March 17, 2009 – 10:30 am
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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By El Keter
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Posted in Music
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Tagged Astrud Gilberto, Bebel Gilberto, Daedelus, Death From Above 1979, DFA, E-40, Feist, Freeway, Ghostface Killah, Idle Warship, John Legend, Justice, Lil' Mo, Mgmt, Michael Jackson, Missy Eliot, MSTRKRFT, Mylo, N.O.R.E., Nedelle, Res, Santigold, The Carps, The Long Lost, Thunderheist
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March 12, 2009 – 10:30 am
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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By El Keter
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Posted in Music
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Tagged Antony Hegarty, Dr. Dre, Feist, First Floor Power, Jenny Wilson, Jens Lekman, Kings of Convenience, Little Dragon, Lykke Li, Parker lewis, Robyn, Saul Williams, Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, The Knife
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March 10, 2009 – 10:30 am
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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By El Keter
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Posted in Music
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Tagged Aaliyah, Big Urban, CocoRosie, Iller Than Theirs, Kray, M.I.A., Nuk Fam, Portishead, RZA, Santigold, Scott Thorough, Short Stories, The Boys and Girls Club, Timbaland, tUnE-YaRdS
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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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By El Keter
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Posted in Music
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Tagged Aqueduct, Black Lips, Bo Diddley, Calvin Harris, Flairs, Fol Chen, Ghostface Killah, Gonzales, Hot Chip, James Murphy, M.I.A., Nine Inch Nails, Of Montreal, Prince, RZA, Sam Sparro, Sébastien Tellier, Smashing Pumpkins, The Clash
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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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