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!

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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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.

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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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!

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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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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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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When I walked out of the Best Buy at the Holyoke Mall at Ingleside on a weekend afternoon in 2001 with a copy of singer Res‘ debut album How I Do I had no idea I’d still be talking about it some seven years later. Yet and still, here I am doing just that. I didn’t know much about Res at the time, but I knew I loved her song “Ice King”—which I’d only heard once, in the mix with Mystic’s “The Life” on a late-night college radio show broadcasting out of Hartford, Connecticut—and the deep Best Buy discount only sweetened the deal.

The album quickly became one of my favorites though—establishing songwriter Santi White as talent to keep an eye on—and I was sorely disappointed that her label didn’t seem to know what to do with her and she got lost amidst the crush of corny R&B chicks who dominated the commercial market. She’s back, alongside Talib Kweli and Graph Nobel as Idle Warship, but for a long time she was virtually missing in action. During that time a whole school of DJs and producers came to prominence who fused Electro, Punk, Pop, Funk, Hip-Hop and other styles—something Res and her collaborators did in their own way on How I Do—and all I hoped was that Res and Santi White would reunite, join forces with cats from that scene and wreck some shop.

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Every morning when I log on to the internets I’m greeted by a barrage of headlines about skyrocketing foreclosure rates, another record-breaking rise in jobless claims or some bloody killing spree. I know the sort of effect the pathogenic strain of adversity infecting ever-widening swathes of the populace is having on my life on a day-to-day basis, so the seemingly endless stream of increasingly bad news gives me pause to wonder how it’s effecting everybody else.

A quick survey of my terrestrial neighborhood, my virtual neighborhood—Facebook, MySpace, etc.—and the media reveal that people are handling the rampant unemployment, underemployment, uncertainty and creeping angst—as opposed to the “national malaise” of the Carter era—in different ways. A few are trying to turn calamity into opportunity by dedicating their suddenly “free” time to their own, hopefully, self-beneficial projects. Their greedier counterparts are getting their Ayn Rand on. Some are checking classics of dystopian anarchist fiction—Anthony Burgess‘ A Clockwork Orange, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, etc.—out of their local libraries, re-reading them on street-corners and re-familiarizing themselves with the paranoid cynicism of their youths which made them not want to be a part of “the system” in the first place. Others—including members of the Legislative branch of our government…no wonder we’re all fucked—are “tweeting” their fingers off like everything is hunky-dory. And another, seemingly growing, group are going on armed rampages.

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A couple weeks back I buffeted a friend with a hastily-issued remonstration regarding a Facebook status update where she urged people to write President Obama and plead the case for financially strapped college students like herself. I responded to her saying that, if anything, Obama needed to help people who could never even dream of being able to afford to go to college before he started propping up the ascendant bourgeoisie as she suggested. Last week she and I sat down for a conversation largely concerned with the ongoing financial crisis and what it meant for job prospects. Apparently she hopes to parlay her degree into a job in my line of work—one which I do not in fact posses a degree in—after graduation. Hearing this, I explained to her that I’m currently hunting for whatever jobs I can find outside of my chosen field because that “industry” is apparently not in a position to pay anybody.

My desperation was clearly a bit disconcerting to her, and after I heard the astronomical amount of debt she’d incurred in an attempt to obtain her degree I understood why. Right then and there I experienced one of those rare lucid moments where something simultaneously enormous but elusive becomes explicitly clear; the high-cost of higher education is a pre-existing condition of the larger economic sickness sidelining our nation! As Obama himself has elucidated in numerous speeches it’s Americans “living beyond their means”—I’d place far more of the blame on the tiny percentage of very wealthy Americans who possess means far beyond their scope of living myself, but I digress— who are responsible for our economic collapse. In the case of receiving an education though the system is designed to prevent anyone unable or unwilling to live far beyond their means by indebting themselves in an attempt to better their chances of providing a respectable means for themselves and their families by obtaining a degree.

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This morning I woke to a local news story about an aspiring Hip-Hop mogul caught up in a plot involving drugs, guns and kidnapping just a few towns away. While at the local news outlet’s site I noticed they have a new Twitter feed, which I clicked, intending to “follow” it. The first headline on their feed was a story about a heroin bust that went down last night around the corner from my house. Then I overheard a piece on one of those morning shows about how England wants to teach Parkour to kids in school. And just now I caught a bit of some evangelical Christian talk-show promoting the benefits of texting, “tweeting” and blogging on the youth of America.  Huh?

Inspired by this surreal exhibition of what passes for news I indiscriminately chose a playlist unified by nothing more than a collection of relatively recent release dates. Well that and perhaps an undercurrent of incongruity that happens to run through them all as well. Take Part I: John Shade, Your Fortune’s Made, the debut full-length from eclectic Highland Park, California-based five-piece Fol Chen for example… It’s got bright-n-bouncy of Montreal-reminiscent Electropop ditties like “The Idiot” and “No Wedding Cake”…Growly electroacoustic Gothic hymns like “The Believers” that sound like Smashing Pumpkins or Nine Inch Nails as covered by a Twee orchestra…Apocalyptic Girl-Group-meets-Psych-Folk reinterpretations of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” (or The Clash’s “Straight to Hell”) like “Red Skies Over Garden City”…Drum-machine-driven Country ballads like “You and Your Sister in Jericho”…And crunchy synthesizer jams like “Winter That’s All” and “The Longer U Wait” that sound like Hot Chip if they joined forces with a high school marching band…Almost all of which are decked out in blingy horn arrangements. The opening song even features the lyrics “don’t follow me”…Shout out to Twitter!

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Sunday into Monday most of the Eastern seaboard was socked with a late Winter storm that local meteorologists were predicting as the “worst of the season.” I don’t know if the system lived up to the hype, but we appear to have received a solid foot here in Western Massachusetts where every sidewalk is walled in by snow and mounds of the stuff adorn every streetcorner. I’ve also heard reports of a foot of snow from Bostonians, and my favorite weather website (yes I have one) is reporting that a new record for daily maximum snowfall—of 7.8 inches at Logan International Airport, breaking the old record of 7 inches set way back in 1916—was set yesterday in Boston.

Getting hit with so much snow so late in the season is actually something of a fortuitous occurrence since an urban landscape covered in white stuff is almost picture-perfect scenery for the return of The Whitest Boy Alive. Founded by Erlend Øye—half of Bergen, Norway’s Kings of Convenience and the voice of Röyksopp’s “Remind Me”—as an extension of his experiments in Electronic Dance Music, the Berlin, Germany-based outfit quickly evolved into a full-on four-piece band whose mélange of Nordic Pop, blue eyed Soul, soft-Funk, Disco and cheesy late-’70s or early-’80s-influenced Soft-Rock styles features little-to-no electronically-generated sounds. Their sophomore effort, titled Rules, drops today on their very own independent Bubbles imprint.

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