Pretty amazing, this site will take a hip hop song and, using a complicated series of algorithms, will work out how smart you need to be to fully understand it.
Jay-Z - Dead Presidents 2: 16/20, University Degree (does HOV-A even have a degree?)
Kanye - Big Brother: 9/20, some high school.
Pretty rad little bit of musical theory shiz…
For all your fluro skittle nu-rave kids out there. This is a summer jam that will blow your mind. Needs big speakers by the way, yo shitty laptop tweeters aren’t going to do this justice. 16th April 2010. Essential New Tune: Dirty South - Phazing by PeteTongsEssentialNewTune
Remember the (Aussie) summer of 2004-05? Hot damn, epic dance-rock was blowing up, but was yet to be taken mainstream by the Killers and the Bravery. And Silent Alarms was released. To this day, this is a ground breaking album for me. Banquet, the first single, is kinda epic and holds its own even now, but my favourite track is Like Eating Glass. The frenetic pace, the overdrumming, the uber-poppy chorus… all so rad. It was rock, with a heavy dance influence on the beat. And their follow-up work continued to move toward that influence.
Kele is about to drop his solo album. And it’s the progression towards proper mid-90s powerhouse you never knew you wanted (but secretly did when justified by one of the icons of Brit-dance-rock). Perhaps it’s a fanboy thing, but I really like this.
I’m going for a Supr 1337 post, demonstrating my n00b pwning ability and what not.
Actually, I’m just sending this in from my iPhone while I wait for a flight at SFO. Still, it’s a little rad right…?
Anyway, I just got a recommendation for a band called Neon Trees (I can’t remember who from - lucky for them). So I’m trying to find it on my iPod to see if it’s any good. And I realise that Neon is the new Deer which is, in itself, the new Wolf.
Allow me to demonstrate. On my iPod, I have: Wolfmother Sea Wolf Howlin’ Wolf Wolf Parade
I also have: Deer Tick Deerhunter The Deer Hunters Deerhoof Deerheart
And, now I have: Neon Coyote Neon Indian Neon Neon Neon Trees
And Neon Trees is so generic, it boggles the mind. I don’t mind it, but Motor Ace did it better, and about 10 years ago.
Willbur out.
For Freestyle Friday, and inspired by MJ’s post, I just wanted to address the urban legend of the infamous “no brown m&ms” at a Van Halen show. Seemingly a demonstration of the wanton excess of superstardom, I simply love the fact that this stipulation in their contact actually serves a purpose.
Seeing as I’m dealing with an enormous hangover, allow me to quote DLR directly.
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
Now, I have to be clear. This by no means exonerates the ridiculous riders that musicians call for today (especially crap like Mariah Carey needing a tea set up for 8, with Poland Springs water in the teapot. Then Evian for ‘drinking’ water). But it’s pretty awesome that the example consistently held up to demonstrate this excess actually has a legal precedent.
- Willbur
Van Halen - Jump from Kleis Auke Wolthuizen on Vimeo.
You may have seen an interview with these dudes floating round the interwebz over the last couple of weeks. The dude on the right is Watkin Tudor Jones (wow), AKA Ninja, and the girl is Yo-Landi Vi$$er (really?). They’re a South African hip hop duo (well, along with DJ Hi-Tek) they have gone viral in the last month or so.
I’ve gone with their first single ‘Enter the Ninja’ because… well, watch it. It’s pretty obvious.
- Willbur
Valerie Collective could be the definition incarnate for Dreamwave - my current favourite genre of music. Initially formed by College and Anoraak, two producers from Nantes, France, it’s since grown to include various like-minded musicians, all obsessed with soft electro-pop from the 80s.
The music is brilliantly tongue-in-cheek parody of the 80s, replicating the period’s essence perfectly, while adding in some modern touches too. The artwork is created in collaboration with a German artistic collective called the Zonders and is period-perfect. Their original productions (like the Keenhouse LP or Anoraak’s EP) are just so damn smooth - perfect for cruising with their upbeat poppiness.
And every post is in French. That’s just too rad in itself.
For a list of releases, click here and check out each record’s cover.
And for my track, I’m going to some classic College.
-Willbur
COLLEGE - “She never came back” from Frantz Lasorne on Vimeo.
It’s getting late and the Vicodin I’m on for my shoulder (torn rotator cuff) hasn’t mixed well with several beers at the bar. Eh, I’m learning about American prescription culture.
This is kind of an easy one. Radiohead’s Kid A is simply a ground-breaking album that justified ‘rock’ bands exploring an electronic sound. If you listen to Paranoid Android (from OK Computer, easily one of the most incredible rock songs I’ve ever heard) and then The National Anthem, there’s almost nothing that links the two songs. And yet it’s mind-blowing. How it starts with a standard bass line and one of my favourite drum beats (grace-notey goodness), but then adds this lone electronic note that starts to bend and waver as you move in - amazing. And slowly it starts to build… and build… until you reach the crescendo at the end when the brass section goes completely retarded.
This song (at least for me) merged your live drums and guitars with some Aphex Twinny synths and jazzy brass. And redefined what a rock band could do, while still staying true to their roots. This album is still SOOO Radiohead, while sounding completely different to everything they did before it. A beautiful demonstration of a band’s progression.
There are SOO many versions of this track (apparently they’ve played it at every show since 2000), but the live versions often replace the brass section with guitars. And while it’s ALWAYS amazing, the original is my favourite.
I’m going to try to have a different take on Wacky Wednesday, particularly in light of the Daft Punk by C Squared below. I LOVE Daft Punk, and there’s a video floating around YouTube of me literally losing my shit to a sick hybrid of Around the World/Harder Better Faster Stronger in Sydney a couple of years ago. So I’m going to take Wacky as something that redefined what I thought music could be and irreversibly adjusted my perspective.
When I was 19, I took a job in an ad agency and my desk-neighbour was a 23yo DJ. I was a typical rock kid, enjoying my Foo Fighters and Grinspoon and we’d have endless debates about the merits of real instruments vs. synths, rock shows vs. clubs etc. etc. Unsurprisingly, these would inevitably end in a stalemate - neither willing to consider the other’s position.
Until he gave me Endtroducing… by DJ Shadow. This album, produced exclusively from recycled sounds (i.e. samples), blew my fucking mind. An amalgam of my ‘live instruments’ but created in a synthetic way. And I fell in love. I went on a rampage, picking up all the EPs, back-issue vinyl, rare BBC Essential Mixes I could find…
Endtroducing… is wacky in so far as it opened my eyes up to the world of electronic music, via an analogue source, and changed what I considered music.
This is Changling, mixed into **Transmission 1.
I’m a bit of a mash up addict, as you’ll soon find out, and this one is one of my favourites. In the wake of Dangermouse’s seminal concept album The Grey Album, I found this bad boy floating round the Internets - DJ Cappel and Smitty’s Blue Eyes meets Bed-Stuy.
A little enigmatic, there isn’t much information available surround it’s history, and it certainly doesn’t have the level of sophistication that Dangermouse’s work does, but there’s something so fracking rad about Biggie’s flows and having them sit on top of Big Band brass stabs. It sounds like something Kanye would try to replicate, and that’s never a bad thing.
So enjoy, one and all, the intro to the album (and my favourite track): Juicy/New York, New York.
-Willbur
Against better judgment, my friend and I headed to Walnut Creek on a recent Saturday night. Walnut Creek is an affluent...
