(Source: horrorgrafia, via horrorgrafia)
Stevie Wonder
—Uptight (Everything's Alright)
Stevie Wonder, Uptight (Everything’s Alright)
from Uptight (Everything’s Alright) single (1965)
One of the best tracks you’ll ever hear on oldies radio.
Limmy live reviews ‘R.A.M.’ by Daft Punk. I’m only 17 mins in but he’s already managed to make track 2 sound like the theme tune to Holiday for me forever. R.I.P. Dando indeed. By way of tribute, Limmy appears to be popping bullets into Daft Punk’s robotic heads as they search for their keys on their digital doorstep.
You know what it’s like when you’re watching a film you were hoping is good with a funny sarcastic friend who just starts slagging it off and soon you’re joining in because he’s RIGHT damn it ‘The Hobbit’ IS awful? It’s funny cos Limmy’s disdain makes you feel embarrassed for Daft Punk with their pompous self-aggrandising ‘REAL MUSIC’ schtick. I need to listen myself I suppose but yeah it sounds pretty pish.
“Roots Of Evil was recorded when Kool G Rap was hiding out in Arizona after a dispute with a certain infamous New York (non)producer, thus its tone is more the grand scale of Casino than rather than the intricate machinations of Goodfellas. Never is this more apparent than the near-ten minute album centerpiece, “A Thugs Love Story (Chapter I, II, III).” The song is essentially a tragedy in the vein of Antony and Cleopatra, with added oral sex, gun-fights, snowmobile chases, and flare gun incidents on yachts.
And that’s the beauty of the album’s best songs: G. Rap’s rhymes are so richly detailed that they put you right there in the heart of the action as wigs are getting split down to the bone marrow and sexual organs are glistening during blowjobs in moonlit rooms.”
—World’s greatest rap blogger The Martorialist takes a break from his day-job to become World’s greatest rap-list writer on his ‘10 Underrated Albums By Great Rappers’ list for Complex.com. A glistening moonlit blowjob of an intro? Yeah, but seriously reading the way this guy writes about rap music - dropping knowledge and gems, cracking jokes and making such a range of references that you are left in no doubt that he knows more than you, and has better taste than you - makes me want to drop my keyboard into a vat of acid and break all my fingers in the hinge of a door.
Clairvoyants on Rinse FM feat. Blawan
—May 18th
Three hours of pulverising techno here with Rinse FM’s Clairvoyants, featuring a guest mix from Blawan (the last hour and a half I believe). It’s funny, I’ve bitched about this sort of techno enough times over the years but maybe its been my shitty mood this week that has got me in the mood for this. It’s relentlessly dark, hypnotic and the kick drum just keeps pounding. There’s these brilliant bits where the kick is pounding (so you think) and then suddenly somehow it begins REALLY FUCKING POUNDING - no, more like BOOMING. This is what happens instead of drops, cos otherwise its pretty much all loops on top of loops.
Blawan is a guy who fuses the industrial-machinery sound of the kick drums and squelches and robo-burps of this sort of techno with more syncopated grime/garage/dubstep like rhythms (Randomer’s another, and Kowton) and that’s definitely a dark smoke filled alley that a naked Arnold Schwarzeneger with a shotgun might suddenly materialise in after an electric storm that I’m interested in following these producers down.
I loved UK Funky, I like Jackin’ - I like music where raw/ruff production meets or is able to meet poppy chord sequences and songs which teenage girls can sing along to with a hairbrush mic. But I also like music which is self-styled monumental, something to be in awe of, or under the hammer of. Music which takes itself deadly seriously - cos its hard to find that sort of earnestness and ambition in much of our culture today.
Irony corrodes from adverts and reality TV downwards and outwards. Not to say UK Funky and Jackin’ isn’t earnest, of course, but I’d like to defend what might be derided as ‘po-faced’ and colourless and sexless and whatnot in opposition or at-least-contrast to more jolly have a larf stuff.
Gang Of Four - Damaged Goods (1979)
Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you / But I know it’s only lust…
I never really knew why indie-snobs were hating so hard on Franz Ferdinand back in the days when I used to wear a leather jacket from Oxam but I guess its like why rap-snobs hate on Spaceghostpurrrp when they’ve already heard ‘Mystic Stylez’ huh?
Daft Punk - Voyager (2001)
I haven’t heard ”R.A.M.” yet. I’ve barely heard ”Discovery” either, but I was listening to it today and I began to appreciate why people feel so strongly about them. They’re a pop group (or a pop-rock group), essentially, taking the bits and pieces everybody knows of genres everybody knows and giving them a crystalline modern sheen. Perhaps that sounds like I’m slagging, but really this magpie sonic architecture sometimes skirts close to genius - the baroque twiddly fanfares in ”Digital Love” for example.
”Voyager” is less showy than all that, and less obviously anthemic than yer ”One More Time”s and ”Harder, Faster…”, but it shows off the other element of Da Punkz’s music that obviously connects with people - the wistful, melancholic, lurve-erly emotion of it all: slightly sickly, slightly gooey, but made palatable by its hi-tech rendering. There’s even something heightening about the obvious artificiality of the sounds, just like those saccharine themes in old video games like Sonic: the naivety of the sound, something short of ‘human’ instrumentation, makes the pathos even more pathetic. See a kid cry, feel sorry for him - see a kid cry and it comes out in jagged pixels which slice up his cornea, and you’ll be all but crying your damn self.
Romanthony - The Wanderer (CD Mix #9)
Max B feat French Montana - Been Around The World (2008?)
This is the best track Nile Rodgers ever played on (unintentionally). ‘Get Busy’ would be ten times better if Max B was doing the singing instead of fruity Pheonix fancier Pharrell. It would start something like ”Like the legend of the Pheonix, Max Biggavelz will burn ya pussy…” then into the hook like ”We up all night to stack funds, we up all night to pop guns, we up all night to get wavy!” Then French could have slurred all over it like a vocodor’d retard, maybe talking about how music has become too ”commercialamised” in recent years and robots are like Jesus now, turning water into Patron and sand into Sour.
Hot Since 82 - Knee Deep In Louise (2012)
And another from that MOS comp. Full tune can be streamed with accompanying photo of bikini clad boiyd right here.
There’s something unremarkable about this tune if you think about it but I wasn’t thinking about it when I started bopping along to it in my bedroom just now cos it rolls so sweetly and the bassline’s kinda BADboy.
