This is a tricky one. To me, you think Earth, you think trees. Trees are made of wood. And we already did Wood two days ago. But this Chinese mysticism: the Wu Xing isn’t meant to be taken literally. There’s more to Earth than just trees and dirt.

Earth is the elemental aspect representing stability and centrality. Unlike the other four elements, Earth doesn’t have a specific season; rather, it represents the period of change in between seasons, encountered every third month. Earth is about yin and yang in equal amounts. It’s about getting to wherever you’re going and staying there to ripen. It’s about inertia. It’s yellow and a little bit damp. Also, the official fruit of the element of Earth is the jujube. I don’t know what to make of that. I bet you didn’t even know the jujube was a real fruit.

It’s a lot more difficult than I expected to translate these concepts into music. When I think balance and stability, I think about music with relatively flat musical lines and with limited variation in terms of parts. The tempo should be moderate: not too fast, not too slow. Also, there’s a certain melodic pattern that strikes me as “circular,” where over the course of a repeating passage the line rises above the root note, passes it on the way down, and hits the root again before repeating. I dunno. That feels like a circle to me, like a closed musical system. I don’t have to vocabulary to describe it other than to point it out when I hear it, and say “see, look, listen to that circle part, you hear it?”

So this is the best I can do with this idea. Phew. Metal’s coming up tomorrow, that should be a little easier.

Curumin – “Compacto”
Stereolab – “Infinity Girl”
La Melodia – “Vibing High”
Beach House – “Silver Soul”
Neon Indian – “Deadbeat Summer”
Catherine Wheel – “Shallow”

Intuitively, wood generates fire. Well, I mean, it’s not quite that easy, you need oxygen and a spark and some tinder, sure, but basically wood burns. Ancient Chinese mystics figured that out pretty quickly. So, we’re continuing up our weeklong series on Wu Xing with the element of fire.

Fire is the element of summertime, on account of fire is hot and so is summertime. The color of fire is red and the direction of fire is South, which makes sense if you’re living in the Northern hemisphere. Summertime is when things are in full bloom, and fire universally represents expansive, consuming energy. Think hot and sticky and wildin’ out, like a Busta Rhymes concert in Menlo Park on the forth of July. Fire, if you think about it, is the stickiest substance known to man. It just sticks to everything it touches. The “grain of fire,” according to wikipedia, is beans. I don’t know what to make of that.

So. What does Fire sound like? Or, rather, how is the symbolic amalgam of a variety of analogous concepts related to the element of fire related to musical patterns? Well, fire is all about a full yang, if you know what I mean. You want your yang to be as big as possible and just OUT there. Heavy energy and lots of movement, movement only slowed down by the punishing heat. The heat is a suppressing element, and just as it warps materials and creates mirages, punishing heat can create musical distortion and flatten musical movement. Think wide, flat expanses of dry grass and apricot trees, beat down by punishing waves of heat. Think torrents of manic, unfocused energy. Think of anger as a vehicle for that unfocused energy. Anger is a volcano, a spurt of petulant magma that forces itself on the world. Maybe it’ll burn up all your wood, but it’s a creative force nonetheless.

So. I’ve selected Grizzly Bear’s ‘Southern Point‘ (has the word South in it, also it represents yada yada yada.) You also get some raw energy by way of Rockin’ Ryan & the Real Goners. That energy is expressed as anger by Nine Inch Nails, Fucked Up, and King Crimson. And then you have Busta Rhymes. To me, Busta represents fire. Not just because he had a song called ‘Fire‘ or because he’s Jamaican, but because of his physical size and strength and the ferocious energy and focus at least his early music. By that I mean most everything prior to ‘Arab Money.’ I know, I can forgive him for his track with the Pussycat Dolls: Busta no doubt needed to pay some bills, cos he needed a hit real badly. But ‘Arab Money’ was straight-up racist garbage. I was not amused. Even so, if Busta Rhymes came over to my house and breathed a blast of fire from his nostrils to light a blunt, I would be only a little bit surprised.

Tomorrow: Earth. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do for that one.

Grizzly Bear – “Southern Point”
Rockin’ Ryan & the Real Goners – “Rock On the Moon”
Nine Inch Nails – “Wish”
Fucked Up – “Days of Last”
King Crimson – “Red”
Busta Rhymes – “Break Ya Neck”

We’re doing a week-long series on the five Chinese elements starting today, which you can read all about on Wikipedia, your number-one source for cursory information on esoteric topics. Since it’s springtime, we may as well start with Wood, the element of spring.

As I’m sure you already know, the element of Wood represents many different things. For instance, springtime. It’s the beginning of things to come, and there are aspects of growth and change. It represents the direction east, so think the sunrise, think wind. Wikipedia says it also represents Jupiter. I don’t know what to make of that.

What does that mean in terms of music? For me, generative energy in music is expressed by repeating patterns that layer and expand over time. Short, simple rifts create a musical floor, and as you add new parts and variations you create the impression that they grow or burst out of the musical soil. As it were. AnCo is a pretty good example of this generative sound. It should feel like the song has plenty of energy, and that the performers are in fact withholding some of their own energy. Lively yet restrained, like Doves and Deastro. Also, musical lines that walk up the scale creates in me the impression of growth and progression more than a flat or descending line. That’s the concept I’m trying to get across with the Bird & the Bee selection.

This is fun! I had to peruse the ol’ iTunes for quite some time to put this together. Which is the idea. Use these selections to guide your playlist. Orient the Bose in the eastern quadrant of the listening area. Sip green tea from a blue teacup and think about your student loans.

Le Loup – “Go East”
Animal Collective – “Brother Sport”
Doves – “Black and White Town”
Deastro – “Biophelia”
The Bird and the Bee – “Fucking Boyfriend”
Bonobo – “Days to Come”

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”

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”

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”

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”

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”

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 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)”