Listenin To That Jesus Muzik

I have to give a shout to my homie Brian who was with me the first time I heard this track. Needless to say it took both of us by complete surprise. We were down in NC for our college reunion a few weeks ago, cruising to the store for one of the numerous beer runs of the weekend. Not being overly familiar with the radio stations in Durham after a 5 year absence we were shuffling through the dial looking for anything good when a thumpin rap beat caught our ear and we stopped to hear it out.

After listening to the first verse, something atypical stood out about this song- there was no cursing. This wasn't the usual pause in the song or reworked lyrics type of no cursing though. This was pious, we're making a point not to curse, no cursing. So we both leaned in a little closer to the radio, like proximity was going to reveal the bad words we knew had to be there but were somehow deaf to momentarily. Still no curse words. Just then a word came blaring out of the speakers and surprised us more than any expletive we were waiting on. As clear as day the MC shouted out- Jesus. Contrary to the notions of gangster bravado the base heavy beat had set us up for, this was a Christian rap song. An in your face, unapologetically urban Christian rap song. When the DJ came on saying how this was one of his most requested cuts I immediately knew why. I'd never heard a religious song come with such a street attitude. Theses dudes weren't preaching from way up high, they were bringing their message straight to the block. It doesn't matter what you believe, there's no denying honest intensity and production like this. So I bring you LaCrea's "Jesus Muzik".

And the people said amen. Amen.

Lacrae- "Jesus Muzik"

Hard Back. Stern Face.

Nobody needs another blog entry giving you the whole Dizzee Rascal backstory. One google search and you'll learn way more about him than I can tell you. I will tell you this though. He's top of the pops in the world of grime and he's about to unleash his third album "Maths and English". This time out he's taken his flow in a new 3rd coast Houston direction. Needless to say some of the kids are loving it but other folks are hating hard. Most notably his one time mentor Wiley, who may or may not be the intended target of a diss song included on the new album.

The first cut I heard was "Hard Back Industry". " The song's I'm Just a Bill steeze is helpfully instructive. Dizzee breaks down the rules of the music game, schoolin youngins on the finer points of business. He's got advise worth heeding and seeing as this is his third album in a genre that produced mostly debuts, he might be on to something. Then he came round the bend blasting the single "Sirens" with a fly little video hot on his heels. There's a full hunting party dressed for the occasion, with Dizzee playing the role of resident sly fox. He slips in and out of corners in the video, paralleling his flow through the beat. Staying completely in the shadows you can hear how dark things are for him.

Dizzee Rascal - "Hard Back Industry"


Dizzee Rascal - "Sirens"

Sparkling

Talent. Its not something that's requisite for kid singers. Don't get me wrong, most of the Mousketeers in Mickey's club are fairly talented but for every Christina Aguilara blowing that old soul truth, there's a Britney Spears sexy whispering her way to better record sales. If talent were the deal breaker in this equation Avril Lavigne would've slipped off her skateboard and broken her neck years ago.

So imagine my surprise when I stumbled across 15 year old Amy Diamond. Another product of pop heavy Sweden this little girl is the real deal and easily my youngest friend on Myspace. She broke out in Sweden at the age of 12 with her debut single "What's In It for Me" off of her album This is Me Now. The song tore up the Swedish charts making it all the way to number #1 even though some Swedish TV stations wouldn't show her video because she was so young. From the wholesome look of the video it's hard to understand what they didn't like. She's dressed like a normal, well adjusted tween should be. "Hit Me Baby One More Time" this is not. To prove she's packin bone fide chops, and not just studio wizardry, I included a video of her singing her newest single, "Don't Cry Your Heart Out", live. You might not like your tunes quite this sachrine but you can't front on her pipes. She's like a teenage, bubblegum version of Neko Case.


Amy Diamond - "What's In It for Me?"


Amy Diamond - "Don't Cry Your Heart Out"

Is it Rock? Is it Rap? Is it Crap? I dont Know...

Pop music enterd the sphere of hipster credibility sometime in the past couple years, and I for one thank god. Its not time to get carried away and start reppin for bullshit trad-rock like Nickleback, but we can all agree at this point that shiny, happy harmonies can still sweat out the liquid irony that fills the core of every postmodern conception of cool. Lilly Allen, The Bird and The Bee, Cold War Kids and others like them have ushered in the current era of "Sophisti-pop" thats brought glossy out of the shadows and onto the most descerning of tastemaker IPods. Don't be ashamed of liking Justin Timberlake. Simply reclaim his MJ apping style as yours all along cool kids. Is that Kelly Clarkson I hear you listening too? I surely hope so.

Enter 21 year old Jamie T out of Wimbledon South London. NME has named him their next big thing but according to these guys that magazine is worthless and I shouldn't be reading it any way. Its a sacrafic I'm willing to make. Doesn't matter what the critics say about this guy any way. I'm onboard right or wrong, in shallowness and in depth. Jamie makes a rocky, rapish, jangle pop fuss all over his tracks and best of all he makes them in the catchiest way possible. He sorta splits the difference between the Artic Monkeys and The Streets, and he's got drunk, everyman wail-speak down pat. The cockney accent keeps the top button of his very blue collar undone and you can hear him thinking about another pint as he's singing.

The song to download, "If you Got The Money" nearly made its way up into the top 10 on the UK charts and rides the little ragga swing its built on all the way to the bank. The video is for his song "Sheila" and stars everyone's favorite rabbit sidekick, Bob Hoskins. Jamie fishes the waters of human interaction for a lot of his themes and Bob plays the father of the song's title character while mouthing the song's words at the camera. Its strangly affecting and I'll bet you watch it twice if you watch it at all. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to mine Radio Disney for my next pop-perfect discovery.


Jamie T - "If You Got the Money"



Jamie T - "Sheila"

No Love

The creepiest, dirtiest and down right most uninviting genre of music to crawl up the basement stairs in the past few years has to be dubstep. We’re a world at war and this is the sound of the battlefield one day after the smoke has cleared. Its empty space, and air that’s almost too still to breath. You feel the bombs in the distance almost more than you hear them. There’s no reason to duck and cover because the violence has passed but there’s danger over the hills and you know one day its coming back around. Dubstep is a warning: leave before it’s too late.

This first dubstep omens came from the darkest corners of UK 2-step around 2001. As Garage made its way up the charts through sunny Craig David vocal numbers the Forward sound retreated as far from the light as possible, turning DnB and 2-Step in on themselves until new twisted hybrids like grime and dubstep were born. Today within its admittedly limited range of sounds producers like Digital Mystikz, Hatcha and Kode9 have pushed the genre into an ever more distinct and dub-ified direction with only minimal attempts at smoothing out the sound for the masses. One of the first attempts at accessible “dinner party” dubstep came last year from a team of producers with the most misleading name possible, Various. Their album The World Is Gone marries vocals with dubstep’s half-step lurch, crafting sub bass funeral dirgs that will blow out your speakers in mourning. The video below for their song “Hater” is on some 3AM MTV Amped Shit. A ball of nothing floating through space explodes into different objects. You don't need a Kanye sized video budget to back up a song like this, following the bouncing ball is more than enough.

Various- "Hater"

Everyone Is Trying to Bum Me Out

Rain, sleet, hail, or snow I tend to walk around with a smile on my face. At first glance you'd think I was either the happiest guy in the world or touched. Truth is neither could be further from the truth. I'm in fairly good control of all my faculties and as a rule I don't like things. Seriously, most things I could do without: Cars, work, people etc. Given the choice I'd take a pass of the majority of life. Problem is I'm stuck here for the foreseeable future so I figure the path of least resistance is my best chance for skating by till something better than the here and now comes along. I have no intention of checking out before my reservation is up but I don't really feel like fighting while I'm here. This machine is broken. We gummed up the works a long time ago so now its completely out of whack. Some people don't see anything wrong with how the ball bounces so they play along in blissful ignorance. Those people bug me. Other people see that things are FUBAR and rage out loud with righteous indignation. Those people bug me. There's lots of gray in between these two extremes and there's folks clear across the spectrum at every point. However, at some point or another I can guarantee you of one thing: they will bug me.

I'm not saying I've got it all figured out over here, I'm just saying I don't pretend to either. If I had to write some sort of credo it would read like this:

CHAS
Que Sera Sera
It Is What It Is
Everything Is Everything
Whatever...I'm Tired

So on those days when my apathetic prick quotient is at its highest I turn to a little song by the Eels called "Flower". Its off their '96 album Beautiful Freak, the same album that gave them their only real radio hit "Novocaine For The Soul". The Eels are a band but really its just an outlet for lead singer/songerwriter/multi-instrumentalist E to wax misanthropic on record. "Flower" is melancholia on a sunny day. E lets you know that he's none too thrilled with the world but the whole song rests on a choir harmony that lets a sliver of inspiration peer through. He's pretty bummed out, but not really...either way.

Eels- "Flower"

Mellow Yellow

Korean born, Queens bred Cool Calm Pete first put me at ease on the Babbletron album Mechanical Royalty. Along with Jay Manila and DJ Pre, they hot wired beats built like hoopty spaceships falling to pieces and rebuilt with junkyard parts. The sound was held together with string but half the fun of a jalopy is the fact that you can drive it into the ground without being afraid. Babbletron took full advantage, whipping through the galaxy without an ounce of fear driving their music like they stole it.

On his first solo album Lost, Pete pulls out of the space race but I wouldn't say he's got both feet planted on the ground either. This afternoon he's hanging in his hammock three feet above the Earth, swaying back and forth in the wind with his journal, some lemonade and a near faded outline of the last smoke ring he blew. He's been around the block before, but today he sees all he needs to from the comfort of his own backyard. Tomorrow he might have something to prove but for now he's just trying to live up to his name. The kind of inner comfort that you can only gain from seeing truth first hand has left him sure of the world and his place in it. No need to brag, no need to boast, just do what you came here to do and keep it movin. He sets the mood for this self-assured day dream with loose limbed soul samples from the 60's & 70's. Easy like Sunday morning, these are screen door beats. They keep the bugs out but let the breeze blow through. The track for download "Tune In" cools things down just like Pete intended. Instead of flexing to support his claim at manhood he lets the truth stand on its own and, as always, reality is strong enough to prop itself up. "Black Friday", the video below, is a song produced by RJ-D2 and was added as a bonus track to the album when it was reissued by the Def-Jux label. The track is more gamma-ray funk than the rest of the album but the interplay between the iconography and lyrics is whip smart.

Cool Calm Pete- "Tune In"

Cool Calm Pete- "Black Friday"

What's Shakin Uptown

The Harlem Shakes are a band I know very little about outside of the fact that I'm obsessed with their new EP Burning Birthdays. I also know that lead singer Lex was polite enough to take the time to read my myspace profile and respond with a real message when I sent them a friend request. I'm glad I caught this band on the way up cause soon he won't have time for those sorts of niceties.
All the pieces snap together to build a jigsaw puzzle of this years big thing in indie rock. First you build the outside edge from the angular guitar grooves of The Strokes, back when they knew how to have fun. Then you look for all the vocal colors splashed across the mosaic. The Walkmen, CYHSY, Paul McCartney, 60's soul and the rest. Finish putting it together when you layout the pieces for the wide expanse of sky behind it all. Its the same sky that Bloc Party moves you toward, till you push right over the edge of the cliff and soar 3 minutes into a song. Take one look at it all together, then break it apart and drop everything back in the box. Now even though you know exactly how the pieces fit, I bet next time you have even more fun putting it all together again.

The Harlem Shakes- "Red Right Hands"

I Could Not Undo This Desire

For my money, Joanna Newsom's Ys was the crowning musical achievement of 2006. Nothing else came close to gracing the heights it reached in terms of musicality, lyricism, or unabashed pathos. Its a career defining work, that I think even she'll find difficult to match again. May she never try.

I do hope for more music from her, but nothing that might detract from the power of the concept she's crafted here. A classically trained harpist, she's thrown the doors wide open on her song craft and poetic content. Her first record, The Milk-Eyed Mender, was an announcement of a new voice in the indie scene that valued both compositional structure and mythic prose. Her childish pitch blended with well-worn themes of being and understanding to imply both innocence and aged resignation. On Ys she pushes this idea to the wall with the help of musical heavies Steve Albini (Producer), Van Dyke Parks (Arranger), and Jim O'Rourke (Mixer). These are bold statements comprised of mini song movements and epic Homeric poetry, the shortest of which clocks in at just over 9 minutes long. There's no irony within these bars and if you can't give yourself over completely to the sentiment then you might find indulgence where I see passion.

The clip below shows Joanna playing my favorite track from the album "Sawdust & Diamonds". Though I can't claim to have extracted meaning from every line, I find the lyrics supremely moving. Its a treatise on birth, love, death and above all desire. Music moves me to tears pretty often, but even I laughed at myself as I sat at work wiping my eyes the first time I saw this. Luckily I came prepared with a tissue when I posted the link.

Joanna Newsom- "Sawdust and Diamonds"

Poppin Off In Sweden

Through a series of complicated and highly accurate mathematical equations, scientists have been able to calculate that the exact center of the pop music universe rests somewhere within the borders of what is modern day Sweden. Theories abound as to why this is the case but all credible sources regard it as an immutable fact. Immediately upon birth, Swedish children have even been known to belt out frightfully catchy, chart-topping melodies when spanked. Perhaps the future holds answers to this mystery but for now we are simply left to scratch our heads in wonder and dance with abandon.

Run down the names: ABBA, Roxette, Ace of Base, The Cardigans etc. Perfect pop music from blond haired artists with infectious hooks. Helping carry on this tradition, singer-songwriter Robyn is doing her countrymen proud and steadily becoming one of the best pop acts on any continent. If you know her at all, its probably from one of her mid 90s American singles "Show Me Love" or "Do You Know (What It Takes)". Both of which used to blast from the hatch back of my Honda CR-X after track practice. She never got huge stateside, but kept making music and turned out a couple of smash singles in Europe. In '05 she started her own label, Konichiwa Bitches, and put out the self titled album Robyn. The video below for "Handle Me" is a lot like her music, simple in execution but dead on with the charm. I love how the guys ice grillin the camera look so perfectly real. And could she be any cuter in those cornrows and bamboo earrings...not likely. The song to download, "Konichiwa Bitches", is from the '06 Rakamonie E.P. Use this one to brighten up any dull moment with hardly no effort at all. Robyn makes it easy.

Robyn- "Konichiwa Bitches"

Robyn- "Handle Me"