- G-Side, iSLAND: They did it again. Their best one yet, even if it is the least accessible. A stalking, angry record: “Recognize,” “Our Thing,” and “16 Shots.” Mo’ blog love and a little mo’ money, means mo’ problems. “Exploratory jazz” makes sense. Review here.
- Oneohtrix Point Never, Replica: Lopatin doesn’t try so hard and does his best work. Hiccuping samples, Charlie Brown piano, secret basslines. Hypnotic because nothing comes together like it should. Can the next Drake feature OPN and Nguzunguzu plz?!
- Rimar, Higher Ground: Originally out in the spring, slept-on by me until September, and now out on vinyl. Ostensibly “chillwave” though there’s some energy and swagger to this one and a whole lotta heart. The year’s most romantic record! Free here. Buy here.
- Nicolay & the Hot At Nights, Shibuya Session EP: The Eno-house of 2009’s criminally underrated City Lights Vol. 2: Shibuya Nights turns into George Benson-like jazz thanks to Raleigh’s the Hot At Nights. Nicolay on keys keeps it on the good side of cheesy.
- Madlib & Freddie Gibbs, Thuggin’ EP: Gibbs isn’t so much “back” as finally figuring out his footing. Madlib flips “Children Of The Ghetto” which yo, that’s not digging, it was on a Soul Jazz comp, but who cares. A perfect 12-inch. It’s even got “bonus beats!”
Archive for November, 2011
November Picks.
WNYC Soundcheck: “The Changing Face Of Hip-Hop”
I was on the radio to talk about the hip-hop issue of SPIN. I actually did alright?! Thanks a whole bunch to Soundcheck and WNYC for taking interest in the issue!
SPIN’s December Issue
So, by now, you should be able to find the December hip-hop issue of SPIN in stores. I had a hand in putting the whole thing together and I’m very proud of what we did: We documented what the hell is going on in rap right now and that’s what we wanted to do. So yes, go read it, maybe buy it, or at least stand in a Barnes & Noble somewhere and look through the thing. Most of the content is online but there are a few thing you’re missing out if you don’t grab the print version…
- “Opening Act”: The usual “editor’s letter” for each issue. Here it has the great Charles Aaron discussing SPIN’s role (or lack thereof) in covering hip-hop and a pretty funny Instant Messenger conversation between Charles and I about Mac Miller, Main Attrakionz, and other rap minutiae.
- “The New Underground: We Got This”: My story that explains how the hell we got here. Featuring: Danny Brown, A$AP Rocky, Big K.R.I.T., Curren$y, Lil B, Yelawolf, Odd Future, Kendrick Lamar, Cities Aviv, Main Attrakionz, Stalley, Clams Casino, AraabMuzik, and DJ Burn One.
- “Hip-Hop’s Planetary Shift”: That infographic that everyone’s arguing about!
- “The Loud Family”: Julianne Escobedo Shepherd hung out with Odd Future and showed them to be regular-ass human beings. Tyler’s essentially straight-edge, which is totally fascinating.
- “50 Mixtapes You Need”: A guide to 50 essential Internet releases (most of them free) from Action Bronson to Zilla.
- “Rocket Men”: David Peisner went down to Huntsville and talked to G-Side and plenty of other Hunts Vegas rappers. Lots of stuff about Slow Motion Soundz that I didn’t know before, including a really tense meeting with a “real” record label.
- “Encore”: The last page of the issue features a picture of a young sleeping Rick Rubin, with quotes from the dude who took it and Rubin himself.
Pitchfork: “2011 Holiday Gift Guide”
I got to write about one of my favorite things ever: the Giorgio Moroder version of Metropolis! It’s out on DVD and Blu-Ray and totally makes an awesome gift for the holidays. I also co-sign that Smile box set, Ellen Willis’ Out of the Vinyl Deeps, and Chuck Eddy’s Rock and Roll Never Forgets. By the way, if you haven’t seen Moroder’s version, it is on Netflix Watch It Now.
In 1981, disco game-changer and electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder thought it would be good idea to restore Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis. Previously lost footage was rediscovered and the negative was cleaned up– and then the running time was sliced nearly in half, the footage color-tinted, and a propulsive soundtrack featuring Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar, Loverboy, and others was smeared over the silent cinema classic.
Arriving in 1984, Moroder’s Metropolis soon disappeared– no doubt, because it was an insane idea that film purists saw as something like sacrilege. Now, fresh off a 2010 theatrical release of Metropolis (the old boring version without Billy Squier songs in it), Kino Classics has made Moroder’s version available on Blu-Ray and DVD. If you can comfortably accept that this thing exists– it helps to remember that Metropolis never had an official score and many now believe it has been projected at the wrong number of frames-per-second– this remixed version is just a lot of fun.
A big fat synth squelch announces the infamous explosion of the M-Machine. Robot Maria’s theme song is Bonnie Tyler’s “Here She Comes”… and it works! The upper-class, all residing in monolithic skyscrapers are soundtracked by coked-out synths and gated drums, predicting Oliver Stone’s Wall Street via footage from the 20s and somehow ending up as a comment on 2011. When it first shuffled into theaters, Moroder’s Metropolis seemed gauche and excessive. Now, it’s ideal for our era of GIF-making and retrolicious music videos that routinely refashion other peoples’ property.
Pitchfork: G-Side – iSLAND
Reviewed that new G-Side. Check it out if you haven’t yet. Right now, I feel like it’s their best release yet, though it’s also the most insular and contained; Curren$y-like, if that makes any sense.
In less than two years, G-Side have gone from being one of the most slept-on rap groups around, to well, kind of taken for granted. That will happen when hip-hop’s having its RSS-obsessed, gimmick-happy, bloggy moment, and ST and Clova’s concerns are consistency and ever so slightly widening the lane they’ve carved out for themselves. So, on iSLAND– the equally estimable follow-up to January’s THE ONE… COHESIVE– they’re still indefatigably grinding, and just as geeked-up on the fact that people write about them in magazines and on blogs.
But there’s something darker creeping into their music here, confounding the occasional misreading of COHESIVE’s glowing, cathartic hip-hop as “escapist” or head-in-the-clouds. Forever right there in the background is their keen awareness that, when it comes down to it, they ain’t all that important to this rap shit. That’s why every interview is a huge deal to them. There’s also their past, rife with tragedy and loss– bouncing around in foster homes, family members lost to cancer and addiction– which they tastefully reveal only in snippets…
The Changing Face Of Hip-Hop: SPIN’s Rap Issue
I had a big part in putting the hip-hop issue of SPIN together and I’m really proud of it. It’s online now and in stores starting 11/22. My essay is an attempt to explain what the hell is going on in rap in 2011 thanks to the Internet. Cast of characters: Danny Brown, A$AP Rocky, Big K.R.I.T., Curren$y, Lil B, Yelawolf, Odd Future, Kendrick Lamar, Cities Aviv, Main Attrakionz, Stalley, Clams Casino, AraabMuzik, and DJ Burn One. There’s also David Peisner on G-Side, and Julianne Escobedo Shepherd on Odd Future. Read it and maybe even buy it!
Spin: Drake – Take Care
Reviewed that new Drizzy for Spin. He’s still a smarmy creepo but he totally makes it work here. There are some sequencing issues on this one (here is my redux version) but it’s nearly 80 minutes and doesn’t really feel like it, which is impressive. Because I didn’t get to fit it in the review: The title track! “Take Care” is like a B-Side to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” like the e-pill comedown after that song kicked you all around. Jamie xx’s late-song breakdown of Heron’s vocals from We’re New Here’s “I’ll Take Care Of You,” in this context, sound like some depressed version of “The Ha Dance” or something. Then again, everything on this record sounds like a depressed version of something else, doesn’t it?
Perhaps “Headlines” had you thinking Take Care would be Drake’s humble moment. On that relatively upbeat single, he raps, “I might be too strung out on compliments, overdosed on confidence,” and, later, expresses appreciation for the fans who told him he “fell off” between his hit 2009 mixtape So Far Gone and his star-packed 2010 debut Thank Me Later. And even though “Headlines” is pretty much a rewrite of a previous hit — the “6 Foot 7 Foot” to “Over” ’s “A Milli” — that hardly matters because Drake is consciously lapping himself, returning to the same topic and style with another year of experience, making his conflicted approach to being richer than you just a little more lived-in.
An appropriately absurd cover depicting a despondent Drizzy, five o’clock shadow-sad, looking like a decadent Baba Booey, also foreshadowed a hard, if melodramatic, look in the mirror. Plus, he titled this new one Take Care — so much sweeter than Thank Me Later, right? But on “Over My Dead Body,” Take Care’s first track, our favorite confused Canadian calculates last year’s earnings plus how much he paid in taxes, and chalks the latter up to “you lose some, you win some.” All right, look, man, the cash lopped off the end of my paycheck blows too, but the whole idea behind taxes is that by paying them, we all, in the long run, “win some”!
Spin: Don Trip, Victim and Villain on “Letter to My Son”
This week’s Spin column: Don Trip’s “Letter To My Son” and how it went from YouTube to rap radio relatively unscathed. I haven’t gotten to say much about Trip but he’s quickly becoming one of my favorite rappers around. Go get Step Brothers if you haven’t already.
Though interest is still growing in Don Trip’s “Letter to My Son,” the song dates all the way back to September 2009, when a YouTube video surfaced of the Memphis rapper in a home studio. The description read, “i use music as an outlet so i say whateva i feel like sayin no matter who or what it involve”; and the video showed Trip, shirtless and gaunt, with a chain dangling from his neck, unloading a three-minute rant about how he’s not allowed to see his son for more than an hour a week, over a soulfully manipulative beat
Don Trip is a rapper out of time. Although his imminent hit did begin as a quasi-viral video, and he’s ridiculously prolific in a way that caters to the blogs, he can’t be bothered with rap’s prevailing trends. He wears basketball shorts and, like, button-downs from Target, not streetwear. His approach to rapping is that of a work-a-day hustler, and his in-studio videos often show him gripping a notepad (and more recently an iPad), or staring off-camera at a piece of paper taped to the wall with lyrics scrawled on it. It’s a subtle way of rejecting the noxious, post-Jay-Z myth that “good” MCs don’t need to write their raps down…
Pitchfork: James Ferraro – Far Side Virtual
Reviewed the latest James Ferraro record which is a little different than the dozens of others James Ferraro records. I listen to this a lot but I have no idea whether or not it’s any good.
James Ferraro’s latest stares down our contemporary world of the future, invaded by iPads, overwhelmed by Skype meetings, and caught up in the unnecessary conveniences of self-serve frozen yogurt spots, with an equal sense of dread and awe. All those 1980s and 90s approximations of the future, in which we’d collectively have luxury stacked on top of luxury, actually sort of arrived, and they’re totally awesome– and really fucking creepy.
Far Side Virtual is inspired by goofy junk like the Windows 95 sound (composed by Brian Eno, it should be mentioned) and the melodies that kick out of a medium-priced keyboard when you punch the “demo” button. It’s a collection of eerily wholesome sounds delivered in an uncomfortably straightforward manner. Either a whole lot of work or very little work went into this record…
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