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Care for a sample?
Wednesday, April 17, 2002 -- 02:55 p.m.
A page with a HUGE SICK RIDICULOUS listing of samples used in popular hip-hop and dance tracks. It's fun to play "reverse sample hunting" and dig up the tracks that gave so many classic songs their foundation; All The People's "Cramp Your Style" and Just Brothers' "Sliced Tomatoes" are just a couple of 'em I strongly suggest heading to Audiogalaxy (er... or to your record store) for.
An age-old mystery solved.
Tuesday, April 16, 2002 -- 07:25 p.m.
Sometime a long while ago I was watching TV and this Gap ad comes on. This was in the infancy of their "gank really good songs to hawk khakis" ad campaign, and this particular commercial featured a bunch of kids breakdancing. Never mind that 9 out of 10 b-boys prefer adidas trackpants to khakis- no, something more important was afoot. The music. It was some sort of uptempo '70s stuff, disco-paced but a lot too bouncy and digital and weird for the Studio 54 set. It coulda been P-Funk or something, but I wasn't sure. Neither were the '70s music geeks on Radio K's magnificent Cosmic Slop show. It was a mystery that plagued me to no end.
Long story short, I found the website above just today and it turns out that the song I was looking for was Clarence "Fuzzy" Haskins' "Gettin' It Off". A quick visit to Audiogalaxy later and that song was mine. Closure! Man, this site is a godsend. It's also living proof that, given the songs that wind up hawking consumer goods, nothing is too esoteric to sell you stuff. (Just ask Jorge Ben [Intel], Gus Gus [Lexus] and the Minutemen [Volvo! Freakin' Volvo!].)
Demorama.com Update
Tuesday, April 16, 2002 -- 02:46 p.m.
Demorama is a site I contribute to regularly- it has evolved from the back-pages of Cake and later Toast magazines (both tragically defunct) to its own online entity. Basically bands send in their demos and we review them. Not only is it a place for aspiring bands to send their stuff, it's sort of like AAA-league baseball for rock critics and I am firmly of the opinion that aspiring music writers should listen to and review at least 25 demo tapes before going for the "big leagues" so they can learn how good they really have it. Trust me, after an endless barrage of halfhearted attempts at music ranging from horrible out-of-tune emo and socially retarded frat-metal to hamfisted bedroom techno and throwaway bar-band schlock, you will come to appreciate good and even okayish "name" bands a lot more. More importantly, though, you will discover the pure joy of taking an unassuming CD-R out of its home-made jewel case, slipping it into your stereo unawares and getting blindsided by some great music out of nowhere that only you and maybe a couple dozen other people in the world know about (including family members of the band). It's a great gig, great enough for me to do it for three years plus without pay.
Anyhow, we finally got our March reviews up (we have sort of lagged behind but not terribly so), and I have three pieces up, reviewing the bands Kangaroo (eh), Olympia (all right) and the Shakes (shit yeah, daddy). Check it out. Hell, check the whole site out.
From a lame salon.com music article to a good one.
Monday, April 15, 2002 -- 07:44 p.m.
I was but a lad of around 14 when I first stumbled across "Nevermind" and of course it knocked me on my ass. Up to that point I'd been pretty much sticking to my local classic rock radio station, back when they actually had the unmitigated gall to slip in R.E.M.'s "Orange Crush" or U2's "Even Better Than The Real Thing" betwixt all the Zep. To say I was unprepared for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" would be somewhat inaccurate; I'd long been aware of a grimy, angry rock underground since I first slid a dubbed copy of the Repo Man soundtrack into my Walkman around 1985. But Nirvana served its purpose- not as the definitive rock band of my high school years (though they could have been at a couple points); not as some sort of legendary rebels headed by a hero-genius figure (they sure as shit weren't); but as a sort of "gateway drug". In other words:
Nirvana->Alice In Chains->Mudhoney->Sonic Youth->Ramones->Clash->Dead Kennedys->Replacements and on and on and so forth.
Yeah, I don't listen to Nirvana much anymore, but I'm not sure what my musical tastes would be like today if it weren't for them. I might have followed the path of classic rock entropy towards the likes of Tool. Or maybe I'd give up rock altogether and become a 100% hip-hop head (as opposed to the 35%-60% I am now). That said, this Salon article brought back some interesting memories, and you should check it out.
Great. He's another one of THOSE people.
Wednesday, April 10, 2002 -- 10:57 p.m.
I think it's about high time I explain the general purpose of this online journal (or "blog", as TEH KIDZ like to call it, because nothing says edgy like something that sounds like a vomit noise). This is one in a seemingly endless line of blogs where people talk about The Rock Music. If you need some sort of justification for reading this instead of checking out the blogs of more notable writers who actually get published- well, I can't help ya there. Yet. I'm not very good at shilling myself and doing the Rob Van Dam thumb-point-to-self action and telling everyone that I'm rokkin' like Dokken. However: If you enjoy reading hip-in-a-naive-way blatherings by a 24 year-old St. Paul kid who used to write for City Pages and likes to sprinkle references to pro wrestling and sports cars into his essays on why Amon Tobin or Daft Punk are cool, then you might want to stick around because it's really not as horrifying as I just made it sound. Please believe me.
And now for a short little rant I gotta get out of the way before it becomes way too dated. Peruse if you will this bafflingly dunderheaded Salon.com article on The Chemical Brothers. The modus sloperandi in this case involves ignoring the most important details of their latest CD (that it sounds surprisingly and marvellously Orbital-esque at points and that Tom Rowlands' new haircut makes him look like Joel Hodgson) and cuts straight to the "Well, (sniff), there's this whole zeitgeist thing and it's post dot-com bust and people don't want to dance anymore." Michelle Goldberg goes on about how the Chemicals' main purpose seems to be providing background music for swank IPO cocktail parties, and you'd think that she had a point, maybe, because she is being paid to write about dance music on a large website with special pay-to-read "Premium" sections so of course she would know about this kinda mindset. Then:
"In Daft Punk's case, their record "Discovery" came off like a parody of the French house craze they helped create. Basement Jaxx's "Rooty" was largely ignored by a public exhausted by the volcano of hype that accompanied their last effort, "Remedy."
(This is where I imagine Matos banging his head against his keyboard, and rightly so.)
"The two most talked-about bands of the year, the Strokes and the White Stripes, were old-fashioned rock bands of the sort that DJs were supposed to displace."
(Well, maybe they're the two most talked-about bands of the year due to their being old-fashioned rock bands, which will net you a lot more attention in rockcrit circles- besides, if the Strokes and the White Stripes broke big in 1996, odds are that the criterati would pick garage rock to kill the last gasp of alternative torpor, not "electronica".)
"And all that was before Sept. 11."
(FUCK TECHNO! Let's all get down to LEE GREENWOOD! WORD BOOTY!)
The great part is how Goldberg talks about the "cognitive dissonance" (viva critspeak!) of listening to "Come With Us" walking past shops going out of business shortly after writing about techno beginning as "the dystopian dream of Detroit kids living amid the rubble of a dead industrial era". I suppose more optimistic (or at least pragmatic) writers would perhaps note the irony of the potential of the entirety of techno returning to the Detroit mindframe just as the entire country staggers towards its own personal post-Motown economy, but nah. Easier to say "Ohmigawd, this is SOOOOOOOO three years ago" and "this was so much better before the white straight people took over" and "since the WTC collapsed it makes no sense to listen to anything fun anymore". Maybe I'm being too simplistic and naive here, but MICHELLE, YOU'RE NO ROCK AND ROLL FUN.
Long, spastic, childish rant short: That article is everything I hate about rock criticism.
More later- peace out. (Oops, shouldn't have said THAT- "peace out" is WAY 1993.)
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