereotypes made about them.

In 2008, four years after the release of the Nelly and Tim McGraw collaboration, a less commercially successful and decidedly unusual take on the hip-hop/country hybrid hit radio. The song was a blues-folk rave up by the famed rapper Snoop Dogg. Over rustic guitar strumming, he introduced the tune with, in rap parlance, a shout out to an O.G.: “I’d like to dedicate this record right here to my main man Johnny Cash, a real American gangsta” Snoop drawled, before speak-singing a series of hip-hop and country signifiers revolving around substance abuse, pimping and cowboy culture. The Californian rapper’s concoction seemed to suggest rural whites and urban blacks have more in common than they might have thought. In the words of Snoop Dogg: “Grand Ole Opry, here we come.”

References

Breihan T. 2008, Country-Rap: A Secret History, New York: The Village Voice, (accessed November 13, 2008)

Billboard.com n.d., Artist Chart History – Nelly, Nielsen Business Media

Ching B. 2001, Wrong’s What I Do Best, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Dimitriadis G. 1996, “Hip Hop: From Live Performance to Mediated Narrative” in Forman M. & Neal M. A. (eds.) 2004, That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, New York: Routledge

Dyson M. E. 2001, Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur, New York: Basic Civitas Books

Forman M. 2000, “’Represent’: Race, Space, and Place in Rap Music” in Forman M. & Neal M. A. (eds.) 2004, That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, New York: Routledge

Fox A. A. 2004, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture, Durham: Duke University Press

Half Time 2006, Hip Hop Icon Series: GZA, Halftime Online (accessed November 13 2008)

Malone B. C. 2002, Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class, Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Malone B. C. 2002a, Country Music U.S.A.: Second Revised Edition, Austin: University of Texas Press

Perry I. 2004, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, Durham: Duke University Press

Peterson R. A. 1997, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Reid S. 2004, Tim McGraw On Nelly Duet: “Nothin’ Country About The Song But It Was Fun”, Country Music Television (accessed November 13 2008)

Rose, T. 1994 Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America Hanover: University Press of New England

Sanneh K. 2005, Ebony and Ivory Learn to Share Country Home, The New York Times, May 5 2005

Schumacher T. G. 1995, “‘This is a Sampling Sport’: Digital Sampling, Rap Music and the Law in Cultural Production” in Forman M. & Neal M. A. (eds.) 2004, That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, New York: Routledge

Screwing forever

2009-01-27T20:44:00.003+11:00

Wolf Like Me (Chopped and Screwed by the Saturday Club

I know you guys love it when I actually do what I'm meant to do with this blog, that, of course, being chop and screw rock 'n' roll songs. If you click on my horrible MSPaint artwork up there (it's almost as bad as the actual Cookie Mountain artwork), you'll get my remix of TV on the Radio's "Wolf Like Me."

I'm quite pleased with the way this one turned out. Some songs can only be slowed down so much before they lose any semblance of being music, but "Wolf Like Me" is intricate enough that you can smear it out seemingly forever.

I would write something about the actual song, but I am very well aware that anyone who tries to write about TV on the Radio ends up sounding extraordinarily stupid, so instead I'll just link to the most recent time I wrote about TV on the Radio (sounding extraordinarily stupid doing so), when I named "Wolf Like Me" the second best song of 2006.

Get on that ship and sail back to me

2009-01-26T23:59:00.000+11:00

You remember my buddy Bonnie "Prince" Tyler? The guy who looks a lot like me except he has a gigantic Rick Ross-esque beard? He's written a story about Dick Cheney and Radiohead's OK Computer, and it's published at The Passion of the Weiss. The Prince would appreciate it if you took a look.

Little Birdy ft. Paul Kelly - Brother

It's Australia Day, so today's post shall not be very detailed. In lieu of cogent musical analysis, I shall offer you an MP3. See, if you have any kind of music blog at all, it is a guarantee that publicists will hunt you down and try to make you listen to all kinds of bands you don't give a shit about. And they'll attach truly terrible copy. And the one time I do find something interesting, and push my luck by asking for a promo, though find out I live in Australia and then act like I don't exist.

So I got kind of excited when a publicist based in Australia sent me an MP3 of an Australian band that I actually kind of like. Little Birdy are fronted by West Australian Katy Steele. You might have heard of her brother, Luke Steele, the one in the Sleepy Jackson and Empire of the Sun.

Little Birdy are a quite nice pop rock band who are good except for the times they appear to believe that singing and writing your own pop rock songs excuses you from the obligation to sing and write enjoyable pop rock songs. Fortunately, "Brother" is an enjoyable song.

It veers more to the country-folk side of things than my previous favorite Little Birdy songs, like the 2003 single "Baby Blue." The sparse acoustic guitar and Steele's stark vocal are a little reminiscent of fellow sandgropers The Waifs. Things start getting exciting when half way through Steele lets out a brief whoop, introducing a bracing, clattering percussion track, scoring the tune in half. A soothing harmonica, played by Paul Kelly eases away that painful rupture, and Kelly, whom I've blogged about before, adds his distinctive voice to Steele's final chorus. It's quite an impressive tune, and I've broken my rule about ignoring publicists to post it, so you should check it out. Apparently it's off a forthcoming album, but I don't know what it will be called or when it will be out. Sorry.

And hey, since it's Australia Day, why don't we look again at that flag I put up for last year's celebrations? Isn't it rather satisfying? Hope y'all had a good holiday.

They 'hind 'em, they 'hind 'em, they 'hind 'em.

2009-01-22T17:02:00.008+11:00

I'll be honest, guys. For those of you who don't know, Screw Rock 'n' Roll isn't exactly a big time music blog. I don't have a huge number of readers, and I'm not fantastic at updating frequently (perhaps these two things are connected). So, I'm kind of perturbed that within days of me posting a review critical of the NSW government and the Sydney Festival on my minor league blog, I find this appearing on my stats:

I believe the CCSU is the Central Corporate Services Department, an agency part of ServiceFirst. It isn't very clear what ServiceFirst does, but it cryptically says it "offer[s] a full range of services, increased capacity for maximising economies of scale and a commitment to harnessing new technologies for service improvement." And according to my traffic counter, it's got something to do with the NSW Premier's department.

So I write something critical about a NSW government event, and I get the Premier's staff stopping round for a look at my little-ass blog? I've got a message for them and their boss: Hey, Nathan Rees, Mr Premier. Thanks for stopping by. Glad to see you're interested in my thoughts on popular music. But how about you catch up with Screw Rock 'n' Roll on your own time, rather than wasting my taxes checking out the latest news on the blog sites when you should be working? You need something to do? Get this city a decent public transport system. And if you do want to keep tabs on what I'm saying about you, how about you leave a comment so I know you're stopping by next time? Then we can have a chat about what I have to say rather than you nosing around in the dark.

And, I'll tell you what. You don't have to worry about missing out on the latest Screw Rock 'n' Roll posts. I promise I'll still be updating in 2011 when you're ass is out of a job and you have all day to spend surfing the Internets.

I'll be goddamned if my rims ain't too

2009-01-20T20:26:00.003+11:00

We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

Congratulations, America

Sydney Festival: We think you're a joke

2009-01-19T20:05:00.000+11:00

If you take a look over to the side of this page, you'll notice I've got a Twitter feed going. Screw Rock 'n' Roll has now officially joined the microblogging age. I believe the inventor of such a thing won a Nobel Peace Prize or something. You can follow my minute-by-minute musings here. And while you're waiting me to update that feed, how about you read my long overdue Sydney Festival whinge?

Santogold
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
Sydney Festival 2009 First Night
College St/Hyde Park
Sydney
January 10, 2009

Just another first night at a Sydney extravaganza

If you live in New South Wales, you tend to expect anything associated with the state government to fail dismally. Actually, to be more precise, if you live outside of Sydney, you expect the state government not to know you're alive, while if you're in Sydney, you expect the state government to know you're alive, and, whether through negligence, stupidity or a carefully calibrated combination of the two, to make life as difficult as possible.

The currently running Sydney Festival isn't wholly operated by the NSW government, but if its First Night event was any indication, Premier Nathan Rees and co are sufficiently involved to have infected the proceedings with their unending capacity for incompetence.

I finished work on the night of January Saturday 10, and headed into the city to catch the First Night festivities, which featured the always irritating Melbourne group Cat Empire, A-Trak, Santogold, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, and Grace Jones. Also, there were a bunch of DJs you don't care about.

I got to the Hyde Park/Domain strip on the east side of the city at nine o'clock, immediately as Santogold was starting, so I didn't expect things to run one hundred percent smoothly, but I arrived to find a mess. The festival organizers had just closed off The Domain, where Grace Jones was to perform, meaning thousands of people were milling about looking for something else to do, apparently unaware that when the biggest city in the country promises a free show in a pretty damn big park with a lot of empty space, they didn't actually intend to let everyone in.

But that's OK. There were other acts to see. Acts like the Shaun Parker Projects, which sounds like the public housing block a New York rapper might claim to have hustled at, but in actuality was some kind of contemporary dance performance. All due respect to Sydneysiders with a passion for contemporary dance, but I feel pretty safe in saying the majority of folks weren't in the city to experience the marvels of Mr. Parker's choreography.

So, with five of the remaing six stages showing hippy drum circles or whatever, everyone who couldn't get into the Domain descended on Santogold. That's if they could find it. None of the stages were signposted, and in lieu of maps of the festival area, the organizers had apparently decided it would be more useful to put up advertisements for ANZ, the bank sponsoring proceedings. My advice: if ANZ's involvement with the Sydney Festival is any indication, giving them your money is not a good idea.

I said, "Lady what's your number"; she said "0-0-0"

In the end, though, I found Santogold, which would have been great, if only the police hadn't found her first. They were throwing up wide cordons around the College street stage where she was performing, and letting no one in (though plenty of folks were streaming out). I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why they considered this necessary; the number of people already at the stage, the number of people wanting to get to the stage, the stirring in the loins experienced by NSW politicians every time they see the boys in blue marching around. Whatever: the facts are that they had two gigantic inner-city parks and half a dozen city streets to put on a day's worth of shows, of which there were only about five a large number of people would want to see. And yes, if I wanted to see Santogold that badly, I could have shown up earlier or gone to one of her paying shows. But I can't help but feel if you need to call out 50 on horseback to constrain the crowd at a Santi White show — you know, a woman who writes songs for Ashlee Simpson — if you need the po-pos to lock that shit down, You're Doing It Wrong.

Pictured: Horses. Not Pictured: Santogold

So I watched about half the Santogold set on a video screen I could see peering over the shoulder of a lady cop (no Mrs Officer). It sounded a lot like what listening to a Santogold CD sounds like.

Sharon Jones, Sydney

Fortunately, Sharon Jones was in less demand and was considerably more exciting. I found Ms Jones and band after a long and fruitless search for the stage at which they were to perform. (Eventually two volunteers appeared to tell me they did not have a map, but could direct me to the show that I was looking for.) Jones was introduced by the leader of the Dap Kings, and listening to their lively funk on a warm night beneath a glowing Sydney skyline, I began to feel maybe the night would turn out OK.

And it did, I guess. I don't think I've ever been part of a more bourgie audience than the one at that Jones show; it was all smart casual shirts and glasses of white wine, except for one aging boomer who, on Jones' entrance, tried to adopt an African-American accent, bellowed "Sing it, Sistah!" and spent the remainder of the set flailing his arms around with whatever it is that is the exact polar opposite of rhythm. I removed myself from his presence very rapidly.

Even if the Dap Kings at times seemed to absorb the gentility of their surroundings, their tight, energetic rhythms cooling off into something more appropriate as background music for a picnic in the park, Sharon Jones made sure to never let up. She flirted, teased, lectured the men and conspired with the women she plucked from the audience, and finally, seeming to have exhausted every other possibility, took off her high heels and wilded out in a dance that she claimed was half-African, and half Native-American.

But I can't help but feel that even as good a singer as Jones is, and as tight a unit as her band is, she would seem nearly quite so spectacular if she were not the only one doing this sort of thing. When you're one of the only acts in the game doing that kind of late '60s funk/soul properly, and your competitors are disgracefully tepid interlopers like Amy Winehouse, how could you not seem brilliant by comparison? Is it unfair to critique the Dap Kings for not being as good as, say, the Memphis Groove, even if they do sound genuinely exciting during their shows?

But even with those doubts playing in the back of my mind, I cannot describe the show as anything less than thoroughly enjoyable. Whether upbeat or soulful or both at once, Jones wrought excellence from even her less memorable songs. And when she finished with one of her best, the title track for her most recent album, 2007's 100 Days, 100 Nights, her set achieved something seemingly impossible for a festival run by the NSW government: it was tight, proficient, and completed without a police officer in sight.

John Darnielle Resplendent

2009-01-10T00:17:00.006+11:00

Happy 2009, y'all. I probably should have spent December updating you on all the exciting things I've been doing, but I didn't, partly because I was doing exciting things and partly because... well, you know how it is with this blog. I think you'd all get nervous if I updated too often.

But if you're looking some new years reading with a 2008 flavor, why not check out Metal Lungies' Beat Drop feature, which has a bunch of excellent writers picking their favorite Pimp C beats? If you really need to be sold on it, not only does it include a few hurriedly thrown together (but still undeniably brilliant, of course) contributions from myself. Even more enticingly, Bun-B, Pimp C's partner in Underground Kingery, shows up to pick and comment on his favorite Pimp C productions. And, if after that you still can't get enough of Pimp C's beatmaking (and if you are satiated, smoke something bitch and get ready for round two, huh?), go over to Cocaine Blunts, where Noz, who also contributed to the Metal Lungies write-up, has compiled a big zip file of Pimp C production.

I've also been writing about some of the best music of 2008 for The Passion of the Weiss. There's a good chance I'll be writing other things there over this coming year, see keep an eye on it. For The Passion's Top 50 Albums of '08 list, I discussed The Black Keys' Strange Times (#35), The Hold Steady's Stay Positive (#23), Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours (#14) and The Kills' Midnight Boom (#13). Go there for MP3s and great writing from even people who are not me.

Also at the Passion, I wrote about The Veronicas' "Untouched," as part of The Best 25 Non-Hip Hop Songs of 2008 (M-Z edition). The A-L list is good too, even though I'm not writing about anything in it. (Fuck the first half of the alphabet.) And because I write about hip-hop too, if you go take a look at The Passion's Best 25 Hip Hop Songs of 2008 list, you'll find my thoughts on The Game's "My Life" (#24) and B.O.B.'s "Fuck You" (#21, though it's my favorite song of the year) Each of those lists is also up on the L.A. Weekly's Play Blog, so I guess I'm part of the Los Angeles media industry now? I can't wait for my first Hollywood party. I'm holding auditions for my Entourage as we speak. There is a good chance I'm actually the Turtle of my own entourage.

And finally, at the now deceased What Was It Anyway, I argue that No Age's Nouns is quite enjoyable and Portishead's Third really isn't. Anyone who disagrees with me, including the other writers in that article, is wrong.

And now, in case you still haven't got enough of reading about what I did and thought in December, let's talk about this:

I saw The Mountain Goats play the Manning Bar quite a while back now; it was actually the night before I saw Kanye West and Nas. But I held my review off, trying to get it published somewhere that would pay me, something which never happened. And then I got caught up in writing all that stuff I've linked to above. But if we all pretend that I've dug out a highly sought-after rarity from my archives, it's not going to matter that I'm putting up a review of a show that happened more than a month ago. Besides, if you behave yourselves and read this without complaint, I may consider writing up the Santogold/Sharon Jones/Grace Jones shows I'm going to tomorrow night.

The Mountain Goats
Manning Bar
Sydney
December 5, 2008

Not quite ready for his close-up

On Friday night at the University of Sydney’s Manning Bar, one of John Darnielle’s fans was unhappy. Darnielle, the singer, song-writer, and at times, sole member of indie rock group the Mountain Goats had just announced he would play a love song.

“Hush,” Darnielle defended himself. Love songs are lovely. Besides, he explained, the lovers in this song are doomed. “If it’s any consolation.”

The audience cheered, satisfied at this, and the Mountain Goats began “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones,” a song with such romantic sentiments as “[we] treated the days as though they’d kill us if they could.”

Doom is a common state for Darnielle’s characters. Drug addicted, outcast or mentally ill, they teeter on the brink of ruin. But Mountain Goats’ songs are characterised by vitality, not misery; for Darnielle, disaster and liberation are not only closely tied, they are inseparable.

On “Dance Music,” a rousing tune refashioned tonight with a slight calypso lilt, he sings of retreating from fear and violence into his record collection. “You’re the last best thing I got going,” he begs a lover, and the audience finished his plea with charged morbidity: “And I don’t want to die alone!”

“Let me down gently,” the singer continued, anything but downtrodden.

Darnielle began the Mountain Goats as a solo project, recording his music live to cassette tape, and although today he makes his albums in studios and tours with a full band, his tunes still retain their ramshackle origins. As usual, he had arranged the set list for that night only hours before, which at one point caused him to express surprise at his own choice. He usually played “You or Your Memory” with a full band, he explained. What had he been thinking? Despite his doubts, he performed the contemplative tune adeptly.

The Mountain Goats split their set between a solo portion for Darnielle and acoustic full-band and electric sections, but each consisted of the same spare elements: Darnielle’s clear, ringing vocal and driving guitar chords. His voice has two styles: a hushed recitation and an exhilarated holler. When he launches into the latter, he sounds caught halfway between pain and overpowering joy.

Darnielle details his songs with complete narratives and multi-faceted characters. That attentiveness came through in his performance. His take on the old “Hello Sydney” rock ‘n’ roll trick was to re-write one song, “Pigs that Ran Straightaway Into the Water, Triumph Of” to include a local suburb: “I come from Newtown, so all your threats are empty,” he sang at that tune’s close, to an appreciative roar from his audience.

In glasses and with conservatively-cut dark hair, Darnielle is slightly reminiscent of the American parody talk show host Stephen Colbert, and like Colbert, on stage, the Mountain Goat has a humour and ease not suggested by his bookish looks. Clad in suit jacket and an open collar, he joked about his Catholicism, bantered with the audience about his ostensibly severe, though, by all measures unapparent, jet lag, and gave tips for betting on boxing. (Manny Pacquiao will defeat Oscar De La Hoya, he said, but cautions that he is not putting money on such an outcome.) His patter, like his lyrics, was conversational, and his shaggy dog stories could have almost been actual songs had they been accompanied by instrumentation.

The show ended with a quintessential Mountain Goats tune, and thanks to frequent Triple J play, something close to a local hit. In “This Year,” about growing up with an abusive parent, Darnielle sings of driving home drunk, “picturing the look on my step father’s face, waiting for the bad things to come.” The audience joined him for the chorus. “I am gonna make it through this year,” they shouted ecstatically, then added the characteristic Mountain Goats clause: “If it kills me.”

She knew about these wooden boys, it's an empty love to fill the void.

2008-12-09T02:45:00.007+11:00

Kanye West/Nas
Acer Arena
Sydney
December 6, 2008

(Picture swiped from FasterLouder)

I'm a reasonable man, get off my case

I wonder how Nas felt about opening for Kanye West on Saturday night. He’s been in the game close to twenty years, remains popular, and yet still had to warm-up the crowd for a star who released his debut album ten years after Nas cleaved hip-hop into pre- and posr-Illmatic periods. On a certain level, it is impressive that Nas could command such a high profile spot on an arena show for an audience on the other side of the world this far into his career, since few of his early ’90s contemporaries retain the relevance he does, but I can’t imagine a line-up like this appearing in many other genres. As big as Coldplay is, they’re not going to have R.E.M. playing support any time soon.

But Nas’ position on the bill was both a testament to his durability and representative of his inability to transcend hip-hop and become a genuine pop star, like Jay-Z, or Kanye himself. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is not as if Nas had not been trying for that position for a good portion of his career. He seems comfortable in his role as hip-hop elder statesman, but it is nonetheless a consolation prize for a superstardom he was never able to properly attain.

Bounding across the stage at Sydney’s Acer Arena on Saturday, Nas looked — and sounded —smaller than his settings. He was wearing a crisp, close-fitting white tee, chain and sunglasses and still managed to look over-dressed, and his attempts to create the kinds of grand narrative moments that fill cavernous concert halls misfired. He did “Black President,” and it sounded great, but it never really became inspiring, even when he followed it with the chorus from his collaboration with Young Jeezy, “My President.” Australia is wildly pro-Barack Obama, but Nas enthusing about the President-elect elicited a comparatively muted response from the audience. When he went on to criticize the mayor and the governor and other politicians, it was odd; did he mean specifically David Paterson and Michael Bloomberg, and if so, how were Sydney-siders meant to react to criticisms of politicians they barely knew and who affected them even less? Of course, Nas was trying to tell us he felt different about Obama to other politicians, but somehow he managed to find a way to make the election of a man the entire world is excited about seem like a distant, distinctly American event.

(Picture swiped from FasterLouder)

Oh I think they like... he.

Nas’ music isn’t really arena music. His inability to transcend hip-hop means his music remains an indelible part of hip-hop's fabric, something the genre doesn't have to share with wider society; the best moments from Nas' career tend to be the ones that reflect his and his music’s birth-place. The teeming metropolis of New York is a city of small spaces, and its hip-hop reflects that. It is built to be heard in subway cars and cramped apartments, through headphones or boom boxes. That Nas’ music is constructed from little more than samples and his intricate rhymes meant that his decision to perform with a full band accentuated his awkward fit with the venue.

Still, he has a deep catalogue, and with less than an hour to perform, his set was stuffed with highlights. Songs like “Hate Me Now” helped; even if Nas is not arena-sized, “Carmina Burana” is. And the pairing of “Got Ur Self a…” and “Made You Look” toward the end of the set saw him getting into a groove that compensated for his fruitless attempt to turn a lyric like “My first album had no famous guest appearances/the outcome: I’m crowned the best lyricist” into a sing-along moment. (He also added a snatch of “Shoot ‘Em Up” between these two songs, using it as an opportunity to endorse gun control, which was weird, to say the least.) The set culminated with a fantastic “One Mic”; the song’s slow build and towering intensity were suited for the setting in a way much of the rest of his material is not. “All I need is one mic,” Nas raps during the song: six words that define his entire career. Nas has an uncertain relationship with big ideas and grand concepts, but he’s never had a problem with words. The best moment of his set came when he introduced one of the earliest songs he recorded: “Live at the BBQ.” A beat, some rhymes and one mic: that’s all he ever really needed.

(Picture swiped from the Sydney Morning Herald)

Let's get lost tonight.

Unlike Nas, Kanye West does make arena-sized music. Last time I saw him, at the Hordern Pavillion in 2006, he was trying to prove himself as a rap star. He constantly urged us to throw our diamonds up, tying himself to the hip-hop legacy of the Roc-a-Fella record label, and though he brought a string quartet with him, his intention seemed to be to distinguish as a rapper of note. Two and a half years later, he played a venue about ten times bigger, and he didn’t even need to try to prove it: Kanye West is bigger than hip-hop.

His music is made for arenas now, and it sounded incredible, from the opening chords of “Welcome to Heartbreak” on. His past two albums in particular are designed for larger venues; the music is expansive, the emotions are palpable but broad and the lyrics are simple and direct. The synth sounds Kanye has been working with are stark and monolithic, complementing the gigantic banks of LED lights that surrounded his stage. “My friend showed me pictures of his kids/And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs” are lines so simple and direct that a ten year old could sing along to them. At this show, many ten year olds were singing along to them.

Songs from West’s new album, 808s and Heartbreak, bookended the show, but their influence soaked through his entire set. The title of the album is misleading: it is a record about alienation, not a break-up album (I don’t think its sound is particularly characterized by 808s either). The album revolves around the death of Kanye's mother and his separation from his fiancée Alexis Phifer, but the central theme is that without these people he has lost all elements of normalcy in his life. That’s why I don’t have a problem with the simplistic way he expresses his sentiments; he’s trying to portray his inability to operate in everyday society rather than detail a relationship falling apart. 808s is more like Kid A than Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker, and as with the Radiohead album, he expresses his alienation with aesthetic choices rather than complex lyrics: distancing vocal affects; flat, all-encompassing blocks of sound; and cold, artificial instrumentation.

Even though the majority of the show’s running time consisted of older material, West redesigned his earlier work so it was consistent with the 808s aesthetic. The soothing guitar loop on “Hear ‘Em Say” was replaced with a skeletal, reverberating drum beat, and the deep groove of “Get ‘Em High” was refashioned into a strange and menacing pulse. Already grim songs like “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” became even bleaker and more detached. When West did return to his trademark soul, as on “Champion” or “Through the Wire,” the results were regal and imposing. They sounded more like the product of Just Blaze’s high-energy bombast than Kanye’s warmth.

This made for an astounding performance. West performed with charged intensity, and his new arrangements were thrilling and kinetic. He barely said a word to the audience all night, but nevertheless held us engrossed throughout his set. He was supported by a band (complete with Daft Punk-reminiscent face guards), including up to four percussionists, who adeptly recreated the massive tribal drumming on the album, but this show belonged to Kanye West. The rapper dominated the proceedings, intent on shaping the experience of every single second for every single person in the room. The result was astonishing.

It was immense fun too; the darker overtones West gave the music didn’t stop us from having a great time. But Kanye himself didn’t seem to enjoy a minute of it. He was impassioned and earnest, and at times angry, as in a lengthy freestyle during his performance of “Put On,” in which he scathingly attacked critics who disapproved of his new direction, and castigated the media’s coverage of Britney Spears. He didn’t even seem to enjoy his genuinely celebratory songs; In “American Boy” and “Good Life,” he seemed to be mourning a carefree past he could no longer access.

(Picture swiped from FasterLouder)

Flashing. Lights.

When in the second encore he returned to new material, things got distinctly weird. In “Amazing,” he didn’t sound amazed, he sounded disconnected, rapping the same phrases over and over. No longer the poppy second single, “Heartless” was brutal and mean-spirited (he cursed out Phifer as a “bitch,” the word carrying more weight in this instance than on a thousand other casually misogynistic rap songs) and by the end he was veritably screaming “Why’d she have to be so heartless?” And when he finally finished the show, with “Love Lockdown,” things went wrong.

The booming bass kicks swelled through the arena, and Kanye, autotuned-up, sung through until the tribal drums kicked in, at which point he decided he wanted to start again. The drums continued for a while but eventually died out until only the bass thump could be heard, and West began over. At the same point as before though, West cut his performance off.

He eventually restarted Love Lockdown three times, explaining that he was having wardrobe difficulties: they took the fucking outfit I wanted all the way back to my dressing room, he seethed. Eventually, he did perform “Love Lockdown” in its entirety, though I couldn’t tell if he ever got the clothes he wanted. It was a fantastic performance, as incredible as the rest of the night had been, but then again, the first few times he started the song sounded great too. As “Love Lockdown” finished, West bade us good night and strode off into the darkness alone beneath the gigantic video screen above the stage. The band continued playing those massive rattling drums, and an arena-filled with people cheered them on, a thrilling finish to an incredible night. But the star of the show was nowhere to be seen. I’m sorry, Mr. West is gone.

Setlist: Welcome to Heartbreak/Paranoid/Through the Wire/Champion/I Wonder/Heard ‘Em Say/Get ‘Em High/Can’t Tell Me Nothing/Put On/Put On (Freestyle)/Diamonds from Sierra Leone/Flashing Lights/Homecoming/All Falls Down/Touch the Sky/Gold Digger/Good Life

Encore 1: Jesus Walks/Stronger

Encore 2: American Boy/Amazing/Heartless/Pinocchio’s Story/Love Lockdown

We screwed it for cheap, that's the re-up anthem

2008-11-09T15:49:00.000+11:00

I had a re-up request for my old Coldplay remix, which, upon listening to this week, I've decided is one of the better things I've done. For those of you who weren't on board two years back when I first put this up, this is your history lesson.

Fix You (Chopped and Screwed by the Saturday Club)

And just so my long-suffering original fans have something new to listen to as well, I'll offer you an Asher Roth remix I made the other day.

Asher Roth - The Reading (The Saturday Club Remix)
The Saturday Club - The Reading (Instrumental)

Now, I don't quite get the Asher Roth thing. From the little I've heard, he just sounds like some garbage ass Crazy Town kind of frat boy rapper, only he missed the nu-metal train by about a decade. I can't hate on "I Love College" too much, because there's a limit on how awful a song built on a Weezer loop can be. As far as songs about how much of an awesome party tertiary education is, though Brad Paisley's "College" beats Roth's track hands down.

But despite my ambivalence for Roth as a rapper, XXL's Scratch blog posted up an a cappella of his song "The Reading" and asked for remixes, and I struggle to say no to any a cappella. So, check out my version of the Asher Roth track, and, as a special bonus, I've put up my instrumental. That way, if you can't deal with Roth's rhyming, you still get to appreciate all my hard work and production brilliance. And if there are rappers out there who want to freestyle over my beat, have at it, but make sure you send me the results. saturdayclubproductions [at] gmail.com, please.

It's been a long time coming...

2008-11-04T22:08:00.005+11:00

Sam Cooke - A Change is Gonna Come

Yes it is.

Meanwhile, over at The Passion of the Weiss, who you may recall co-hosted Summer Jamz '08 with me, I'm guest-contributing a post about rappers, money, and politics. Click to find out which rapper has donated enough money to nominate a Secretary in the new Administration (Hint: it's not DMX).

Also, my American readers should probably vote.

Feel like a Black Republican?

2008-10-07T16:57:00.004+11:00

We all know it's true, but regardless: ouch.

From Politico, in a story about Barack Obama's subtle efforts to appeal to black voters:

In the largely black precincts of those metropolises ... megastars including Jay-Z, Russell Simmons, and LeBron James have led massive rallies...

and later:

Obama sent lesser-known celebrities like ... rapper NAS

Yeah... Nas lost.

Sarah Palin is here for the Party

2008-09-15T01:28:00.008+10:00

Will leave the Christmas lights up at the White House all year long

A lot of Democrats don’t get Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. They see her as a novice frontier Governor with more interest in moose hunting than foreign policy (all of which is true), and think that the big chunk of the United States that has found itself smitten by her has lost its collective mind.

To understand the appeal of Sarah Palin, it’s best not to think of her as a politician. Her role in John McCain’s campaign thus far has not been to bolster the governing credentials of his prospective administration (the way, for instance, George W. Bush used Dick Cheney in 2000 and Barack Obama is using Joe Biden in 2008). Palin, at this point, is a star, a brand, and, as loathsome as the McCain camp apparently finds such people, a celebrity.

But Palin is not just any celebrity. Palin is Gretchen Wilson.

Wilson released her first album, Here For the Party, in 2004, and its lead single was the raucous “Redneck Woman.” The song introduced Wilson as a down home firebrand, a tough, unashamedly country woman who embraced her roots and celebrated her local culture. She called herself a redneck with the same pride Jeff Foxworthy did in his “You Might Be a Redneck” routine, though Foxworthy was more obviously self-effacing than Wilson. While Foxworthy’s fans might have wryly and appreciatively recognized the stereotypes the comedian peddled, Wilson’s redneck was something even the most effete city-dweller would aspire to, at least for the four minutes it took to listen to her song.

“Redneck Woman” could be an anthem for Palin; it is certainly more appropriate than Heart’s “Barracuda,” which the Republicans are currently using at campaign events (it’s in reference to her nickname as a high school basketballer). Take a look at the chorus, which seems as designed to respond to Palin's Democratic detractors as it is to Wilson’s haters:

'Cause I'm a redneck woman
I ain't no high class broad
I'm just a product of my raising
I say, 'hey ya'll' and 'yee-haw'
[...]
So here's to all my sisters out there keeping it country
Let me get a big 'hell yeah' from the redneck girls like me

Note that, like Palin, Wilson frames her blue collar background as intrinsically feminist; because she identifies as a woman as well as a member of the working class, declaring her pride in her roots becomes a pro-female stance. That’s why Palin is particularly appealing to Republican women who have no interest in the policy proscriptions of progressive feminism like abortion rights (which Palin opposes) or enforcement of equal pay (which McCain voted against as a senator). Palin is to Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi as Wilson is to, say, Ani DiFranco or Liz Phair, but once feminism adopted the politics of identity rather than being purely policy focused, any of these women could define themselves as feminist, despite having possibly very different ideas about the role of women in society.

At the end of the first verse, Wilson sings a line almost directly applicable to Palin: “Some people look down on me, but I don't give a rip/I'll stand barefooted in my own front yard with a baby on my hip.” To my knowledge, Palin hasn’t been sighted barefooted and nursing young Trig, but her response to criticism is the same as Wilson’s. “You might think I’m trashy, a little too hardcore,” Wilson sings later. “But in my neck of the woods, I’m just the girl next door.”

Of course, Palin is more polished than Wilson; as a politician, she has to be (and Wilson, as a country singer, shouldn’t be). But both women hold a similar appeal, and, both are undoubtedly appealing. Palin can deliver an engaging speech, and do so likeably, regardless of your opinion of the content. Wilson is a blast of a listen; she’s a charismatic presence and hugely enjoyable. And she doesn’t mind a bit of wowser-baiting immorality, either. In “All Jacked Up,” the title track from her second album, she sings of having too much to drink, and smashing up her truck when she tries to drive home intoxicated. The story is one of a lesson learned, but Wilson sings it like she hasn’t learned a thing. Meanwhile, “Skoal Ring,” also on All Jacked Up, celebrates chewing tobacco like no one has ever heard of cancer. Wilson wants you to know she’s a rebel.

Country listeners, even the conservative ones, don’t care, just like they don’t care that Palin’s eldest daughter Bristol has pre-marital sex. Palin and Wilson are redneck women, and if that means the occasional D.U.I. (as in the case of Palin’s husband Todd) or teenage pregnancy, they don’t give a rip.

Not every Wilson fan is a Christian conservative, and for that matter, nor is every redneck. Palin will need to capture voters outside the Christian Right. Is being a country girl-next-door good enough to do it?

The only difference between rallying and tailgating is how much you've had to drink

If “Redneck Woman” is Wilson’s convention speech, an introduction to her personality and style, the song “Politically Uncorrect,” from All Jacked Up and featuring Merle Haggard, is her policy platform. The lyrics use the language of the right wing, but the message is potentially centrist. Take a look at Kelefa Sanneh’s analysis of the song:

“If you're looking for a more familiar example of [country music’s] politics, you couldn't do much better than "Politically Uncorrect," the new video from Gretchen Wilson. She has built a successful and hugely entertaining career on two albums full of songs about her "redneck" pride, and this video lays it on thick. "I guess my opinion is all out of style," she sings. And she turns her conservative values into a typically rousing sing-along: "And I'm for the Bible/ And I'm for the flag/ And I'm for the working man." To prove it, she sings the song with Merle Haggard, who was long ago enshrined as a human embodiment of good-ol'-boyism.

[...]

[Wilson] uses politically charged words and images — "redneck," "rebel," the Confederate flag — while just about draining them of any specific political meaning. She brashly announces that she's "politically uncorrect," but the things she sings about seem guaranteed not to cause offense: not just the flag and the Bible and the troops, but also preachers and farmers and the working man. No doubt she also enjoys puppy dogs and long walks on the beach.

Ms. Wilson even includes on her list "the single mom raising her kids." That's a neat reversal: in the early 1990's, during the short-lived controversy over "Murphy Brown," it was the politically correct types who were defending single motherhood. But then, that's the seductive thing about Ms. Wilson's world: you don't have to be incorrect to be "uncorrect." Everyone's a rebel.”

Palin, ideologically, is not so centrist. However, while,as the McCain camp would prefer, the campaign remains focused on her personality rather than the issues, that will not matter. You don’t need to be a dyed-in-the-wool Republican to enjoy “Politically Uncorrect” (I’m not and I do), and John McCain is surely hoping that you don’t need to be a Republican to admire Sarah Palin.

But being a Redneck Woman and little else may not be the best thing for Palin. It wasn’t for Wilson. By the time her third album, One of the Boys, came out, her good old girl persona was growing stale. “There Goes the Neighborhood” trod over old ground with no new insight, “You Don’t Have to Go Home” was a less exciting take on “All Jacked Up” and the title track said the same thing her past hits had without the vitality or spark. Her exciting choruses now sounded like she was covering talking points.

The best song on the album was one of the few that explored new territory; “Come to Bed,” a weary duet with John Rich (who this year released “Raising McCain,” a song celebrating the Republican candidate). The song was about a couple who reconcile because they’ve been together too long to not, and while she had covered similar ground on earlier material (“I Don’t Feel Like Loving You Today”) she hadn’t done so with this level of emotion or nuance. But the album was dominated with too many weak versions the sort of songs we’d heard from Wilson before, and record buyers responded accordingly; One of the Boys sold a fraction of the amount her previous albums did, particularly her debut.

The precise cost of driving your truck while all jacked up

Being a Redneck Woman or a Hockey Mom is interesting enough to capture the attention of record buyers and voters. Sarah Palin will need to do something Gretchen Wilson couldn’t if she is to keep their attention. If all she has to offer the public is her personality, they will tire of her by election day. The Obama camp seems to have realized this, and is keeping its attention directed at the candidate on the top of the ticket.

The Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert sees Palin as the American Idol candidate. Rather, she’s the Gretchen Wilson candidate, and Palin has done little to define herself as anything more than a Redneck Woman. It won’t be enough to save John McCain this November. If he is to beat Barack Obama, he will need more than the Mayor of Wasilla on his side.

Jonathan’s in Sydney and he ain’t returning

2008-08-09T00:07:00.003+10:00

Well, I am returning, at least, I'm returning to posting here. As you can tell from the very illustrative picture above, I'm in Sydney. This is where I live now. Only problem is, I don't have an apartment until next week, and I don't have a regular internet connection until sometime after that. Apologies for the lack of action round these parts, but as soon as I get my Internets working, I'll get started on bringing Screw Rock 'n' Roll back to life.

The air on Railroad's still making the same sound

2008-07-19T00:45:00.006+10:00

The Saturday Club - Seven Months on the Run

I quit my job today, so I sure as hell ain't going to spend tonight writing. In lieu of any other material to post, I guess I'll just have to go ahead and leak some more of my mixtape (Emerald City! Coming as soon as I get my computer fixed!). Here's a song that I've had sitting around for a couple years, though this recording was only done a month or so ago.

The only thing lesser than Os is Mike Vicks

2008-07-18T03:49:00.004+10:00

I may have a few more Summer Jamz left for you yet, so check back over the next couple days. When it' definitely all done, I'll put up a guide for the whole thing, so keep an eye out out for that. Meanwhile, remember when I posted half a 7-song meme, promising to complete it later? Well, you regular readers know that I always keep my promises, and I always keep them ridiculously late, so, enough of the intro, here's my part II of the following:

That's 7 grams for you fools who ain't hip

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring."

No Age - Things I Did When I Was Dead

I didn't like No Age, or its album Nouns, much when I first heard it, and while I still don't think it's anywhere near the 9.2 Pfork gave it, I have begun to quite enjoy a few of its songs. My other two favorites, "Teen Creeps," and "Ripped Knees," won me over by eventually convincing me they were pop-punk with extra fuzz, but "When I Was Dead" is something quite different. It's soft and dreamy, a mechanical drone leavened with beautiul piano chords. They caress the discord, molding it into something gently but definitely melodic. I've heard fans describe No Age as both ambient and noise; this track comes closest to conforming to that description.

Weezer - Heart Songs

Peo ple don't like Weezer's "Heart Songs." I get that. It's embarassing. Music fandom is embarassing. We're all deifying some bullshit made by (mostly) braindead retards who can bang out a tune on a guitar or whatever and holler out some words that we want to sing along to. And we can be forgiven for enjoying that. But what we're all so embarassed to admit, and what "Heart Songs" is more than happy to cop to, is that these compositions play such an important role in our lives, and with no real reason, either. Rivers Cuomo makes himself look stupid by admitting to what we all do anyway; find extraordinary meaning in pulpy pop culture. Even the supposed cream of pop music, like Bob Dylan, or the Beatles, can't compete with the likes of Shakespeare or Godard or Da Vinci or Tchaikovsky or Hemingway.

Indie rock fans, in particular, hate the facile, populist nature of our obsession being pointed out to us. They (we?) think they're more refined than the masses, and it hurts to be reminded we're quibbling over degrees of lowness in art. High Fidelity is loathed because it understands how infantile music obsessives can be, and celebrates it. That "The O.C." or Juno or any other similar piece of corporate ephemera could accurately reflect any segment of indie fandom was seen by those very fans as a travesty.

"Heart Songs" catalogues biographically music that has resonated for Cuomo: "Mr Springsteen said he had a Hungry Heart." When rappers do this, as in Ray Cash's "Bumpin' My Music" or Mr. Lif's "Return of the B-Boy," they can masquerade it as history, and Daft Punk's "Teachers" shields itself by means of the list, the vanguard of obsessives. Cuomo, however, explains nothing more than why the songs mean so much to him, and finishes by rejoicing that his band has made music that other people relate to in the same way he relates to the songs he has mentioned. That he interpolates a snatch of Weezer's own tune "Only in Dreams" suggests he has a pretty good idea of what one of those particularly fan-resonant songs might be.

The rest of The Red Album is pretty awful (remember when I wrote this? I can't believe "Pork and Beans" sucked me into thinking I should get excited about them again), but this is exactly what Weezer fans have been crying out for: a personal, emotional tune, rather than the glib distance that has characterized Weezer's past four albums.

Crystal Castles vs HEALTH - Crimewave

Should I be ashamed to admit that I first discovered this track, and by extension, Crystal Castles, on an episode of Gossip Girl? From what I'd heard previously of this duo, I thought it quite likely they wouldn't interest me in the slightest; reports of their music seemed to suggest they were unpleasant, unsubtle egotists. Perhaps they are, but this track is nonetheless suitable for soundtracking trashy teen soaps like Gossip Girl, and I mean that as a compliment. The cut-up, stuttering vocals and glassy bleeps make it more like mainstream club music than you'd expect of a pair of Canadian indie favorites; a lot of this isn't too far from Timbaland's work on Nelly Furtado's Loose (though, of course, a little more straightforward and a little more abrasive). I'm not sure what HEALTH has to do with it (another oft-talked about band whom I have not bothered to check out), but they and Crystal Castles have put together quite an addictive tune.

The Cool Kids - What Up Man

I won't get into convoluted analysis of hipster rap (as all analyses of hipster rap are), but I will get into the beat of this song: the cymbals are a voice saying "tick," the kick is a voice saying "bass" and in place of the snare is a voice saying "clap." It works, which is either astounding or completely obvious. The lyrics are pleasant inanities about going shopping at the grocery store combined with dialogue like "All I got is five dollars/So you broke, man?/I thought I had ten dollars!/So you broke, then" and absurd boasts ("I could go catfish-fishing and come up with a whale"). Because of the place they hold in contemporary hip-hop, it's easy to overthink the Cool Kids. "What Up Man," though, is not a complicated song, and trying to make it so obscures how easy it is to enjoy it.

Summer Jamz '08 #15: Sach O

2008-07-16T23:42:00.003+10:00

Summer Jamz ‘08 #15: Sach O
http://www.sendspace.com/file/josps9

Sach O blogs for Ohword.com where his angry rants make the natives restless. He can currently be found somewhere in Thailand but will be returning to North-America in August to record a pop album. We’re not sure if he’s joking.

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

1.The Beastie Boys – Mark on the Bus
2. Marlena Shaw – California Soul
3. The Stone Roses – Elephant Stone
4. Gal Costa – Lost in Paradise
5. Doris – Waiting at the Station
6. Happy Mondays – Hallelujah (MacColl mix)
7. Bucktown (Interlude)
8. Juvenile – Ghetto Children
9. Society of Soul ft. TLC – Changes
10. Main Ingredient – Summer Breeze
11. The Decemberists – Summersong
12. Fleet Foxes – Blue Ridge Mountains
13. The Pharcyde – She Said (Jay Dee Remix)
14. Friday Foster (Interlude)
15. The Mary Jane Girls – All Night Long
16. Tricky – You Don’t
17. De La Soul ft. Maceo Parker – I be Blowin’
18. The Notorious B.I.G – Juicy
19. Akhenaton ft. Fonky Family – Bad Boys de Marseilles
20. The Kinks – Sunny Afternoon
21. Of Montreal – An Eluardian Instance (Live)
22. Sach – Who’s the Deejay? (Madlib vs. Cheech n Chong)

Summer doesn’t mean much in the tropics, at least for visiting white people. Sure it rains more (less tourists, cheaper rooms) but the shift from “hotter than a 92 Dre beat” to “almost unbearable” isn’t quite the same as going from frosty to scorching. Back home (Montreal, that French place with the indie bands) summer is the single most important part of life, the 3 to 4 month window where it’s warm enough to go outside and the town suddenly explodes with festivals, street parties and every other imaginable excuse to get out and enjoy life before the icy hand of winter creeps back in. Summer out there makes people do crazy things, I’ve quit jobs over good weather and more than one demented drug binge has been undertaken solely because “it’s nice out”. Summer also results in radio hits that skirt the line between good and awful so subtly that it’s years before you realize in horror that Incubus and Noreaga are permanently associated with cherished memories. But if there’s one thing I’ve missed about summer back home on this trip (6 months and counting in Asia), it’s the cycle. The slow build from the minute the leaves are out to the last bacchanalian blowout come early September. With all of this in mind, here’s a mix dedicated to my favorite summer moments.

1. “The fuck-going-to-work song” The Beastie Boys – Mark on the Bus

A proper mixtape needs a proper intro just like a good summer needs that moment of clarity when you suddenly realize that you only live once and that welfare checks can pay the rent this go around. Keyboard Money Mark may be singing about heading to work for the man, but it sounds like he’s 3 miles high and building a b-ball court for a guy called MCA.

2. “The Opening credit song” Marlena Shaw – California Soul

Someone once said that mixtapes are how we score the films of our lives. Actually, lots of people have said that, usually after listening to entirely too much Phish. But if ever I need to match the title sequence of some long lost black 60’s coming of age story to a song, it’ll be Marlena Shaw’s California Soul. DJ Premier knows what’s up.

3. “The crazy night out song” The Stone Roses – Elephant Stone

I’ve met more than my fair share of British people while traveling through Asia and more or less every single one above the age of 25 has an undying love for this band. I knew they were big out there but I had no idea that the entire United Kingdom lost its virginity to their music while we were stuck with Milli Vanilli. Anyways, summer’s all about partying and while I don’t approve of Nu Rave, M.I.A or most UK dance music in general, this is a surefire classic.

4. “The morning after song” Gal Costa – Lost in Paradise

Everyone remembers the hangover, but no one ever gives props to those perfect mornings where the right combination of time, liquor and junk food leaves your digestive system perfectly unscathed. Gal Costa’s “Lost in Paradise” captures that feeling effortlessly, from the hazy horns of the intro to the slowly building verses to the explosive finale. The perfect song for when you’re feeling good enough to get up but don’t really need to.

5. “The Road Trip Song” Doris – Waiting at the Station

I’m cheating a bit with this one since it’s definitely inspired by my summer/winter abroad this year rather than my time in Montreal, but anyone who’s taken a road trip without a proper car can relate. Train stations aren’t nearly as romantic as their depictions in novels or films, but they’re not half bad places to people watch either. The Swedish soul singer Doris’ take on waiting around for one’s ride out of town after a winter slaving for the man is liberation music at it’s finest.

6. “The Drug Song” – Happy Mondays – Hallelujah (MacColl Mix)

Simply put, Sean Ryder’s drug intake puts anyone short of Keith Richards to shame. While this means that his attempted comeback at Coachella last year was a predictable disaster, it also made for some interesting music during his band’s early 90’s peak. Riding a mechanical rhythm, Hallelujah’s sacrilegious melding of drugs, dance and religion would be the perfect song for an Candy flip fueled freak-out if only the rest of the party remembered it.

7. “The interlude” – Bucktown

Interludes are what separate mixtapes from…better mixtapes with interludes. Plus summer’s all about seeing flicks with the crew. Hopefully your viewing is half as bad ass as Bucktown.

8. “The Bounce Song” – Juvenile – Ghetto Children

Ok, I know what you’re thinking: “did this East Coast elitist motherfucker just put a Juvenile song on his tape?!” (Alternately, “that’s technically not a bounce song”). To this I answer, “yes I did” (and alternately, “I don’t care”). Like it or not, for the past 10 years every summer’s had its southern anthem and as far as I’m concerned, they were never better than Cash Money’s initial onslaught on the mainstream consciousness. I mean, just compare this album cut to Lollipop or anything by Yung Berg.

9. “The house-party slow jam” – Society of Soul ft. TLC - Changes

Try as I might, my house parties never managed to be quite as cool as Biggie’s “One More Chance” video. Maybe it’s because I don’t know any video hoes. Still, I always throw this on around 2AM in the blind hope that chicks will spontaneously make out with each other and that my pimp game will suddenly improve.

10. “The clean-up song” – The Main Ingredient – Summer Breeze

Cleaning up after house parties is a bitch. If you’re like me, you’re either coming down or entirely too hype for such a routine activity. But friends don’t let friends deal with random puke on their own. I promise that if you throw this bad boy on, the job won’t be half as bad and you’ll be done in time for sunrise and McDonalds breakfast.

11. “The white girl song” – The Decemberists – Summersong

Ok, so I win no points for originality here, but if you’ve ever dealt with quasi-arty white chicks, you know that’s the point. Making out with Colin Meloy warbling in the background after a date is probably up there with putting on a Peter Frampton or Foreigner record in the 70’s but if it gets me in, I got no shame. Although I draw the line at Maroon 5.

12. “The living-out-in-the-woods song” Fleet Foxes – Blue Ridge Mountains

Indie darlings they are and I’m not totally sold on the album but even I can’t deny just how dope “Blue Ridge Mountains” is. While I can’t front on how awesome Montreal gets in the summer, I always try to spend at least one week out in the mountains to really get away from it all. This will be the soundtrack for that expedition when I touch down back home.

13. “The laying-around-in-bed-with-her song” The Pharcyde – She Said (Jay Dee remix)

This one’s really all about the beat and chorus. Who cares if the Pharcyde are going on about rejection for the thousandth time? Dilla’s dropping an early gem and the hook is so smooth that your one night stand is onto round two before you know it.

14. “The Interlude redux” – Friday Foster

Keeping with the theme…

15. “The well known retro funk song” – Mary Jane Girls – All Night Long

Everyone from Redman to LL Cool J has bitten off a chunk of this Rick James produced classic and with good reason. Sure your parents probably recognize it and it might make an appearance at your cousin Jon Jon’s wedding but its one of the tightest, sexiest grooves of the 80’s and it’s not nearly as synthesized as your typical Prince jam. I stand by this one.

16. “The stoner song” – Tricky – You Don’t

Trip-Hop is supremely unpopular right now. I mean, even Portishead all but abandoned it for their newest album and they freaking invented the sound. It’s a shame, I’ll take heavy boom-bap drums, fat basslines and sexy vocals over 808’s, gurgling synths and annoying dance-floor call-and-response chants any day. Here’s a test: put this on when your pretentious music snob friends are around after everyone’s sufficiently high. Odds are, they’ll all ask what it is and recoil in horror when they realize that they actually *gasp* like an uncool record.

17. “The instrumental song” – De La Soul ft. Maceo Parker – I be Blowin’

Just in case you’re still high and don’t want to move after the last one. You know I take care of ya. Incidentally, with all the talk about Outkast and Lauryn Hill introducing genre bending pop elements to rap with their 98 releases, how come no one ever gives De La props for having the balls to let MACEO PARKER drop 5 minutes of funky jazz waaay back in 93? It’s a damn shame.

18. “The Feel-good classic rap song” – The Notorious B.I.G – Juicy

This Mp3 is actually ripped from my original “Ready to Die” cassette purchased in 95. No lie. Every summer tape needs at least one crazy known rap jam for everyone to sing along to. This is that jam. Interestingly enough, I notice that the “Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis” line gets people the most hyped these days. Videogame nostalgia stand up!

19. “The French rap song that Sach tries to push on us” – AKH ft. Fonky Family – Bad Boys de Marseilles.

Marseilles was to French Hip Hop as LA was to the States…if Wu-Tang was from L.A. and everyone was cynical and North-African. This track was a MONSTER summer hit out there spawning two remixes, a career for the Fonky Family and a full-time rap radio station. Now you’ve gotta listen to it because this is my mixtape dammit and I’m not curbing my eccentricities. Just pretend it’s what the cool kids are listening to.

20. “The summer’s over song” – The Kinks – Sunny Afternoon

And just like that, it’s over. It’s the end of August and you’ve wasted another season drinking, smoking, eating, partying and avoiding responsibilities. Ain’t it grand? But now you gotta face reality and the only one there to take your side is Mr. Ray Davies and his motley band of misfits.

21. “The nostalgic look back song” – Of Montreal – An Eluardian Instance (Live)

The nostalgic song…OF THE FUTURE! Seriously though, committed fan that I am, I had to throw something from Of Montreal’s upcoming “Skeletal Lamping” onto this mix even if the actual record hasn’t leaked yet. An uptempo pop track celebrating everything fun about summer time (with no mentions of transsexuals like most recent Kevin Barnes songs), this is the perfect way to look back at a season well spent.

22. “The Outro” – Sach (Madlib vs. Cheech N Chong) – Who’s the Deejay?

Just because it was lying around the iPod with those other two interludes.

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #14: Douglas Reinhardt’s “Sugar Pies and Lullabies” by Douglas Reinhardt
" I think for the most part, the mix plays out like a child/Artie Lange crashing after a sugar overload. Very fast, very anxious in the beginning and then it just falls into a deep slumber at the end."

Summer Jamz '08 #13: Douglas Martin's Days and Nights by Douglas Martin
"...An aural journey of a beautiful summer day, from the moment your head leaves the pillow it's still damp from drool, to the moment where your eyelids are heavy and you're nodding off like you're on dope (no Pusha T)."

Summer Jamz '08 #12: Disco Vietnam Presents Soul Korea: The Ultimate Summer Blunt Sesh by Barry Schwartz
"The tracks selected for Disco Vietnam Presents Soul Korea all share the crucial yet elusive element of groove, each song more dangerously absorbing than the last."

Summer Jamz '08 #11: G'Z Up, Prose Down by Jeff Weiss
"Pure California ride music to cannon out of every car stereo, soundtrack every party, the ideal accessory to cheap weed, smuggled liquor and the baking black asphalt."

Summer Jamz '08 #10: What Is by Mike Powell
"The summer mix—full of hot tunes advocating general irresponsibility—is basically a sham..."

Summer Jamz '08 #9: Compiled by Nate DeYoung & Todd Hutlock
"If we have a theme for this mix, it would be ‘nothing from the new milennium.’ Well, for Hutlock’s portion of the mix..."

Summer Jamz '08 #8: Privately Owned by Theon Weber
"I'm typing this from a studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, at the tail end of a hazy First of July..."

Summer Jamz '08 #7: Daydreamin' by Andrew Gaerig and John M. Cunningham
"For this mix we focused on the theme of "daydreams." Pour yourself a drink that requires an umbrella, kick off your flip-flops, and take a listen."

Summer Jamz '08 #6: It's Not the Heat by Jeff Siegel and Kevin J. Elliott
"This mix is a reflection of soupy, unrelenting humidity. A heat mirage. A little dancing, but not too much, because we must lie down and rehydrate."

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #3: Dear Summer... by Jonathan Bradley
"My mix is for the times everything is still and quiet and perfect ... I haven’t included any yacht rock or Eagles tunes, but that’s all I can guarantee."

Summer Jamz '08 #2: State of the Union, Jack by Mike Orme and Nick Southall
"Two former Stylus Magazine compatriots ... celebrate the summer by splitting halves of a mix CD, each trying to fill their side with songs the other writer would put on a summer mix."

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #14: Douglas Reinhardt

2008-07-14T23:35:00.004+10:00

Summer Jamz ‘08 #14: Douglas Reinhardt’s “Sugar Pies and Lullabies”
http://www.sendspace.com/file/josps9

Sometimes, Douglas Reinhardt blogs at Skeet on Mischa. Sometimes, he blogs at Defamer. At all times, he is well-caffeinated.

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

Track Listing:

1. “Fresh” by Daft Punk
2. “Bring It On” by Playgroup Featuring Kathleen Hannah
3. “Ring The Alarm” by Tenor Saw
4. “Say Wussup” by Small Breed
5. “Skeleton” by Abe Vigoda
6. “Dance Walhalla” by Times New Viking
7. “Skulls” by The Misfits
8. “The Search For Cherry Red” by Jonathan Fire Eater
9. “ Challenge The Throne” by Mika Miko
10. “Standing By The Sea” by Husker Du
11. “See You Again” by Miley Cyrus
12. “Sleeper Hold” by No Age
13. “Cohesion” by The Minutemen
14. “Postcards From Tiny Islands” by The Walkmen
15. “ I Can’t Get My Eyes Off” by Prefuse 73
16. “Cash Still Rules/Scary Hours” by Wu Tang Clan
17. “ Open The Gate” (Dub) by King Tubby & Lee Perry
18. “Redondo Beach” (Live) by Morrissey
19. “Your Hand In Mine” by Explosions In The Sky
20. “Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi” (Automator Remix) by Air
21. “Silent Morning” by The Rapture
22. “Dark Days” by DJ Shadow
23. “Goodnight Assholes” by David Cross

Any collection of summer jamz, mixtapes have to be an odd assortment of new and old. Stuff to sing along with, but without having to dig out that old Pennywise chestnut, “Bro Hymn” while on that late night drive. Stuff to get you excited while still on that late night drive and the stoplights are not in your favor. And with the new stuff hopefully over time will become the sing along classics or the songs that you air drum along with while stuck on the freeway. It’s a cliché, but there’s a good reason why it’s a cliché, summer jamz are the soundtrack to our lives and memories. Hearing that one song might remember that day at the beach where the MILF tried to pick you up or that night where you heard terrible second hand accounts of how the local scene kids got into a fight with a bunch of frat guys at the go to 24 hour fast food place; my memories and the second hand tales I heard involved a girl dumping an entire bowl of pico de gallo on somebody at four in the morning, which lead to the 24 hour place no longer being open for 24 hours a day.

Knowing me, the problem in making this could’ve been going overboard with the current crop of LA punk stuff. Instead, I kept it to a minimum, thankfully, but it could’ve easily been a very premature ‘Best Of No Age’ mix. Instead, there’s one No Age song and a couple other Smell related bands. These songs also hint at my current quarter life musical crisis; hence the Morrissey, the Misfits, and Miley Cyrus. Then again, every summer needs a great pop song and oddly, “See You Again” is a great pop song with a catchy chorus and easy to dance beat. I think for the most part, the mix plays out like a child/Artie Lange crashing after a sugar overload. Very fast, very anxious in the beginning and then it just falls into a deep slumber at the end. I highly suggest listening the last couple of tunes during a sunset with a nice, ice cold tall can of Tecate wrapped in a brown paper bag in your hand. Also, apparently, there’s a skeleton motif, so that goes out to all of the psych majors.

As my mixtape tradition dictates, thank you to: The Usual Suspects, all the girls at the American Apparel stores that won’t give me the time of the day, Greg Ginn, Diablo Cody, Old Town Pasadena, Jiffy Lube, Albertacos, Swingers, The Donut Place Next To The Detroit Bar, David Lynch, Baba Boey, Leighton Meester “Wizards Of Waverly Place,” Hip Hop, Miller High Life, Gingers, Sun Dresses, Frank Bascombe, Don Drapper, and Barack Obama.

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #10: What Is by Mike Powell
"The summer mix—full of hot tunes advocating general irresponsibility—is basically a sham..."

Summer Jamz '08 #9: Compiled by Nate DeYoung & Todd Hutlock
"If we have a theme for this mix, it would be ‘nothing from the new milennium.’ Well, for Hutlock’s portion of the mix..."

Summer Jamz '08 #8: Privately Owned by Theon Weber
"I'm typing this from a studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, at the tail end of a hazy First of July..."

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #13: Douglas Martin

2008-07-11T23:27:00.002+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #13: Douglas Martin's Days and Nights
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vudu8d

Douglas Martin is a singer/songwriter living in Seattle. He records and blogs under the name Fresh Cherries From Yakima. He may be the best musician with “Cherry” in his name since Neneh Cherry. Screw you Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

Most years, I go back and forth about whether I enjoy hot or cold weather more. Would I rather bundle up and crank the heat up as far as I can without setting my blinds on fire, or would I rather withstand not having an air-conditioner in my apartment for the sake of a few extra hours of daylight and the ability to rock Super V-Neck Tees that veer dangerously close to making me look like a bald-headed girl? (Note: I'm actually using music and blogging as a front to jump-start my American Apparel modeling career.) It could be because of the tunes, it could be because of the innumerable pints of White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle ice cream, or it could be because in Seattle, we had our hottest day of the year in April. Whatever the reason, in 2008, summer wins.

So, in a method to reinforce to everyone how pretentious I am, my tape is somewhat conceptual; an aural journey of a beautiful summer day, from the moment your head leaves the pillow it's still damp from drool, to the moment where your eyelids are heavy and you're nodding off like you're on dope (no Pusha T). And, as a favor to the world, I've opted not to include any actual Fresh Cherries from Yakima songs. You're welcome.

ALTERNATE THESIS: What's summer if you can't throw a chick on the track like Just Blaze? You'll understand where I'm getting at in a minute.

SIDE A: DAY.

1. Bill Callahan- Day:
Like nearly every young black man that was brought in the South (North Carolina, stand up), I was raised in the church. And when I say raised in the church, I mean raised: Bible Study on Wednesday nights, Children's Choir Practice on Saturday afternoons, Sunday School on Sunday morning, Regular Service directly after, and I had to BEG my grandmother to let me stay home from Sunday Evening Service, or I'd just pretend that I didn't finish my homework. "Day" is Bill Callahan in his Johnny-Cash-Gone-Gospel phase, with bouncing drums, pianos, tambourines and soulful background vocals. It sounds like something my grandma would have played while fixing me some hash browns on Sunday morning, clapping along in her kitchen. Sometimes, I can picture her calling me up and asking why I don't go to church anymore. I'd probably tell her it's because my homework's not done.

2. PWRFL Power- It's Okay:
This is as close as "indie" gets to a children's song, and I mean that in the best possible way. With it's bright chords and prodigious fingerpicking, "It's Okay" is the perfect audio companion for a beautiful Pacific-Northwest summer day. Sometimes, I play the song for my four-year-old niece, and she dances around gleefully. I'm just glad that I haven't yet had to explain to her what it means when Kaz Nomura sings, "It's okay to release your powerful power." When the time comes, that'll be her mother's job.

3. The Mountain Goats- Itzcuintli-Totzli Days:
In my opinion, John Darnielle is the Mike Jordan of the mic recordings, my favorite lyricist of all-time. "Itzcuintli-Totzli Days," couples Aztec mythology with vivid images of summer (naked shoulders, a bunny stomping all over the garden) to make a spectacular sing-along, perfect for summer afternoons. Plus, if I can out myself as a Goats geek for a minute, there aren't many female background singers with harmonies as beautiful as the Bright Mountain Choir; the only thing that even comes close are those girls from the Dirty Projectors. Another Mountain Goats tune appropriate for the Summer of 2008 is "Cubs in Five," due to the spectacular season the Cubbies are having, and because baseball is the only great American sport going on right now. I mean, what are you going to watch, Wimbledon?

4. Abe Vigoda- Animal Ghosts:
Have you ever been drunk in the mid-afternoon, like really fucking shitfaced? You know, when the combination of booze and sun makes you all bleary-eyed and squinting, struggling to see your friend two feet ahead of you? Well, whenever I listen to "Animal Ghosts," it reminds me of the feeling, all the way down to the lyrics, which I can only pick out every third or fourth word. I can hardly understand what people are saying when I'm drunk, too.

5. TV on the Radio- Staring at the Sun:
In spite of being terribly literal, "Staring at the Sun" is a perfect summer song, because the guitars (or synths, or whatever the fuck they are) sound like they've been frying on the sidewalk along with the eggs on the hottest day of the year. The heavy pulsating of the whatever-the-fuck-they-are before the drums kick in reminds me of the feeling you get when it's super hot, and your pulse is throbbing, searching for an ice cold bottle or glass of water to dump on yourself (No Busta Rhymes).

6. Vivian Girls- Wild Eyes:
Another song with guitars (they really are guitars this time) that sound like they've been cooking in the sun for way too long, only this time with corroded, proto-punk production, beautifully thrashing drums, and-- at this point, a must for the Douglas Martin Summer-- beautiful female vocals. "Wild Eyes" sounds like the cute girls you wanted to date (preferably all, but at least one), beating the shit out of their instruments in your neighbor's garage, all artsy cool and charming amateurishness. Why didn't the whole "Shoegaze Girl-Group" thing get thought of sooner?

7. Modest Mouse- Perfect Disguise:
Issac Brock is a lyricist's lyricist. Adam Brody (probably the only-and-last time an O.C. cast member gets name-dropped sans sarcasm on a music blog) once famously said that Brock's lyrics "held the secret to the universe," which is hard for me to disagree with. But, beyond the talk of the creation of the world ("3rd Planet"), characteristic moody centerpieces ("Lives"), and an Aesopian fable about his sister getting eaten by animals ("Wild Packs of Family Dogs"), The Moon and Antarctica also showed Brock's singular talent as a brilliant kiss-off artist: "Need me to fall down/So you can climb up/Some fool-ass ladder/Well, good luck/I hope, I hope there's something better up there."

8. Radiohead- Let Down:
In Spin Magazine's 20 Years of Alternative Music book, Will Hermes writes about listening to Ok Computer in an ice cream parlor, specifically referencing "Let Down" as the perfect song to listen to while getting your two (or three, you fucking glutton) scoops. The heart-wrenchingly gorgeous guitar line from Jonny Greenwood sort of sends your mind into a vertigo of vivid colors as Thom Yorke beautifully harmonizes with himself about being squashed in the ground. Now, I get the sort of gooseflesh you get from eating too much ice cream not only when I hear the song, but every time I eat ice cream, because the song plays in my head every time I have a waffle cone in my hand.

9. Jay-Z- Never Change:
It wouldn't be a Summer Jamz mix without the once-reigning-and-undisputed and the current owner-and-proprietor of Summer. "Never Change," may not remind of you summer at first, but with its Kanye-helmed beat and open-hearted nostalgia, it's perfect for driving around the city on a hot summer night with all the windows down and the streetlights and buildings buzzing past you. The Original Mr. Carter not only drops serious words of wisdom ("We all fish, better teach your folk," "Chains is cool to cop, but more important is lawyer fees"), but also creates a hustler's anthem. Even the closest you've ever come to hustling is fucking off your Summer Reading to mow lawns, Hov's got you. Fuck y'all; we needed money for Atari.

10. Raekwon- Heaven and Hell:
Outside of Outkast, Rae and Ghost are rap's perfect dynamic duo. They're don't have the the Felix and Oscar (please tell me you guys got the Odd Couple reference; peace to Nick at Nite) push-and-pull that Big and Dre 3000 proudly display; they're at times too similar. However, their styles compliment each other perfectly, especially over this all-time-great RZA soul beat, with Rae waking up at ten, "about to make moves that slide like grease," and Ghost being Ghost, seeing some cat "up in Bojangles, strangling a 40-Oz./With 10-G's worth of gold bangles." The melancholy backdrop is so wonderful, it doesn't really matter that Rae and Ghost do two-minutes worth of shout-outs at the end; you just wanna play it until it's over.

11. Cave Singers- Elephant Clouds:
With it's shimmering guitars and galloping drums, "Elephant Clouds" is perfect for driving into the sunset.

12. The Walkmen- Thinking of a Dream I Had:
Starting off with an 80's Hardcore-Punk riff and a tribal thump, when the organ comes in on the chorus, it sounds like The Walkmen are ushering summer in themselves. Hamilton Leithauser drunkenly singing, "We're gonna have a good time tonight," works very well with what's going on musically, and works as a great accompaniment to the sun going on. Then, suddenly, there's an apeshit crescendo, with Leithauser screaming, "NOONE SPEAKS TO ME THAT WAY," and you're left hoping that his night goes as good as he originally thought.

SIDE B: NIGHT.

13. Panda Bear- I'm Not:
When I famously stated that my mom loves Person Pitch(!), I was talking to her about what she liked about the album. She pointed out that there are some songs on the album are great for falling asleep to, and cited "I'm Not" specifically (as "the one where it sounds like the only thing he's saying is 'I'm not' the whole time"). The repetitive, high-pitched vocal sample, coupled with the soft drums and Noah Lennox's eternally boyish, ethereal vocals amazingly prove that you don't need expensive synths to do ambient music.

14. 50 Cent- Heat:
Remember when people actually liked 50 Cent? When those G-Unit Mixtapes came and spread like napalm throughout the rap consciousness, making Get Rich or Die Tryin' one of the fastest-selling rap records of all-time (A million in a week is impressive, especially these days, Weezy, but 50 sold 800,000+ in four days)? That's because Get Rich signified the arrival of a bulletproof asshole, an overabundantly charismatic anti-hero who smiled (albeit with as much nihilism in his heart as Manson, but still) more than he scowled, giggling with childlike glee everytime gunshots were fired. In "Heat," among providing probably the best song of 50's career, Curtis brilliantly sums up summer in TWO BARS: "In the 'hood, summertime is the killin' season/It's hot out this bitch, that's a good 'nuff reason!" Maybe this is the reason Dom Imus had his right to
intelligently speak on race relations in America revoked for a second-straight time.

Furthermore, It's a crying shame we (who aren't haters) ended up being wrong about 50.

15. The Microphones- Solar System:
Starting out with a flurry of unlistenable white noise (you might want to turn the volume down for the first thirty seconds or so), Phil Elvrum, with gorgeous backing harmonies, singing about being haunted by the memories of a girl (I think), repeating at the end, "I know you're out there." The wistful sadness of the track (spoiler alert: MORE FEMALE BACKING HARMONIES) makes it a lock for a summer night.

16. Bonnie "Prince" Billy- Raining in Darling:
The beginning of the track continues in the same wistful sadness that I talked about with the previous track, but the end of the song is the payoff, where the drums crash in a climax with Will Oldham wailing, "It don't rain anymore."

17. No Age- Semi-Sorted:
Whenever I listen to No Age (for all intents and purposes, probably my favorite new band of the last few years), it reminds me of their hometown of Los Angeles, a city in which I've never visited, but none of the good things. I'm talking dirty beaches, smoggy air, abandoned air, and heat, heat heat. Of course, being a Northwest kid, I'm sure I'm stereotyping, but I think the dirt and the grime of big cities are much more attractive than a gentrified metropolis. "Semi-Sorted" starts out with a couple minutes of dirty, dingy ambiance which threatens to run longer in length the actual "song" part of the song, then kicks in with guitar squall, a four-on-the-floor kick stomp, and Dean Spunt's boyish vocals. Then, the song goes from introverted-stomp to visceral-stomp, and the next thing you know, it's over, just like summer.

18. Weezer- Only in Dreams:
Before we get too far off the subject of artists that peaked early (see also: Cent, 50), Weezer's eponymous debut ("Well, fuck, half their catalog is eponymous, Douglas Martin") was probably rock music's first grunge-pop record, with distortion and winks of feedback showing up as much as the incredibly studied pop songwriting. This, the album-ending opus, is much like driving at night during a road trip; peaks and valleys and quiet and loud and long crescendos. I dare you to listen to it and not get the opening bass riff stuck in your head.

19. Cat Power- Back of Your Head:
"Back of Your Head" is like the late-night, drunk-and-teary-eyed phone call from an ex really late at night, with Chan Marshall's simple-but-catchy fingerpicking and her vocal rambling and bleak pessimism ("Can't you see that we're going to hell?"). This is the perfect soundtrack for the comedown, and proof that Marshall was way hotter back when she was batshit crazy.

20. Tiny Vipers- The Downward:
Hands Across the Void, Tiny Vipers' sad-and-beautiful debut, is perfect for a sweltering-hot and deeply depressive summer night, a soundtrack for drowning in post-bar night caps, thinking about your past. The drones at the end of this song is probably the closest thing music comes to staring inside of an abyss.

21. Bill Callahan- Night:
With its twinkling glockenspiel and sparse piano line, "Night" is a beautiful piece to end your night, falling in-and-out of sleep right after your head hits the pillow. The lyrics themselves could even be about the summer sun: "We stand under it/But we don't understand it."

douglas martin

http://www.myspace.com/freshcherriesfromyakima

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #10: What Is by Mike Powell
"The summer mix—full of hot tunes advocating general irresponsibility—is basically a sham..."

Summer Jamz '08 #9: Compiled by Nate DeYoung & Todd Hutlock
"If we have a theme for this mix, it would be ‘nothing from the new milennium.’ Well, for Hutlock’s portion of the mix..."

Summer Jamz '08 #8: Privately Owned by Theon Weber
"I'm typing this from a studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, at the tail end of a hazy First of July..."

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #12: Barry Schwartz

2008-07-10T23:28:00.006+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #12: Disco Vietnam Presents Soul Korea: The Ultimate Summer Blunt Sesh
http://sharebee.com/8b113323
http://discovietnam.muxtape.com/

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

01. Aretha Franklin – I Get High
02. Spanky Wilson – You
03. Syl Johnson – Concrete Reservation
04. Smith – I Just Wanna Make Love to You
05. The Dynamics – Funky Key
06. J.R. Bailey – Everything I Want I See in You
07. Detroit Emeralds – Til You Decide to Come Home
08. Lynn Williams – Don’t Be Surprised
09. Barbara & the Browns – I’m Gonna Start a War
10. Undisputed Truth – Ma
11. Chicago Gangsters – Smoke
12. Curtis Mayfield – Back to the World

We aspire to the condition of sustained groove. Separate the English from the Dutch and discard its useless entrails on the sun-baked parking lot asphalt beside your front left tire. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it; we have the technology. Fingers of stone grind purple golden nuggets into dust. Paper folded over firmly, enveloped in its vanilla leaf, twisted into a cone-shaped cannon. Better. Stronger. Faster. A spark, a flame. Bye-bye. The Jedi, from NY, stalking city sidewalks cuttin’ headz before we rotate back to the world.

The tracks selected for Disco Vietnam Presents Soul Korea all share the crucial yet elusive element of groove, each song more dangerously absorbing than the last. Soul Korea is reserved for those gorgeous summer days spent trapped in windowless office dungeons connecting plots and collecting props. When the clock strikes 5:00pm you’re free to leave but that sure as hell doesn’t mean you’re free. Soul Korea is part reminder, part reprieve; if you’ve earned it you deserve it. An hour of true freedom a day and everyday is your birthday.

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #10: What Is by Mike Powell
"The summer mix—full of hot tunes advocating general irresponsibility—is basically a sham..."

Summer Jamz '08 #9: Compiled by Nate DeYoung & Todd Hutlock
"If we have a theme for this mix, it would be ‘nothing from the new milennium.’ Well, for Hutlock’s portion of the mix..."

Summer Jamz '08 #8: Privately Owned by Theon Weber
"I'm typing this from a studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, at the tail end of a hazy First of July..."

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #11: Jeff Weiss

2008-07-09T23:33:00.005+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #11: G'Z Up, Prose Down
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4NBDRWLQ

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

01. Parliament-“Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)
02. N.W.A.-“Alwayz Into Somethin’”
03. Dr. Dre-“Nuthin’ But a G Thang”
04. Above the Law ft. 2Pac & Money B-“Call It What U Want”
05. The Dove Shack-“Summertime in the LBC”
06. Domino-“Getto Jam”
07. The Twinz-“Round N’ Round”
08. Snoop Doggy Dogg-“Gin and Juice”
09. 2Pac ft. Shock G & Money B-“I Get Around”
10. Mista Grimm ft. Nate Dogg & Warren G-“Indo Smoke”
11. Ice Cube ft. George Clinton-“Bop Gun”
12. The Lady of Rage-“Afro Puffs”
13. Sam Sneed ft. Dr. Dre-“U Better Recognize”
14. The D.O.C.-“The D.O.C. and The Doctor”
15. DJ Quik-“Jus Lyke Compton”
16. W.C. and the Maad Circle-“The One”
17. Tha Dogg Pound-“Let’s Play House”
18. Kurupt ft. Nate Dogg-“Girls All Pause”
19. Warren G ft. Nate Dogg & Snoop-“Game Don’t Wait”
20. Warren G & Nate Dogg-“Regulate”
21. Warren G & Nate Dogg-“Nobody Does It Better”
22. Parliament-“P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)”

Radio raised me. Power 106 and 92.3, The Beat, filtering in fuzzy and faint from the battered and bruised transistor, blank cassette in at all times—just in case. “Gin and Juice” and Maxells as madelines and tea, inside my broom closet bedroom, tattered with tapes as trophies. The holy trinity: The Chronic. Regulate and Doggystyle; the latter, swiped from a shuttered Music Plus, purchased by me for a mere $7 from a kleptomaniac, entrepreneurial ex-friend. Last I heard, he’d moved to Northern Arizona to escape from drug dealers. In the process, he found God and eventually assumed a position in an evangelical Korean Ministry.

Contrasted with the cluttered condo clusterfuck of this last Bush year, that Los Angeles of 1992 seems almost unrecognizable. Back then, South Central, Compton and the land south of the Ten still smoldered, a burn-out husk from the Rodney King riots that had erupted a few moths prior, as though to prove Ice Cube’s point. The city had an almost martial tone to it, there were unspoken boundaries you didn’t cross and “the club” on every steering wheel. Crips, Bloods and Bullets waged internecine warfare* so the shrill sirens of Fox 11 News at 10 told us. Hell, even in the rich parts of town, neurotic school administrators banned Raiders and Kings garb for being gang affiliated, though the closest their students had come to ‘banging’ was the Whack-A-Mole at Chuck E. Cheese.

So maybe Mike Davis was right. Maybe Los Angeles was a city of quartz. But if so, it was about to turn platinum. Thing is, everything changed when The Chronic dropped. The Dre of N.W.A. that “didn’t smoke weed or cess,” was dead, his politics largely muted. Instead, he’d found the good drugs, a stack of Parliament samples and a lanky, ex-Long Beach Crip with a flow ostensibly ordained by God to soundtrack hot and hazy Sunday BBQ’s. The combination was unstoppable and by the time Snoop’s debut dropped the next fall, G-Funk had everyone on lock, from Baldwin Hills to Bel Air, from Compton to Calabasas. You want proof that Jayceon Taylor is full of shit? Because of no self-respecting Angeleno would’ve ever bragged about shop-lifting The Chronic in ’95. What was dude listening to before that? P.M. Dawn? Snap? Jesus Jones?

The story’s rote by now. The big money boom. Suge Knight, the mad villain, burning blunts and Cohibas, glowering at the world from a plush aerie inside a pitch black Wilshire Blvd. skyscraper, the same one shared by Larry Flynt and Hustler, on the corner of Beverly Hills’ restaurant row. Dre turned hip-hop’s Howard Hughes, hibernating deep in the West Valley, obsessed with the unattainable notion of perfection and whether Winstrol could make his biceps as big as his ego. Snoop became more brand than rapper. Warren G got busted for taking Nate Dogg’s advice to be “high like every day.” And as for poor Nathan Hale, that perpetually underrated R&B master, he was somehow felled by a stroke before the age of 40. God knows what happened to Sam Sneed? Drugs. Jail. The PGA Tour?

But for a few short years there, say that stretch from The Riots until 2Pac got shot, G-Funk owned the sound of our summers. Pure California ride music to cannon out of every car stereo, soundtrack every party, the ideal accessory to cheap weed, smuggled liquor and the baking black asphalt. I don’t know what kids listen to today. Weezy? Jeezy? The Game’s compelling but hollow nostalgia? We had it good. After all, who better to make sun-scorched jams than the kids from the real land of the endless summer? Like Nate Dogg and Warren G said, “Nobody Does It Better.”

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #10: What Is by Mike Powell
"The summer mix—full of hot tunes advocating general irresponsibility—is basically a sham..."

Summer Jamz '08 #9: Compiled by Nate DeYoung & Todd Hutlock
"If we have a theme for this mix, it would be ‘nothing from the new milennium.’ Well, for Hutlock’s portion of the mix..."

Summer Jamz '08 #8: Privately Owned by Theon Weber
"I'm typing this from a studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, at the tail end of a hazy First of July..."

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #10: Mike Powell

2008-07-08T16:03:00.001+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #10: What Is
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ucf276

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

01. Baka Pygmies - Hut Song
02. Disco Inferno - It's a Kid's World
03. Lord Melody - Carnival Proclamation
04. Junior Murvin - Roots Train
05. The Who - Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand
06. Tabu Ley Rochereau - Aon Aon
07. Johnny Osbourne - Murderer (Heavenless Riddim)
08. Mouse on Mars - Catching Butterflies With Hands
09. Allen Toussaint - Southern Nights
10. Bennie Maupin - Past is Past
11. Animal Collective - Street Flash
12. Wally Badarou - Voices
13. Kate & Anna McGarrigle - Heartbeats Accelerating
14. Kid Creole - Off the Coast of Me
15. Junior Byles - Cutting Razor
16. Prince Far I - Jamaican Heroes
17. Franco - Kinsiona
18. Jackie Mittoo - Ayatollah

My primary concern with the summer jam is the winter jam. By which I mean only the exceptionally stupid and antisocial have a hard time celebrating summer. Daylight lasts longer in summer; summer is also hotter. People traffic public walkways in greater numbers. They wear less and drink more. From subway cars of commuters arises a syncopation of grunts and pants; Rorschach blots of sweat form over butterfly tattoos and the lip of leather belts. It is gross and rather beautiful, mostly because we all suffer.

And yet the summer mix—full of hot tunes advocating general irresponsibility—is basically a sham: You will have a few opportunities to press your moistness against that of another, perhaps in a pool house or a deserted side-street, but most likely you will spend the summer at work. Your victories outside it—day trips, solitary nights outdoors—will come as spiritual coups buried amongst long afternoons of daydreaming in temperature-regulated rooms.

So I guess I was appealing to the idea of summer, if not summer itself. Which, for me, turns out to mean pigmy chanting (1), Congolese pop (6, 17); reggae (4, 7, 15, 18) played by unshakably melancholic (16) white women accompanied by Celtic fiddle (13). And some other stuff, I suppose.

But when I look this all over, I realize that I have no winter jamz—I have only jamz. Summer is a synonym for liberation, an association held over from a time when the season actually meant we didn’t have anything to do (unless your parents were farmers; if that’s the case, and you worked the farm, I find that pretty admirable, for the record). This is the same music I listen to in the winter, it’s just that now I forgo long johns and scotch for wit’s-end concoctions of Smirnoff and sweetened lime juice (which I just choked on in a kind of alarming manner). Hold your head high: summer is a feeling; summer’s what you make it—if you don’t have it now, you can always have it in December.

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #9: Compiled by Nate DeYoung & Todd Hutlock
"If we have a theme for this mix, it would be ‘nothing from the new milennium.’ Well, for Hutlock’s portion of the mix..."

Summer Jamz '08 #8: Privately Owned by Theon Weber
"I'm typing this from a studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, at the tail end of a hazy First of July..."

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

What’s wrong with “No Air”?

2008-07-08T02:27:00.005+10:00

Some of you may remember me saying Summer Jamz was taking one day off and, by implication, would return on Monday. You John McCains need to take your brain medicine; I said Summer Jamz will return on Tuesday. Warm weather tunes are back in town tomorrow (or, technically, later on today).

Chris Brown, if only you were old enough to grow a bad teenage mustache, Jordin Sparks would go out with you in a second

The Jordin Sparks/Chris Brown duet, “No Air” looks like it’s shaping up to be the song of the summer (northern summer, of course; that’s where most pop music lives), and the song’s critical moment comes in the first line of the pre-chorus bridge, when Sparks sings, “But how do you expect me to live alone with just me?” It’s not a rhetorical question. Sparks sings it like she’s being confronted, in that moment, with the possibility of a life without her beloved, and she is demanding an explanation. The song turns to ice, and if you’ve ever been so infatuated with someone that it is unbearable to be without them, you’ll recognize the feeling. You want to know exactly why you’re forced to endure this heartsickness. “Who’s in charge here?” you want to demand. “There must be an explanation! Why are you doing this to me?”

“No Air” can’t maintain this emotional intensity. The song itself is strangely unmoving; Brown and Sparks weep and wail, quite beautifully so in the video, but they can’t again capture the chilling incapacitation of the song’s central conceit: that for each of these singers, being without the other is comparable to asphyxiation.

It’s quite a dire circumstance they posit for themselves, and yet, I’m unmoved. Or, I’m not moved enough. A song that claims being without another person is like being without oxygen should carry enough emotional heft that the listener can empathize with the sentiment, but apart from that “how do you expect me...” line, “No Air” is a curiously middling affair.

Part of the problem is that the music isn’t as bereft as the feeling it attempts to describe. It is sparse enough — much of the song consists of just a beat and a keyboard line — but this keyboard line blossoms into a twinkling cascade of notes. There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but for a song about suffocation it sounds far too airy. The music suggests anything but a vacuum. Likewise, Brown and Sparks, though delivering a respectable vocal performance (and in the case of Sparks, a more than respectable one), have their vocals layered and extensively treated. The song is excessively thick and full for a track concerned with a void. With this much exhalation, how can we possibly believe there is really no air?

Yes, Chris Brown. I am jealous. Fuck you.

If the problem is indeed one of production, it carries over to another version of the song, that by country singer Rissi Palmer. Palmer is a low level star responsible for grazing the bottom end of the Billboard charts with a couple of promising, but not outstanding songs. She’s notable for being a rare African-American singer to find any amount of recent success in this vastly Caucasian-dominated genre.

Palmer’s “No Air” cover is, even by contemporary country standards, not very country sounding. It distinguishes itself from the original by virtue of organic instrumentation, rather than the computer generated sounds of the Sparks version, and a brief slide guitar interlude that presents itself toward the end of the track. And like the Sparks version, it is a warm, full song about a chilling void. It is no improvement.

Usefully, radio is playing another song that illustrates the deficiencies of “No Air.” The British singer Leona Lewis’ hit “Bleeding Love” is exactly a model for what the Sparks hit could have been.

Like Sparks’ song, “Bleeding Love” uses a physical ailment to describe an emotional one; in this case, Lewis vulnerability around her lover is supposedly akin to profuse plasma loss. Unlike the Sparks song, though, Lewis’ effort sounds like the malady it expresses. The music is cold and distant; it feels as if the blood is draining out of the song. When Lewis sings “you cut me open and I ... keep bleeding love,” she sounds like the life is fading out of her. Her reliance on her significant other ceases to be academic and becomes aural, and thus actual. Hearing this song on the radio, you get the urge to call 9-1-1 and demand “Get this woman a doctor!” With Sparks and Brown? “That’s sweet, guys, but get over it already.”

"We the purple"? What the hell was that?

2008-07-05T00:24:00.007+10:00

No Summer Jamz today, mostly because nearly every single one of the Summer Jamz writers is American (other than me, there's a Canadian and two Englishmen, all of whom have written), and is currently celebrating the independence of their nation by blowing up a small part of it. Or something.

So, I'll get in the spirit of things: Happy Birthday America. I hope you all have a great time celebrating your freedom. To help you along, please enjoy my gift to you: Screw Rock 'n' Roll's Favorite 4th of July Songs. Congratulations, guys. On that day in 1776, you started something pretty great.

(And if you're wondering why an Australian is dedicating a post to a U.S. holiday, it might help to read this and especially this. Maybe even this, this, and this, though don't read too much into those. And if you're still confused, remember, people who actually know me don't really get it, so my advice is to just accept it and move on.)

But, wait, wait, wait. Tuesday was Canada Day, and I actually meant to honor Canada on that day with some Canadian ish. But I had Summer Jamz to run, and I thought Canada wouldn't mind too much if I left it until next year. But, since we have the opportunity, before we begin the list, I'll drop one song in belated celebration of Canada Day. Canada, this one's for you.

The Weakerthans - Tournament of Hearts
Canada, I've spent no more than three days within yours borders. So forgive me if this is an offensively stereotypical view of your country. But the Weakerthans track "Tournament of Hearts" appeals to me because it offers a rare thing in pop music; an unmistakably Canadian theme and setting. I won't pretend to understand all the references - apparently nearly every lyric is a curling reference - but the description of a winter-beset curling tournament is an enchanting view of the Great White North. The fact that all that curling lingo is being used to describe emo girlfriend anxiety makes it even better. I'm sure there's more to Canada than a lounge full of farmers "for the 7:30 draw," but the notion that somewhere in the world, a group of people will congregate to push heavy weights along ice by means of broom, and that such an occasion could be used to describe a relationship is rather wonderful.

Screw Rock 'n' Roll's Favorite 4th of July Songs

Martina McBride - Independence Day
I wrote about this a couple weeks back, but at that time, I focused on the darker qualities of the song. And, no doubt, they're there. But this works as a celebration, too. When McBride's vast voice opens up in the chorus, belting out, "Let freedom ring," even those of us whose national holiday is not being referenced can be forgiven for wanting to chuck a big box of tea into Boston Harbor.

Shooter Jennings - 4th of July
Waylon junior's Independence Day tune skips the fireworks and heads out on to the open road. It's the idea of liberation through movement that makes this song so intrinsically American, and Jennings, driving across the country with a woman who looks like "a queen in [her] nightgown," makes his summer road trip something vital and essential. It helps that the chorus is so fun to shout along with, too, though I had to google to find out that "Stranglehold," the rock 'n' roll song of which they could take no more was a Ted Nugent track. I only knew of that guy from the Beastie Boys oddity "The Biz vs The Nuge." I guess out in the country, they even have different rock 'n' roll.

Ryan Adams - New York, New York
It makes sense that Ryan Adams could make a great 4th of July tune, because much of Adams' career has been based on his earnest replication of the American rock music tradition; he attempts to join the greats by learning and adopting their mythology. It's a short step from that to studying and replicating a wider American mythology. Adams is "shuffling through the city on the 4th of July" with "a firecracker waiting to blow," and he sings about the holiday and the city with such celebratory gusto that living in a shitty little apartment on Avenue A sounds like the best thing ever.

The Killers - Sam's Town
The Killers know the American mythology, but unlike Adams, are uncomfortable inserting themselves into it. Brandon Flowers wants to make a sweeping vision of Americana, but he's aware that the country he lives in is more complex than the stories it tells itself about it. He claims "an American masquerade" is running through his veins, and then fumblingly lists a series of patriotic paraphenalia: "I still remember Grandma Dixie's wake/I'd never really known anybody that died before/Red, white and blue up on a birthday cake/My brother he was born on the fourth of July, and that's all." He doesn't succeed in working out how to tell a new story to replace the one's he recognizes as untrue, but his neurotic self-examination is illuminating nonetheless.

The Hold Steady - Killer Parties
Again, the idea of liberation through movement, but in this case, the liberation is in the form of a never-ending stream of new parties, and new people to party with. The pursuit of happiness, perhaps? Regardless, the lyrics are a curiously appropriate dedication for the country, a place filled with great people and, indeed, killer parties: "We heard about this place they called the United States/We found out Virginia really is for the lovers/Philly is full of friendly friends that will love you like a brother/Pensacola parties hard with poppers pills and Pepsi/Ybor City is tres speedy but they throw such killer parties."

Summer Jamz '08 #9: Nate DeYoung & Todd Hutlock

2008-07-04T00:29:00.005+10:00

Banner swiped from Adventures in Sonic Fiction

Summer Jamz '08 #9: Nate DeYoung & Todd Hutlock
http://www.sendspace.com/file/58zmwc

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

Tracklisting:
1. Bandulu - Phase In Version
2. Delta Funktionen - Nebula
3. Two Lone Swordsmen - Turn the Filter Off
4. The Mole - Hey Girl (I Feel So Good)
5. Stephen Beaupre - Fish Fry
6. Sweet Exorcist - Clonk (Freebass)
7. Matthew Styles - We Said Nothing
8. Ernesto Ferreyra - The Last Shooter
9. Robert Hood - Master Builder
10. Slowhouse - Unknown Track 3
11. Teste - The Wipe (5 AM Synaptic)

If we have a theme for this mix, it would be ‘nothing from the new milennium.’ Well, for Hutlock’s portion of the mix - he went so far as trying to convince me that ‘everything old is new again.’ And if that’s not a plea for a way out of a mid-life crisis, I don’t know what it is.

Old jokes aside, Hut gave me some nice surprises - “Phase in Version” is a little wonky Basic Channel rush. Todd crushes hard on this track - it probably doesn’t hurt that it was released on a Creation sub-label - and I can finally say I totally agree with him. Same goes for Sweet Exorcist. But those of us with Warp fixations already knew that. Maybe my favorite of Hut’s choices is Teste’s send-off of “The Wipe.” It’s pretty bleak for a summer jam, but the bassline nuzzles in just right.

If everything old is new again, then there’s only one constant in my selections and that’s keeping it as ephemeral as possible. Tracks like Matthew Styles’ “We Said Nothing” might be a nice little trick - detuned drums and an insistent analog synth screwdriving - but I don’t care how it ages. It’s perfect for right now. Same goes for the overwhelm-o-disco of Mole’s “Hey Girl (I Feel So Good).” But Stephen Beupre has spent the longest time as my instant-fix, from the spring deep into the summer. “Fish Fry” is nothing but modest - a slow accumulation of atmosphere, held down by just the vibrato of a meandering melody.

Ableton didn’t play nice so this “mix” is unmixed. It’s a paint-by-numbers, if you will, so make your own.
--Nate DeYoung

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #8: Privately Owned by Theon Weber
"I'm typing this from a studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, at the tail end of a hazy First of July..."

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #8: Theon Weber

2008-07-02T17:31:00.004+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #8: Privately Owned
http://www.sendspace.com/file/tll7no

In high school, a little deranged, I called what most people call mix CDs "Grand Anthologies", and gave each one an oblique title and liner notes written as if I had an audience of millions (if a particular Grand Anthology didn't soundtrack my walk to school as well as I'd hoped, I'd refer in the notes for the next one to "disappointing sales"). The last Grand Anthology came out in 2004 - my senior year. It was called "Grand Anthology: The Last One", so with this new one - which by the way is called "Privately Owned" - I join the ranks of Jay-Z, Michael Jordan, and Dick Nixon. Understand that I have since 2004 become clearer, neater, except when it comes to Grand Anthology liner notes. Because the liner notes for "Privately Owned" were written in a hurry, and I'm not sure they make sense. The album's about summer. Just keep that in mind.

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

01 T H E W R E N S. surprise, honeycomb.
02 G H O S T F A C E K I L L A H. walk around.
03 T H E K I N K S. top of the pops.
04 O U T K A S T. gasoline dreams.
05 U 2. zooropa.
06 B L U R. on your own.
07 B I K I N I K I L L. i like fucking.
08 W H Y ?. fatalist palmistry.
09 T H E R U N A W A Y S. queens of noise.
10 O K K E R V I L R I V E R. plus ones.
11 T H E R O L L I N G S T O N E S. ventilator blues.
12 E M I N E M. my fault.
13 T R A V E L I N G W I L B U R Y S. margarita.
14 D A V I D B Y R N E. miss america.
15 R A D I O H E A D. palo alto.
16 F U N K A D E L I C. can you get to that.
17 T H E V E R O N I C A S. untouched.
18 Y E A H Y E A H Y E A H S. dudley.
19 T H E D A N D Y W A R H O L S. big indian.
20 L I L ' W A Y N E. sky's the limit (ride 4 my niggaz)

SURPRISE, HONEYCOMB (1). I'm typing this from a studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, at the tail end of a hazy First of July, and what this song is about - besides picking up an old crush as accompanist for a murder spree - is summer restlessness, the desire to get something done, even if it isn't constructive, and the (secondary) desire to get someone to do it with. But itches lead to impulses, and impulses don't always pan out. Witness WALK AROUND (2), in which Ghostface, always the world's tensest gangsta, shoots someone without quite meaning to, can't get over it, and by the end is pacing back and forth, waving off suggestions and requests to chill, insisting he isn't going crazy, and finally going back outside because "I can't take this shit no more; it's too hot". Which it is.

Then again, sometimes things work out, transient or not; TOP OF THE POPS (3) chronicles the first half of what Ray Davies' dry crankiness makes clear will end badly, but that's what happens in summer: three months of cresting thrills and then it's September. This song doesn't end in September, though - it ends in, oh, early July, time to break out the hamburgers and camping permits and GASOLINE DREAMS (4), a flag-burning so severe (and festive!) we need ZOOROPA (5) to come down from it. Zooropa is all about being in Europe and looking at advertisements from behind sunglasses, which makes them look cool (polarization), and it's probably best to keep the sunglasses on what with the light and the heat and the haze and ON YOUR OWN (6), which might make some kind of lyrical sense beyond Damon Albarn's vague state-of-the-States, um, "tapestry" (Ross Perot is mentioned, and California, and the chorus - "my joy of life is on a roll" - appears to have been translated from something) but which doesn't need to because vague tapestries are precisely the sort of thing to which we're itching to pledge allegiance.

So: we've got a season and a country, now we need some ideology. It's too hot to really work at this, so let's go with I LIKE FUCKING (7), which along with "White Boy" and probably "New Radio" is the angry giggly capstone of Bikini Kill's most attractive pyramid. The thing about this band is they were funny. Nobody remembers they were funny because we prefer it when feminists aren't funny, but they were hilarious, contradicting and mocking and caricaturing themselves, slipping the real rightousness as much under the radar as they could considering they were called Bikini Kill and were always talking about rape. This song builds through two minutes of punchy polemic before concluding with BK's most profound bit of sarcasm: I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, BABE - well I mean why wouldn't you, but the answer to that's all in the sneer, and the antidote for the sneer's in the guitars. Drop from the heights of radical female pleasure to the depths of overarticulate male misery for FATALIST PALMISTRY (8), the song on this mix in which, though we talk a big game, a lot of us will be spending our summer: our ability to cope is directly proportional to how funny we can be about how screwed we are. This is a defense mechanism, but it's a good one; it only falls to something like QUEENS OF NOISE (9), from the Runaways' second album (1977), with guitars hissing from inside the postapocalyptic Haze the Stones pumped out of the fog machines at Altamont to shroud the Seventies. (I don't think there were actually any fog machines at Altamont.) The Haze is what summer sounds like, always has been; not the Summer Of Love but whichever one Blue Oyster Cult meant. Everything inside it comes out diffused, flattened, hard to get close to. Summer lovers don't cuddle like winter ones.

Let's slow down for a second, then. PLUS ONES (10) is the same Haze scrubbed and mocked by some autumn asshole, remembering a garland of song titles and fiddling with them, and ah yes remember this song? that one? me too, pass the canapes while I don another sweater. It is impossible, in July, to imagine again being so sophisticated! Right now everything's sweat and itches and barbarism, and let's check back in with Ghostface who's still trying to deal (geddit), and VENTILATOR BLUES (11), besides being from Exile On Main Street which understood the Haze better than any of the other albums caught in it, contains one of Mick Jagger's wisest dumbest lines - "everybody needs some kind of ventilator" which doesn't mean anyone's going to get one, which is how you end up with messes like MY FAULT (12). Now this takes place in the spring, expressly, but only because "take" rhymes with "break" and "break" goes with "spring"; pretend for a second that "take" rhymes with "vacation" - which it almost could, really, and Eminem's supposed to be a professional; why isn't he on top of this - and it makes more sense, because stupid guys getting stupid girls to do stupid things at stupid parties is really a summer-vacation thing; spring break is when stupid guys get stupid girls to do stupid things on TV. So this girl's taken all these mushrooms (which Em totally did mean to give her, and being so upfront about this in the first verse and such an equivocating coward about it in the chorus is why he's funny) and she's gonna die, and the thing is, you don't stay at these parties, not unless whatever's gone wrong really is your fault - you leave poor Marshall Mathers panicking in the corner over the maybecorpse of the girl he maybemeant to give mushrooms, and you're back into the Haze, and the Traveling Wilburys, old navigators themselves of its slipstreams and dead spots, are playing MARGARITA (13), one of the oddest songs ever written. Fades in, rambles, fades out; Dylan's probably freestyling; Tom Petty gets a closing line delivered so much like a joke it actually becomes one. "She wrote a long letter on a short piece of paper". You're home - the party's over - and is it August already?

MISS AMERICA (14) is - well, pick your poison. A) the girl you're chasing all three months; B) like those other America songs we played, but funnier, meaner; C) just that song where David Byrne says both "fuck" and "I'll be your teenage fanclub". Whichever you choose you can dance to it (you!) and as we coast nervously towards September sarcastic songs about girls who are also sociopolitical frameworks are the kinds of ironies we prefer with our iced teas. ("American Woman", by the way, has the Haze, but I don't like it as much.) Speaking of which here's Radiohead, who never met a sociopolitical framework they didn't want to stand next to making scary faces, sunning themselves in dystopian PALO ALTO (15), enjoying Orwell's Indian summer. This is what the Haze sounded like in 1997. In 1971 it didn't sound like Funkadelic because Funkadelic weren't into haze (they more dug earth), which is why CAN YOU GET TO THAT (16) is here - as respite, and also because, remember, it's the last week of August by now, and there's barely any Haze any more, just weird chilly winds and a little bit of sighing less-than-green-ery, and someone's making preparations for the coming separation, and are we about to hit the comedown? The last four tracks, the last four days.

UNTOUCHED (17), then - by a lover, by the accomplishments our serial killer dreamt of back on track one, by Miss America, but not by those Goddamn strings which really aren't going to leave you alone, or the grasping useless wistfulness you and the Veronicas can't shake. You've got wet eyes now, letting go of things, and so does my favorite active band, whose DUDLEY (18) is a nursery rhyme about loss, hot cold season gonna sink in my sweat, God I wish it was still as hot as it used to be, that the days were as long. There's barely enough sunlight now for platitudes and summations. BIG INDIAN (19) has both - Polonial hand-me-downs from figurative fathers, end-of-song triumphalism, and OH we just hit September. It's not summer anymore. So feel free to pretend this last song doesn't exist. But you're going to need it, like nuts, for the winter. You're going to need its braggadocio - so absurd it's noble - and its sense of apocalypse tastefully quieter than its sense of self-importance. You're going to need to remember, like it says on laminated flyers in elementary school lunchrooms - they can't print this stuff if it's not true - SKY'S THE LIMIT (20). While you're here why don't you boast along with Lil' Wayne - birds don't fly without your permission. It isn't true, of course. They're flying south. Go ahead, let them. And hunker down.

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #7: Andrew Gaerig & John M. Cunningham

2008-07-01T14:56:00.006+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #7: Daydreamin'
http://www.sendspace.com/file/izx220

For this mix we focused on the theme of "daydreams," the kind you have while gazing out the window on the last day of school or while absent-mindedly dipping your toes into wet sand on the beach. We went back and forth, each drawing inspiration from the other's selections, which led to some nice surprises along the way. Pour yourself a drink that requires an umbrella, kick off your flip-flops, and take a listen.

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

1. Allá, “Un Dia Otra Noche”

The Chicago-based psychedelic pop band Allá worked on their debut album Es Tiempo for six years (I heard some early mixes, courtesy of a mutual friend, way back in 2003) but chose just the right time to release it: the beginning of summer. On this, the opening track, the busy arrangement—anchored by a restless Swedish string section—threatens to swallow up the whole tune, but Lupe Martinez’s dreamy vocals keep it as light as a swiftly floating cloud. [John M. Cunningham]

2. Kid Creole and the Coconuts, "I'm a Wonderful Thing, Baby"

Strut. Buy new hat. Strut with new hat. Wonder aloud if that too expensive "Africa '76" t-shirt from the too expensive t-shirt shop is 1. too expensive and/or 2. unacceptable on a white boy. But what if the hat matches the t? Ponder. [Andrew Gaerig]

3. Shuggie Otis, “Aht Uh Mi Hed”

Like Stevie Wonder, Shuggie Otis was a 1970s soul-music polymath, playing every last instrument on Inspiration Information. I particularly like his use of a primitive drum machine, though, which lends yearning songs like this an intimate homemade feel. [JC]

4. Serge Gainsbourg, “Daisy Temple”

What happens when a narcissistic French crotch-scratcher rings Sly & Robbie and they take him exactly as serious as he needs to be taken, composing rhythms out of those whirl-around party favors and … bass guitar. The latter of which is pretty standard, granted. I hope these backup singers are well-compensated. [AG]

5. Calle 13, “La Jirafa”

Calle 13 is nominally a reggaetón duo, but this 2006 single, with its lush strings, conversational flow, and romantically surreal lyrics (one is translated as “I want to wrap you in a tortilla”), is miles away from the gruff shouts of someone like Daddy Yankee. As the video makes clear, it’s also perfect for lying in the grass and conjuring up some sun-fueled fantasies. [JC]

6. Rancid, “Hoover Street”

I once suggested to my high school girlfriend that Rancid’s “Old Friend” should be “our song,” which was shot down about as fast as mom used to shoot down “chocolate cake” as “our breakfast.” “Hoover Street” ain’t that song, but it has always elicited my most churlish Tim Armstrong mumble-alongs. [AG]

7. Stephen Malkmus, “Dynamic Calories”

This breezy miniature (from the Pig Lib bonus EP) finds Malkmus asking us to imagine ourselves in an ‘80s underground rock band that never quite made it, a whimsical conceit that nonetheless retains a measure of wistfulness. [JC]

8. Ugly Casanova, “Things I Don’t Remember”

Funny how attaching a good hook makes absurdum palatable. Like if Billy B. had a little more Alex Chilton in him I might’ve made it more than 30 pages through Naked Lunch. Either way, best use of “alligator” in a song since Anthem of the Sun. [AG]

9. Pinback, “Concrete Seconds”

I’m kind of a sucker for precise, crystalline indie pop (there’s a playlist on my iTunes called Clean Guitar), and Pinback does it better than pretty much anybody (though the Sea and Cake are also right up there). Once they’ve locked in to a groove, the effect becomes almost trance-like. [JC]

10. Phoenix, “Lost & Found”

Listen for the shrugging “hmph” before “You don’t know what you’re doing” and the first chorus. For those days I wish I was younger, Frencher, and cockier and my friends were younger, Frencher, and fuller of shit. [AG]

11. The High Llamas, “Go to Montecito”

Sean O’Hagan catches a lot of flak for aping late-era Beach Boys, and recent High Llamas albums have proven that he sometimes has trouble crafting songs that transcend their retro details, but “Go to Montecito” frames its melancholic summer’s-end harmonies within a bossa nova that I find impossible to resist. [JC]

12. Gilberto Gil, “Mamma”

The opening syllabic nonsense might be the daydreamiest bars of music ever recorded, in a Highlights magazine kind of way. Then dude goes on about setting off and leaving mom behind, which, come to think of it, is exactly the sort of daydream you might have when you’re part of Highlights magazine’s target demographic. [AG]

13. The Avalanches, “Two Hearts in 3/4 Time (Edit)"

Rarely have I heard a voice more weightless than the anonymous one sampled here: the descending pattern of those la-la-las even suggests a lazily drifting feather or leaf. Completely inconsequential, and totally beautiful. [JC]

14. Low Motion Disco, “Things Are Gonna Get Easier”

One of those remixes where it sounds like your vinyl is skipping in a really cool way, a way that your vinyl never actually skips after you drop it on the ground. Saying we need more edits like this is akin to saying we need more summers. Well, of course. [AG]

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #6: Jeff Siegel and Kevin J. Elliott

2008-06-30T14:48:00.003+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #6: It's Not The Heat
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qrmab7

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

01. Jean-Claude Vannier - L'Enfant Au Rayaume Des Mouches
02. Meth Teeth - To My Good Friend
03. Royal Trux - I'm Ready
04. Amon Duul II - Archangels Thunderbird
05. Ruth - Mon Pote (Version Courte)
06. The Wedding Present - Spangle
07. The Congos - Congo Man
08. Depth Charge - Blue Lipps
09. Gilberto Gil - Sai Do Sereno
10. Circle ft. Verde - Gerde
11. Cut Copy - Far Away
12. Depeche Mode - See You
13. DOP - Foly
14. Nomo - All the Stars
15. Crystal Castles - Courtship Dating
16. Part Timer - Only Natural
17. The Olivia Tremor Control - Jumping Fences
18. Vivian Girls - Wild Eyes
19. Natural Snow Buildings - Gone
20. The Pizzas - Hideous Fashion
21. Sian Alice Group - Motionless
22. Cristina - Drive My Car (Long Version)
23. Frank Black - Headache
24. Jack Rose - Kensington Blues

Here in greenhouse NYC, our only real theme is "sweltering," so this mix is a reflection of soupy, unrelenting humidity. A heat mirage. A little dancing, but not too much, because we must lie down and rehydrate. Ready the sweat-bucket.
--Jeff Siegel

This mix started from my end -- where in the fickle Ohio heat and rain and wind, I'm forced to celebrate summer with a "home" vacation. That is, with the price of gas and food and alcohol going through the fucking roof, trying to conjure up a seasonal fever dream is confined to the basements, backyards, and dive bars of Columbus. So excuse the randomness, the scruffy edges, the teenage nostalgia. I don't have beaches or skyscrapers or foreign flights to pad my imagination this year, only scuzzy, cigarette stained hangovers, bong rips, and lo-fi escapism. Jeff did a wonderful job juxtaposing my trash heap -- giving us the soaring solar to my claustrophobic nocturnal.
--Kevin J. Elliott

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Compiled by Jayson Greene and Stewart Voegtlin
"Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran?"

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Jayson Greene & Stewart Voegtlin

2008-06-28T02:49:00.000+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #5: Stewart Voegtlin & Jayson Greene
http://www.mediafire.com/?dmyjnlwnpup

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

KISS "Love Gun"
RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS, “Love Comes in Spurts”
AC/DC, “Rising Power”
ROLLING STONES, “Stray Cat Blues”
LED ZEP, “Lemon Song”
BUZZCOCKS, “Orgasm Addict”
THE STOOGES, "Shake Appeal"
NIRVANA, “Moist Vagina”
ZZ TOP, “Pearl Necklace”
GHOSTFACE KILLAH, “Wildflower”
FLIPPER, “Sex Bomb”
LIZ PHAIR, “Flower”
SIR LORD BALTIMORE, “Aint Got Hung On You”
PJ HARVEY, “Sheela Na Gig”
SOUNDGARDEN, “Big Dumb Sex”
WEEZER, “Tired Of Sex”
MC5, “I Want You Right Now”

Threaten to follow a question with more of the same.

Q: Chastity?

Q: In the full-tilt swing of summer?

Oh, geezus. Didn’t we all wanna give up the goose when the sweat ceased to dribble and ran? When the cheep swill, greasy food and sticky gropes marked the day-to-day as hounds pissin’ upon hydrants? Shit, I know I did. Shoulda, woulda, coulda kept at bay with lock & key. A big motherfuck to camp, stuck-inside jobs or dreaded “college resume building” interning. It was odd-job-ad-hoc that allowed that ol’ initial momentum, then the arc. And as logically follows: the denouement—all limp, all feverish, all photo flash instant, 1,000 words past.

Never really gave much thought to what was playing on the hi-fi in those swipe-the-ticklers-français from the Rx counter momento mori. Never really cared.

Guesses are mostly good: A mélange of Metal and Anthem Dandied? —Voivod and Slayer. —Roxy Music and Bowie. —Maybe the Velvets. They all “worked.” Sound-tracking the pre-party partying, a mixtape crammed into a mom’s minivan and wailed away while nitrous oxide brought ye knuckle-draggers one less grunt closer to Quest for Fire. Agh! Agh! The admitted—no, really—the brandished Weltanschauung was all cock and cunt and some things “worked” better than others.

The 70s worked mostly for me. A taut opalescent boil of Heh-Vee Psych grime slicked with STP und jissom, inflated with self-worth, self-loathing, an impending eruption just a motherfuckin’ given. Plant & Page, Stanley & Simmons, Kramer & Smith, et cetera, et cetera. Here was majik, real check-the-tophat stuff. No bunnies. No bullshit. But we were mostly worried we’d find gods. —Perhaps the whole fuckin’ pantheon. Dive into that dark headfirst. The most unusual suspects for more of the same summer sportfuckin’. Nothing so different from handjobs-to-blowjobs-to-vaginal-to-anal. (Incidentally, I recall a particularly unsavory memory involving Miracle Whip as lubricant…)

What is it supposed to say? Why were we playing this shit and why must we continue to do so? These are questions best left unanswered. There’s just not enough mystery nowadays anyway.

And so, anywho, best defense is no defense. Play it as it lays. Hence, the boudoir ambient: Kiss wields the pistol of ess-eeee-eks and its inevitable entelechy: Trouser snake as shapeless Platonic Form. A quality never agreed upon, since it seemed to never change—only reoccurring in different gradations of strength and weight. Like the Washington Monument’s obelisk erect. The great phallic wand of megadeth, its palpitating apex revived and died a billion times. Might as well not exist: Plant’s paean to his prick. Like the Sumerian calendar? Like fuckin’ Vico. Like the rouge of Eve that clouds as a spoon of currant jam in a tumbler of tap. Oh, Iggy Stooge: ass-shaker of ill repute, butt-plugged and dolled-up for the stage, vein-tapping into Little Richard and all the other folks’ boogie-woogie pathos he managed to rip off to excellent effect. Then there’s The Top channeling the pre-pubescent white boy blues for boys who never had none of neither. There are not-so-hidden connections. “Pearl Necklace.” Speak it to yourself. Write it out. Say it aloud. It comes with a single breath, flung from the palate as ah bucket of gullshit. Say it again. Sheesh. Like a loogie. Each vowel upon a raft of flan-hued snot… There are nudged winks as plentiful as locker-room underarm farts. Remember: The same river, always the same river. —And yet always different water. Then there’s Flipper, with the most un-Flipper bit ever branded upon quarter-inch tape, nothing less than the throne of Mighty Egypt left warm for the next pair of Pharaoh buns. Smarmy gear-headed come-ons from rock’s community chesta has-beens the Lord Balt and then some oh-so superlative lyrics from Chrissy Cornell. To wit:

JAYSON GREENE: BIG DUMB SEX!!!!! Fucking awesome. The last time I heard "Louder Than Love," my hair was cut into a bowl shape and I had braces.

STEWART VOEGTLIN: You are insane. That song is so fucking dumb. But so incredibly wonderful. I saw them on the LTL tour, opening for VOIVOD.

JAYSON GREENE: Wait, so why am I insane? We agree on "Big Dumb Sex," right? That's it's awesome?

STEWART VOEGTLIN: Your bowl cut and braces. That's insane. Yeah we are in ACCORD.

And so The Motor City Five pull it slow(ly) into the station and leave us wonderin’ who ever thunk the Whip wuz dressing for salad greens after all. A sketch, roughshod and rapid. Not so sweeping. Not so “encapsulating.” But what is? And on the fly? Surely not.

11:19 AM me: I didn't know we had to actually "write" stuff for this. WTF.

11:20 AM I have ZERO time to do this. Should we just submit our e-mails... Hahaha.

Jayson: We could both write 150 words or so?
I could probably scratch it out tonightish

11:22 AM me: Jesus...
OK. Maybe. MAYBE.

11:23 AM Jayson: write three sentences about wanton lust, and I'll write three or so about the slimy underbelly easy

11:25 AM me: Yeah. Sounds good.

It does. Three sentences metastasized as they always do. So. As Heraclitus offered, the gift of what is, is not. Put it all together and drink it deep(ly). I did/do.

[Stewart Voegtlin]

“Three sentences about wanton lust.”

This was Stew’s assignment, and he took it about as far into the gnarled, dirt-clump roots of his humid brain as he could. As a result, we have the above magnificent testament to tantalizing mythical hoodoo: I could spend eleven months in a cabin in the Montana woods, drinking nothing but absinthe and reading the collected works of Bangs, Meltzer, Faulkner, and Hubert Selby, Jr., with only a blotter of acid and multiple bags of irregular pork rinds for sustenance, and not produce a single sentence that radiated that level of grizzled insanity.

So let’s, instead, quote Nick Tosches, on The Killer, Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis, whose shoes were once smudged by the reverent lips of a supplicant John Lennon, who once shot his bass player in the chest with a .357 Magnum, who in 1976 arrived impromptu at the gates of Graceland armed with a .38-caliber Derringer at 3:07 a.m., yelling for Elvis:

“Of all the rock-and-roll creatures, he projected the most hellish persona. He was feared more than the rest, and hated more too. Preachers railed against him, mothers smelled his awful presence in the laundry of their daughters, and young boys coveted his wicked, wicked ways … Believe it: Jerry Lee Lewis is a creature of mythic essence, a Set, a Baptist Dionysus aflame with glorious cowardice and self-killing guilt.”

There ain’t no more to say: this mix finds the queasy, certainly fluid-slicked middle ground between Robert Plant, exulting at length about the juice running down his leg, to the leering, self-punishingly sexless rictus of Richard Hell, mirthlessly mocking you for buying into the brief glow of good will that follows the few minutes immediately after orgasm.

[Jayson Greene]

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Compiled by Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
For their summer mix, Paul and Ian decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: Ian hates summer.

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #4: Paul Scott and Ian Mathers

2008-06-26T15:04:00.000+10:00

Summer Jam '08 #4: Paul Scott and Ian Mathers
http://www.mediafire.com/?ubxavz2ny20

For our summer mix, Paul Scott and I decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: I hate summer. Paul decided to take a stab at changing my mind, and so we volley competing versions of the hottest summer at each other along with the songs. We also got started a bit late, and after jokingly discussing which one of us would get to including a Los Campesinos! track first, I got the ball rolling by declaring “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks” the opener. Events preceded, or degenerated, from there. --Ian Mathers

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

01. Los Campesinos! – “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks” (4:29)
02. Ola Podrida – “Jordanna” (4:50)

Paul:

Okay, so, the thing is, I'm a little drunk, but we have to get moving on this; in addition that particular Los Campesinos! track (*key lyric: "When the small picture's the same as the bigger picture, you know that you're fucked" - which is pretty much the way I feel whenever the heat sets in, sadly), I mostly tend to retreat to slow, draggy, oppressive music this time of year. My bedroom doesn't have a window and as a result the heat in here is brutal - something like Ola Podrida's self titled debut suits me best right now because on the one hand it doesn't require any real heat on my part in loving it, and partly because it sounds like it was recorded in an oppressively hot room. So I would kind of like to lead off with “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks” and its desperation (that’s me when we get our first intolerable days every year!), and then go from there. Here's "Jordanna", by Ola Podrida – definitely the next track I'd think of putting on the mix. He sounds pretty exhausted, really.

Ian

03. Saint Etienne – “London Belongs to Me” (3:58)

Ian

This Ola fellow, he sounds pretty beat. Is this fear of summer a Canadian thing or just a you thing? Over here in England the summer is a weird, unpredictable thing. May was gorgeous but now halfway through June the sky seems to be permanently grey. It's funny you say you have a bedroom with no windows. Mine has, let me count them, four. The next song for the mix is a counterpoint to the heavy, heavy sounds of Ola Podrida. Saint Etienne's "London Belongs to Me" sounds so light that on a couple of occasions it almost floats away. It captures the feeling of getting the tube on a warm summer night and being hit by a blast of cool air rushing its way up from somewhere deep underground. It feels like coming up without touching any kind of chemicals. It feels like someone has opened a window, let the light in, let some cool air in. In its own blissed out way – even as London skies, in their usual way, turn to granite – says "this is gonna be the best summer ever".

Paul

04. Spacemen 3 – “So Hot (Wash Away All of My Tears)” (2:39)

P,

Fear is the wrong word – that implies some level of the unknown. I know what summer here in Guelph is, and I fucking hate it. It is indeed unpredictable – it was cold enough here last night that I needed a hoodie! – but we can look forward to (and have already experienced one of) these periods of just blastingly intense heat and humidity. I forget if you guys use proper temperatures or what, but with humidity it can hit 45 degrees or more here, outside (to say nothing of my room – that's around 115 for the Americans, by the way), and given that we're also used to seeing temperatures dip into the -40s with wind chill in the winter (which works out to around -40, funnily enough), suddenly having that amount of heat trapped between the blue-but-solid sky and the fucking pavement is just ridiculous. It also doesn't help matters that I am, as John Cunningham once told me, a pale, easily burned motherfucker. Standing in the direct sun for even a minute makes me feel like my skin is being cooked off, it's ridiculous. I liked that St. Etienne track, but it's like you say – because it summons up not summer for me but that blast of cool air that means a fan, air conditioning, a cold snap. The other solution, of course, is to go swimming – as Jason Pierce sings in my next pick "I just want a river, just want the ocean." And it's called "So Hot (Wash Away All of My Tears)," which is thematically appropriate at least. The slow motion crawl of the track makes me think of summer, Pierce sounds pretty oppressed, and while he may be talking about heartbreak, when they sigh out "so hot...." I can easily turn the song into a lament for a Guelph summer, at least in my head.

I

05. Lindstrom – “Music in My Mind” (4:51)

I,

I think, in a sense, I agree with you. Summer, as an idea, sometimes seems oppressive. The feeling that just because of a metrological shift one should suddenly be happy. I like the Spacemen 3 song, did J Spaceman use that tune again on a Spiritualized album? I certainly know a version of it. Yes, it's track 4 on Pure Phase, that's one hell of an album. Opiated, beautifully sad summer jamz from a parallel universe. Enough of this heartbreak! Let's have some disco. Yet even here, amongst the flashlight and explosions, we can't quite let go. Lindstrom's "Music In My Mind" is certainly a lot more lithe and – let’s be honest – sexier than J Spaceman's blues. But, it's fueled by the same fever. It's there, just under the surface, somewhere between the beat and bass. The vocalist, she sounds cool but listen closer: "your eyes kill me": she seems to be surrendering. There is no cold snap here, no summer breeze: the beat goes on. You can't argue with caprice of metrology. Here, as oppression and exultation entwine - much as it did for J Spaceman - we see, sometimes, summer makes masochists of us all.

P

06. Scannerfunk – “Cosy Veneer” (6:39)

P,

Well shit, don't let me convert you or anything... and yeah, I forgot Jason recycled that one, but he did. I think I prefer this version, actually, and it does make a surprisingly good segue into the slinky as hell "Music in My Mind." Damn, that tracks burns – but in a way that makes me think of summer nights, which I much prefer to summer days. It's a bit cooler, the sun can't burn you – but some nights it's still sticky and close and you just want to jump out of your skin. Or at least I do. But you can't always manage that, so the night just goes a bit hazy instead, everything slides, indistinct, you wake up the next morning not quite sure where the hours went. That's the kind of night where I pull out the Scannerfunk record, precisely because of tracks like "Cosy Veneer." Fuzzy, shifting, low key - it makes a decent afterparty for the Lindstrom track, but it also takes us deeper into the muggy night, away from all that inconvenient solar radiation. You can still feel that heat, though, and it even sounds a bit mournful in places.

I

07. Air France – “Collapsing at Your Doorstep” (4:34)

I,

Through the night and out the other side. I've been working night-shifts. The sun starts to rise between four and five: if you're in a negative frame of mind Radiohead's "Lucky" sort of captures it. That guitar part mimicking the first oppressive break of the horizon, the histrionic proclamation of "it's going to be a glorious day", lacquered with bile: it's almost apocalyptic in its portent, a summer morning recast as the rapture. But, I'm younger than that now. Yes, the sun is rising, yes it may be oppressively hot later in the day, but for now it's perfect. It's not too hot yet, the sky is turning from grey to deep blue and the cynics have yet to get out of bed. "Collapsing at Your Doorstep" by Air France captures this feeling exquisitely. "It's all like dream" a little looped voice chirps and it is. It's indistinct yet somehow lucid, there is a certain clarity you just don't get at any other time of day. Then the main theme swoops in, the curtains are flung open, the horizon breaks: "this place is amazing". You can say "it's going to be a glorious day" and mean it. You can go to bed now safe in the knowledge you've seen the best part of the day.

P

08. Stina Nordenstam – “Crime” (5:41)

P,

Yeah, Air France captures that poignant clarity of the early morning quite well, I'd say - but I tend to see that time of day because of insomnia, not the night shift (you're making it harder and harder for me to play the curmudgeon, but I'll do my best). "Collapsing at Your Doorstep" works perfect for going to sleep that night, but what about when you get woken up an hour later and have to go to work? Strangely, it's the kind of precisely placed minimalism you find in Stina Nordenstam's "Crime" that most sums up how my head feels at those times, waiting for the sun to hit (hmm... some Slowdive later, maybe?). Except for the opening "Whatever made me cold, it's gone now" nothing in "Crime" speaks directly to the summer, but there's this desire, the obverse of Thom Yorke's plea for invisibility in "How to Disappear Completely": "You know it wasn't really me, you know I wasn't really there" – please, just forget that you saw me. Let me stay down here, out of the sun. The necessary, for me, postscript to "this place is amazing," at least when it's muggy out.

I

09. Christopher Cross – “Sailing” (4:17)

I,

That song is cold. Really cold. There's a motif at the beginning that reminds me, somewhat, of Christopher Cross's "Sailing", albeit with all the blood, all the warmth drained out. So, lets put some colour back in. It's cool but it's not cold. It's a groovy kind of melancholy; this man is, as someone once said, swimming in sadness. He's alone out on that endless ocean with nothing but his memories and the breeze. Where Stina shuts the curtains across and hides from the heat, Christopher – the not-so-rugged-individualist – slips on a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of loafers and sets sail. Perhaps, instead of curling up and hiding from those rays, the trick is to face them head on, curls those fingers into a fist of pure emotion, pour a margarita and man up. In the smoothest possible way, of course.

NB: Please see the following video for more on the creation of this piece of music.

P

10. Steely Dan – “Time Out of Mind” (4:13)

P,

Using Christopher friggin' Cross to chide me in terms of 'manning up' is a bold move indeed, and if "Sailing" wasn't so smooth I might even take offense. Of course, as the supplementary material shows, even that song isn't all sunshine and puppies. It did make me think of Michael McDonald, though, and Michael McDonald and summer make me think of one thing: Steely Dan. Especially Gaucho, their most "summery" album (because it's their LA album, and I've never been there so in my mind it's always summer down there). McDonald only provided backing vocals on one track there, the heroin ode "Time Out of Mind," but what backing vocals! Becker and Fagen's evident relish at making the smoothest possible backing for what are fetid, misanthropic tales of human folly and suffering is kinda funny - at least if you're still drawing those curtains, like I am. Perfect for air conditioned night clubs where everyone disappears to the bathroom twice an hour.

I

11. Bill Bragg – “Lovers Town Revisited” (1:18)

I,

It's getting so smooth here, it's almost decadent. I never suggested "Sailing" was "all sunshine and puppies", it's about dealing with the pains of summer not denying them. Now, another coping strategy. We're still in the club, or perhaps outside, but we're a hell of a long way from L.A. Billy Bragg's "Lovers Town Revisited" crackles with a parched, nervous energy. The shards of solo electric guitar sound like the tense heat of a summer Saturday night in some provincial British town centre. This is not the Dan's world of coke and hipcats, it's ale and skinheads. And, there in the centre of it all, the young William Bragg. He's weighing up his chances, just before he makes the great leap. He really is looking for a new England, but the savagery of a Summer night – "boys outside preaching genocide" indeed – is almost enough to make him just forget it, just turn and run away from it all. It's the antithesis of The Smiths "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others", yeh it's the same shitty provincial Britain but Bragg wants, though he knows it is perhaps impossible, to "save the world". Unlike moz though, he is unwilling to just give up, but at this moment he could just give in. It's a sublime moment of faith in doubt. These things, Ian, are sent to try us.

P

12. Jason Molina – “Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go” (6:40)

P,

Really? Christopher Cross is sailing into some sort of yacht rock fantasyland, not sure how he's dealing with the pains of summer! Bragg definitely is, though. Such a sublime depth of effort and pain packed into less than 90 seconds. But if I think of a man and an electric guitar, standing outside of a bar after a fruitless night with a stifling, moist heat in the air, I'm more likely to turn to Jason Molina and his claustrophobic solo album Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go. It was recorded by dint of the man hiding himself away in a small studio for three days, and you can tell; the subtly cataclysmic title track alone makes it feel like it's at least thirty degrees in the room. It's actually a little less sparse than the rest of the album, what with the muted drum machine in the background. For about a week here, between the punishing heat and the way rapidly rising gas prices made our broke asses unable to travel anywhere (oh, for a mass transit system like the UK's!), this summer felt like the end of our comfortable way of life, in a small, overly dramatic way. Which is exactly what this song feels like.

I

13. The Jazz Butcher – “Southern Mark Smith (Big Return)” (4:58)
14. Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass – “Casino Royale Theme (Main Title)” (2:38)
15. Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass – “Casino Royale Theme (Vocal)” (2:21)

I,

Maybe C. Cross isn't really coping, but he's dealing with it. Perhaps, it's only denial. The Molina track is making the walls close in just listening to it. Heavy, heavy vibes. The skies over London have gone grey and I'm blaming you. If there's one thing that typifies the reality of the English summertime it's afternoons like this, wasted holidays spent indoor looking out as the rain drizzles down. That's probably why our beaches fill on days the average Australian or Californian would describe as "a bit on the chilly side". It's like our national football team (soccer to you guys?); we don't win very often – sometimes we even fail to qualify – so even the smallest victory becomes a momentous triumph. It's that same spirit that fuels The Jazz Butcher's "Southern Mark Smith (Big Return)", sure he has no truck with the Hollywood ideal of summer ("Oh, look- in California, everyone's got a swimming pool in their backyard / Well-Me and Max and Davey Jones- we think you ought to get out there and stop it") but he's still hoping, still reaching for something. It's the archetypical eighties indie tune: jangly guitar, proto-shoegaze swirly guitar, organ, bouncy momentum and most of all a lyric that speaks of a desire to connect. It comes from the same place as The Smiths' "Ask". Sure, Mozza may have been "spending warm summer days indoors" but he was still "writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl Luxembourg". In their own wayward ways the OG indie kids were after pretty much the same things as everyone else in the universe: it was just that the thoughtless "fuck you" hedonism of the yuppies and thatcherites was giving contentment a bad name. It's a song about getting out there, a song that put its faith in the theory that thousands of people have got to be O.K. He's thwarted by distance, by reality - but he's putting the words out there, 'cos well someone might just listen. It may be using 7 inches of plastic, fanzines and the letters page of the NME - no internet in those desperate, desperate times- it doesn't matter, it's all communication, just different ways of getting out there. Meeting people can be easy! And hell, if not having to put on three layers makes it easier to get out there, then all the better!

Perhaps I have convinced you summer ain't so bad, perhaps not. Hell, the amount of sunny days I've spent indoors. Doesn't really bear thinking about y'know. Not that you have to go outside to have fun. I mean wasting Bank Holidays watching Bond films you've seen a few hundred times before isn't the worst way to spend time. And, with that rather ungainly bit of shore-horning out of the way, my final song: Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass performing Burt Bacharach's "Casino Royale Main Theme". A piece of music that very possibly drove some hepcat to invent the words "groovy" and "swinging" simply to describe the riotous collision of easy listening kitsch and blockbuster bombast. I've included both the instrumental version and the none-more-ridiculous vocal version performed by Mike Redway. After all that heat, angst and indie moping it's only fitting to end with a track that manages to be at once sublime and not in the least bit serious.

P

P,

James Bond films! Herb Alpert! Herb Alpert doing the theme to a comedy James Bond film! I've tried hard to be the negative one here, but I can't say no to that. Well, your music and the relatively cool weather we've had here recently. I give up, it's not so bad - I'm going to go listen to "Don't Falter" by Mint Royale ("when you're with me, it's always summer") and pet my cat. We should try this again in the winter... assuming you don't like the cold. It'd be nice to be rooting for the season next time.

I

PS. Is the rest of the Air France album as good as that track? I'm a little in love.

Total running time: 59:53

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #3: Jonathan Bradley

2008-06-25T22:39:00.014+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #3: Dear Summer...
http://www.mediafire.com/?ey1wsfnylgy

Dear Summer,
I know you’re missing me. We don’t always go together like Nike Airs and crisp tees, but when the temperature is just right, the sun’s going down, and I’ve got a cold one in my hand, we don’t look too bad together. I don’t have any up-tempo party tracks for you, summer, no pounding beats or sweat-drenched rock ‘n’ roll. My mix is for the times everything is still and quiet and perfect. The times when the sunshine is warm rather than baking, and the biggest decision I have to make is whether to start reading the newspaper from the front or the back page. I haven’t included any yacht rock or Eagles tunes in this mix, but that’s all I can guarantee. From the depths of the cold southern hemisphere, I hope you’re showing the same love to my friends.
--Jonathan

Not this Summer

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

01. The Promise Ring – Wake Up April
Promise Ring frontman Davey Von Bohlen must be synonymous with summer in my mind. After all, I put his band’s perfect season closer “Jersey Shore” on my 2006 Summer Jamz tape, and once again Mr Von Bohlen has found himself on one of my mixes. “Wake Up April,” from the unreasonably maligned 2002 album Wood/Water, is dedicated to the beginning of summer; its gentle pace sounds like the welcome warmth of the first days of the season, when the sunshine is still a pleasant novelty. Von Bohlen lays out his instructions for enjoying such a time in the opening verse, and you should heed his advice as a guide to properly enjoying the rest of this mix: “You’ll be sipping your morning coffee in the afternoon.” His languid strumming smears across the track like dappled sunlight, its gentle pace befitting an indulgent afternoon filled with nothing more pressing than coffee consumption.

02. Fleetwood Mac – Gypsy
In Fleetwood Mac-land, it’s always summer, but they wouldn’t know, because the band is cocooned from any harsh realities that might intrude on its crystalline perfection. “Gypsy” exists in a temperature-controlled bubble in a sweltering Los Angeles, Stevie Nicks’ unearthly vocal gliding over hermetically-sealed, surgically sterile instrumentation. The arrangement is so precise that it seems to encase the singer; Nicks sings like she’s completely alone, never imagining anyone could be listening in on her self-examination.

03. Donna Lewis – I Love You Always Forever
Where Nicks’ bubble is cool and private, “I Love You Always Forever” is a moment shared between two people: Donna Lewis, and you, the listener. Apart from a few house-reminiscent piano chords that enter toward the end, the entire song, including Lewis’ dreamy coo, is a soft-focus throb. The disparate musical elements coalesce into a pillowy bed of sound, deliciously warm, Lewis and you under the covers.

04.Wilco – Either Way
“Either Way” is a glimpse at what an engaging record the disappointing Sky Blue Sky could have been. Jeff Tweedy is entirely passive in this song, singing, “Maybe the sun will shine today, maybe it won’t” and later, “Maybe you still love me, maybe you don’t,” seeming to suggest he has no more power to affect the latter than he does the former. His paean to surrender is an inviting one, and Tweedy has never sounded more middle-aged than here, where he finds happiness in a cloudless day and the acceptance of his powerlessness. As if to accentuate its flabby aging, the band colors the latter half of the track with an entirely purposeless guitar solo, an ostentatious piece of trilling that flutters over the song like sail boats on a lake. It would be disgraceful, save for the fact that it seems right that the aging Tweedy would enjoy nothing more than a summer picnic on the shore of Lake Michigan, the wind ruffling his hair like the notes of Nels Cline’s guitar.

05. Mariah Carey – Always Be My Baby
But if “Either Way” had you thinking too much about your pension, Mariah Carey’s “Always Be Your Baby” will have you feeling like a twelve year old again. She sings this buoyant expression of puppy love with such joy that it is easy to forget it is a break up song; the guy who Carey says will always be her baby has just left her. Few actual love songs are this jubilant. It’s not hard to share her optimism, though; the vaguely Motown beat and playful piano chords are as carefree as Carey herself.

06. Cut Copy – Feel the Love
Finding the common interest in psychedelia shared by rock and dance music, Cut Copy’s “Feel the Love” mixes shimmering acoustic guitar and shimmering synth lines so expertly that it becomes irrelevant which is which. Music festivals throughout 2008, if they’re any good, will sound like this.

07. Debbie Harry – French Kissin’ in the U.S.A.
The strident way Harry sings the title makes it sounds like a political slogan, but the graceful synths and Springsteen-esque saxophone confirm she’s concerned only with having a good time. Mixing French and English, pop and pleasure, the only excuse for not enjoying this tune is if you’re filling your summer days with actual French kissing in the U.S.A. Paris is calling indeed.

Not this Paris

08. Rilo Kiley – Silver Lining
Blake Sennett bites George Harrison’s guitar sound and the rest of Rilo Kiley embraces ’70s sheen on the opening track to 2007’s Under the Blacklight; the result is pleasure pursued so mercilessly that it’s amazing the result sounds so easygoing. Jenny Lewis’ airy vocal conjures up summer with the lines “the grass it was a-ticking, and the sun was on the rise,” even while she adds a hint of darkness, admitting that she “never felt so wicked when she willed our love to die.” If that’s the cloud, the silver lining is worth it; as pop goes, this is solid gold.

09. The Sleepy Jackson – Good Dancers
George Harrison finds himself robbed again, this time by Perth act the Sleepy Jackson. Luke Steele pilfers Harrison’s slide guitar, and in an inspired, if obvious, move, floats an unearthly falsetto over the top. When this was released in 2003, Australian critics got cute and called the result West Coast Country, even though there’s only a hint of twang and the West Coast was that of Australia. Still, the description was more than appropriate; Steele’s uh... sleepy melodies suggest California as easily as Western Australia. An ideal accompaniment to a lazy summer Sunday spent anywhere from Fremantle to Fresno.

10. Ben Lee – Begin
Over his past few albums, Ben Lee has embraced an unyieldingly optimistic outlook, and the results have tended toward the nauseating and lobotomized (“Catch My Disease”, “Numb”). Occasionally, however, this unrelentingly cheery approach results in inspired sincerity, as it did with “Begin.” From his 2005 album Awake is the New Sleep, which was released after a three year hiatus, the song sounds like a rebirth, Lee putting himself back together after losing his ultra fashionable record company (Grand Royal closed its doors in 2001), his celebrity girlfriend (he broke up with actress Claire Danes in 2003) and his status as burgeoning indie prodigy (no one was really checking for Lee in ’05, were they?). Having returned home to Sydney he sings about his old residence of New York from the perspective of a visitor: “I’m walking through Central Park/I’m in a foreign country.” The quiet hum of the song and Lee’s softly sung affirmations (“I’m thinking about the city/It’s living proof people need to be together”) are a salve, the warmth of summer tinged by a memory of a winter still recent enough to prompt a shiver.

11. Loudon Wainwright III – Grey in L.A.
“Grey in L.A.”? As a summer song? I knows that Los Angeles has a Mediterranean climate, which means that its grey days usually coincide with its winter months, but Wainwright’s treatment of the city’s unusually wet weather is so welcoming and sunny (He even seems happy that the town “smells like a wet dog”!) that I can’t help but think of it as a summer song. It helps that in my decidedly non-Southern Californian climate, there are plenty of wet summer days, and they are exactly as relaxing and refreshing as this tune sounds.

12. Manitoba – Jacknuggeted
But if Wainwright’s brief sojourn out of the sunshine had you worried, feel free to relax. If a Los Angeleno can be counted on to rejoice in overcast weather, Canadians like Dan Snaith dependably celebrate moments of sunshine. The gorgeous “Jacknuggeted” bursts into life with a dazzling wash of synths and acoustic guitars, while the mantra-like vocal glimmers from odd corners of the track like sunshine breaking through storm clouds.

13. Fleet Foxes – Sun Giant
And if things weren’t sunny enough after the Manitoba track, Seattle’s Fleet Foxes have some folky, hippie bullshit that sounds like it was made of sunshine itself. “What a life I lead when the sun breaks free,” they sing in a cappella harmony, as if they were at one with the natural world. Damn hippies. Good song, though.

Fleet Foxes: Pitchfork gave these guys a 9.0

14. The New Radicals – Someday We’ll Know
The New Radicals, of course, were responsible for that classic ’90s one hit wonder “You Get What You Give.” Less reliant on Clinton-era cultural detritus (Beck, Hanson, Marilyn Manson), and over all a better tune, is the unashamedly soft rock “Someday We’ll Know.” Gregg Alexander spews claptrap questions (“Did the captain of the Titanic cry?”) and somehow manages to make them sound meaningful. It should be the kind of tune that the radio throws on after a parade of current hits, triggering instant nostalgia for summers gone, except radio didn’t play it much when it was released, and certainly does not play it now. Since the song sounds as if it were written for them, it makes all the sense in the world that Hall and Oates covered the tune for their 2003 album Do It for Love. If anyone has a copy of that recording, I would love to hear it.

15. Neil Young – Everybody Knows this is Nowhere
Perhaps not quite as smooth as the preceding tracks with its distorted country rock guitar, “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere” is nonetheless a fitting closer. Not only does Neil Young give the song a fair amount of smoothed-out ’60s sunshine of the sort he was pursuing with Messrs Crosby, Stills and Nash around the same time, he also sounds like he’d like to spend his summer exactly as I would. “I’d like to go back home and take it easy,” he sings. “I gotta get away from this day to day running around.” Neil, when you do, play this tape. In summer there’s nothing like having nothing to do, and where better to do nothing than nowhere?

***

More summer:

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz '08 #2: Mike Orme & Nick Southall

2008-06-24T15:04:00.006+10:00

Summer Jamz '08 #2: State of the Union, Jack
http://www.mediafire.com/?nvzzexqvjdn

Two former Stylus Magazine compatriots, Exeter UK’s Nick Southall (also of The Guardian and Paper Thin Walls) and Oakland’s Mike Orme (also of Pitchfork Media), celebrate the summer by splitting halves of a mix CD, each trying to fill their side with songs the other writer would put on a summer mix. In the process, they hope to reconcile musical tastes separated by the sides of a record, not to mention the Atlantic Ocean. While they’re at it, they might get around to revisiting the whole the 49th parallel issue and whether “chuffed” is a positive or a negative.

Each Summer Jam is proudly co-hosted with The Passion of the Weiss and What Was it Anyway.

Side One: Mike orme’s summer dance bum-out!!!
(As chosen by mister nick Southall, esquire)

01. Guillemots – she’s evil
02. The field – a paw in my face
03. Four tet – ribbons
04. Von südenfed – the rhinohead
05. Vitalic – la rock 01
06. Studio / kylie – 2 hearts
07. Lcd soundsystem – Hippie priest bum-out
08. Young gods – strangel
09. Akufen – jeep sex

Why the hell did I suggest picking tracks in the manner of each other? I’ve never really spoken to Mister Orme and he’s a; not been around the Stylus ragtag band for all that long, and b; tastefully eclectic enough not to be able to be pigeonholed into easy mimicry. Potentially hoist by my own potato, I decide to go with a theme; many of Mister Orme’s favourites from the last two years show a fondness for supremely stylish, textured dance music with an alternative bent… and so the SUMMER DANCE BUM-OUT is born…

Things start out kind of weird with an odd number drawn from the semi-rare Guillemots “Of The Night EP”, wherein the finest purveyors of indie-jazz-pop suddenly go all LCD Soundsystem on us and get freaky with the fuzz-bass and 4/4 beats – it’s something to do with the guitarist, I think. I doubt Mike has this track, but I expect he’d like it.

Then we take a turn for the familiar with The Field’s exquisite “A Paw In My Face”, one of Mister Orme’s favourite tracks from last year, and one of mine too; it’s doubly apposite at the moment, because my kitten is mental. And I’m getting another soon. WHY?!

Now for a foray into the uber-new, with the second track off Kieron Hebdon’s latest EP, “Ringer”, which sees him largely ditching the folktronica tag of his previous work and going all 90s techno on us, sort of. What Mike’s digging right now I’m not sure, but this should certainly be involved somewhere.

Mark E Smith and Mouse On Mars, in their guise as Von Südenfed, step up next, with the exquisite Motown-gone-big-beat dancepop of “The Rhinohead”; I’ve not seen Mike mention this collaboration anywhere, but it surely MUST be up his street?

Next to my favourite house / dance / wtf tune of a few years ago, and Vitalic’s exquisite “La Rock 01”; released before Mike was on-staff here, I can’t imagine he’d be anything less than into this.

Likewise this Kylie remix by Studio from Yearbook 2; I know Mike was chuffed with Yearbook 1 last year, and Studio continue to wow with their Balearic postpunk disco. Or something.

Next the title track for this side of our collaborative mixtape, which I picked up on the CD release of 45:33. Minimal by Murphy’s standards, this is nonetheless classy, just like Mike’s dapper pink slacks on his Facebook profile picture.

And finally we get the insane “Strangel” by Young Gods. Does Mike like deranged Scandinavian sampledelic dance-metal? Fuck knows, but that’s an awesome riff and beat…

[MO note: In true music nerd fashion, Nick added a track to the end of his mix after he sent me his side and his write-up. The ninth track on “Mike Orme’s summer dance bum-out!!!” is “Jeep Sex” by Akufen, a Montreal based microhouse-ish artist who is known as Marc Leclair by day. This lovely track utilizes a number of punchy samples to drive the beat, with strings, an R&B crooner, pianos, and funk guitar each from separate samples, seemingly contributing one note apiece to the groove’s melody. I always love this kind of sampling wherein the cuts between samples provide as much percussion as the beat itself. Nice work, Sick Mouthy!]

Side Two: Nick Southall’s June Evenings

(As chosen by Mike “Freedom Fries” Orme)

10. Battles – Race In
11. Patrick Wolf – Accident & Emergency
12. The Chap - Surgery
13. Air France – June Evenings
14. Fennesz Feat. David Sylvian - Transit
15. Brian Eno – Another Green World
16. My Bloody Valentine – You Made Me Realise
17. M83 – Dark Moves of Love
18. Phoenix – Definitive Breaks

I’ve always respected Nick Southall’s writing and his uniquely acerbic take on music and listening. In his Stylus articles, Nick always attempted to elucidate the struggle between the intangible pleasures of pop music and the corporeal concerns of actually listening to it. Nick is an audiophile and his Stylus Magazine writings, including the Da Capo-honored Imperfect Sound Forever, chronicle his quest to save the world one pure audio signal at a time. Anyone familiar with my tastes, which sometimes run into the overdriven worlds of noisy, electronic fuzz, might think that Nick and I wouldn’t get along musically; however, Nick’s collection of favored records intersects with mine at some significant vectors. I’ve attempted to explicate those cross-references by mixing together a couple nice tracks Nick might select to accompany him on one of these serene June evenings.

We begin with “Race In” by New York math rock group Battles. I’ve always thought of this group (and this opener to their album Mirrored in particular) as a mutated synthesis of Discipline-era King Crimson and the choral German 60s pop chronicled on the In-Kraut series. Nick called Mirrored his tenth-favorite “postrock” album of all time in a Stylus Top Ten which explored the meaning of that nebulous genre, and I wholeheartedly agree that their progressive, meandering pixie jazz inhabits the post-rock style just as thoroughly as their more tranquil counterparts.

If Nick suspected from the Battles selection that I’d be trotting out his obvious favorites, he’d be right! Next is “Accident & Emergency” by Patrick Wolf, one of Nick’s favourite artists. (Note: I love that this Microsoft Word document, in which I am appending my humble liner notes to Nick’s descriptions, automagically added the “u” to my boorish American “favorite”) I’m always a sucker for cut-up vocals and wonky, sequencer-driven synthesizer counterpoints, but to be honest I didn’t really get into Patrick Wolf until last year’s The Magic Position, on which this cut appears.

I like to think that the London-based pop group the Chap has a bit in common with Wolf’s flamboyant and subversive personality, and so I’m veering away from Nick’s canon with “Surgery” from the Chap’s recent release Mega Breakfast. The track is a sedate anthem, recalling Skylarking-era XTC, but as with all Chap recordings, there’s a curious DIY aesthetic to their electronic production, like they got their drum machine at a liquor store for ten quid. I’m sure Nick would enjoy the Chap’s heavy-handed but marvellously fun lesson in popposition.

Nick might be unfamiliar with the next cut, “June Evenings,” as well, but seeing as how we share a love for Swedish group Studio and the recent Balearic rock movement, I’m sure he would quickly glom onto this track off Air France’s recent EP No Way Down. Air France also hail from Studio’s hometown of Gothenburg and also indulge in the beach-loving synthesis of disco beats, Krautrock’s motorik rhythms, and Manuel Göttsching’s funky techno guitar.

As this evening mix progresses, the pace slows down considerably with “Transit” off prepared guitar technician Fennesz’s 2004 album Venice. This reflective cut features David Sylvian’s baritone and lyrics concerning the memory of European travels as a vehicle for explaining a sense of loss. This collaboration came on the heels of Sylvian’s 2003 starkly-composed solo album Blemish, recorded as his marriage was coming to an end, and put a coda to that brooding, experimental period in his career.

Nick and I may agree most heartily on the radiance of Brian Eno’s last two solo albums, Another Green World and Before and After Science, before the commonly accepted beginning of his “ambient” period. Next up is the title track from the former, a short, repeated guitar and organ figure that fades in and out in the space of little over ninety seconds. It’s one of my favourite transitions in the whole of popular music.

The pace picks up a bit with “You Made Me Realise” by My Bloody Valentine, an unexpected beloved of Southall. One of the group’s relatively early recordings, the track appears on their first Creation Records EP. This recorded version fails to capture the band’s crushing live performances of the song, in which MBV often extends the chaotic “bridge” (consisting of one pounded, noisy chord) for fifteen or twenty minutes before returning to the closing chorus.

I may be accused of heavy-handedness by transitioning from My Bloody Valentine directly into M83, so I beg the forgiveness of both Nick and the readers. “Dark Moves of Love” is a penultimate track (off their new album Saturdays=Youth), a sequencing position I hold dear to my heart. Although M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzales has nudged his project in an airy and nostalgic (though no less salient) direction, this track is classic Dead Cities M83. It’s basically a three-minute chorus of guitars and female vocals that repeats an abstract and insistent message of reconciliation across great times and distances, building to a climax marked by a simple five-second drum fill. Then, it all fades down into an oceanic synthesizer hum, which I’ve transitioned into…

“Definitive Breaks” by Parisian quartet Phoenix closes their 2000 debut United, an album whose blue-eyed synthpop has been praised by both Nick and myself. My relationship with the group began during a period living in Japan, during which time I would frequent a Kyoto club called “Metro” located in a subway station just off the Kamogawa river. The DJ at the Tuesday 80s night played United’s second track “Too Young” one fateful evening and that was it. Ill-advised Zima hangover be damned, I rushed to the Tower the next morning, picked up United, and never let go. I thought I was keying in on something elemental, something special. And then Sofia Friggin’ Coppola had to go and use the song to give Bob and Charlotte the same revelatory clubgoing context in Lost in Translation a year later.

***

More summer:
Summer Jamz '08 #1: Compiled by Alfred Soto and Dan Weiss
"In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly..."

Summer Jamz' 08 #1: Dan Weiss & Alfred Soto

2008-06-23T16:48:00.006+10:00

The irony is, we're in the thick of winter here in Australia. It's cold, wet, and, as I type these words, I'm trying to prevent little icicles from forming on the tips of my fingers. Maybe that's why I've always enjoyed the series of annual summer-inspired mixtapes the sadly defunct Stylus Magazine would present at this time of year, starting in 2002 and continuing right until it closed its doors in 2007. These playlists, which would encompass a variety of styles and perspectives on the season never failed to warm my short winter days.

Although Stylus no longer publishes, summer continues to shine, and so this year, as June approached, I called up some of the old Stylus writers and asked them to contribute a mix of songs to soundtrack their summer. Amazingly, they agreed, even the ones who are getting married, hate summer or live in places like Miami and Los Angeles, and, by all rights should be too busy picking up models and partying to be constructing mix tapes.

Screw Rock 'n' Roll, The Passion of the Weiss and What Was It Anyway (along with a few other locations across the Internets) will be posting these Summer-inspired mixes for your listening pleasure. Working or partying, relaxing or vacationing, these are the sounds of our summer. Join us and enjoy.
-- Jonathan Bradley

And while you do so, check out Stylus's archived Summer Jamz:

Stylus Summer Jamz '02
Stylus Summer Jamz '03
Stylus Summer Jamz '04
Stylus Summer Jamz '05
Stylus Summer Jamz '06
Stylus Summer Jamz '07

* * *

Summer Jamz '08 #1: Dan Weiss and Alfred Soto
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1U19FJYG

1. The Reputation - Face It
2. Arthur Russell - That's Us/Wild Combination
3. Cut Copy - So Haunted
4. Yo La Tengo - Today is the Day
5. The Cure - A Japanese Dream
6. Be Your Own Pet - Super Soaked
7. Lil' Wayne - I Feel Like Dying
8. Belinda Carlisle - Heaven is a Place on Earth (Heavenly Version)
9. Mike Doughty - Like a Luminous Girl
10. Hercules & Love Affair - Shadows
11. Pet Shop Boys - Minimal
12. Katy Perry - Waking Up in Vegas
13. Wussy - Soak It Up
14. Kathleen Edwards - The Cheapest Key
15. Jens Lekman - A Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill
16. Bryan Ferry - The In Crowd
17. Weezer - Everybody Get Dangerous
18. Al Green feat. John Legend - Stay With Me (By the Sea)
19. Duran Duran - Meet El Presidente (7" Remix)
20. The B-52s - Eyes Wide Open
21. We are Scientists - After Hours
22. Liz Phair - Lazy Dreamer
23. Rosanne Cash - Hold On
24. Bob Dylan - Clean-Cut Kid

Mixing this was a necessary challenge. I'm in constant worry that the constant tide of new sounds to parse will eventually swallow my instinct for putting music together or catching the hairpin logic of a loop in potentia. I'm really proud of these results, though. Alfred is a natural collaborator for me because he's one of the few critics of my time who zeroes in on melody, rhythm, songwriting...the boring essentials that some people will go as far as SunnO)))) records to avoid. I can count on him to present me with a new way to hear E-A-B-C# again (Kathleen Edwards' brilliant Amy Rigby stunt "The Cheapest Key") or discern visceral arguments of longevity from inscrutable favorite-band-ism (Pet Shop Boys' "Minimal," as exciting as they've ever been in 20+ years). I was delighted by his picks, nearly all of them unknown to me. In fact, his choices set the bar so high I went back and redacted a few of mine that I fear relied too much on my weakness: classic alt-rock comforts. Even still, no summer can jam without Weezer, Weezy or Belinda Carlisle. Thanks for luring me out of the cheapest key.
--Dan Weiss

After studying our mix, I noticed that we were most concerned with space -- how artists and shrewd remixes suggest vastness. In the context of summer, vastness suggests the abrogation of responsibility: school and relationships, mostly, and the moral sinecures they provide by necessity, against which we strain with some success, and towards which we return as the days start to shorten, and bank balances begin to shrink. These songs are guideposts: towards danger and release.
--Alfred Soto

Stand in the way of love and we'll smoke them all

2008-06-13T03:42:00.005+10:00

I'm not too keen on this Queen, either...

It was the Queen's Birthday holiday in Australia on Monday, which I usually mark with a call for independence from the British crown. As I have in previous years, I'm declaring it Republic Day; fortunately the day we'll get that republic is looking like it will arrive a lot sooner than I would have predicted this time last year. PM Kevin Rudd has put it on the agenda, and Shadow Treasurer Malcolm Turnbull, who will be opposition leader as soon as Brendan Nelson's had enough of making himself look like foolish, is also a prominent Republican. I was going to commemorate this pleasing state of affairs with a Top Ten songs to Play While Taking Down the Monarchy or something, but I could only really think of the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" and the Smiths' "The Queen is Dead," and celebrating Australian independence from the British Empire with a list of songs by English artists doesn't seem quite appropirate. Still, as ardent a Republican as I am, I can't imagine much of musical worth could be wrought from anti-monarchy (or, for that matter, pro-monarchy) views. So let's ignore all that and do something else.

It was this or a picture of Kevin Spacey. I made my choice and I'm sticking with it.

It's been a while since we last spoke (my computer's been broke), so let's ease back into this blogging shit with what the kids out there call a "meme." So called because me, me, it's all about me. I've been tagged by Lil' Weiss, and I believe the ettiquette of the internets requires me to do the following:

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to."

Now, I ain't going to tag anyone, because I fear the rejection of them ignoring me (who knew I was so insecure?), but if you read this blog and feel like playing, leave a comment with a link to your blog, and we'll pretend I tagged you to begin with.

Though if I must tag some people, I instruct the following to all participate: Barack Obama; Paul Krugman; Pete Wentz; Kanye West; John Darnielle; Tom Breihan; Peter Hartcher. I expect each and every one of them to respond.

1. Paul Kelly - Big Heart

I'm not sure the anatomical analysis really justifies Paul Kelly's conclusion, but I can certainly get behind his diagnosis as an aorta-tugging hook: "Your big heart's gonna break your little body." I've been listening to his great late '80s albums Gossip and Under the Sun (from which this song comes) lately, and "Big Heart," though not thematically exceptional, keeps pulling me back. He encompasses so much on these records: politics, Australiana, a distinctly blue collar take on life and relationships, but the compassion he injects into this song makes it one of the most striking on these albums. It's an uncomplicated country-rock tune, but the mere fact that Kelly sounds like he cares so much makes it extraordinarily affecting.

2. Lil' Wayne - Open Shop

Things Lil' Wayne's quite excellent new album lacks: Develop production, Mack Maine guest spots, generic trap talk. Now, I understand most people will respond to that complaint with a perhaps justified, "yeah whatever," and I don't think the album necessarily suffers from its lack of any of those things. But both Develop and Mack Maine have been distinctive parts of Lil' Wayne's fiercly Southern identitiy, as opposed to his drugged-out eccentric, best rapper alive or hottest new radio star identities. I think Southern Wayne is my favorite one, and it's why I might even like Tha Carter II even more than Tha Carter III

The most obviously impressive thing about Wayne's recent material has been his insanely unhinged space rap, and yes, "Dying" was my favorite song in 2007, and when he does that shit well, he does it very well. It's a big part of the reason I've had Tha Carter III on repeat since it leaked. Like, I literally can't stop listening to it: It's in my car stereo, and when I thought I was ready to change it today, I took the Get Up Kids Live disc to the car, and just couldn't take the Weezy disc out of the player. But despite my appreciation for his more expansive creative aspects, sometimes I like my Lil' Wayne direct, nasty and dumb. "Open Shop" is the first two, for sure, though it's not as dumb as it might have been.

It's a drug song. Lil' Wayne opens up a shop and sells drugs. Whatever. It allows Develop to do his thing, and when Develop does his thing with Wayne, it always results in effortlessly enjoyable music. The two have a great resume: together, they've created "Fireman," "Make It Work For You" (with Juelz Santana and Young Jeezy) and now "Open Shop." Develop's sparse, banging synthetics are excellent complements to Lil' Wayne's cracking sneer, and together the two are extraordinarily adept at creating a very specific form of trap rap, and so with enviable consistency. In this song, Develop shoves his drum machine up against a tinny, rolling bass line, creating the hip hip version of the indulgently trashy aesthetic of the Kills or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the Libertines. Mack Maine describes it in his verse as "drug music ... rock 'n' roll, hip hop, thug music/heart-missin' no love music." Which is accurate: as well as being utterly cold, it has a good amount of rock 'n' roll in its hip hop swagger.

And Mack Maine more than excels on this song. He's the best of Lil' Wayne's next generation Cash Money MCs (and Curren$y definitely is showing some potential), and his verse on this song outclasses Wayne. Maine emits grimy boasts like "We smash daughters/Smoke and drink tap water": unpoetic scene-setting that nonetheless sounds fantastic. Brisco was the only New Orleans local to guest on Tha Carter III, and though he gets in a good line about being higher than gas prices (side note: I'm paying approx US$6 a gallon for gas, America. If you don't like $4 a gallon gas, send me some!) I would rather Mack Maine had got the spotlight.

3. Martina McBride - Independence Day

The narrative device driving this song is the American Revolution, and the annual celebration thereof, but it doesn't actually have much to do with the song. It's used as a setpiece; young Martina heads to the fairgrounds on the 4th of July her mom finally snaps and gives her abusive husband whatfor. But rather than the aggressive assertion of freedom at the core of the U.S. Revolution, Martina's mother, and Martina herself, are passive characters in the action. And while the biblical reference in the chorus is to Jesus' resurrection ("roll the stone away"), this track is firmly Old Testament in its outlook. It isn't a story of a wronged woman's revenge like the Dixie Chicks' "Goodbye Earl" or Miranda Lambert's "Gunpowder and Lead." It's a song about sinners being punished.

McBride sings that she'd went off to the Independence Day festivities after her drunken father started beating on her mother, and when she gets back, her house is on fire, and she is sent away to live at a "County Home." We don't quite know what happens to her father, but the song's finality, referring to the torching of the family home as "Independence Day" certainly hints that he was killed, perhaps even burned alive inside the house. It's a horrible end, one even worse than what the man deserved: "Let the guilty pay," as McBride sings. This is the act of a vengeful god, not the forgiving one who was said to have been reborn on Easter Sunday.

The song is dominated by passive sentences. "Let the weak be strong"; "let the right be wrong." And the mother is a passive character. She gets beaten, and she frees herself by letting a fire drive her abuser away. She doesn't wait for him with a loaded shotgun like Miranda Lambert does in "Gunpowder and Lead." And by doing so, she loses her daughter. It's a sad end for the character, and it's hard to see her as an active figure in the song. Rather, she's an instrument for an act of God. The true victory in this song is not, like the American Revolution, that of the oppressed over an oppressor; it's the victory of right over wrong, and it's a meagre, hollow victory. Some of the characters may be better off, but no one has really won. For a song centered on such a valued American holiday, it's surprisingly grim.

OK guys. I've done it before, please don't make me do it no more. I'll finish this off some other time

Don't worry 'bout the President...

2008-04-25T03:33:00.002+10:00

I reviewed The-Dream's Love Hate over at Lost at Sea. It's one of my favorite albums of the year so far (even if it was released at the end of last year); you should check it out. I've also been making some music. Check for this shit on the forthcoming Saturday Club mixtape Emerald City:

Lyrics Born - Callin' Out (The Saturday Club Remix)

I played this remix in my last podcast, but I thought I'd release it as an individual download. If you could all pretend you've been hanging out for that, I'd really appreciate it. My ego doesn't massage itself. (Actually, it does).

I'd had this a capella lying around for a while, and I'd been trying, with little success, to match it up with some beats I'd been working on. This was back before I'd heard any hyphy, but I had heard that the Bay Area (from which Lyrics Born hails, even though he isn't part of that whole hyphy scene) had it's own unique sound, their own version of crunk. So, undeterred by the fact that I had never heard any hyphy, I tried to make a few hyphy beats to put under it. Needless to say, it didn't work.

Then I placed it over this instrumental that I'd been fiddling around with, and it worked great. The original "Callin' Out" is a loose, funky, West Coast underground sort of song, but I thought Lyrics Born's unconstrained exhortations would work better if they were held down by something a bit harder. So I stuck it together, liked what I heard, and then left it unfinished on the shelf for a few years. A couple weeks back, I finished it off, touching it up with some tricks I've picked up in the intervening years. I do hope you like it. I'm pretty happy with it.

Jay-Z - Izzo (H.O.V.A.) [The Saturday Club Remix]

And because I'm posting up one of my remixes, I'll let you take a listen to another I did. It's actually a repost, since I uploaded it for my second Screw Rock 'n' Roll post ever. But I think I possibly have a few readers now who weren't paying attention to me back in those days, and maybe even a couple who would like to hear my re-imagining of one of Jay-Z's biggest hits. Bonus points if you pick the sample, but I'll be surprised if you can, and I'm really hoping you can't.

And because these remixes are just vocals over beats I'd already made, these beats are for sale. If you want to buy either or both from me, email saturdayclubproductions at gmail.com, and we'll try to work something out. I've never sold a beat to anyone, so I'm not going to be asking Timbaland level cash. Probably not even Scott Storch level.

Finally, you might have noticed that Pennsylvania's musical community let me down with its failed prediction that Barack Obama would win the state's Democratic primary. I blame the unusually large cartoon mouse turnout.

Screw Rock 'n' Roll's Musical Guide to the Pennsylvania Primary

2008-04-23T00:10:00.029+10:00

Beef is not what Jay said to Nas

So, right now, Pennsylvanian Democrats are voting for their party's nominee for the Presidential election, and just maybe (but probably not), they'll end the whole mess here and tomorrow we'll know whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be the Democrats' candidate in the United States' November election. In the interests of helping you understand what's going on in the Keystone state today, I'm devoting today to exploring its musical history. Perhaps by turning our ears to this broad, diverse Commonwealth, we'll work whether it's the sort of place who wants a leader who can't bowl but can shoot hoops, or a one who can knock back shots, but can't remember whether she's being shot at or not.

Not shown: Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Paradise. Shown: Beaver Falls

I have never been to Pennsylvania, having decided to spend an extra day in Boston the one time I had the opportunity. Sorry, Philly. But that shouldn't stop you from trusting my analysis one hundred percent. Incidentally, I one day hope to write a book about music and United States geography and regional culture. I doubt it will be anything like this post.

Philadelphia

The City of Brotherly Love, the Cradle of Liberty and, as the New York Times likes to say, the Sixth Borough. Seen to be an Obama stronghold, as it is filled with Obama-loving elites like the 44% of the population who is African American. Overshadowed by the larger New York to the north and the capital Washington D.C., to the south, the city shares the Eastern Seaboard culture of its neighbors, but retains its own unique characteristics.

The Roots

The Philadelphia of the Roots is a hard-scrabble one inhabited by citizens that are sometimes furiously intelligent, and sometimes just plain furious. Like Obama, The Roots can make concessions to the center ("Birthday Girl"), but they're not very good at it ("Birthday Girl"). Truth be told, they appeal more to prospective fans outside their usual base when they're just being themselves. The title of the Roots new album, Rising Down, could be a subliminal attack on new Obama endorser Bruce Springsteen (who titled a recent album The Rising), but my guess is that ?uestlove and co are going to be voting for Obama today.

X-Factor: If Clinton pulls Patrick Stump out and promises The Roots a TRL spot, who knows which way they'll go?

Prediction: Obama.

Download: The Roots ft. Dice Raw, Jazzy Jeff & Peedi Crakk - Get Busy

Marah

White Philly rock dudes who probably wish they'd written Springsteen's "Philadelphia" (or really, wish they'd been Springsteen), these guys love Philadelphia so much they named one of their albums Kids in Philly. They sing that "Across the river, Camden is a guilded kingdom on the verge of night" and name songs for Philly neighborhood Point Breeze. These guys want to be a band that chronicles Philadelphia the same way Lou Reed did New York, Springsteen did New Jersey and Craig Finn now does Minneapolis. And they do sound like what I imagine parts of Philly to be like: chilly, working class, slightly nostalgic.

Prediction: This sounds exactly like Clinton's core audience, the kind of folks she'll be hoping to win over to prevent Obama sweeping Philadelphia.

Download: Marah - East

Beanie Sigel and Freeway

Like The Roots, Beanie Sigel and Freeway hint at a pretty gully Philadelphia, though their Philly has more guns and less afros than ?uestlove's crew. And Sigel, the self-described Broad Street Bully, said on Ghostface's "Tony Sigel (Barrel Brothers) that he's "not feelin' Bush overseas," suggesting, like much of the rest of the American population, he's at least open to the possibility of a Democratic president. Obama's already endorsed the Roc, meaning he should get Beans' and Free's vote with little difficulty. And on "Tony Sigel," Ghostface announced that he'd voted for the triple threat of "Oprah, Obama and Eric. B." Only problem is, Beanie Sigel is a convicted felon and can't vote.

X-Factor: Even if Beans can't vote, Freeway could end up siding with Obama if he notices the candidate's attempts at reaching out. You telling me that Obama-endorser Bill Richardson's new facial hair isn't an attempt at reaching out to gruff, bearded rappers?

Prediction: Obama.

Download: Freeway ft. Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel - What We Do

Gamble and Huff

I've been listening to a Philly soul compilation lately called The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble and Huff's Greatest Hits, and it's pretty great. From the sound of things, even with stagflation, gas shortages and Watergate, Philadelphia was a pretty great place to be in the '70s. I guess, for the black population behind this music, it was; the decade previous had seen major gains in civil rights and Ronald Reagan was still over in California where he couldn't do any harm to anyone on the East Coast. If the '70s were the beginning of the black middle class, the sound of Philadelphia was a good soundtrack. You can't help but feel like things are getting better while you're listening to this.

What the candidates should have been doing: Obama has been playing Motown hits while he's been campaigning, but he should have ditched that for some Teddy Pendergrass. There's making an audience fall in love with you, and then there's making an audience fall in love with you.

Prediction: Obama. Like Obama, Gamble and Huff know the audacity of hope, and like Obama, that positivity attracts criticism that they're too insubstantial.

Download: MFSB ft. The Three Degrees - T.S.O.P.

Pittsburgh

An old industrial town, that I hear is now a thriving modern city, Pittsburgh is probably best known for its bullshit football team (sorry... sour Seahawks grapes there). Still, even with those lucky sons of bitches who were fortunate enough to face the Seahawks on an off day, Pittsburgh seems one of the few success stories of the rust belt. A gleaming steel-built urban center in the middle of the midwest Pittsburgh is kind of fascinating. Besically, it's in the middle of nowhere, but it's managed to be somewhere its entire history by making itself so. And yet it still retains an essentially working class quality; it's never going to be confused for anything but part of the flyover country. Also, fuck the Steelers.

Wiz Khalifa

Pittsburgh rapper Wiz Khalifa makes his hometown sound like it has an unexpectedly vibrant night life, or at least clubs where you can hear eight-year-old trance (that's Alice DeeJay's "Better Off Alone" he samples for "Say Yeah"). He actually sounds like a pretty good rapper (and gets points for referencing Superbad in "Be Easy",) and if Pittsburgh is an untapped hip-hop resource, I'll be happy to hear some more from the place.

Sure-fire vote-winner: Any candidate that breaks out the glow sticks will appeal to Khalifa's trance-happy heart.

Prediction: Hillary Clinton. This is a dude that wants the Clinton Administration back so bad he's digging up one hit wonders from the era to sample.

Download: Wiz Khalifa - Say Yeah

Anti-Flag

At first, you could conflate Anti-Flag with Obama's anti-flag pin stance, but on closer inspection there are subtle differences. Anti-Flag is basically anti everything, except, occasionally, catchy pop-punk tunes. One member hints vaguely that he might support Obama, but apart from that, I can't imagine any candidate being anti- enough things to satisfy Anti-Flag

Things that suck according to Anti-Flag (from actual song and album titles!): Corporate rock, North America, indie, hardline, emo, you.

Prediction: Abstain.

Download: Anti-Flag - Turncoat

And the Rest

Jack Kerouac said in On the Road:

"I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wild-buck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of Eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like the Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy."

James Carville described it as something like Alabama between Paoli and Penn Hills (suburbs of Philly and Pittsburgh respectively). However you describe it, Obama and Clinton have been working hard to win over its voters, basically by trying to prove that they are just like them. Because Ivy League-educated New Yorkers and Chicagoans have everything in the world in common with these folks.

Live

This is the region whose voters Obama described as "bitter" about poor economic opportunity and "cling[ing] to guns or religion," when asked why he was struggling to appeal to them. Maybe Obama had been listening to too much of York PA alt-rock group Live. Take the lyrics to "Shit Towne," from 1994's Throwing Copper: "The crackheads, they live down the street from me/The tall grass makes it hard to see beyond my property ... gotta live in shit towne." If this is representative of small town Pennsylvania, this is a pretty desperate area, one that could really do with at least a lawn-cutting service. These guys absolutely are bitter , and if Ed Kowalczyk's bullshit pseudo-spirituality is any indication, they're clinging to something close enough to religion.

Policy candidates should have been pitching: Like other Pennsylvanians, Live has suffered from outsourcing. Foreign groups like Nickelback are now producing turgid post-grunge that Americans like Live can't compete with. If Obama or Clinton wanted this section of the electorate's votes, they would have been promising to re-negotiate NAFTA so as to place tariffs on imported Canadian modern rock.

Prediction: Clinton. As a seasoned political reporter, I need to fall in line with the media's dominant argument that voters will be terribly insulted by Obama's patronism.

Download: Live - Shit Towne

The Juliana Theory

The Juliana Theory first signed to Christian Rock label Tooth & Nail, suggesting, as Live does, that Pennsylvanians like their God-stuff. Still, the Juliana Theory were rebellious enough to attract an audience outside the core Christian rock demographic. Then they broke up, probably due to smiting. The Lord gets mad when his minstrels make grand, sweeping emo.

Prediction: Emo kids are so earnest that they're usually the first to get swept up in the excitment of Obamamania. Obama has the youth vote sewn up.

Download: The Juliana Theory - Into the Dark

Predicted winner: Barack Obama 4, Hillary Clinton 3

I guess Screw Rock 'n' Roll is calling the election for Obama. Because you can always rely on musicians to get things right.

Some things

2008-04-21T22:52:00.005+10:00

Some things:

01. I am defending Mike Jones' Who is Mike Jones?, particularly the screwed and chopped version, over at What Was it Anyway? Check it out.

Snoop: Not exactly clear on the distinctions between country artist and Batman villain

02. I don't know how many of y'all actually listen to these podcasts I do (seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if I have absolutely no listeners whatsoever), but last time I played a Snoop Dogg country song called "My Medicine." I said that I thought it was pretty neat, but I couldn't see it being a success on country radio the way Nelly's pretty great hook up with Tim McGraw was.

Well, Snoop seems to disagree with me. He showed up at the CMAs and announced that "My Medicine" is his new single, and that he "wanted to get a lot of country artists to perform on it, because it was inspired by country music and by the late Johnny Cash." The version on the album, Ego Trippin' is with Everlast, who is one not-very country artist, so I don't know whether by "a lot of country artists" he means that he's recorded the song with some other dudes, or whether he's having the cream of Nashville appear in a video or what. If he does have some established country stars on the radio version, maybe the country music world will take to this. They've certainly welcomed sonic immigrants like Bon Jovi and The Eagles.

Lyay predicted last month that Snoop could find success on country radio with this song, saying, "I listen to these country stations every once in a while and I can tell you that My Medicine would fit perfectly into their format."

I don't particularly agree with that. To my ears, Everlast's faux-backwoods hoedown doesn't sound a lot like the slick southern rock influenced twang of modern country. But it doesn't sound a whole lot like rap, so maybe Snoop's celebrity will turn "My Medicine" into a leftfield hit. And if so, Lyay has one thing right: "this song has the potential to introduce Snoop Dogg to a new group of people. These people haven’t heard of iTunes and still buy “LP’s” on a regular basis."

If Snoop makes this work, he could count a lot of people who actually pay money for music as new fans. There aren't many artists who've been around as long as he has who can do that.

Icy on purpose

03. I don't have a problem with "Lollipop," the new-ish Lil' Wayne single. I don't mind that it has the same sugar-as-sex metaphor as 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" because I'm not dumb enough to think that two songs with the same lyrical theme must be equal in quality. And I don't mind the simplistic rapping because this isn't a rap song.

Lil' Wayne has shown a not uncommon interest in making music that isn't quite hip hop. I mentioned last year that his single "Shooter," based on a Robin Thicke song, didn't sound much like a rap song, even though Wayne was rapping. There's also his oft-threatened rock band, Bad Ass Grasshopper, which would probably be pretty great as long as Weezy keeps his guitar playing to Bono levels (i.e. ornamental). Wayne does sound good over guitars, and his voice is so distinctive that it adjusts to making non-rap tracks, like "Lollipop" with ease.

In "Lollipop," the effects-laden vocal emphasizes the melody of the track and de-emphasizes the flow. There are countless rock songs that feature singing that sounds more like rapping than this. The synths sounds and sparse beat sound more like Euro-pop than anything from the west side of the Atlantic. Sally Shapiro or Annie could sing over this no worries. And if you play it through any kind of decent system, that bass fucking knocks.

Unless you're the kind of dude that is only interested in hip hop (in which case, this is the internet: learn to like some new kinds of music!) or get hung up on the masculinity or lack thereof possessed by the rappers you listen to, I don't see why there isn't at least the possibility this track might have something to offer you.

On the latest The Drought is Over, mixtape, Weezy explores further this interest in music that isn't quite inside the hip hop tent, on the song "I Got My." He does actually rap on it, but the music starts off on a syncopated white funk shuffle and transforms into full-on new wave by the time the chorus hits. It's not as overtly left-field as "Lollipop" or "Shooter," but it is pretty great. And unlike the poor track record outside rap demonstrated by artists like Cee-Lo, Mos Def, Andre 3000 and etc. Wayne retains an interest in rapping, meaning his extra-genre experiments are fewer in number and less indulgent.

This hat better be because he's recording Montana

04. Speaking of Lil' Wayne and long-awaited albums like Tha Carter III, what's with everyone talking about how long overdue Tha Carter III is? Yeah, I've been waiting too, but as far as artists who need to release a fucking album already go, Sufjan Stevens has Weezy beat no worries.

There's all this fruitfly chatter about how Tha Carter III was never going to come out, but let's look at the dates. Tha Carter II, Wayne's last album proper, was released December 6, 2005. Sufjan Stevens released Come on Feel the Illinoise! five months earlier on July 5. And now Tha Carter III has a release date, and Stevens isn't even saying what state he's working on, or even if he's doing anything at all. And don't talk to me about The Avalance, the b-sides comp released July 11, 2006. That's like Lil' Wayne's mixtape material except there's about a tenth as much and the Stevens outtakes are about a tenth as good. And I don't want to hear about the re-release of Stevens' Christmas EPs on November 21, 2006 or that BQE material he performed three nights in Brooklyn last year. Hey, Sufjan. We don't all live in New York. Release it on an album if it's that great.

And like Lil' Wayne, Stevens has been spending his time appearing on other people's records, like The National's The Boxer and a bunch of Asthmatic Kitty releases. Only difference is that in a month or two I'll be listening to Tha Carter III, but I doubt I'll be listening to an album of songs about Utah, or whereever. Sufjan, step your game up.

"I'm Marrying a Member of Fall Out Boy and All I Got Was this Stupid Photo Taken of Me"

05. Ashlee Simpson has a new(ish) single out, "Little Miss Obsessive." It might be even better than "Outta My Head." And "Outta My Head" is pretty great. I'm rather getting excited about Bittersweet World.

Simpson has always been adept with songs about relationship anxiety, and the chorus on this track is one of her best. "I guess we're really over, so come over, I'm not over it," is clever and revealing and anxious all at once. She has a real knack for illuminating those awkward, contradictory parts of relationships that don't even make sense to yourself. "So come over" isn't a plea, but it's not a come-on either. It's Simpson trying, unsatisfactorily, to find certainty amidst a crumbling relationship.

Even more clever than that hook, though, are the lines after it: "Late night you make me feel like I'm desperate." It's a charge Simpson can only refute with a most desperate sounding, "I'm not desperate!" She sings it like she knows she's fooling herself. This is the sort of shit Pink tries and fails to do with that broad, unconvincing self-loathing she pulls out so often. Where Pink reduces these complex feelings to "leave me alone, I'm lonely," and sounds like she's throwing a tantrum doing so, Simpson colors the edges with adult emotions. The most tangible feeling in so many of her best songs is uncertainty. "Little Miss Obsessive" isn't actually about being obsessive; it's about the fear that she appears obsessive to others, and the worry that maybe she actually is.

Musically, its a good hybrid of the Timbaland dance-pop of "Outta My Head" and the pop rock of her previous material. It's very much like the songs on Autobiography, but the programmed beat and Tom Higgens backing vocals are arranged very much like a dance pop number. It will be interesting to see in which direction Bittersweet World ultimately heads. And incidentally, this ties with "Hey There Delilah" as Tom Higgens' best contribution to pop music. (Just Higgins' contribution, that is. "Little Miss Obsessive" is better than "Delilah.")

Incidentally, Jon Pareles' ham-fisted review of Bittersweet World demonstrates how badly the New York Times' music section is missing Kelefa Sanneh. I don't know if Sanneh would have given the record a good review or not, but he certainly would have been more thoughtful.

"Herman Munster motorcade"

06. This new R.E.M. record has quite a few fans, apparently. But whatever Rolling Stone says, it is not "one of the best records R.E.M. have ever made." It's not even particularly good.

One of the problems with this critical revision of R.E.M.'s post-Bill Berry career is that it ignores, for a start, that Up was a pretty good album. It wasn't perfect, and, like New Adventures in Hi-Fi it was far too long, but it had more than a few good songs, and it had R.E.M. exploring plenty of interesting sounds. R.E.M. has had problems over the past 12 years, but the back to basics approach of Accelerate doesn't address nearly enough of them. Besides, by suggesting that their past few records have not been fast or loud enough, the band is trying to address problems that never existed.

Nevertheless, the liveliness and concision of Accelerate makes for a few exciting moments, and the new approach is a decidedly good thing. R.E.M.'s last album, Around the Sun was terribly dull; it was the first album R.E.M. ever released that I didn't buy. I vaguely appreciated the first single, "Leaving New York," but that appreciation came with so many qualifications[1] that it hardly excused the band from rapidly impending irrelevence.

Accelerate does, to some extent, rescue the band from irrelevence, but that's not really enough. Jacknife Lee produced the album, which isn't necessarily a problem. He did Bloc Party's A Weekend in the City, which was one of 2007's best albums, and even his less impressive outings, with U2, Snow Patrol and Editors shouldn't mean an R.E.M. collaboration would be more likely to yield poor results. In 1986, R.E.M. hooked up with Don Genham, a slick commercial producer best known for his work with John Mellencamp, for Lifes Rich Pageant, and the result was one of the band's best albums. He forced R.E.M.'s introspective writing into a bigger, bolder sonic environments, and the resulting songs were immediate and catchy but retained their depth.

The songs on Accelerate aren't like that. They are immediate, but they aren't particularly catchy, and it doesn't sound like they ever had any depth. And as satisfying as it would be to blame the clumsy hand of the producer, it's not Lee's fault. R.E.M. is to blame for this one.

All the Marshall stacks in the world can't save a band that has forgotten how to write songs. These tracks have melodies (well, the choruses do anyway) but none with the memorability and appeal of the songs the band seemed to write as a matter of course at its peak (Nothing compares to "Maps and Legends," "Fall on Me," or "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite," but nothing even comes close to regular album tracks like "Exhuming McCarthy," "Good Advices," or "Departure." Many of these songs are supposedly political, but they lack any sense of urgency. Compare this selection to the excoriating blast of "Ignoreland." Don't call it a comeback. No really: don't.

The same thing happened with U2's last album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, also produced by Lee. Reviewers got very excited, proclaimed the record a great success, and then, after the hubbub had died down, admitted that maybe fast, simple and loud isn't the same as exciting.

Accelerate is fast, simple, and loud, just like Atomic Bomb. And like Atomic Bomb, it's also ponderous, leaden and lacking in ideas. Anyone who thinks this compares at all to the Lifes Rich Pageant-era recordings the band is desperate to revisit needs to actually put Lifes Rich Pageant on and have a listen to the opening two tracks. Nothing on Accelerate has that forceful vitality, that clarion-call clarity that made "Begin the Begin" and "These Days" so utterly thrilling. These were tunes with the fierce urgency of now sewn into their fabric. The R.E.M. of now, on the other hand, is neither fierce nor urgent. It is loud.

And believe me, I'm not pleased to hear yet another middling album from R.E.M. I have loved this band since I was thirteen, and they're still the rock group I can best geek out over. I can list B-sides, arcane trivia, chart positions, and whatever with ease. But Accelerate, even if it does hint at a tiny spark of life that once seemed entirely extinguished, is only the same old aimlessness wandering in a new direction.

[1] First, those lyrics are terrible! Second, Stipe, have you forgotten that verses can have melody too? Third, it absolutely is not "easier to leave than to be left behind!"

Screw Podcasts 003: A little bit country, a little bit Screw Rock 'n' Roll

2008-04-06T02:34:00.005+11:00

You never thought you'd see a third one of these, did you? You cynical bastards. Anyway, I'm working through the tail end of a cold, so if my voice sounds weird or if I'm not quite as energetic as I should be, that's why. This podcast is very vaguely themed, in that half the songs have a very vaguely country sound. The other three songs, uh... don't. They're just good songs.

Screw Podcasts 003: A little bit country, a little bit Screw Rock 'n' Roll

01. B.O.B. ft. Lil' Boosie & DG Yola - Fuck You
02. Snoop Dogg - My Medicine
03. Cakehole - Stab You
04. Lyrics Born - Callin' Out (The Saturday Club Remix)
05. A Cursive Memory - Everything
06. Panic at the Disco - Folkin' Around

So download the podcast, and after you do, rejoice in the good news that though (my favorite music critic) Kelefa Sanneh is no longer with the New York Times, he is still writing, now for the New Yorker. He's no longer writing about music, which is an unbelievable loss, since he was basically the best in the game, but he is still delivering great writing. His return is in the form of an article discussing Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former and controversial pastor. It's good to see Sanneh bringing the same thoughtfulness to his writing about politics and culture that made his music criticism so vital.

And back at the Times, Damian Kulash Jr of OK Go writes an op-ed about new neutrality. Net neutrality concerns permitting Internet providers to give priority to information sent by some people (like big corporations) over others (everyone else). It's more interesting and relevant than that description makes it sound though. I'm not a big fan of OK Go, and the future Kulash describes sounds so fiendishly horrifying that I'm having trouble imagining it, let alone getting worried about it (though I probably should be). But the article is worth reading if only for this sentence:

I’m flattered, of course, but it makes you wonder if Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner sit around arguing who was listening to Vampire Weekend first.

I very much want to believe that happens.