Wednesday, February 27, 2008
 
KOALA SLEEP ON
Leon Fallon
Outback Aussie
Caspian Productions : 2007
[Buy it]

KOALA LA LA
The Wiggles
Wiggly Safari
Koch Records : 2003
[Buy it]

RETURN OF THE PANTHER (ft. Mustafa Akbar)
Thunderball
Cinescope
Eighteenth Street Lounge Music : 2006
[Buy it]

PANTHERS (Tony Galvin Remix - Instrumental)
Tony Galvin
from Panthers 12"
ft. Last Poets, Common, Dead Prez
TEG : 2004
[Buy it]

PANTHERS (Crosswind Remix by Zamali)
ft. Last Poets, Common, Dead Prez
Bootleg
Zamali


Found recently online by Tony over at Moistworks' Seattle Bureau:

. . . . . . . . . . . .


This essay was written by an 8th grader in Pittsburgh in the spring of 2004. The assignment was to pick an enangered species, and explain why it's important to save it. The typos and formatting are preserved from the original.

Richard XXXXXXXX Draft 2

I shouldn't do shit. I don't care about them they all could die and it won't affect my life. I know a lot about them but I don't need to think about them. They're just a waste of time koalas are stupid they don't help me with shit so why should I help them. If they all die there will be more room for the panthers and all the other hard animals. Koalas are weak a pit will get rid of their whole fucking family. That's why I don't like koalas.

Koalas have sharp claws but they are weak. They all small and fat and they be climing trees. I hope a storm just come while theyjust chilling up in the tree thinking they is hard and they're will all just fall off. They just break they neck and shit. When they fall they claws are going to fall off and they going to be crying like some little bitches.

Koalas aren't hard they some little bitches. They start climbing up the tree soon as they see a deer from like 50feet away. They stupid as hell they should put their brain in their pouch and put the kid in they ten they're be able to think better. They try to be in the fucking kangaroo family. They weak as hell, talking bout they got a pouch a kangaroo so they their cousins and shit. Kangaroo's have some big ass legs and whot do a koala got? Some little ass legs, they tails is little and weak as fuck kangaroo's got a big ass long tail that can kill a fucking koala.

If a koala goes in the water it won't be able to breathe with its little short ass. It'd fucking drown soon aas it take one step into the water. While they at the river trying to get something to drink a bear could just come to him and snatch its ass up. It doesn't know protection because they don't have
protection. What they little ass going to do? It can't scratch him. The bear will beat his fucking ass.

The important think about koalas is that just don't care about tem and let them die by all the other animals in Australia. They're not important just let nature do what it do and kill them. Koalas do not have a place in this world there's not enough room for all the bitches in this world. So let all the koalas that's in the zoos and shit. Let them go and put them back with their family. If you let them all go they won't nothing except for that's what they was put in this world for.

Now you know why koalas aren't important. They have nothing to do except for sitting around in the trees. It's like they just was like they was sent have to die. Koalas don't do nothing to help anybody. Thre would be just one more relative of the kangaroo that will be six feet under. Now you know why koalas are not important because there are dumb.

Labels: ,



posted by James
LINK |


Monday, November 12, 2007
 
GET YOUR MOTHER OFF THE CRACK
Audio Two
I Don't Care (The Album)
Atlantic : 1990
[Buy It]

GIMME NO CRACK
Shinehead
Unity
Elektra : 1988
[Buy It]

BEEN THIS WAY BEFORE (RAP)
Roger
Unlimited!
Reprise : 1987
[Buy It]

CRACK ROCK
The Dogs
The Dogs
J.R. Records : 1991
[Buy It]

CRACKHEAD
Kenn Kweder
Kwederology, Vol. 1
2002
[Buy It]

CRACK
Big Black
Hammer Party
Touch & Go Records : 1986
[Buy It]

BASEHEAD
Corey Harris
Greens from the Garden
Alligator Records : 1999
[Buy It]

CRACK PIPES
Sage Francis
Personal Journals
Anticon : 2002
[Buy It]

CRACKSPOT
Ghostface Killah
Fishscale
Def Jam : 2006
[Buy It]

RAP GAME / CRACK GAME
Jay-Z
In My Lifetime, Vol. 1
Roc-a-Fella : 1997
[Buy It]

I AM CRACK
Juelz Santana
What the Game's Been Missing!
Def Jam : 2005
[Buy It]

SMOKE
Dimmer
I Believe You Are A Star
Flying Nun : 2001
[Buy It]


If you are of the certain age and the certain whiteness that I am, then you can't think of the 80s without thinking of crack. Crack was huge in the 80s. Juat like that, Styx was no longer the country's favorite white rock. It was pretty impressive - for this little upstart drug to become, in a few short years, a modern American plague. I like to imagine those first Shuttle astronauts looking down from space and seeing our nation's crack pipes ablaze, like a thousand points of light. Crack had a very candid resume: it was cheap, available, and promised instant returns. Even so, the boom it enjoyed was amazing. In a blink, the crack habit became an emblem for all habits, its mechanism the mechanism for all addictions. There was no wiggle room with crack, no recreational crack smoking, no loud, bohemian couple at your dinner party offering the crack pipe around, no lifestyle that included crack smoking except the crack smoker's lifestyle. The crack boom brought a parallel boom in new, sinister compound nouns: crackheads, crackmoms, and crackbabys - a whole new citizenry overnight.

Crack devastated America's black urban communities. But for white America, crack was a great phantom. For the white community, crack's grip was mostly on the imagination, but that didn't make it any less potent or twitchy. The way a white person thought about crack said much about the way they thought about race, and money and the city. It was something of a prism to be looked through, or maybe a more accurate, if equally lazy, metaphor would be a kaleidoscope, whose optics caught each tiny personal flaw and projected them into a uniquely, fantastically colorful spectacle of predjudice.

Crack became one of our great racial bogeymen. The history of race in America is stocked with racial bogeymen, but in the 80s, conditions seemed uniquely moist for the seeds of rapid fear.

The national tone was conservative and cocky. For the typical Reaganite, black America may as well have been a foreign country. The Establishment had never done or seen crack, or had any friends or friends-of-friends who had done or seen crack, or ever shown any previous interest in the welfare of America's inner cities. Yet the Establishment was obsessed with crack.

Politicians, economists, urban planners, the people in charge, were all exactly unqualified to handle the crisis. But they all took a furiously inexpert shot, like the crack epidemic was a Rubik's cube they had been handed for the fist time. I'm pretty sure at some point someone declared war on crack. Scientists gave crack to animals and announced importantly that the animals chose the crack over food. (I'm not sure what the benefit of these studies was --as we all know, one of the great evolutionary bonuses of being human is the ability to choose drugs AND food.)

Meantime, news from the crack front was being delivered to us by a new, accelerating media. A faster, noisier, sleazier, more voyeuristic, more entertaining media. A small-picture media obsessed with trend-spotting and tabloid magazine shows hosted by loud Australian men. This media loved crack. Do you remember, at the end of the 80s, when crack's ability to shock was on the wane, how the media didn't want to let it go? I remember a desperate spate of stories about new, more deadly drugs that were about to sweep into the suburbs and turn your Honor Roll daughter into a cheap hooker. Rolling Stone ran a big cover story on a drug called "Ice" that was supposedly going to make crack look like Flintstone's chewables. Ice was cheaper, more addictive, more deadly. I think some gangs in Hawaii were making it. Of course it was the Hawaiian gangs. That's an old Rolling Stone trick, because they know nobody fact checks the Hawaiian stuff.

The changing media reflected a change in media consumers. The audiences were younger. For white suburban kids, there was suddenly a new familiarity with black style and black music. White teens were dressing black, talking black, listening to black radio, admiring black athletes. They were even venturing into the city on weekends, where they mingled with black kids on the racial frontiers, swapping cultural chips, like the early stages of a game of Othello. Ahh, Othello, the 80s chess! But it was mingling, not mixing. We walked the same blocks, but passed each other on opposites sides of the street. For white kids, this new intimacy brought into relief very real divisions in a way we had never quite considered. Joseph Conrad, in a famous book he wrote about a crackhead called Mister Kurtz, described a phenomenon whereby the "glow brings out a haze." For kids like me growing up in DC, this bright new fog created a queasy kind of segregation anxiety. We laughed at our parents for being so ignorant, for getting it wrong when it came to all things black, but at the same time, we didn't know specifically in what ways they were getting it wrong. We couldn't debunk their myths with any evidence based on actual experience, we just did so on faith. The everyday invisibility of black people in our lives was embarrassing to us, and so we over-compensated, nurturing our own counter-fantasies about what real black people were all about, and we did foolish things like go to Kid 'n Play concerts.

I guess I don't really have anything in the way of a conclusion. What got me thinking about our old friend crack, was a link someone sent me a few days ago. It's a nasty link, nasty in so many ways, absolutely unsafe for work, and in fact, best left unclicked.

Here it is.

Instead of clicking that link, why not hop on the comments board, anonymously if you like, and give us some good personal crack stories. I know you got em. If I'm sure about one thing, it's that moistwork readers love to hit the pipe.

SOME CRACK LINKS:

CRACK IS WHACK

VINTAGE RACIST CRACK P.S.A.

VINTAGE CRACK P.S.A.

VINTAGE CRONKITE CRACK P.S.A.

PEE WEE HERMAN CRACK P.S.A.

CRACKHEADS GONE WILD

CRACK SMOKERS IN HELLS KITCHEN

THE IRON SHIEK SMOKES CRACK

I GOT COCAINE RUNNING AROUND MY BRAIN

THE MYTH OF THE CRACK BABY

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posted by James
LINK |


Wednesday, October 17, 2007
 
69
Father
Sex is Law
Mca : 1993
[Buy it]

KNOCKIN' BOOTS (12")
Candyman
Ain't No Shame In My Game
Epic : 1990
Out of Print
[Buy it]

GETTING IT ON
Dennis Coffey
Big City Funk -- Original Old School Breaks & Heavy Guitar Soul
Vampi Soul : 2006
[Buy it]

GET IT ON
The Delta Rhythm Section
Old School Classics
Vinylizor Productions LTD
Atmosphere : 2002


A foreplay fourplay

69:

Remember the New Jack Swing movement? It was a fumbling, forgettable time when rap got into bed with the flyweight sound of R&B, and it was possibly the last time rappers danced in public. Maybe you even remember Father MC, who modestly changed his name to just "Father" for 1993's Sex is Law. He was popular with the white boys and the girls with daddy issues. "69" is New Jack at its punchy best: vigorous, cheesy, unsubtle, with more energy than finesse. Slick music for un-slick people, seduction music for personal trainers.

Knockin Boots:
Perhaps the worst rap song to ever crack top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. This song was a crossover hit in the sense of crossing over from white boys to their younger, whiter brothers. It features some of hip hop's most embarrassing boasts: swilling Asti Spumante, taking a groupie called "Norma" back to a Holiday Inn, making her pay for the room.

Getting It On:
Deep, scorching funk from a 70s funk guitar hero who had the last name of 'Coffey', played with Parliament, Edwin Starr, Freda Payne, and Wilson Pickett, released an album with this cover, and who was still, somehow, a white boy.

Get It On:
A nice example of a little genre we at moistworks like to call "Elephunk" - inappropriate music for elevators, from the mysterious acid jazz collective Vinylizor Productions.

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posted by James
LINK |


Tuesday, October 09, 2007
 
AFRICA (Previously Unreleased)
SWIFTNESS (Previously Unreleased)
STYLE WARS
Lakim Shabazz
The Ol' School Flava Of Lakim Shabazz:
Rare & Unreleased Old School Hip Hop '89-'90

Tuff City : 2007
[Buy LP]

SOMETHING MELLOW BUY HYPE
Priority One
Total Chaos
Tuff City : 1989
[Buy LP]



Tuff City Records recently reissued a bunch of lost classics from its vault, including cult favorites from Priority One and Lakim Shabazz. Both rappers had close affiliations with DJ Mark the 45 King and The Flavor Unit, a group that included Queen Latifah, Apache and Chill Rob G.

Shabazz was also a "Five Percenter," a member of the Five Percent Nation aka The Nation of Gods and Earths, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam popular with many edutainers of the time.

The group was founded in Harlem by a Korean War veteran and martial arts expert named Clarence 13X. Clarence 13X attended Nation of Islam Temple Number Seven, where Brother Malcolm was minister, in the early '60s. I've always thought of the NOI as a sort of poor man's Scientology. It's a crude comparison, but at their heart, both involve the same kind of wacky bargain: we'll clean you up, give you focus, give you self-determination, as long as you just quietly believe the thing about the aliens - the aliens floating either in your blood, or above your head in a UFO called the "Motherplane," depending on your faith. It's a pretty decent trade, especially if you are an ex-con or strung out hooker.

But I guess the Motherplane wasn't wacky enough for Clarence 13X. He had some fundamental disagreements with the NOI - like with that thing where he reckoned he was God while they didn't - and he was excommunicated.

Rappers began embracing the group's teachings decades later. They were obviously drawn to the movement's black power energy, its Mecca-centric histories, and of course the opportunity to use the word "Supreme" a lot and wear cheap homemade pharaohwear.

So it's somewhat amazing when I'm checking wikipedia, to find that the Five Percenters actually received support from New York's Republican City Hall:

The Five Percenters established a headquarters in the Harlem section of Manhattan. The Allah School in Mecca, previously known as Allah's Street Academy, was founded in 1966 through the Urban League with the help of the Republican mayor of New York, John Lindsay. The agreement reached between Clarence and the Urban League was a payment of one dollar a day... The first programs instituted in the school contained 10 to 30 kids, certified teachers, and three street workers. Graduates of the street academy would transfer to an academy of transition and then on to college preparatory school. Clarence disagreed with the program originally instituted at the Urban League, and so the curriculum was later turned over to him to manage, while the daily programs switched to math, English, and self defense.

Another fun factoid:

The rap expression "G" comes originally from Five Percenters, short for "God." Most people think it came from "Gangsta." I, sadly, thought it came from the broadway slang of Damon Runyon.

As far as Five Percent rappers go, Lakim Shabazz is pretty thoughtful. I'm not sure why the track "Africa" was never released. It's easily one of his best, with a beat that chugs and rattles like an old subway train. Shabazz doesn't rhyme on top of it, so much as inside and through it, like a kid hustling between the moving cars.

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posted by James
LINK |


Thursday, September 27, 2007
 
GODMOMA HERE
BE ALL YOU CAN BE
Godmoma
Here
Elektra : 1981
Out of Print

SEX SHOOTER (DEMO)
SEX SHOOTER (EXTENDED DANCE MIX)
Video
French TV Performance
Apollonia 6
Apollonia 6
Warner Bros : 1984
Out of Print

The girl group Godmoma was a sexed-up side project from that funk muppet Bootsy Collins. The girls: former P-Funk vocalists Cynthia "Sugar Baby" Girty, Arnenita "T Baby" Walker, and Carolyn "Baby Kay" Myles. Bootsy beamed them up to the Mothership, along with Sly Stone, and Horny Horns Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley, and cut an album of dirty disco that sweats like a FEMA trailer.

The experiment only lasted the one record, but Bootsy may have ushered in one of the decades great pop trends. Didn't it seem like back in the 80s, every dude and his cousin had a girl group? Not the in a Berry Gordy supergroup kind of way. And not yet the calculated marketing creations of the video generation. No these were strictly vanity projects. The girl group as the ultimate accessory: stage candy, funk whores, the girl group as soft porn harem.

Prince had a vanity project. There were 6 girls in it. Prince called it Vanity 6. But Vanity left the band, so Prince reformed it as Apollonia 6. I would have killed to have been on the Staten Island Ferry the day of that casting call. There's a Herzog documentary in there somewhere. All that hairspray and the anxious savagery of chased dreams and the lingerie from the Red Door Store in Paramus with the tags still on it.

'Sex Shooter' is one of Prince's premier pieces of brilliantly ludicrous porn funk. (When you consider that no music critic worth his vintage Tretorns would dare discuss Prince without those four words: porn. funk. brilliant. ludicrous. - then you know I speak high praise.)

There are certain similarities between Bootsy and Prince's side projects. They both were at their peaks, both brought in all-star support, both embrace their signature sounds, and both parade some serious, vaingloriously confused sexuality.

Take a lick, gimme a hit, get on the stick
and suck upon this


and

I need you to pull my trigger babe

I need you to get me off
I'm your bomb getting ready to explode
I need you to get me off
Be your slave do anything I'm told

Im a sex shooter....
Blow me away,
C'mon kiss the gun


It's a real Pandora's Box. Normally, when it comes to early '80s girl groups and party funk, I try so very hard not to pull the trigger on concerns of sexual identity politics. Those debates of stripper pole feminism: empowerment v objectification, emancipation v subjugation, the balances of power on the fetish exchange. This music just is what it is. It's post-narrative, it's post-innuendo, it's some serious species level action. When it comes to Pandora, Bootsy and Prince really aren't worried about what's coming out of her box so much as what they're gonna' put in it. I like to leave all that figurative groping to the gender studies undergrads at Sarah Lawrence. They can hash it out in their tutorial. Maybe in that new class they have:
The Nasty Dialectic: Transgression, Aggression, Sexuality and the mOthership.

But listening to Apollonia now 20 years on, please forgive me if I clear my throat. Prince really is a freak. Sure Bootsy and the ladies get into some gender role play, but it's all in fun. You know he's just trying to bring some dialogue to the dance floor. But in the Thealogy of pop funk, Prince is flying solo. He's sorting out some serious hyper-gender-erotica business, and he's using Apollonia 6 as psycho-sexual proxies in his little vagina monologue.

Maybe Prince just loves sex so much, that he wants access to all possible POVs available. Maybe he's a raving sexual narcissist, not just satisfied to sex-up women, he wants to enter the female form to embody it so he can experience what it's like to be a woman sexing him up. Or maybe these are just the shadow puppets of his erotic theater, and Prince in the role of of sex puppeteer, Gepetto as pimp. The Apollonia 6 certainly seem like puppets. Really, you can tell their hearts are not in it. When they command "Soon as I get undressed y'all clap your hands OK?" they just sound tired and blue collar. The orgasms are obviously faked, the gyrations the tired hulas of a Tijuana burlesque. They are nice girls; all they really wanted was to work at the Macy's cosmetics counter but Prince went and turned 'em out. And look at poor Sheena Easton: a sweet Scottish kid, with a stable career in Adult Contemporary music ahead of her. She studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She sang duets with Kenny Rogers. She hooks up with Prince, and now she's inviting American inside her 'Sugar Walls' and has Tipper Gore and the Parents' Music Resource Council naming her one of music's "Filthy Fifteen." Prince takes these young ones, coaches them up, gives them a new language, a genital lingua franca.

It must be exhausting to be Prince. Me, if I lived in the Purple Rain universe, I'd skip the whole girl band thing altogether. It's just so deviant and sexually confusing. I'd go for something normal, something conservative. Maybe settle down with a fashionable manservant named Jerome who would be full of self-esteem and would dance around in front of me with a giant mirror.

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posted by James
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Thursday, September 06, 2007
 
BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD
Video
Peter Murphy w/ Trent Reznor and TV On The Radio
Live on DC-101 FM
6/13/2006

CUTS YOU UP
Video
Peter Murphy
Deep
Beggars UK : 1990

THINGS TO REMEMBER
Peter Murphy w/ Mercan Dede
Dust
Metropolis Records : 2002


A brief holdover from our week of conversions:

Bauhaus' Peter Murphy grew up Irish-Catholic, became a goth godhead, and then converted to Islamic Sufism in the early 90s. I know next to nothing of Bauhaus, Goths or Irish-Caths, but I know enough of Peter Murphy to know that Sufism makes a great fit - being Islam's most mystic and pretentious order.

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posted by James
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Friday, July 13, 2007
 
SLOGAN INSTRUMENTAL
HOUSE PARTY FABERGE
PRESENTATIONS MONDAINES EVELYNE
LA CHANSON DE SLOGAN
EVELYNE & DIALOGUES
Serge Gainsbourg
Slogan Soundtrack
1969
Unreleased

DID YOU FEEL IT TOO?
HOLD YR TERROR CLOSE
The Go! Team
Are You Ready For More (Australian Tour EP)
Memphis Industries : 2005
[Buy it]

PHANTOM BROADCAST
The Go! Team
Help: A Day In the Life
Independiente UK : 2005
[Buy it]

LADYFLASH
The Go! Team
Thunder, Lightning, Strike
Memphis Industries : 2004
[Buy it]

I was just listening to these unreleased soundtrack bites from the 1969 film Slogan, on the set of which Serge first met his sex-kitten protege and paramour-to-be Jane Birkin. They are smoother than The Island Of Al Jarreau. For whatever reason these songs really remind me of The Go! Team, the great UK band with their Pro Tools and their Pro Keds. Once you get past Go! Team's nostalgia for Seasame Street pattycakin', you find an even stronger nostalgia for Gainsbourg's languid french funk.

Labels:



posted by James
LINK |


Monday, July 02, 2007
 
WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME
Pharoahe Monch
Desire
Universal : 2007
[Buy it]


Pharaohe Monch has a new record. Critics love Pharaohe, maybe because he isn't terrible, and not being terrible counts for alot in rap these days. Moistwork's own hard rimer Brian Howe liked the new record - check out his write-up at fearofawhiteplanet.com.

I won't bother re-covering Brian's tracks. Brian drops crit in ways I am not able or willing. Like Brian, I admire Monch's "durable, booming vernacular" and "showy clusters of tongue-twisting homophones." And like Brian, I'm into the ambitious song Trilogy, which sounds a little like if Outkast travelled back through time to make a neo-soul concept musical about Marvin Gaye. But I gotta disagree big time when it comes to Monch's cover of PE's Welcome To The Terrordome. Brian calls it a "dud" but I can't stop listening to the damn thing. I'll agree that covering Public Enemy is pretty much a pointless exercise. (The only act to take a swing at a PE song and make contact was Tricky, who hit it right out of the park on Black Steel.) And vocally, Monch invokes Jay-Z much more than he does Chuck D - whom he stalks more effectively on the song What It Is. The new Terrordome even employs the kind of sampling that makes Jay-Z so consistently disappointing: horn crescendos looped with a barefaced repeat that wears out any and all original bombast. But for whatever reason, next time I'm driving through the Valley of the Jeep Beats, I'll be bumping this update over the PE original, which was always one of my least favorite tracks on my most favorite albums.

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posted by James
LINK |


Friday, June 15, 2007
 
YOU'RE ONLY LEAVING HURT
Video
SCRAPBOOK
Dimmer
There My Dear
Warner Music New Zealand : 2006
[Buy it]

BBC WORLD
SUN OF GOD
David Kilgour
The Far Now
Merge : 2007
[Buy it]


I don't listen to too much Weepy White Guy music these days. For one - like playing wiffleball or using coupons at McDonalds - it just doesn't seem like something a man should be doing in his 30s. But also, surprisingly, my tolerance to it has become more sensitive with age. When immersed in emo-angsty poignancy of certain tones and frequency, my brain becomes like some simple-celled organism suspended in a biological medium that scientists are running an electric current through: helplessly without control, just a big twitching, embarrassing reflex. (Which reminds me, as I type it, of a mom, a mom of a certain size, a size that pantyhose copywriters might describe as "Queen-Plus," who I saw pushing a cart through the aisle of a low-income mega-mart the other week. She was a really big woman and she had a really big cart, like Ikea-furniture-cart big, and it was entirely filled with soda and nothing but soda, of all hue and literage. I wasn't judging her. If anything I felt a little envy. After all, isn't sugar water the one great redeeming perk of poverty? I felt like a 98 pound donkey, there with my flip-flops and bourgeois protein.)

So I don't listen to much WWG, but when I do, I'm fiercely loyal about it. I was quite sweet on the NZ rock band Straitjacket Fits in the early 90s, and ever since have kept tabs on its former frontman, Shayne Carter. Sometime in the very late 90s, Carter had Sony deliver some sort of studio recording pod to his New Zealand farm, like a plastic Pro Tools yurt, and he shut himself away, alone, for months, and immersed himself monastically in its circuits. As a musical experiment, it was akin to that movie Altered States, except with more purpose and less full-frontal nudity. He emerged with a brand new sound, something that achieved some kind of vivid electro-stupor. That sound became I Believe You Are A Star, the debut album by Carter's band Dimmer. It holds some pretty godlike activities. Especially "Under The Light" [download] and "Smoke" [download]. These songs move like the blood of a man who is 10 years into his career as an MTA night-shift train operator, and 15 years into his heroin addiction.

Dimmer's follow up record, You've Got To Hear The Music, was still had an electronic measure, but with more of a pop feel. It won awards and was okay, in the way Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" won awards and was okay. For their latest, There My Dear, Carter goes way way back to the old Fits formula. Guitar driven, melancholy but muscular. Though the standout is a downbeat one: "You're Only Leaving Hurt." If early Dimmer sounds, as Carter once very coolly described it, like "Sly Stone dying on the mic," then this song might sound like "Elvis drinking alone at the pub." The way Carter gets all up in your brain often reminds me of my WWG idol, Matt Johnson, especially so on an agro-angst track like "Scrapbook." This album was recorded mostly live in the community hall of the Grey Lynn Bowling Club. Only in New Zealand kids, only in New Zealand.

Carter's fellow Kiwi, David Kilgour, also has a new album in release. Kilgour, who led famed NZ rock band The Clean oh so many years ago, seems to have a much sunnier outlook these days than his countrymate. Maybe it comes from not isolating himself in techno pods. You could argue that just living in New Zealand is an isolating act in itself, but I reckon the isolation of open spaces is a different kind of isolation. A kind that empties you out, and makes it really difficult for you to continue stashing your introversions like soda in a cart.

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posted by James
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Tuesday, May 15, 2007
 
GRIP DA MIC TIGHT
Original Flavor
Prod. by Clark Kent
Atlantic : 1992
[Out of Print]

ALL SHE WANTED
Knucklehedz
Prod. by EPMD
Eastwest : 1993
[Out of Print]

SHOOTIN' THE GIFT (REMIX)
Craig G
Prod. by Marley Marl
Atlantic : 1989
Original version available on The Kingpin
Out of Print
[Buy it]

Old school magic from a trio of super producers.
I think I plucked these off a bootleg called Still Got The Props Vol. 2 I found hiding out in one of the interweb's fresher corners.

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posted by James
LINK |


Monday, May 07, 2007
 
CHUCK BABY
Chuck Brown ft. KK

LOVE THEME FROM "THE GODFATHER"
Chuck Brown
We're About the Business
Raw Venture : 2007
[Buy it]

BUSTIN' LOOSE
Video
Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers
Bustin' Loose
Valley Vue Records : 1979
[Buy it]

WE NEED SOME MONEY
Video
Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers
T.T.E.D. : 1984
available on The Best of Chuck Brown
[Buy it]

WOODY WOODPECKER
Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers
Any Other Way To Go?
Verve : 1988
[Buy it]

DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?
Chuck Brown ft. Little Benny, Rare Essence, DC Scorpio
Live at The Capital Center
Video

CAT IN THE HAT
Little Benny & The Rockers
Live on "It's About Time"
Video

Chuck Brown may be the "Godfather of GoGo", but the title comes somewhat by default. Not to say he doesn't deserve it. He invented the word, and popularized its syncopated backbeat when he first experimented with latin jazz rhythms in the late '60s. But the GoGo sky is as starless as a humid PG County night in August. Chuck Brown isn't just the face of GoGo, he's GoGo's only face.

There are a couple clear reasons for this. First, GoGo is party music, street music. It isn't a music of songwriters, or frontmen, or even MCs. It has never translated well to the studio. GoGo's best studio recording may still be one of its first: when a very young Rick Rubin signed the even younger Junkyard Band to Def Jam and released the stunning Sardines/The Word 12". GoGo has remained a stubbornly local sound*. Its greatest shot at a Jeffersonian advance, and by 'Jeffersonian' I refer of course to the Norman Lear sitcom, came in the late '80s, when the band Experience Unlimited (EU) was featured prominently in Spike Lee's 'School Daze' and collaborated with Salt N' Pepa on Shake Your Thang (It's Your Thing) and the brilliant My Mike Sounds Nice.

Second: GoGo, at its heart, is just a beat, a beat knocked out on congas or paint buckets. Despite many efforts, this sound just isn't proprietary, it's more of an open-spource code.

Where Chuck Brown has been most successful, is in respecting the GoGo animal. (Did I really just write that?) He hasn't tried to own it or tame it. Instead he presides over it in the James Brown mold; as a showman, a bandleader, as, they might say in Vegas,"a professional's professional." He has hemmed a medley of styles to it's beats; funk, jazz, blues, and given it a diversity that is the trademark of his 40 year career.

Bustin' Loose, Woody Woodpecker and We Need Some Money are the classic cuts. I just saw this astonishing video for Bustin' Loose last week: Chuck appears to have borrowed Rick James' BeDazzler and set it to full-auto.

A couple months ago Brown released a new CD, and at age 72, hasn't lost that swing. Especially on the contemporary single Chuck Baby, which features his daughter 'KK' doing her best Missy Elliott impression.


*Not always local. When I was in college in Australia my neighbor, a friendly, hard-drinking single woman of around 40, had, to my amazement, a Best of Chuck Brown CD in her collection.

. . . . .

Also...

It's been quite a year for our friends the Wizznutzz. They were the only Washington Wizards sports blog this year to:

-Coin the nickname-of-record for an NBA superstar
-Appear on TV, radio, and in a number of national papers, including the NYT, WSJ, The Washington Post and Newsday.
-Accidentally turn up on Finland's National High School exam
-Equate double-consciousness in the NBA with the cover of ABBA Arrival
-Claim August Strindberg (1849 - 1912) as an intern
-Open a popular online fashion boutique named after a torture chamber from a Sam Lipsyte novel

It is in that fashion boutique that they are offering a dope new t-shirt that threatens to one day become as ubiquitous among local hipsters as the CBGB tee. Get it while it's hot.

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posted by James
LINK |


Wednesday, April 25, 2007
 
POPPIN' THEM THANGS
G-Unit
Beg For Mercy
Interscope : 2003
[Buy it]

THE PRIDE
Chuck D
Autobiography of Mistachuck
Polygram : 1996
[Buy it]

I AM I BE
De La Soul
Buhloone Mindstate
Rhino : 1993
[Buy it]

FLY GIRL
Queen Latifah
Nature of a Sista
Tommy Boy : 1991
[Buy it]


I was shuffling some rap tunes on the iPod yesterday and Chuck D's 'The Pride,' from his under-rated 1996 solo album, came up. It contains one of my favorite rap lyrics ever:
The Panther Party, before 'La-Di-Da-Di'
Put pride inside, plus taught karate
Immediately afterward, G-Unit's 'Poppin' Them Thangs' - with its irresistible Dr. Dre beat - kicked in. It contains some of my favorite, laugh-out-loud-bad, rap lyrics ever:
Read the paper, look at the news
We on the front page
Yeah we in the Bahamas with AK's on the stage
The ice and the Jacob watch make a broke nigga take somethin'
So I gotta keep the four fifth with no safety button
G-Unit gettin' money
I know some artists is starvin'
But play the game like they rich to me this shit funny
I know you see me comin'
Cuz on the front of the Maybach
It say payback
for those who hated on me
They are not bad in the clunker kind of way that, say, Queen Latifah's sloppy lines from 'Fly Girl' are:
But I'm not the type of girl that you think I am
I don't jump into the arms of every man
(But I'm paid) I don't need your money
(I love you) you must be mad
Easy lover is something that I ain't
Besides, I don't know you from a can of paint
Or Mase's 'Can't Nobody Hold Me Down':
You name it, I could claim it
Young, black, and famous, with money hanging out the anus
Rather, their cocksure and aggressive swag just seems so over the top that I am dumb struck by the supreme silliness of it all.

It made me think, if rap is a lyrical game, where are all the great lyricists? Or even the good ones? I'm hardly an authority on this, so happily correct me. And there are a handful a solid writers in the recent mainstream. Kanye West, Mos Def, The Roots and Eminem are the first that come to mind. But those guys are already AARP by rap standards.

But where are the Chuck D's, the Rakims?
Who writes a verse as fluid as De La Soul's 'I Am I Be'?
Product of a North Carolina cat
who scratched the back of a pretty woman named Hattie
Who departed life just a little too soon
and didn't see me grab the Plug Tune fame
As we go a little somethin' like this
look ma, no protection
Now I got a daughter named Ayana Monay
And I can play the cowboy to rustle in the dough
so the scenery is healthy where her eyes lay
I am an early bird but the feathers are black
so the apples that I catch are usually all worms
and
I bring the element H with the 2
so ya owe me what's coming when I'm raining on your new parade
I'll tell you who doesn't: Three 6 Mafia. Or Lil Flip. Or anyone called 'Young' or 'Lil' anything.

Some of the choice lines from Lil Flip's agonizing new tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre, via his MySpace page:
So we pray for each one of y'all who lost a child
And for that brave man who escaped the Holocaust
....
Then later on they lettin' classmates talk about him
But his screenplays should have let you know he had a problem
....
Even with my album out, i can take the time to grieve
Cuz if i had a tragedy i hope you'd so the same for me
So hop on the comments board and tell us:

The best and worst rap lyrics of all time.

Any all you young kids, if you're serious about becoming an MC, please do your self a favor and pick up your Flocabulary course now!

A reminder: if you find yourself in the loins of NYC this evening, pick up your tuxedo and head to the KGB Bar at 7pm for a moistworks reading. Details here.

Labels: ,



posted by James
LINK |


Monday, April 16, 2007
 
MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Eric Burdon & War
MGM 7" : 1970
Available on: The Best of Eric Burdon & War
Avenue : 1996
[Buy It]

MINNESOTA THINS
Mike Manieri
Available on: Rare Funk vol. 4 (Soundtrack Edition)
[Out of Print]

FLO
Isaac "Redd" Holt Unlimited
Isaac, Isaac, Isaac
Paula : 1974
[Buy It]

MAN FROM CAROLINA
The G.G. All Stars
Trojan : 1970
Available on: Tighten Up: Trojan Reggae Classics 1968-74
Trojan US : 2002
[Buy It]

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posted by James
LINK |


Friday, April 06, 2007
 
LET IT ALL HANG OUT (Pete Rock Remix)
Video
A.D.O.R.
Atlantic : 1992

FAKIN' JAX
Video
I.N.I.
Prod. by Pete Rock
Elektra : 1995
available on
Lost & Found: Hip Hop Underground Soul Classics
[Buy it]

SLOW DOWN (Pete Rock Newromix)
Brand Nubian
Elektra : 1991
available on
The Very Best Of Brand Nubian
[Buy it]

SEARCHING (Remix)
Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth
1995
available on
Rare Tracks, Remixes [IMPORT]
[Buy it]

I have had something of an obsession with the life and times of Patrick Swayze ever since I built a short story around the following, spectacular, true quote:


"I smile to one side. I got my father's smile. I've been workin' not to smile like that. I'm always exercising the other side of my face when I'm drivin' my car, so I don't get too lopsided. That's the only level of narcissism I allow myself."
-Patrick Swayze

You know who else is obsessed with Swayze? Rappers. His name has been popping up in Hip-Hop tunes for years. Don't get me wrong, Red Dawn is a powerful piece of work, and I can see its appeal if you are a young black inner-city revolutionary. But I've always assumed this Swayze phenomenon was just lazy lyricism: I mean you can only rhyme so many things with 'crazy' before PatSway's name gonna come up.

As it turns out, the tradition has its roots in rhyming slang of the cockney variety: "Swayze" in its Hip-Hop use, means to bail, to 'disappear' like a 'Ghost' and was popularized by EPMD in the early 90s:

But now I'm Swayze, ghost,
The rap host
Who rip shows,
From coast to coast
Get on down
It's going down

-EPMD: 'It's Going Down'

That's why I bust back, it don't phase me
When he drop, take his glock, and I'm Swayze
Celebrate my escape, sold the glock, bought some weight
Laid back, I got some money to make, motherfucker

-2Pac:'Runnin' (Dying To Live)'

This doesn't mean there haven't been many, many, not so clever examples of Patrick's full and proper name being deployed as a cheap rhyme:

Take a track from Jay-Z
And flip back like crazy
Claimin you God
But look more like Patrick Swayze

-L.G.: 'Wise Da Weight Is Over'

That's a diss, I'm strivin not Drivin, Miss Daisy
and Patrick Swayze don't amaze me or faze me
Me look up to these stupid clowns - you're crazy!

-Chubb Rock: 'Organizer'

Wrap it up in the club, ya I'm so crazy
These other rappers actors like Patrick Swayze
I try to tell them but these niggas aint hear me
Mossberg pump, i'm riding shotgun literally

-Young Jeezy: 'And Then What'

Me and Attitude creeped like snakes
Grabbed the tapes and the Louie and break
The whole swap meet went crazy
I'm sockin' more fools than Patrick Swayze

-Sir Mix-A-Lot: 'Swap Meet'

Rock act Train deserves some credit, at least, for moving the Swayze rap in a new, perhaps desperate, direction:

Like a Sunday afternoon
My dad used to tell me I was lazy
I got dance moves like Patrick Swayze
I'm the left over turkey for the world's mayonnaisey

-Train: 'All American Girl'

You would think that all the songs posted today would have Swayze references, but only one does. They are connected, however, in that they are all decent Hip-Hop tunes that employ the downbeat, jazzy remix skills of Pete Rock. The A.D.O.R. and I.N.I. tracks are both underground classics. Especially 'Fakin' Jax' which was part of I.N.I.'s 1995 Pete Rock-produced album that was pulled at the very last second by Elektra, and was finally released a few years ago as part of Lost & Found: Hip Hop Underground Soul Classics

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posted by James
LINK |


Wednesday, March 21, 2007
 
FROM LITTLE THINGS BIG THINGS GROW
The Waifs
Cannot Buy My Soul: The Songs Of Kev Carmody
EMI : 2006
[Buy it]

NASTY DAN
Johnny Cash
The Johnny Cash Children's Album
Columbia : 1975
[Buy it]

NASTY DAN
Video
Johnny Cash and Oscar The Grouch
Sesame Street
available on The Stars Come Out on Sesame Street
1979

SALE BONHOMME (NASTY DAN)
Video
Claude Francois
1976

CHARLIE ON THE M.T.A.
Kingston Trio
1959
Kingston Trio Greatest Hits
[Buy it]


The MW Brooklyn bureau just returned from the fatal shores of Australia, where I participated in the Running of the Bogans, and spent a great deal of time with a riotously articulate 2 year old, my Upper West Side nephew Alfred. When Alfred was born, I made my sister a mix-CD of baby music. The Jolie Holland/Be Good Tanyas song "The Littlest Birds" was a popular lullaby in the early days, and he could only sleep on car trips if Paul Kelly's "From Little Things Big Things Grow" was playing on endless repeat. The song is about an aborigine called Vincent Lingiari and his decades-long land rights struggle. For his first Christmas, I gave Alf this historic photo of Vincent to hang above his crib (next to the one of Muhammad Ali that already hung - such is young life in the Oceanic-American diaspora). My sister said she and her husband listened to "From Little Tings" so many times, that they would quiz each other on the song's more trivial points:

"So, what was Vincent's wage?"

"Well, the 'Vestey man' said 'I'll double your wages, Eighteen quid a week you'll have in your hand,' which means his regular wage must have been 9 quid , paid weekly."

"From Little Things" was co-written by Indigenous Australian songwriter Kev Carmody. A Carmody tribute album, produced by Kelly, was just released. You can buy it here. It includes this cover of "Little Things" by The Waifs that, despite the over baked accents, still gives me chills.

I recently gave Alfred The Johnny Cash Children's Album, and we spent much of the last few weeks hooning around The Great Ocean Road listening to his new favorite song, "Nasty Dan." It is a sublime thing - and even more so when sung to Oscar The Grouch. A couple years before recording this album, Cash had become much more PG-13: losing drugs and finding God. After perhaps the 100th listen, Alfred asks the carpool: "What's a wife?" but pronounces 'wife' as 'whaahf' in his best Johnny Cash drawl. Alfred then begins to develop a cunning Nasty Dan alter ego:

Q: "Alfred! Why did you smash the remote control?"
A: "That's something Nasty Dan would do."

Claude Francois's french pop cover "Sale Bonhomme" is frightening and amazing. Claude perished shortly after while replacing a light bulb while in the bath tub.

My earliest personal musical memories only go back as far as age 8 or 9 or so. At my funky little progressive school in the Maryland suburbs, we had a music teacher called Thayer Baine. At age 10 I expect it's common for a young man to fall for an older women. (I did fancy one girl my age, Lauren Thorpe, but that ended the day I got a look at her smokin' mom.) But the crush I had on Thayer was supreme. She was a gloriously earthy hippie-chick with flared corduroys and long, straight hair. Like a young, extra wholesome Joni Mitchell. She would take the class into the gully - a crude wooded amphitheatre behind the school - and teach us folkie protest songs on her acoustic guitar. We did Kumbaya, Blowin' In The Wind. And we did this song called "Charlie On The M.T.A." It was a song written in the '40s or '50 to protest transit fare hikes in Boston, but for a 10 year-old it was a disturbing and insane song about a man being trapped on the subway for the rest of his life.

Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket,
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTA

Charlie handed in his dime
At the Kendall Square Station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him,
"One more nickel."
Charlie could not get off that train.

Chorus:
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may ride forever
'neath the streets of Boston
He's the man who never returned.


What do you mean, he never returned?!
I thought about Charlie's fate for years after. Why didn't someone just give him the nickel? Why didn't he just run for it? Did his wife bring back-issues of Life magazine to show him the ways in which time was marching on without him? I feel a bit better about it all now. This comprehensive history of the song reassures me that sometime in the 1980s Charlie would have qualified for the 5 cent senior citizen discount, and walked free, like a ghost, back into the world.

Thayer left the school a couple of years later and was replaced by Lenna. Lenna was everything Thayer was not. A divorcee, with a garish red perm and long lacquered nails. She looked like a poorly maintained Bette Midler, and taught us songs from tacky Broadway shows. Lenna made extra cash as the bus driver, and made us stop at her place one day after school. She lived in an small apartment. I had never been in an apartment before. It was way too adult for me. The wet towels and half-eaten toast and ashtrays made me feel deeply queasy and alone.

I googled Thayer Baine today and it appears she is still singing, now with the Washington Chorus. And if this is in fact her, second from the left, then she is still getting it done.

(As is Lauren Thorpe, if this is in fact her.)

Labels:



posted by James
LINK |


Friday, February 23, 2007
 
IF THE PAPES COME
A Tribe Called Quest
Mi Vida Loca (Soundtrack)
Mercury : 1994

GLAMOUR AND GLITZ
A Tribe Called Quest
The Show (Soundtrack)
Def Jam : 1995
[Buy it]

PEACE, PROSPERITY AND PAPER
A Tribe Called Quest
High School High (Soundtrack)

Atlantic : 1996

SAME OL THING
A Tribe Called Quest
The Jam EP
Jive : 1997

THE REMEDY
Q-Tip ft. Common
KC The Funkaholic Presents Bassline Laidback Sound Sensation
Rhythm Distribution : 1998

Growing up in DC I was exposed to a lot of rap's early sounds. Grandmaster Flash, Whodini, Doug E Fresh were sibling staples. When I was shipped off to college in Australia, I was suddenly on my own in terms of nurturing my hip-hop tastes. My peers listened to big rock sounds from the UK and US, or preferred the local indie bands to my "jungle music." Occasionally alternative radio would play some gangsta rap just to prove they had the stones. (JJJ national radio got flak once from the suits for playing "Fuck Tha Police" uncut, and in protest, programmed NWA's "Express Yourself" on a loop for 12 straight hours.) I snatched up anything I could afford from the local record store. I recall buying 3 Feet High And Rising based entirely on the album art. It was very hit and miss: Booyah Tribe, Sex Packets, MC Brains (that was a miss.) Anything and everything Public Enemy.

I spent my first 2 years at University studying towards a degree in genetics, but began to get existential chills when I looked around at my lab partners: social cripples, the lot. I started taking humanities courses, beginning with an Intro to Feminist Studies. I pulled consecutive all-nighters completing my first essay, on Simone De Beauvoir. I got through it by playing It Takes a Nation of Millions... over and over and over again. With Millett, Gilligan, Dworkin on the prowl, it felt good to have the S1Ws in the room, watching my back. But it was also the first time I had harnessed music purely for energy. The Bomb Squad powered me like a combustion engine. On the downside: I would commit the frequent freshman sin of incorporating rap lyrics into my essays. I think I may have worked a Tribe Called Quest verse into a paper on Pan-Syrianism.

I got into TCQ via the "Native Tongues" fraternity of De La Soul, Jungle Bros, Queen Latifah, Monie Love. I loved their first record, though mostly on the strength of the great old material it looped in long greedy lengths. The Low End Theory, on the other hand, was a brand new sound. This post-gangsta jazz rap was so proudly bare, like a bonsai tree. White people LOVED this record. White college girls loved this record. All you white girls out there who were in college in the early 90s, was this the first hip-hop record you ever bought? Sure you danced to Cheeba Cheeba and Bust a Move like you were Kate Beckinsdale in The Last Days of Disco, but first album? Ladies, let us know your first rap CD in the comments box.

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posted by James
LINK |


Friday, February 09, 2007
 
WILD CHILD
LASER SHOW
WHAT'S GONE WRONG

The Untouchables
Wild Child
Stiff Records : 1985
Re-issue Cherry Red UK : 2002
[Buy it]
MySpace

The Untouchables were a Californian Mod/Ska band that passed into my airspace sometime during high school at a time when kids were popping up and down in Fishbone shirts. They are the first band I ever saw live. I was at a UB40 show at the Lisner Auditorium in DC, and the show started and I remember thinking "I didn't know UB40 had so many black people in it" and then after three songs I didn't recognize: "Geez when are they going to play 'Red Red Wine'?" It wasn't during one of my cooler periods. I really don't remember anything else about that night. I'm not sure why, although the Lisner has a way of sucking detail out of the air.

I didn't see a whole lot of live music in High School. I passed up a number of chances to see IRS-period REM. $8 seemed kinda steep. Ditto Prince's Purple Rain and Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense tours.
I did see Go-Go legends Trouble Funk play at Sidwell Friends, a small, private Quaker High School in Northwest Washington. I think Megan was there, though I wouldn't meet her until 2 decades later. And one of the first things we talked about when we did meet, was what the fuck was Trouble Funk always doing at Sidwell Friends High School?

The title track Wild Child was the clear hit off the Untouchables debut LP. When it comes to the 2-Tone species, I really can't think of a more wonderful specimen. The bands popular tide soon flagged, and drew back to the West Coast. I stopped listening to UB40 for good soon after and haven't even considered them for 20 years, though I did make a bet with my girlfriend a couple weeks ago: she claimed Neil Diamond wrote Red Red Wine, I insisted it had roots in an old rocksteady song. She won: the Jewish Elvis dropped that hot pocket almost FORTY years ago.

But I hung on to Wild Child in the form of a dusty gold Maxell cassette, and the song that I always returned to was Laser Show. There is something so perfectly and deftly spare about it. I was happy to discover recently that Wild Child had been re-mastered for CD in 2002 with bonus action (including this extended version of What's Gone Wrong), and recently took up residence in iTunes.

I don't really have anything more to say, so I'll ask you, MW faithful, to answer me one or more of these questions:

1. What was your first concert? Discuss.

2. Name a T-shirt that out-sold the band it advertised more so than the Fishbone T-shirt.

3. The comments below were left on a youtube video. WITHOUT cheating, tell me the name of the artist and song they apply to.
(The answer has nothing really to do with anything in this post)

- - - - - - - - - - - -


I'M NOT CRYING, THERE'S SOMETHING IN MY EYE!!!!!!!!!!!!

JUst a beautiful piece of musicianship. It's a shame that songs like this aren't big hits anymore..

If there was ever a song where the picture was painted before the artist ever said a word, it was THIS one. The scene, the mood, the picture...everything is set before he sings his first line.

sob sob sob (reminds me of my cousin who died of cancer a year ago)

Gangsta rap is all bad. Anyone who thinks it's cool to glorify criminal activity, prison life and raping girls is nothing but sick!!! This stuff is great! Good wholesome values here.

Man this song takes me back to the essence of my being, freakin amazing.

I actually saw him perform this song in the living room of a friend of mine. Excellent! He's a good guy too.

excellent i really like this song and im only 19

I was conceived to this song..thanks mom!

I remember puking up having the flu listening to this as a kid and it would make me feel better.

This song's so beautiful it makes me want to do smack.

great song, no good music now; rap sucks

i love this song!! i dreamt that i was flying and it was the best dream i ever had coz it felt so real..;'b

Reminds me of my vacation at Lake George, NY....circa 1972...

If you play close attention... this song is actually about espionage... Nothing is what it seems. Scope the lyrics reeeeeeeallll close...

rap is not REAL music. It is borrowed, homogenized, artificial crap that rots the brains of its creator and listener as well. This is an actually song with real instruments, thoughtful lyrics, melody, and emotion. Today's music doesn't just pale in comparison; THERE IS NO COMPARISON!

I just love this song because it reminds me of the best brothers ever, Kenny & Kevin, that night at the karaoke was AMAZING!!

love this song..
really makes fall in love again
and again
again...
and
really makes me feel free...

Classic. Rap should die a painful death!!!

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Labels: ,



posted by James
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Friday, January 26, 2007
 
CRY
Godley & Creme
Episode #34, Definitely Miami, 1986
[Buy it]

TAKE ME HOME
Phil Collins
Episode #23, Prodigal Son, 1985
[Buy it]

INTO THE NIGHT
Ace Frehley
cover of Russ Ballard's In The Night from:
Episode #4 , Calderone's Return: Part 1, 1984
[Buy