tentative blog post

Tentative blog post

I'm In A Band/A Musics

Apropos of nothing, really, I just think it's neat to finally put some of my mole-ridden face up on the blog and make fun of my voice and Prince-like face movements.

Down the line I'll probably post some music from my emotional 00's altrock quartet once we get some not-shitty recordings.

Weekend Stars>Opeth.

I said it.

A Tribute To Hoodrats

Valentine's came and went this weekend and for the first time since the last time I was going out with someone (a whopping 4 years ago) and not just busting a nut on a Junior whenever Flex drops a bomb (word to Horse). That girl also happened to be the first person I ever fell in love with, so of course only recently have I been trying to snag me a wife.

No, for real. I'm wifing the first girl I find that's at least a 7.5/8, has good conversation and can cook me some good arepa. Utility>Heartbreak. I have no interest in revisiting the emotional catatonia of splitting with your love and I'm prolly just going to get betrothed to one of Christian's Colombian cousins

Speaking of heartbreak, it ended over me airing out business and my doubts about the future of the relationship out to a third party and posting it to my online journal, but fucking up the friends filter and not realizing she could see all of it and not being experienced enough to finesse that out.

Anyway, when I was recklessly nutting like Mr.Peanut all over Brooklyn with the ex ,on-and-off for two years, I had a real penchant for the arts 'n' crafts. Re-gifting an old VDay heart-shaped gift box and goth-ing it up with black and purple markers, making colored confetti to line the inside with marker and looseleaf, writing really really bad high school poetry (read forced nihilistic/romantic goth-lite prose) about her and etc. I once even went to Chinatown, our haunt in high school, to pick up a foot-tall Hello Kitty jewelry box (more like a mini-closet with drawers) with a copy of Manson's Holy Wood and Antichrist Superstar. The first thing to go after the (second and final) breakup was my sense of creativity and romance. The thrill was long fucking gone and, although I'm prone to thoughtful and romantic gestures naturally, I haven't had the urge to go all out until this past weekend, when I plastered my campus with fliers with Bjork on them and handmade (or designed) cheap-ass Microsoft Word cards for 8 specific girls at my school, 5 of them platonic friends, two of them I probably have crushes on, or whatever being enamored passes for at 21, and one who has nice enough to let me put my shame into her lately (No Catholic Church).

Maybe it's the fact that two of the girls are graduating and I'm doing an extra bid of a year for some upper level credits so I can graduate, or maybe it's that I finally have my shit together and am motivated (No Tony Robbins) at the same time, but it was fulfilling to root down Saturday morning and devise individual images and captions that would capture how I feel or be funny as per each girl's relationship with me and/or personality. Plus, I may never do this shit again on such a large scale.

Post-participating in my first V-Day since that time in '05 that the ex went to the corner store to get me a sandwich after knee-scabbing at her sister's house, I got inspired to...hm, in retrospect, she even paid for my sandwich. Fuck I miss those last two years of high school.

Anyway, I've had a bunch of ideas on the back-burner (some, like my Nas post, since last summer) as evidenced by how sporadic my updates became, but I felt compelled by the holiday to deliver on this drop. I've made a two-disc mixtape/playlist celebrating the post-Valentine's day period, which, from the 15th to the 21st, I feel, should honor the various hoodrats, trollops, scalawags, slags, clap-havin jezebels, chickenheads, scientists, birds, pigeons, trifling whores, skanks, and assorted bar-trolls that color this beautiful, diverse earth of ours.

For every chick still rocking comically large press-ons, fucked up weave tracts, really tacky blonde streaks or red-dye jobs with the mousse/gel effect.

For every chick who stays reading Eric Jerome Dickey and writes their own little ghetto-ass slash fictions about their life hoping to get published at Barnes & Noble in their brand-new "Urban" section (Seriously, could we be setting the bar even fucking lower?) with some really terrible ClipArt looking cover.

For every chick putting cocoa butter on their prison scars and stretch marks hoping to wear a new too-small sequined top to the club and not look too much like a Flavor of Love reject.

For every chick who gargled Cadillac Tah's step-children just to get near enough to Ja Rule to give him their man's demo

For all of those dirty south heffers openly confessing their pedophilic intentions on MTV to sit on 1999-era Lil' Wayne's pubescent shitstache.

For every chick with a Micky Dee's paunch and tacky-ass labret/Monroe piercing that I've seen in Brooklyn, New Rochelle, White Plains, Myspace, or Times Square.

For every girl who failed out of her senior year of high school because she discovered the joys of dick (I See you Anthea).

For Keyshia Cole and, surely, her extended family.

For Mary J when she was real Ralph Lauren with the white pony.

For Ray J, Nick Cannon, and Superhead.

For Scott La Rock (R.I.P. Superhoe '87)

This is for you.

This mixtape is separated into two types of songs: Tracks prominently featuring hoodrats on the hooks and/or verses, or exemplary assessments of hoodrats, their culture, lifestyle, beliefs, and behaviors by colleagues such as Ludacris, Ghostface Killah, Project Pat, Jay-Z, and UGK. If you download only one Hoodrat-themed mixtape this year, make it this one


Fuck I Look Like? Presents: Hoodrats '09

A Salute To Hoodrats

Limit's The Sky

Mandatory B.I.G. dorm poster

Notorious was sold out at most major theaters on Saturday (especially Times Square, ignorance capital of New York City) so around 11 my friend Jesse and I said "Fuck it" and went to Brooklyn for this burlesque/bar thing being held by Burning Angel. So I spent Sunday night, after waiting on my favorite hip-hop album/movie piracy site to upload Notorious for most of the weekend, managed to view about 25 minutes worth of the film, uploaded to zShare and Rapidshare and dissected into 3-4 parts. I'm running low on hard drive space so it's tricky to watch films on my computer these days for fear of fucking up my computer before I get to upgrade, making watching a 1 gig movie not an option yesterday, although it was a bootleg so I'm not about sitting around for 2 hours and 2 minutes with shoddy resolution and only the left sound channel working.

But from what I did see, I can state two things. One, Naturi Naughton should never wear clothes. If there's any sort of justice she should be paid to parade around titties akimbo until she eventually hits the wall in her 40's.

And two, 2Pac won.

Though only confused and emotionally unstable/hormonal 70's and 80's babies keep track of shit like this, but if one were so inclined, I'd have to say Pac won this shit from beyond the urn. Let's take this chronologically:

1.West Coast rap is terrible. It just is. As opposed to NY rap, all the good West Coast shit has always been underground (Blu, Busdriver, The Pharcyde, Tha Alkaholiks, etc) while the face of the scene was always pretty spotty at best. Snoop and Dre fell way the fuck of more than 14 years ago (2001 without it's singles is a fucking terrible record), E-40 has two good songs, Ice Cube's good albums were produced by The Bomb Squad who weren't a West Coast production team, and The Game would be tied with Young Jeezy as the most frustratingly popular yet boring and unoriginal rapper today if it wasn't for the fact that Jeezy has a handful of standout tracks amongst the wall of synth din on each of his albums, which is something The Game can't claim. This is important because mainstream West Coast rap's traditional shittiness is a big part of the chip they had on their shoulder around the time all the bullshit started. That little brother complex always seemed like an internal recognition of deficiency to me and all the posturing and very real violence that followed seemed like overcompensating. 2Pac's first victory was getting murdered, validating his weak catalog (Greatest Hits is my shit, though), creating a rockist wet dream in terms of mythology and a convoluted persona that could be further marketed as things it wasn't (political and poetic, things that Pac failed at being), but most of all inspiring a stan to kill Biggie in the first place.

2.Biggie was and is respected and loved, but Pac's death automatically rendered him to permanently be number two in every attempt to canonize the two into rap history. Things like good albums and lyrics were eschewed in favor of image and marketability, which Pac had in spades, probably more than any other rapper ever. Most lists place Pac as the greatest rapper of all time, and even with the current revisionism of the canon he's still seated comfortably there, though most synopses of his career don't actually talk about his abilities as a rapper, which is pretty much the entire basis for these lists. Thus, despite the deluge of rappers that have followed, he's still revered in circles as Messiah-like and beyond criticism, something that Biggie isn't. Which is a shame, since Biggie doesn't get college courses dedicated to Ready To Die, but someone like Michael Eric Dyson could rhapsodize about the Diaspora in relation to All Eyez on Me for hours. The fact no one ever posited that Biggie was still alive and chilling in Afghanistan with Superhead attests the mark his life and death had on the mainstream as a figure, as opposed to someone who wasn't as good of a rapper as, say, Kool G Rap.

3. As an extension of that idea of remembrance, Puffy began a series of really questionable and gross album releases following a similar slew of posthumous records of Pac's scraps released by Death Row and Afeni Shakur (who should know better). Born Again was alright, since Biggie's discography was unfortunately not as deep as Pac's and it gave us "Dead Wrong", so that's something (although if I was Puff I would've put Tracy Lee's "Put Your Hands High" on there). The record wasn't entirely Biggie, had some cool B-side tracks on there and some nice tributes, most notably "We'll Always Love You Big Poppa" by the Lox. But somewhere after the 2004 10th anniversary remaster of Ready To Die, which I thankfully bought before a lawsuit came through to force Bad Boy to excise some crucial samples from the album, and Da Band's and by an extension Bad Boy's utter failure Puff thought that what Biggie needed the most was to ape the 2Pac mold and make an album of watered down beats with a bunch of mid-00's also-rans rapping alongside his ghostly detached vocals using the latest in grave-disturbing technology, necromancy and ProTools. On top of the pile of shit that Biggie Duets was, and it's intrinsic cheapening of the man's memory and catalog, a second unnecessary record was released in the form of a Greatest Hits. Listen, when the artist only made two albums and one is a classic and the other a near classic, you should just let kids fucking buy Ready To Die. It's not like, say The Clash or DMX who legitimately benefit from having their spotty album highlights compressed for consumption, mixtape style. Especially since they dedicated 4+ tracks to cuts off of Biggie Duets. I understand why there's a Notorious Soundtrack, but honestly it's just another financial stopgap fucking up the man's catalogue.

4. And now we get to Notorious. So, Biggie already has a pretty good movie, not as good as Tupac Resurrection which really was an amazing and encompassing documentary, but it still provided a lot more insight into Biggie's life that was oddly missing before 2007. There's another doc coming called Biggie Smalls:Rap Phenomenon that is apparently going to be composed of actual footage of the motherfucker, which'll serve as a great companion piece to Bigger Than Life, which was entirely composed of interviews with a few clips of Biggie placed as much as I guess they could financially be allowed. The two docs together should provide a great look into Biggie and at least give him something comparable to the care and expanse that clearly went into Tupac:Resurrection.

The problem with Notorious itself is that, though its enjoyable enough and, as Combat Jack asserts, pretty spot-on to actual detail despite what Lil' Kim says (and really, fuck Lil' Kim), it's a cheesy rockist biopic with sometimes awkward acting that ends up just being okay in the end, nothing great or bad, sort of like a movie version of Tha Carter III. Some of that has to do with the directing and how everyone tackles the "oh-shit-look-at-this-thing-that-really-happened" scenes. My interest in the film, as someone who already knows about Biggie and isn't a 90's baby or an old head who wants to wax nostalgic, revolved around Naturi Naughton and the girl who played Faith, and for purely aesthetic (i.e. eye candy) related reasons. As Paul Cantor discussed in the xxlmag.com Scratch blog, this turned out to be a lot more like a VH1 biopic akin to Too Legit or that Meatloaf documentary from the look to the script. I know everyone is all excited, but like everything Puffy did after Ready To Die, the movie was shinier and more glamour-crusted than it was good. Details alone don't make a good movie, it's the execution, and like almost every black film this decade not named Akilah and the Bee or Barbershop, it was just incredibly fucking shallow. Angela Bassett was amazing as Voletta and managed to get her mannerisms and specific accent down pat, the girl who played Faith was spot-on as well (down-to the lousy heart tattoo on her left titty), Gravy did a real good job all things considered, and Naturi Naughton was surprisingly good and managing to be more than a random name attracting attention for baring a supreme pair of titties (seriously). However, you could make the argument, and you'd be right, that Notorious mirrors the failing of black film making in this decade, biopics as a mode of film making and the constant artistic failure of Sean Combs. Watching the movie in theaters a few days later (this Wednesday), I felt that Biggie's story would've benefited from being stretched out into something like an HBO mini-series by the people behind The Wire. Condensing a life into two hours is always treacherous and there are probably a lot of details that didn't make the movie that would've proved equally interesting. Enjoyable, yeah, but I don't know how much this helped B.I.G's legacy.

Some Say It's Mixed, But I Say Mulatto

Please, Tends Loreille - Bams and U-God

A xxlmag.com blog post mentioned the RZA world rap album that came out 5 years ago that I either never knew about or forgot of and while doing my normal browsing thing on iTunes, I came across this, one of two gems buried in that record.

(The other track is a wild-ass Pretty Toney Album-era Ghostface track with "Saian Super Crew" called "Saian".)

RZA's production + a "world" rapper that can really flow= GOLD. While we're on the subject, someone should put down Yelle.

Doing It Wrong Since 2007

Funny story. Type in "french hipster" into youtube and all her videos show up as the prime results.

It should be said that U-God is the greatest guest MC ever. Dude's like a blitzkrieg on tracks. Ideally, a U-God solo album would be the most insane club beats RZA could chop up, like this song or "Wolves" from 8 Diagrams, and the rule would be U-God can only do one verse, and maybe a hook per song to keep the consistency good. That's the only way dude'll ever release anything good, and shit, it worked on Missy Elliot's better albums. Chick had like 2 minutes of actual song and two and a half of instrumental on each track.

To be honest, I'm anticipating Golden Arms Redemption II way more than ...Cuban Linx II, especially as there's little chance the latter will be good.

Criminally Slept On: "Remission"

This wasn't originally going to be the record I would inaugurate this series with (metal isn't usually very interesting to write about), but I've already written this for metal-archives.com, so fuck it.
Despite a lot of mainstream music outlets giving this album its proper due, there's definitely seems to be a lot of uninformed criticism of this record, especially in the aftermath of the band becoming popular years later. Detractors from the record, and to a further extent, the band fall into two camps; those who admittedly don't get the band and those who malign the band but, keeping in line with having bad taste, posit genuinely overrated bands like Opeth or Meshuggah as superior alternatives.

A shame because, as Mastodon continues on this seems to be the most overlooked and under-appreciated album in their catalog, the opening salvo of a streak that would produce two classic modern metal albums.

The band itself has always been odd, composed of members who had respectively flirted with tech metal, hardcore, grind and hard rock, leaving the band and their common influences into a sludge-y beast that congealed into a mix of 70's rock, 80's metal, the oddly unsettling chorus-drenched guitar balladry of 80’s Metallica, and Neurosis.

Tuned to Drop-A on occasion like the aforementioned sludge influence, the band was never heavier than on this record, though their rock influence, talked up in early Relapse press releases, is prominent in the songwriting, musical hooks, over-driven and noisy Marshall amp sound, and abundant Thin Lizzy-affected leads. "3:30"-"3:46" during "Ol'e Nessie" alone demonstrates some of the quirkiness that made Mastodon stand out in a stale genre burgeoning with metalcore clones, half-baked prog, past-its-prime tech death and hordes of uninteresting and over-produced European bands.

It's an extreme metal record that rocks, something that was rare and oft-ignored until metalcore bands like Avenged Sevenfold would turn that into a successful sales gimmick. The majority of that has to do with its rhythm.

The key to all music is rhythm; it's what differentiates something like The Violent Femmes' "Add It Up" from someone just blandly strumming a B power chord at an open mic. The core of a good riff is never the notes, it's its rhythm. Things like jazz and AC/DC always had a preternatural ability to determine where spaces and rests should go, why you shouldn't rush a phrase, why tremolo picking some C minor scale retread over blastbeats doesn't necessitate good music. Mastodon, from here until "Blood Mountain", understood that concept very well.

There's audible development in song structure, riffs change frequently and keep dynamic (although the band claims this is due to their "musical ADD") lending power to the longer songs which frequently contain dramatic bridge sections or riff refrains, which are frequently the only time Brann Dailor plays with the riffs as a standard drummer would, instead of playing "lead drums" against them. Though an aspect of the record that is criticized, it works because Dailor's actually a very good drummer, and someone who manages to tastefully overplay. This doesn't detract from the songs themselves because the band seemed to be quite aware of this and would occasionally surrender control of the dynamic and shift of the music to Brann as his drumming would take charge with the guitars and bass sometimes being static as he would appear to solo mid-song.

The guitars are no slouches either, supported by Sanders' distorted bass and employing everything from chicken pickin' to 70's arena rock harmonies to the signature open string arpeggios and interlude riffs the band made its signature. Against the more natural sound Marshall's produce, a lot of the guitar parts sound a lot noisier and more dissonant than they normally would, creating a record with crunch to spare and a lot of heft.

The "groove metal" tag is lazily slapped on this band now, but that seems to come from the vexing that they give some listeners, since there are songs that are blatantly Neurosis-influenced ("Trainwreck"), songs with more blatant rock feels ("Mother Puncher"), songs with a less-odd metered (and better written) Meshuggah feel ("March of the Fire Ants"). There are even a few death metal growls thrown in deep in the mix that, with the hardcore/sludge influence in the band, made them decidedly unique and difficult to categorize. This difficulty also made them appealing to all sorts, since they were never too much of one thing to alienate fans of a particular scene.

In terms of vocals, Troy is the dominant voice on this album, and possesses a gruff/hoarse sort of sludge metal throat that paces itself and is served well by the band's sparse lyrics. Like a lot of metal records, the lyrics are framed in sentence fragments and bandy ideas instead of presenting something fully detailed and literary like other genres. This isn't much a drawback since its a normal concession and a good amount can be determined or interpreted from what little is presented lyrically. As this is more of a guitar and drums record anyway, the lessened focus on vocals (particularly vocal rhythms which are performed well and in proper place but not anything special) and lyrics isn't surprising but doesn't really take anything away from the record as a whole.

This record was a landmark piece of original metal with great songwriting and proficient playing that hadn't yet ("Blood Mountain") bordered on the soulless and rhythm-less wanking of most progressive and technical metal. To tread a tired cliche, this album is just as heavy and crushing as their name, aesthetic, and song titles ("Trampled Under Hoof", "Crusher Destroyer", "Where Strides The Behemoth") implied and is perfect for anyone remotely into sludge but doesn't mind something that sounds this technical. Only hampered by "Trilobite" (which is maybe one plaintive Mastodon track too many and the sole dull entry on a surprisingly catchy album) and the second half of "Trambled Under Hoof" (which drags on a bit into "heavy-for-the-sake-of-heaviness" territory), "Remission" is a majestically heavy 00's metal and strong case that metal isn't quite dead. It's just that most of the bands can't write songs for shit.