I really feel like I experienced the music of the 2000s from an ideal vantage point; I was a high school junior when the decade began, around the same time I started thinking seriously about what music meant to me. As a result, going back through the music from the early 2000s has been a crazy nostalgia trip. How insane is that concept, by the way -- nostalgia for the 00s!
While working on my list for pitchfork's 'best albums of the 00s' feature coming out in late September, I spent a lot of time listening to the music I explored in college ('01-'05), when I first discovered just how expansive of a world 'music' really is. I think one of my main problems with the way many people write about music generally (not excusing myself here) is simply that the writer's lens is focused only on what's in front of it, without regard for what else is out there, oblivious. Not that you should or could cover everything; more that a self-awareness of your blind spots leads to smarter coverage. But more significantly, and this is exceptionally difficult: it's about remaining open to the possibility that the music that moves you most profoundly could come from an entirely unexpected direction.
This record was put out on Kompakt, a Cologne, Germany-based techno label. It is by a trance artist from Japan named Hiroshi Watanabe, aka Kaito. On one significant level, his debut record Special Life is perfect. Perfect as in the music has no clear flaws, a surface of internal reflection so smooth that you feel your own emotional motion reflected back at you. Everything in the music is layers, each poised with zenlike balance, always topped with one more beautiful melodic trick than you deserve (yes I'm Catholic), its ceaseless rhythm perfectly congruent to your pulse (in spirit if not BPM).
DJ Spinna's new record is pretty hit-or-miss, a bunch of solid-to-great beats with a bunch of decent-to-mediocre rapping; Torae is so bland that he seems to exist only so folks hating on current NY rap can point to exactly what is wrong with it. But there are a couple great tracks on it, including lead single "New York" which has a solid verse from Krym of the Jigmastas, "performing so sick with it, i'm worth about six digits, i'm hot like a Chinese kitchen cookin with six skillets." Although there's no excuse for Yung LA-lookalike Spinna explaining Krym's lyrics for us via punch-ins ("this ain't the Matrix man!!") The beat kinda reminds me of this remix to O.C.'s "Born 2 Live."
In fact, Spinna's beats on the record all embrace this ambiguous unease, as if El-P's tracks for Company Flow had become an actual blueprint for anything underground rap that came afterward. (In fact, there's even a track with Breezly Brewin featuring a Sitar sample -- an obviously intentional reference to 'The Fire in Which You Burn.') The greatest thing is that they seem really unconcerned with sounding either classicist-traditional, or like Dilla, which are pretty much the only two directions anyone seems to care about in underground rap right now, for good (Marco Polo) or evil.
The best track on the record is the incredible "More Colors" with Elzhi. It helps that he's by far the best non-Brewin rapper on the record. I really appreciate that it doesn't try to do anything too-clever with the 'colors' concept, and that it never feels like he's really trying to force something -- like he's unafraid to break concept for a couple lines in order to make a point that makes sense. And the beat is one of the best on the album. And yeah, he might be second to Gucci or Dro, who've been doing color-wheel raps for awhile now, but if it takes a Trojan horse like Elzhi to get this creative approach up north then so be it. Elzhi manages to spin it into a detached 3rd-person observer perspective, which makes it more critic-friendly, but that's not really taking anything away from its quality.
The great thing about this remix is how it transforms cocky, douchebag L.A. scene cornball raps into this over-blissed burnout poignancy. Great remixes and edits of crap often work by removing the parts that don't work; instead Classixx (who have done high-profile & excellent remixes for Phoenix & Holy Ghost!) take elements that were just obnoxious in the original & manage to re-contextualize them so effectively that they become the best parts of the new version -- i.e. the hokey chorus vocals transformed into a gauzy druggedness, or the way the pop-rap goes from total trash to Crazytown-effective.
But the reason Classixx have finally 'clicked' for me is not in spite of their embrace of the trashy L.A. club-scene-kid aesthetic, but kinda because of it. I continue to be suspicious of this ‘scene’ as a whole, partly because of received wisdom, partly because of the ridiculous clothing, and mostly because much of the music credited to that world feels creatively bankrupt & emotionally like a lot of detached fronting. This can work in doses, but feels borderline nihilistic for an entire night out. Classixx embrace the slowed tempos that have turned the disco revival into more of a chugging balearic/sundrenched haze, the same spacious tastefulness, focus on craft, the epic sonic scope, and, most importantly, the emotional heft of peers & artists as diverse as Aeroplane, Mark E, Simian Mobile Disco's "I Believe." This is where they earn their hype & attention, even if functionally they aren't doing that much different than some of those artists. But by transmitting these values, these musical qualities, onto the trashier, Kitsune/Cobrasnake affiliated crowd, it feels like Classixx are also giving the style a big shot in the arm, all while differentiating themselves from the nudisco pack & enlarging their potential audience. This lack of 'seriousness' in collaborators & associations gives a genre that occasionally veers too close to record-spotters, collector-nerds & obscurantists (aka men, primarily) a needed shot of superficiality, an embrace of the facile, the artificial, the fleeting & the ephemeral. But it's all grounded with an emotional seriousness that sees meaning & feeling in the whirlwind youth world party, rather than dusty record sleeves, hidebound tradition & 'reference points.'
Also, if you haven't checked out the mix I did with DJ Brett Randle earlier this year, make sure to check out Summer Luau Luv here, and in an abbreviated, safe-for-work format here.
I've been coming up with a list of albums for Pitchfork's 'best albums of the 00s' feature running this fall, and its got me going back to all these old blog entries (now secure from wider circulation) from when I was 20 & 21, trying to recall all the music that was moving me at the beginning of the decade.
Mostly, though, I've just been rediscovering tracks; good post-popist anti-rockist that I am, the strongest memories I have tend to be more about individual songs I heard: the first time "Still Tippin" was pumping from a car in my neighborhood, dancing to "Move Your Body" or Jacques LuCont's remix of Gwen's "What You Waiting For," etc. The Ewan Pearson remix of Seelenluft's "Manila," was a part of a group of tracks that I played at most of the parties we threw at the house I was living in my junior year of college. "Hey Ya" had just hit, & I was basically trying to appeal to as wide a crowd of interesting people as I could, so we'd keep the trendy kids with Joy Division's "Digital" & keep the hip-hop heads with "What Happened to that Boy" & keep everybody with Liquid Liquid's "Optimo" & Earth Wind & Fire's "Let's Groove." Heady times -- something I'll probably write about a bit more in depth towards the end of the year.
The international phenomenon of house music owes its existence to the basement clubs of 1980's Chicago, but many Chicagoans are unaware of their city's underground legacy. "Home Sweet House" reveals a thriving Chicago house scene hidden in plain sight. From a footworking battle on the South Side to a night out at a legendary North Side club, the film takes viewers to the city's most hallowed house hotspots. Interviews with DJs, promoters, producers, dancers, and record store clerks--all set to a soundtrack of authentic underground Chicago tracks--answer the ultimate question that surrounds this legendary subculture: Why Chicago?
One of the great things about following UK funky for the past year or so has been the amazing number of tracks that poured out of such a seemingly small scene. By the time my overpriced import vinyl copy of the "Do You Mind (Crazy Cousinz Remix)" had arrived last summer -- the first & still best introduction I had to the genre -- i already had about fifteen new favorite tracks. The video above, for Egypt's beautiful "In the Morning," just dropped a day or two ago.
One of the best ways to keep up with it has been through mixes, which really gives the best idea of how this genre 'works.' Much like the world of cosmic/balearic/nu-disco, a single track might suggest the genre is one thing, while in fact it's a lot more helpful to hear the genre as a constellation of impulses, musical concepts that revolve around certain trends & aesthetic approaches. At one level, funky is simply house music with more syncopated rhythms of soca & dancehall, tied to a specific geographic locale. But it's also a petri dish of how popular music develops & flexes between trends as a whole, playing with the internal tensions of a genre that appeals to a comprehensively diverse array of people.
Tim Finney follows the genre better than most people I've read, and always seems to do a really great job of explaining how certain tracks function in relation to others & the genre as a whole. He's just revived his blog to start running through a bunch of funky tracks that grabbed him this year. I particularly like this quote where he explains the appeal of funky as a genre:
People talk about funky like it’s a swing back to femininity from grime and/or dubstep. This is true only to the extent that funky harks back to garage’s particular arc of development at times. Even then, that’s only half the story: funky sounds crude or robotic as easily it does fluid, sexy and, well, funky. As with dancehall, funky’s flexible beat structure and hormone-balanced aren’t tied to any particular strategy of affect, but (especially in good DJ sets) create a sense of such questions being suspended.
One of my favorite mixes so far has been DJ One Drop's Kingston Flavour, which is a predominantly UK Funky mix, but explores the various commonalities between the genre & dancehall; this is no accident, as many of the UK's black immigrants (a core group of funky listeners, as is my understanding) are of Jamaican origin. Mostly, it's a really great document (and in good sound quality) of a fun, relatively new dance genre.
The only song that really falls on its face in the mix is Boy Better Know's absurd "Too Many Men." It's a song about the dance floor being too full of dudes, and I'm not really sure who that would really appeal to on the dancefloor. It doesn't even work at the level of "It's Raining Men," because 'too many' is already implied by the title. I doubt playing this song is gonna get girls running to the floor. Until this is ironically co-opted by a gay UK funky subculture I can't really say I have a use for that track.
Its failure, however, does work as a nice microcosm of what NOT to do in UK Funky, where the most interesting music is about tensions and balance between gendered aesthetics, a lack of resolution, the idea of possibility.
Fly is Vol. 2 of the 'digital release' from my new project Toeachizown. The 1st 3 joints on this volume consist of my continued steps into the 'electric-space-funk' style I'm humbled 2 share with U from my mind, yet this time out, with a more 'danceable' vibe 2 it. U know, for the clubs...worldwide! The first 3 tracks “Flying V Ride” (which is a reference 2 the fabled UFO that many have reported seeing in their lifetime), “Candy Dancin’” & “Burn Straight Thru U” co-exist as a 'suite' called “The Move Suite”. Yes, 3 songs that are joined together as 1. This is why the 'drum machine pattern' is the same on these 3 particular songs. “Candy Dancin’” also features a wicked synth solo & vocoder contribution by the 1 and only Mark de Clive-Lowe.
The remaining 3 joints of this volume on this 'digital release': “10 West”, “I Wanna Know” (a vocal) & “Rollin’” represent exactly what the title of this volume is: Fly. They're joints that U can roll 2. Let your hair down 2. Vibe with a lady 2 (or vice-versa), + stay 'fly' 2. I know there's still some fly ladies & gentlemen out there. This Vol. 2 from my Toeachizown project is...4 U.
- D-F
"imo if you aren't playing the hell out of dam-funk your summer sucks balls and you should be deported to the north pole."
