Shuffle Songs, Vol. 8 — All of That Shuffling is Making Me Sick

This iPod isn’t feeling good in his tum-tum!

There are a number of reasons why I may have woken up this morning feeling sick…The late-night walk in the rain I took yesterday could have been a factor. There’s the chance that I could have come into contact with that “stomach bug” I’ve seen everybody on the internets griping about for the last few weeks. Or it could just be that the crushing sense of doom hovering over our uncertain nation has finally given me an ulcer, or a good old-fashioned tummy-ache at the least. All I know is that I rest easy in the knowledge that it’s not morning sickness…Hooray for being a dude!

Momus ‘Joemus’Jumping from genre to genre like I do in these “shuffle” posts probably isn’t gonna help the queasy feeling in my belly any, but a blogger’s gotta do what a blogger’s gotta do. So if I’m gonna shuffle myself up I might as well go all out and start the shuffling with a record that not only shuffles between genres quite a bit itself, but which has actually been shuffling on my iPod for a few months now. That record—which dropped at the tail end of ‘08—is Joemus, the latest album in avant-garde singer, songwriter, musician and journalist Momus‘ extensive catalog which finds the eclectic Scotland-born, Berlin-based eye-patch enthusiast collaborating with Glaswegian Breakcore producer Joe Howe. The result is something like an animatronic cabaret show where a fusion of baroque orchestra-pit acoustics and laptop glitch provide the backdrop for glittery Glam-Rock burlesquery, speak-easy Jazz balladry, gin-joint dirges and macabre vaudevilliany. If Schneider TM collaborating with Hot Chip, Timbaland replacing Keri Hilson with Antony Hegarty, OutKast’s André 3000 making a Bruce Haack tribute album or laptop music that doesn’t sound like The Postal Service appeal to you Joemus is gonna shuffle up your guts in the best way possible.

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Do Young Folks “Lykke” Mushrooms?

Peter Bjorn and John and Röyksopp

Last Saturday L.A.-based emcee and music aficionado Micah James re-posted the video for “Run Run,” a Summer favorite from last year by Swedish girl-group Those Dancing Days, on his Facebook wall. Earlier the same day I resolved to finally delete Swedish Indie-Pop Lolita Lykke Li’s outstanding 2008 debut Youth Novels off my iPod to make room for something else. Freshly reminded of the awesomeness of Scandinavia’s music scene, and with storage space practically begging to be filled, I picked up a pair of new releases bearing some notable Nordic names.

Peter Bjorn and John ‘Living Thing’The initials of the first of these names, PB&J, are of course synonymous with one of the most classic lunch items in all of creation, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The band who shares those initials—eclectic Stockholm, Sweden-based Pop trio Peter Bjorn and John—made those three letters and an ampersand their own when they released the feel-good song of the century, “Young Folks,” in 2006 to widespread acclaim and countless licensing deals. Since they made the whole world whistle along with their infectious hit they’ve released a mostly instrumental digital and vinyl-only album, played around with solo projects, and group-member Björn Yttling produced the afforementioned Youth Novels for Lykke Li. This week they finally release Living Thing, the long-awaited follow-up to their 2006 breakout Writer’s Block.

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Shuffle Songs, Vol. 7 — Shuffle, Step, But Change…Not So Much

Hit the Button! — Grand Puba

Since this blog’s inception a few years back London-based composer Shawn Lee has appeared in our pages no fewer than three times. His most recent appearance was of course in Tuesday’s post, where I featured his newest LP Soul in the Hole alongside metal-masked rapper/producer DOOM’s new record Born Like This. But the first time he popped up in this space dates all the way back to only the second week of this blog’s existence!

Chin Chin ‘Tha Flashing, The Fancing’It’s been almost that long since I first profiled Chin Chin, a Brooklyn-based retro-Disco-Funk trio whose lineup grows by leaps and bounds in the live setting to include numerous musicians from Brooklyn’s rich music community, in this space. At the time I had In the interim they signed with flagship avant-garde Hip-Hop label Definitive Jux, who re-released their self-titled debut for American audiences last year, got treated to a few club remixes and have recorded another full-length for Def Jux, the just-released The Flashing, The Fancing. And while I’m well aware that Spring just started and Summer’s still a ways off, Chin Chin’s new record—much like their first joint—has “warm-weather jump-off” written all over it! Uptempo West End-style Disco jams like “Stay” and “Moments,” synthesizer-soaked, Loft-ready Jazz-Funk workouts like “The Fancing” and Soul-Revue-meets-religious-revival blue-eyed-Soul stompers like “Hotter Than Hot” will make perfect soundtracks for saturating ones clothes with sweat, radiating body-heat and boogieing until you can’t any more on a hot, dark dancefloor. While inter-stellar instrumental “Peterdactyl,” bubbly downtempo stepper “Go There With You,” easy-listening soulful slow-jam “That’s Where I’ll Be,” and bionic-larynxed lite-Funk pimp-strut “GG and the Boys” are made for cooling shit out like taking a step out onto a breezy nightclub rooftop, or that early-morning drive home with the windows down.

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The Sound of Your DOOM is the Roar of the Tiger, No Jive

DOOM and Shawn Lee

A couple of days ago the Northern Hemisphere crossed the threshold from Winter into Spring and with the exception of a few locations hit with “freak” blizzards or anachronistically chilly blasts of arctic wind that means ski-mask season is all but over for most of us. I mean that in a strictly meteorological sense of course since utility bills, past-due rent and the prospect of looming tax debt—apparently the Feds stick it to the “self-employed” even if they live below the poverty line—are making doing things the “ski-mask way” look more and more attractive every day.

Emcee producer Daniel Dumile—then still better-known as Zevlove X of K.M.D.—probably felt the same way when he first decided to cover his face with a stocking cap and take on the persona of MF Doom—a street-savvy, comic-book inspired super villain bent on terrorizing the Rap world—a decade or so ago. Since those early days he graduated to a much fancier metal mask more in keeping with the likeness of his namesake Dr. Doom, and he recently dropped the “MF” from his name and began identifying himself simply as DOOM, a nick-name I recall seeing him called by friends in interviews dating back to the era of the Bl_ck B_st_rds debacle an his brother Subroc’s tragic demise. But with allegations of authentically villainous antics—chief among them being the recent “Doomposter” saga—flung at him regularly I think he’s well aware of how important concealing one’s identity can be, regardless of what alias he uses or what his mask is made of.

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Bon Bon Vie (Gimme the Good Life)

‘This is the Life’

I’m not the biggest fan of celebrity biopics, so when Notorious, a film purporting to tell the story of the rise and fall of rap star Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, was released earlier this year I wasn’t the first in line at the box office to buy tickets. I alluded to my disinterest in the film in my post about Biggie’s debut and ultimate impact on Hip-Hop and popular music in general which I posted the day it premiered. I also mentioned my lack of excitement in a comment to a link share of a review for the film which a Facebook “buddy” posted that weekend. The reviewer himself commented back on my comment, touting the film as an important benchmark for the future of “Hip-Hop movies” and asking me if I didn’t want to see more biopics about Rap artists, something he hoped Notorious‘ box-office returns would inspire studios to get behind.

To be honest, I’m not exactly itching to watch an actor lip-syncing classic Kool G Rap verses in a dramatization of The Juice Crew era, or somebody in a bad jheri curl wig pretending to be Eazy E on his deathbed in a flick about N.W.A., any time soon. Hip-Hop is still a young genre, and most of its founders, legends and notable personalities are still very much alive to tell their own stories, so if filmmakers must chronicle Rap’ history on celluloid I’d much prefer to see it treated with the scholarly seriousness, journalistic integrity, reverent warmth and homespun authenticity that only a documentary can provide. Why waste time fictionalizing our history when in-depth interviews can be conducted with the people who were there and their private collections of photos, audio and video recordings and other memorabilia be mined for a more vivid glimpse of the past? Besides, isn’t the cut-n-paste documentary style a little more “Hip-Hop” than all that other shit anyway?

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