I confess to some jealousy of those bloggers who are eternally moaning about all the free review copies of music they get that they don't have time to listen to...but NO LONGER! I have just received my first review copy of a CD.
After I wrote briefly about Robin Danar's Altered States CD here, the nice folks over at Elemental Consulting/Shanachie were nice enough to contact me and I ask me if I'd like a copy. That was an easy enough question to answer. So now I have one!
This is mostly an album of covers, but I think my favorite is an original track by Jessca Hoop, which you can hear over here...
Blogs that when you land on them, start playing music at you without you doing anything? Grumble...
Although, I must confess that the last time this happened, I liked what I was hearing well enough to fumble around the Web page until I figured out what it was. And it has tilted me from being in the "I dunno about Santogold" camp into the "Alright, I'm digging Santogold" camp. Twas this, in less invasive format:
Man I got summer hatin on me cuz I'm hotter than the sun I got spring hatin on me cuz I ain't never sprung Win-ter hating on me cuz I'm colder than yall And I would never I would never I would never fall I'm being hated by the seasons So f--- yall for hatin with no reason
#243.
Wherein Lil Wayne thanks all the fans for buying his history book and gives a shout out to the book drive. Eh?
Gosh, I didn't know toting around a boom box was back in style. It is in the outer outer boroughs, at least, where not one, but two boom boxes were going on the shuttle back to the A Train after my trip to Rockaway Beach. Along with a guy drinking a Corona on the train, two barefoot kids (eek!) and several people eating chicken and rice out of styrofoam containers.
Sadly, neither one of our boom box entertainers had put much thought into their playlists: one was playing an abominable, abysmal, asphyxiating slow jam, and the other, more boppable but somewhat irksome gangsta rap.
If I were lugging a boom box on the A train and drinking a Corona at this very moment (and I kind of wish I were!), this would be what I would be playing.
Beastie Boys - An Open Letter to NYC (duh) Bryan Adams - Summer of '69 Notorious B.I.G. - Anything. Everything The Ting Tings - Great DJ Def Leppard - Pour Some Sugar On Me Lil Wayne - Lollipop Smashing Pumpkins - 1979 Flo-Rida - Low Ludacris - The Potion The Replacements - Kiss Me On The Bus. Or maybe Bastards of Young Foghat - Slow Ride Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes Billy Idol - White Wedding M83 - Highway of Endless Dreams Jurassic 5 - Quality Control Dead Prez- Hip-Hop The Raconteurs - Salute Your Solution Nas - Made You Look M.I.A. - Galang Soul Coughing - True Dreams of Wichita And of course, The Ramones - Rockaway Beach
1. I am running in Prospect Park on Sunday. It is 7:45ish p.m. but it is still blazing hot. It is Puerto Rican Day, and the park is CROWD-ed and festive. I look to my left, see a guy lying face down in the grass in a very chalk outline-esque way. All around him, people partying, wandering, sitting, and this dude, face planted in the dirt. I ponder what to do. A half mile or so ahead there's an African drumming group that's always there on Sundays, and there's usually cops there to quell the drummers, should they, I dunno, start throwing drumsticks viciously. So I run along and find me a slightly pudgy cop, stop, and say, "there's a guy lying face down in the grass back there." He looks at me and goes: "drunk." I stare at him. "Maybe," I say. "Or, he could be dead..." Says he: "How far back is he?" I explain. He looks sad, and hot, and makes general noises about how he's going to check it out. I sure hope he did...
2. I am exiting the PATH train at the WTC station. There are two people at the turnstile next to mine, an unruly-looking guy coming in and a fierce-looking woman going out, who have reached an impasse. He has put his money in. She is halfway through the turnstile. Finally, she backs down and out, but he has already lost his money. "I lost my money!" he says, and as she breezes through the turnstile next to him, he slaps her in the back of the head. She hauls off and punches him. A flurry of half-hearted slapping ensues, as I stand frozen in the turnstile next to them, with my jaw on the floor. Two PATH employees are nearby, and they're like, "WTF?" And the guy is like, "I lost my money!" And they're like, "Dude, you just hit a woman because you lost your money???"
(I had to link to this picture. Click here for the original post by its original author.)
Saturday I went to a music festival down near Atlantic City at a place called Appel Farm. It would have been awesome had it not been 250 million degrees in the shade. Oh wait, there was no shade. The last time I completely sweat through every piece of clothing I was wearing was at the Mermaid Parade a couple of years ago, and I had totally forgotten what a disgusting feeling it was.
Anyhow, I think Enter the Haggis was pretty good, but I was so hot I couldn't pay attention. By the time Suzanne Vega came on, I had resigned myself, and managed to enjoy her stage banter quite a bit ("Do I look like Alice Cooper up here? Maybe not the best idea to outline my eyes in black ink before coming out here...and now, we're going to play a song in a major key!")
She ended her set with "Tom's Diner". Now, when I was growing up I absolutely hated that song, mostly because local radio overplayed the crap out of it. But compared to what radio plays today - well, I'll take it. And the live version she did was surprisingly rock 'n' roll...lots of bass, lots of drums.
Then there was They Might Be Giants, who were enjoyable simply because they were clearly having a good time, and because, as they say, they might be the only band on the planet that employs a full-time confetti artist. And maybe because, by that point, the sun had retreated at least five feet away from my head.
My friend advanced a theory that with They Might Be Giants, you can totally date someone by what songs they're a fan of. In my case, it's "Istanbul Not Constantinople" and "Particle Man", but there were some people in the audience grooving to "Fingertips," which I found to be an incomprehensible mess. So what TMBG era do you hail from?
Spied outside my building in Brooklyn the other night: a small child, perhaps six or seven years old, skipping down the sidewalk singing about lollipops. Bucolic childhood scene? Maybe, if it weren't Lil Wayne's song about lollipops. Disturbing, seeing a child utterly absorbed in singing "She lick me like a l-l-l-l-lollipop."
Stoked: That Radiohead has 167,147 fans on Facebook (which I just joined!), currently 80,848 more fans than Britney Spears. All is as it should be.
Not stoked: That Coldplay has more fans than Radiohead. Which reminds me of a distasteful interaction I once had:
Me: (playing Radiohead CD) Unnamed blasphemous one: They sound like Coldplay! Me: (ominous silence)... ... ... Uh, nooooo, Coldplay sounds like Radiohead.
As a side note, Linkin Park, Justin Timberlake, and Chris Brown all have more fans than Radiohead, as does Victoria's Secret Pink. (?) And someone called 'The Stig'. (But not, thankfully, Tool.) Curious, this Facebook...
Stoked: To be going to All Points West.
Not stoked: In sign number 5,644 of the pending CD apocalypse, I was stalking the new Ting Tings album this weekend (i.e. too lazy to look up release date so just checking to see if it's out whenever I'm at a record store) and it was available, but only as LP or MP3 download. If want CD, must wait until June 3. Which happens to be today, but see, I wanted it Sunday, see.
Okayyyyy, I might be a teeny bit obsessed with Soulja Boy Tellem. Or whatever their name is. First I frightened my neighbors by learning, slowly and clankily as a 30+-year-old woman trying to be cool does, how to do the Superman dance. Now, I can't stop laughing about this "Yahhh Trick Yahhh" song. In its lyrical genius, it outdoes "Supersoak that ho" (is that realllllly what they're saying!??!) by, like, a factor of one million. I think I will try the move at about 3:32 of the way in the next time someone messes with me on the subway.
Another "how did I live this long and not know about this?" moment.
If you ever go to Memphis (and you should), your number one stop, even ahead of Graceland, must be Sun Studio. This two-room, 45-minute tour is one of the best I've ever been on. I got to hear great stories (Elvis lied about his mother's birthday to get that legendary first Sun recording), hear great music (sure, you've heard 'Hound Dog,' but have you heard 'Bear Cat'?), and stand in the studio itself, ground zero for rock and roll.
The picture here hangs in Sun Studio (several times). It's a shot of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. They randomly got together (Cash left) for a jam session. Sam Phillips recorded the whole thing, without anybody else knowing. The session sat, dusty and unheard, for some time; according to our tour guide, it was because Elvis was by that time under contract to RCA and no one else could record him. But after his death, the session saw the light of day. And it's great: as historical record, as music, as way of making legends real. It's got gospel. It's got blues. It's got Christmas music. It's got Elvis impersonating the first Elvis impersonator.
Click here for Sun Studio's own opinion of the top ten lyrics ever recorded there.
And, one of the best tracks on the CD:
And, speaking of Memphis, the Hold Steady is streaming a track from their new CD on their MySpace page where they depart their traditional northern U.S. climes and move south. Is that a joke, that fried reference?
Commentary on stuff I like, which is mostly music, but is sometimes, in no particular order, college basketball, wine, books, pop culture, media, weird business trivia, Brooklyn, good food, and other stoopid stuff. And sometimes, commentary on stuff I don't like, which includes but is not limited to, in no particular order, the MTA, rude people, too much work, and other stupid stuff.
I confess to some jealousy of those bloggers who are eternally moaning about all the free review copies of music they get that they don't have time to listen to...but NO LONGER! I have just received my first review copy of a CD.
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