How Big is Your World at No Trivia

Jackie Chain ft. Zilla – “Ladies In The House”

Jackie Chain’s After Hours is an album in which David Guetta, Avicii, etc. are jump-kicked off of their platonic, all-partying, consequence-free bottle service throne by Bama’s Polo rocking, long hair flowing trance-rap enthusiast. There’s “Moving,” which, with the help of Nick Catchdubs’ curation, Jackie tackles Aviici’s “Le7els” and Flo Rida’s “Good Feeling” with a freestyle over Pretty Lights’ 2006 Etta James-sampling slow burner “Finally Moving.” Somewhere, there is a dude pissed off at Flo Rida for “stealing” Aviicii’s song, and elsewhere there is a Pretty Lights fan who guffawed when “Le7els” arrived, and Etta James fans presumably find the whole thing kinda tasteless, and well, “Moving” is a song that they can all be collectively disgusted over! See how that works?

“Ladies In The House” throws Scatman John’s “Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop)” into a whirling wheezing trance-party, and on a primal digging through pop-culture detritus level, that’s just really hilarious. Plus, Jackie Chain was born to transcend cheesy samples and turn them into awesome club rap. Keeping with After Hours‘ concept, though, “Ladies In The House” also confronts modern day EDM with its own dirty little history: This shit was, not too long ago the goofiest fucking music on the planet. A place where an outsider artist, borderline autistic eccentric like Scatman John went to make a buck. So think of that Mr. Guetta, next time you pose messiah-like on the Tomorrowland stage. If only there were also a freestyle over Jordy’s “Dur Dur D’etre Un Bebe” on this thing! After Hours‘ syrup-drunk, boner-popping, condom-eschewing take on fistpumping pop is kinda doing the same thing as the Weeknd’s trilogy of releases. And Jackie Chain, an impervious hedonist who doesn’t seem to have human emotions, and is fueled by blunts, blowjobs, and booze, is a far more successful strip club Virgil than Abel Tesfaye. Bonus: Huntsville’s Zilla guests on this one, impatiently shit-talking the girl he’s trying to take home.

Written by Brandon

February 9th, 2012 at 11:15 pm

Posted in How Big is Your World

Gucci Mane ft. 2 Chainz – “Get It Back”

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Though 2 Chainz is the next exciting thing in trap-rap weirdo personalities–more knowing than Future, three times the personality of Meek Mill, and a total maniac–he’s still no Gucci Mane and “Get It Back” proves it. There’s probably more lines for you to quote to your GChat buddies when 2 Chainz pops-up (“Get your baby mama, take her then make her/You date her, then fuck her, I fuck her then date her/Everything is on the up, like an elevator”), but Gucci sounds alive and unconcerned, doing his head-down, straight rapping, stumbling upon a catchy phrase and not a big obvious hook From Zone 6 To Duval thing like it’s 2009 again. Producer Mike Will Made It takes the theme from Tetris and adds a boom of low-end every few bars, tosses in a few chintzy keyboard bloops and some Mannie Fresh synth-organs, making a potentially shticky production way more dynamic than it needs to be. Notice how this whole mixtape just kinda pretends the Lex Luger-ization of rap never happened. Even Lex’s “Blessing” isn’t by-the-numbers, stop-start glitching corner kid stomp. Drumma Boy remains the model here. And observe how closed-circuit and word-focused Gucci’s rapping is. He’s a lyricist, guys! A nerdy MC only worried about piling syllables on top of beats. I get the impression that the people around Gucci just hoard his good music, all made in his moments of clarity, so it’s hard to tell if “me and Slim Dunk in the clubs throwin’ racks” is simply there because this was written before Dunkin’s death, or if it’s a tight-lipped reminisce. I’d like to think it’s the latter, and either way, it’s very touching.

Written by Brandon

February 9th, 2012 at 6:13 pm

Posted in Gucci Mane, How Big is Your World, Uncategorized

Pop. 1280 – “Nature Boy”

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Everything is so chillwaved the fuck out right now that Pop. 1280, feedback fetishists from New York with entry-level taste in gritty noir (Jim Thompson, really? Let’s rename this band The Burnt Orange Heresy and be a little less predictable) and some good songs are passed off as menacing? If these fellas arrived a decade earlier, with this exact sound, then they’d be mentioned in a profile piece on the return of New York garage rock. In 1998, I bought Pussy Galore’s Live In The Red at a Best Buy in suburban Baltimore, and even then, at age 14, I was weary of Jon Spencer’s bachelor’s from Brown. And I can’t be the only one who is put off by every impeccably designed Sacred Bones release, right? All this is really just a way of saying, “wowzers, independent white people music sure has changed in the past 10 or so years!” I’ve changed too though, so it all sounds pretty awesome, especially “Nature Boy.” While so many others are content to make moody gloomy noise rock comfort food, Pop. 1280 have distilled the gnarly skronk of their pigfuck forebearers into a concentrated dose of the cheap strong stuff. When vocalist Chris Bug gargles, “hips to the right, and hips to the left” it’s pure Swans-like violent, ritualizing. And oh yeah, the guitars scrape and crunch and buzz just right, and the drums snap and rattle like a slinky the size of a Dune spiceworm tumbling down a flight of stairs. It helps that Bug sounds very Bob Mould–like a nice enough guy putting on a menacing mask to get through the day without getting fucked with too much.

Written by Brandon

February 8th, 2012 at 11:17 pm

Posted in How Big is Your World

Labtekwon – “Economy Of Tricknology”

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The dude Michael Byrne wrote about Labtekwon’s “Economy Of Tricknology” over at the City Paper but oh man, lemme add some more words of praise to this one. Here, the Baltimore hip-hop legend delivers a breathless, ridiculously on-beat, sometimes totally off-the-rails, 11-minute bugged-out rap that dips and dives around the history of money and rambling illuminati talk, convincing you that there’s no difference between cold hard facts and nutty conspiracy theorizing: “Now you had the government borrowing money to pay private corporate contracts/ Sound familiar? America does that/ You see, the bail-out scam was invented way back/This ain’t conspiracy theory, it’s conspiracy fact.”

“Economy Of Tricknology” makes the case that we’re not battling a decade or so of deregulation, a Republican party gone retarded thanks to Reagnomics, and a few generations of politicians in the pockets of someone else, but a web of centuries-old DaVinci Code type shit. The song’s rickety soul beat molts into another rickety soul beat a few times, but it’s cleverly bookended by the same, lumbering, steampunked sample of MFSB’s “Something For Nothing,” perhaps best known as the source for Jay-Z’s “What More Can I Say.” Labtekwon earns the right to steal that rhetorical from Jay here, though. There really isn’t much else to say when this one ends. An urban legend is going around that says if you can memorize this whole song and deliver it in the mirror three times in a row, Mitt Romney will actually burst into flames.

Written by Brandon

February 8th, 2012 at 6:15 am

Posted in How Big is Your World

Fiend – “Aqua Flow”

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Here’s Fiend rapping over Washed Out’s “Feel It All Around,” which makes no sense, and a little too much sense. Important things mentioned on “Aqua Flow”: Ocean Drive, Zach Galifianakis, potions, valiums (on the beach), pyramids. Also worth noting: Those rushing water sounds before the beat drops were not added for ambiance, they come straight from this video for that song from Portlandia, which means Fiend just queued this up on YouTube, clicked “record” on whatever cheapo program he’s got on his computer, tapped into the sensuous-ness of this chillwave classic (no, really!), and purred out some spliff-inspired sweet somethings. And chillwave owes a great deal to hip-hop anyways. On this song, Ernest Greene, who has some Dilla and Pete Rock in his sound, pretty much just slopped-and-screwed Gary Low’s “I Want You.” And chillwave and chilled-out rap pretty much started up at the same exact time, so let International Jones go jackin’ for beats over top some Gorilla vs. Bear fare. “Aqua Flow” isn’t as accomplished as his freestyle over the Specials’ “Ghost Town,” but I’m just as happy this one exists.

Written by Brandon

January 30th, 2012 at 3:21 am

Posted in How Big is Your World

G-Mane – “Thankful”

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Holy fuck, this G-Mane mixtape. If you’re like me, you probably follow quite a few #occupy types, and they can be equal parts informative and idiotic. One thing that seems to come up quite a bit (way too much really), is a certain distaste for rappers’ spending (as if the money of one moderately wealthy aspirational black man has anything to do with our country’s problems) and the typical grumbling about needing more “conscious” or “political hip-hop” to soundtrack the movement. Dunno, kinda think this was what Jay-Z was getting at with those “Occupy All Streets” shirts, but anyways: Hip-hop is political by nature dummy, and there is this whole New Underground thing, which in both its business model (dogged D.I.Y.-ness, use of the majors rather than the other way around) and content (low-stakes regular guy-ness) addresses the state of the nation quite well.

But okay, fair enough, save for Killer Mike, there isn’t a lot of effective, revolutionary rhetoric and old fashioned street knowledge running around right now and so, something like Mark Of The Beast from G-Side buddy G-Mane fills that void. “Thankful,” an interpolation of William DeVaughn’s “Be Thankful For What You Got” (“9 in my lap, pop-back top, pull up on the scene blowing hydro-green”) comes right after “Think,” one of the best and most quotable rap songs of last year (“you got a new whip man, that’s tight, go and pick up your soon”). “Think” is recycled for this short EP, which feels like Willie D’s I’m Goin’ Out Like A Soldier, Behold A Pale Horse by way of Pimp C, Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, and the collected works of Clarence 13X all mixed together and then given hooks by Nate Dogg.

Written by Brandon

January 19th, 2012 at 4:43 pm

Posted in G-Mane, How Big is Your World

Antwon – “Handsome”

Oval – “Heroic”

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Without Oval you’d have no glitch and without glitch you’d have no Boards of Canada or Fennesz and without those fellas you’d have none of this delightful, warped bliss-out electronic music right now that soundtracks your chill-out times at the beach and your bum-out, nodding off on painkillers time alone. Well maybe indirect father of chillwave isn’t a good argument for Oval’s growing though marginalized importance, but listen anyway: Oval are awesome and important and one of a kind, and that’s clear on OvalDNA a newly released odds-and-sods compilation that fuses together better than anything they’ve put out since 94 Diskont.

“Heroic” has a simple evocative, spot-on title, which helps conjure up a scene from some psychedelic sci-fi viking movie’s last act, where everything’s gone to shit. There’s something in that guitar–meaty, yet depressed and lost–and the way the chords ring out, getting sloppier each time they’re played, that sounds like whoever’s strumming them is losing consciousness. This mysterious shard of guitar, waterlogged R2D2 squeals, and sad-sack piano, is my favorite song of 2012, even though it’s definitely not from this year. Then again, “Rack City” (which is great because it has even fewer elements and stretches them to three and a half minutes, instead of two and half) isn’t from this year either, though it’s ubiquity has made me, on more than one occasion, declare it SONG OF THE YEAR SO FAR as well.

Written by Brandon

January 13th, 2012 at 3:59 am

Posted in How Big is Your World

No Trivia

Archive for the ‘How Big is Your World’ Category

Jackie Chain ft. Zilla – “Ladies In The House”

Gucci Mane ft. 2 Chainz – “Get It Back”

Pop. 1280 – “Nature Boy”

Labtekwon – “Economy Of Tricknology”

Fiend – “Aqua Flow”

G-Mane – “Thankful”

Antwon – “Handsome”

Oval – “Heroic”

DDm – “Spend It”

T.I. – “The One”

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