Indie Feng Shui, or, the Playlist of the Five Changes
Bear with me on this one. I have a passing interest in Chinese mysticism. I’ve played a lot of video games and am conversant in interior design, and I read an awful lot of wikipedia, so I suppose you could call me an expert. All this week I’ll be doing a series on aligning music with the five traditional Chinese elements of the Wu Xing. And there’s not a god-damned thing you can do to stop me.
Maybe this is ill-advised, but mostly it’s a good excuse to share a lot of music from the back catalog. So, that’s starting tomorrow. Just thought you should know. Here’s some holding-pattern music to tide you over.
The Church – “North, South, East and West”
MF Doom – “Dragon’s Blood Resin”
Boards of Canada – “Roygbiv”
Shut Up And Jam
We don’t really talk about video games on this blog, but I’ve really got to make an exception. If you have a PC, you need to download Charles Barkley’s Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden right now.
I used to make video games when I was a kid. I quit when I decided to take the leap from drawing numbers and maps on Big Chief writing tablets using mechanical pencils and try my hand at actually programming them. Turns out I’m really shamefully bad at programming. But you know, it’s good that I didn’t stick with it, because I never had an idea for a game as good as this one. This is the sequel to the old Sega Genesis basketball game Charles Barkley’s Shut Up and Jam. Set in Neo New York after the post-cyberpocalypse, you play as Charles Barkley living in exile after having performed the forbidden Chaos Dunk that killed millions, causing B-Ball to be banned. Inspector Michael Jordan heads up the B-Ball Removal Department, hunting down and exterminating the famous ballers.
You team up with the octaroon great-grandson of LeBron James, your son Hoopz, and a dwarf who underwent skin grafts with B-Ball leather on a quest to recover the Ultimate B-Ball, the experimental B-Ball infused with Slamicite and Jamicite, the only thing that can stop the terrorist group B.L.O.O.D.M.O.S.E.S. You explore the tombs of the ancient ballers and fight the ghost of Dikembe Mutombo. You defeat the Ghost Dad, You find Wilford Brimley, leader of the Diabetes cult, the only man who can cure Type 2 Diabetes. There’s a WNBA dating sim. The movies Space Jam and Juwanna Mann are considered canon. It’s just about perfect. It’s about as sophisticated as a Super Nintendo-era RPG, but with a lot of really brilliant ideas that make the gameplay more fun than it ought to be. It’s absolutely hilarious.
I’m on a Mac, and if all you’ve got is a Mac you’re not going to be able to make it work. i borrowed my roommate’s old piece-of-crap PC netbook and played it on that. Whatever you have to do, make it work. If you had a Super Nintendo as a kid, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. The music is pretty good too: Chef Boyardee (not the pasta guy) composed a pretty good 8-bit soundtrack to go along with it. And it makes me want to find a copy of the Space Jam soundtrack. I owned the physical CD when I was eight, I think it’s within my rights to download it from the internet. Don’t you? It’s not like you can find it anywhere else these days.
Quad City DJs – “Space Jam Theme Song”
Chef Boyardee – “Rap Cancer”
Let’s Play Baller / Not Baller
We’re going to play a little game here. It’s real simple: you just consider each situation and decide if it’s baller or if it’s a grossly misguided attempt at balling. Let’s give it a go:
* Build a Gravity Bong, Fill It With Cristal
Answer: Not baller. The principle makes sense; recreational drug use, elaborate contraptions, and wasteful conspicuous consumption. Problem is, a gravity bong is trashy and busted no matter how you slice it. High-end balling and low-end balling aren’t compatible. One ball shouldn’t be higher than the other unless they’re wrapped up in a scrotum.
BALLER FIX: replace the Cristal with Andre. $4.99 champagne you can get at 7-11.
* 20-inch Spinning Rims On Your Dad’s Minivan
Answer: Not baller. Normally I’m a sucker for spinners, and that’s the truth. You just STOP and let ‘em keep spinnin’. I literally love them. But a minivan, even an expensive minivan, isn’t the kind of thing you put $40,000 Daytons on. Bottom line is that your rims can’t cost more than the ride you put ‘em on.
BALLER FIX: 20-inch spinning rims on a vintage Schwinn.
* A 3-inch thick wad of Benjamin Franklins double-wrapped with a rubber band
Answer: Not baller. This one’s a trick question. Carrying around a wad of cash so thick it can stop a 9-millimeter bullet is baller in principle, but there’s more to it than that. You can’t carry around a wad of cash so thick it doesn’t fit in a diamond-encrusted money clip shaped like a woman with big breasts. That limits you to thirty to forty bills at one time. Suppose you stop on the street to buy a pack of Parliaments with your silly-ass rubber band wad. You have to use both hands to take off the band, hold the band in your teeth, hand the guy a hundred with the bills in your off-hand, wait for your change, put the change in your pocket, get your smokes, put them in your other pocket after shifting the pile of money, then wrap it all up again. It’s cumbersome and you could easily drop money unintentionally. And ballers never falter.
BALLER FIX: a Trader Joe’s paper bag full to the brim with Abraham Lincolns. Same value, much higher volume. Lower monetary density.
* Doing pushups by the pool with a bikini-clad woman sitting on your back, while rapping
Answer: Ballin‘.
Jim Jones – “Ballin’”
Three 6 Mafia – “Stay Fly”
Rich Boy – “Let’s Get This Paper”
Let Me Name Your Baby
Last night I had dinner with some friends who are about to have a baby. Congratulations on the miracle of life and so forth, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about the poor kid. Most of the big problems aren’t really problems here, so that’s good: the parents love each other, they work hard, they’ve got supportive families, they’re relatively stable, intelligent, all that is there. I’m worried about the biggest problem, the problem trumping all other problems: they’re going to give the baby a boring name.
The best part about having a kid is that you can name it whatever you want. There aren’t any rules. There should be a couple of rules, but there aren’t, at least not in America. In Iceland you’ve got to pick one of the traditional names off of a very traditional list, and the surname is one of your parents’ names with the suffix -son or -dottir. Isn’t that a shame? I would say we need to load up the bombers and deliver them some good old-fashioned American freedom, except the system does admittedly allow for awesome names. Ever heard of Bjork Gudmundsdottir? Girl who wears swans? If I had a name like that, I’d wear a swan every day.
I recommend looking to the music world for baby name suggestions. Right off the top of my head, there’s Rilo Kiley. Great name, and evidence suggests she was born with it. Cool parents, the Kileys. Being christened with a great name is somehow more legit than choosing one later in life. Which, if you’re creative enough, can still work out okay. Take the band Black Moth Super Rainbow. The singer goes by Tobacco. One synth player is Father Hummingbird, the other is The Seven Fields of Aphelion. For real. That’s awesome. It can get taken to extremes, though. It’s hard for me to wake up in the morning knowing that right now, in the United States, there is a man who walks around calling himself Waka Flocka Flame. That’s got to be the dumbest name I’ve ever heard. It’s even worse than Oj da Juiceman, or Kentuckyfriedcruelty Dotcom.
At any rate, make sure you don’t waste this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Why go with Benjamin David Johnson when you could choose Keirkegaard Catastrophe “The Little Emperor” Johnson? Or Batman bin Suparman? You think I would have chosen the name Paul A. Gibson? Hell no. Every day I wish my parents had named me Karate Muscles Gibson. Or maybe “Iron Ore” Armor Gibson? Forget the “Junior” suffix: go with “: The Reckoning.” Every day would be an adventure if my passport said “The Right Reverend Soren ‘Big Savings’ Slaughterhouse von Gibson: Third Time’s a Charm.”
So anyway. Put down the baby names book and pick up Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Put on a kung-fu movie and name that baby.
Rilo Kiley – “A Better Son/ Daughter”
Black Moth Super Rainbow – “Smile The Day After Today”
Waka Flocka Flame – “O Let’s Do it”
These Are the Hippest 5th-Graders Ever
As the famous photoblog might have said, Look At These F-ing Hipsters. I didn’t actually use the curse word, because these elementary school alt-icons are no doubt tech-savvy and I don’t need their parents Google-ing them and finding a bunch of sailor talk. But just look at them. Here they are, none of them a day older than twelve, with the classiest cover version of, very arguably, the best indie-rock single of last year. I did choir back in the day; would that my choir directors were so in-touch with modern culture.
Maybe that’s unfair, though; maybe we never did those songs because my choir directors didn’t feel like clearing the samples. Anyway. The mp3 version is attached (thanks to Dirpy), as is the original song, as unnecessary as that may be.
PS22 Chorus – “Lisztomania”
Phoenix – “Lisztomania”
The Ramones – “Rock ‘n Roll High School”
Broken Bells, Fixed Ears
My last post was over two months ago. That’s unforgivable. I could make excuses… so I will.
I haven’t really been inspired by anything lately. I haven’t heard any new songs or albums that sucker punched me in the eardrum. Beach House’s “Teen Dream” is everything I imagined it would be. Vampire Weekend’s “Contra” is exactly what you’d expect. And yet, nothing has really motivated me to get off my busy ass and pencil in time on the ol’ schedule to make posts. In music’s defense, I’ve also been lack in actively searching for the Soundtrack Of MY Life.
With all that said, this week has been one hell of a week. All of a sudden, the floodgates were opened. New music abounds in my inbox. The names of new bands are on the tips of everyone’s tongues. Word-of-mouth introduces me to new auditory mistresses and maidens, and I’m reaping all the benefits. This week, I’ve been disappointed, flabbergasted, amazed and let down.
And now it’s my task- nay, my duty- to report to you good readers my findings in a non-scientific method to push you to your own opinions (as long as they agree with mine).
Let me start with the album that got me started. “Broken Bells” from… that’s right, Broken Bells. Danger Mouse and Mr. James Mercer creating beautiful music together. This album awoke my senses!
You can hear The Shins. You can hear Danger Mouse. You can hear the 80s and Gorillaz and post-punk and Fleetwood Mac and new wave and Theivery Corp. and a lot of other stuff. The album starts as if with a sunrise, sunny uncomplex melodies in “The High Road”. That’s just to whet your appetite. The album continues throughout the aural span of a day as the sun rises, reaches the apex, begins to fall into something duskier, until it’s gone and you are left with the complexities of the twinkling skyline and the dark sounds of the night. It ends with the electronic, dark and provoking “The Mall and Misery”
They just had a show at the Bootleg that was PACKED. So they opened up tickets to a new show at the Troubadour in a couple weeks. Tickets were sold out in MINUTES. These two underestimate the pre-existing following that they’ve already built with their musical genius. Now they just multiply each other and make for a brand that will be on a meteoric rise this year. Expect this album to be near the top of EVERYONE’s “best-of” lists come the end of the year.
The album drops next week
Broken Bells – “Your Head Is On Fire”
Broken Bells – “Mongrel Heart”
I’ve Got a Bad Case of Pompadour Envy
I almost feel bad reblogging tracks I heard today on Pitchfork, only because everybody reads Pitchfork. It’s a little bandwagoney, a little me-tooey. Maybe it’s completely unnecessary. But then again, maybe you just skim and didn’t hear the same two tracks of red-hot madness I’ve been jamming to all day.
First, Flying Lotus has a new album coming out relatively soon. If you read this blog regularly you know we’ve got a raging hard-on for FlyLo, the Squarepusher of the Obama era. The track, ‘Computer Face / Pure Being,’ is dense and bright and fast and almost baroque, and that four-note hook keeps circling around higher and higher, pulling you up into the air like a disco tornado. It’s really damn good. You can download it here.
Next, we’ve got Janelle Monáe. I hadn’t heard her before today, but I don’t think I’m obligated to have had done so, since she’s only had an EP or two so far. Her debut album come out in May, but we’ve got this single from her to tide us over until then. It’s called ‘Tightrope’ and it features Big Boi and it’s crazy, isn’t it? Her voice is a little like a young Michael Jackson’s and she’s packed so many fabulous ideas into this song it makes me despair of ever writing one. The Big Boi feature makes a lot of sense, as she’s as high-concept and artistically fashionable as Andre 3000. She’s going to be huge, absolutely huge, and I hope ‘Tightrope’ becomes the next ‘Hey-Ya.’ Maybe you didn’t hear it here first you certainly are about to hear it here. You can also download this track from right here, homeboy.
Flying Lotus – “Computer Face / Pure Being”
Janelle Monáe – “Tightrope (f. Big Boi)”
Dan Black at Spaceland: 2.24.10
Normally, record labels are retarded. This is well documented everywhere on the internet. That being said – every now and then they do something that isn’t completely dumb. Like throw a show at Spaceland for $1.06 (tonight by the way). And not just any show – but a Dan Black show. If you haven’t been to Spaceland (one of my favorite venues) go. And if you haven’t heard Dan Black, check this track below. It’s a little remix of the Symphonies jam with Kid Cudi. Kid Cudi’s voice is kind of like Megan Fox. I can’t figure out why I like it. I just know I do. In the case of Megan Fox I just keep staring at pictures of her. In the case of this song I keep hitting repeat. At this point my finger kind of hurts. And go catch Dan Black tonight. If you don’t do it now that show price decimal is going to move farther left the longer you wait.
Dan Black is playing tomorrow night up in SF at Popscene if you’re one of those California people who doesn’t live in Los Angeles. Haha, you sillies.
Dan Black – Symphonies (ft. Kid Cudi)
Hey, Remember That Thing?
Couple updates for you. Number one, you may notice the big YouTube video right above this sentence. That’s the (first?) music video supporting CRUDBUMP’s new album ‘Na$ty Jam$.’ If that name sounds familiar, it’s because we talked about it earlier. The update is that I still like the album, and I bet you would too. The video starts out stupid, then becomes laugh-out-loud hilarious, then stomach-twistingly disgusting. I’ve watched it a couple of times, and there’s still a couple of Clockwork Orange moments where I just…prefer to look away. Also, Drew (the guy in the video) has excellent taste in wallpaper.
Secondly, when we last spoke about Curtis Plum his album ‘Call My Cellphone‘ had yet to drop. It is really and truly out right now, it’s shipping and everything, so go get it. The label released another single ahead of the album, and in my opinion it’s one of the highlights: ‘Lil Wayne Tried to Rape Me.’ Best of all, the label’s letting you download it for free, all legal-like. How do you lose on this one? How do you not download a song with a title like that? Go get it here.
Thirdly, some internet sleuthing and deductive logic have led me to believe that rapper B Dolan reads, or at least at one point has read, this website. So remember that. Next time you come here, you might be reading our posts at the same time as a famous person. You’d get to meet them! And if you get our RSS feed, those famous people will basically come to your house every day!*
CRUDBUMP – “Take a Number”
Curtis Plum – “Lil Wayne Tried to Rape Me”
B Dolan – “Lucifer”
* EDIT: I have been informed that this is not how the internet works.
Cool Story Bro: ‘The Kilogram’
I don’t know when I’m going to have a thousand hours of free time, but I know what I’m going to do when those happy times come. I’m going to write the dopest novel you’ve ever read.* Here’s the pitch:
Do you know what the Kilogram is? I’m not talking about just the unit, I’m talking about the object; that’s why I capitalized it. The lower-case kilogram is actually based off of a real object, a perfect cylinder of platinum and iridium in a vault in France. A kilogram weighs something like 2.2 imperial pounds, and that’s because the Kilogram weighs something like 2.2 pounds. You see where I’m going with this? What would happen if some shadowy organization staged an elaborate heist to steal the Kilogram?! What sort of chaos would result from that? And how can our intrepid and well-sexed hero stop them?
It doesn’t matter, by the way. First of all, in real life there’s a whole bunch of copies of the Kilogram, and even if you screwed around with them it’s not like you would change what things weigh. That’s why it’s going to read an awful lot like a Dan Brown novel. As much as possible, in fact. I’m going to do an immense amount of research and just disregard all of it and make stuff up. First of all, in the novel the Kilogram is going to be this massive cube, and all sorts of plot points are going to revolve around how heavy it is. None of the characters really have a good grasp of the metric system:
“I stopped in my tracks. To think what Professor Hellhammar could do with that two, two-and-a-half pound chunk of platinum was unthinkable. And just when I thought I had thought of everything, an idea occurred to me: Hellhammar had another think coming.”
Not that the Kilogram is even particularly valuable. A kilo of platinum will set you back about $50,000. That’s enough to buy a used Mercedes, maybe. I just think it’s hilarious that we still have an artifact with that sort of mystical power over weights and measures, and it would be really fun to explore that.
I envision this as an airport novel. You know, it’s about 450 pages of cheap paper with my name in raised silver lettering on the cover in 32-point Impact font. You buy it for nine dollars and read half of it before you forget it at the hotel and never finish it. That’s totally fine with me. It could also work as a summer movie, perhaps integrated into the National Treasure franchise. I would sign away the rights if and only if Nic Cage played the lead. Here are some of my suggestions for the soundtrack.
The Drums – “Let’s Go Surfing”
Mephisto Odyssey – “Jump”
The Weather Machines – “Last Stop”
* In all honesty, I should disclose that I was drunk when I came up with this idea. And now I’m fixing it in a tangible medium of expression so that I own the copyright. Bitches.
