subsdance set, 4/29/11

Substance at Hooligans

2301: Ms. John Soda, "Go Check"

A favorite from my college radio spell. Notwist side project.

2305: Lushlife ft/ Camp Lo, "Another Word For Paradise"

I was still hyped on Camp Lo. Those rappers can rap the fuck out of a rap.

2309: Lupe Fiasco, "Go Go Gadget Flow"

Haven't messed with Lasers yet. Very mixed buzz and Lupe seems to resent it himself. "The Show Goes On" is fun and has that Modest Mouse "Float On" earbug going for it, but I wish an album dropped that followed up the neurotic negativity of The Cool.

2314: Massive Attack, "Five Man Army"

People call me tricky for particular reasons.

2319: Prince, "Pop Life"

The crowd seemed like they would enjoy some Prince, and they seemed to. Maybe I was just itching for some Prince.

2323: The Easybeats, "Friday On My Mind"

Well, it was Friday.
Pop Life by tpryorl

2326: The Coup, "Laugh, Love, Fuck"

So I've been laughing, loving, and drinking liquor. Who wants to fuck and make a revolution?

2329: The Faint, "Worked Up So Sexual"

This track was on the classic Office episode "Night Out" as a coked up Ryan is acting such a fool as to make a group of women beat him up.

2332: The Specials, "Blank Expression"

The Specials are Tricky's all-time favorite band, and he slipped a nod to this song into Massive Attack's "Eurochild".

2335: Kid Cudi, "Pursuit of Happiness"

Ratatat...yay! This has two videos worth watching. Play them both at once and see if you can get them synced up.

2339: Jackie Mittoo, "Right Track"

Crucial Jamaican keyboardist getting his Stevie Wonder on in Canada. (Note to self: Stevie Wonder)

2342: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, "Spottie"

Ill horn conglomerate instrumentalizes OutKast

2346: James Pants, "We're Through"

Cosmic grandnephew of Gary Wilson, also on Stone's Throw now.

2350: Lady Gaga, "Paparazzi"

Girl comes up to me and requests the new Katy Perry on behalf of her girlfriend. I don't have it on my thumbdrive. I ask her if she likes Gaga. She loves Gaga.

2353: Kool Keith, "Make Up Yr Mind"

I will never stop being thrilled with being allowed to blast porno rap downtown, particularly when it is this good.

2358: Neon Neon, "I Lust U"

Last song, and a good one. Technical difficulties fucked it up. Corrected this disservice tonight.

Watch the official promo here.

beat street breakdown

I had a chance to talk to DJ Cornbread at "The Torn Flannel Affair" tonight. Seems a comment on the role or lack thereof of the dj in busking led to a sincere visit to the City of Norfolk offices in hopes of spinning outdoors for Art | Everywhere. The issue is currently unresolved as to whether the city will grant permission for a live dj on the streets or if he or she even needs one, but Cornbread will stop back by tomorrow. He hasn't found anything in the letter of city law that would exclude djs from the kind of permissions granted to buskers. Then again, Norfolk's city government has traditionally been unfriendly to anything that smacks of hip hop culture. Click here to refresh yrself on what Norfolk had to say after the 2007 shooting at a Clipse show.

the mixdown part 1 (the birther edition)

Davwrx presents... The Mixdown Part 1 (The Birther Edition) Mixed by Davion by davion

A fine mix our friend cooked up making good use of a few Camp Lo tracks.

And, we're tired of telling you by now, but Camp Lo will be at Shakas tonight (Thursday) with Ced Hughes, Moe Hendrix, and DJ Cornbread!

It will be, in a word, bananas.

camp lo at shakas, not hangar 09

Camp Lo will be at Shakas and not Hangar 09 on Thursday. Tell erryone.

Everything is still true about this earlier post except for the location.

Poly Styrene Dead at 53

“Poly Styrene”s voice on “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” was the most exhilarating voice I ever heard.”
-Kim Gordon

With all due respect to my pal Joan Jett, Poly Styrene was the first Riot Grrl. Her groundbreaking work with the late-70s punk band X-Ray Spex made it apparent that girls could be as brash as the boys and still have that feminine touch. While less sexual than her American counterpart Debbie Harry, Poly Styrene's day-glo colors, adult braces and unrestrained pogo-ing made her that chick every dude wanted to hang out with like a homeboy. Until about three in the morning when everyone fell asleep but you and her and you could finally make out just the way you'd been imagining since...

Sorry; maybe that was just me.

With lyrics focusing on social mores and the dowfalls of commercialism and normalcy, Poly laid the groundwork for modern day grrls like Kathleen Hanna to look sexy while scaring the shit out of you. In a good way? While X-Ray Spex lasted about as long as the fad they were named for, Poly continued to follow her own path and joined the Hare Krishna movement and explored her spirituality. But she'll probably be best remembered for her immortal opening lines to her most popular song. "Little girls should be seen and not heard," she would snarl, "But I say, 'Oh Bondage! Up Yours!'"

Poly Styrene's death was announced on her website and later confirmed by her manager and publications more reliable than this one. She passed peacefully in her sleep on Monday at the age of 53 and had been treated for breast cancer at a hospice near her home in the south of England.

Tomorrow will be X-Ray Spex day at the fatlittlemonkey offices and we suggest you do the same.

subsdance set, 4/19/11

Substance at Belmont

2132: Antibalas, "Beaten Metal"

Opening track on 2007's Security

2137: Bell Biv Devoe, "Poison"

New jack nostalgia

2142: Childish Gambino, "Put It In My Video"

Donald Glover

2145: Chromeo, "Fancy Footwork"

Community used this track

2148: Neon Neon, "Dream Cars"

Boom Bip and Gruff Rhys collaborate concerning the life of John DeLorean

2151: Neneh Cherry, "Buffalo Stance"

One of my favorites

2157: Pet Shop Boys, "Domino Dancing"

Comfortably nestled in the late '80s

2201: Raphael Saadiq, "Keep Marchin'"

Former Tony Toni Tone frontman, his solo work is routinely great

2204: Abba, "SOS"

I promised Twitter I would play Abba

2207: Toy, "Rabbit Pushing Mower"

An aptly named ensemble

2211: Big Boi ft. Janelle Monae, "Be Still"

As good as the collabo would suggest

Watch here

merry twentieth of april from dj cornbread

arbor day ain't got shit on this

You may remember when we told you that Camp Lo would be blessing Hangar 09 on April 28...butwaititgetsbetter. Errything is all official and whatnot and by far the best place to buy tickets is http://www.inticketing.com/. Specifically here. That is it. What?

Okay, there's more. The site will be planting a real honest to blog tree for every ticket purchased through it, which will go a long way towards offsetting the countless euphemistic trees that may or may not be blazed in activities related to this show. It's like Arbor Day, but much better since this is a Camp Lo show.

Camp Lo is about to drop a new ablum with Pete Rock kicking his skills on production. The promo mixtape itself is salivation-worthy. Minds are likely to be splattered. Local heroes Ced Hughes and Moe Hendrix will warm it up as they were born to do. In case you didn't know, Moe is the next mayor of Norfolk and Ced is the love child of Barbarella and Lando Caldrissian. Who doesn't want to see these cats mix it up?

Ced Hughes - "Spacely Sprockets" from Number Twenty on Vimeo.

MOE HENDRIX - "HIEROCORE" music video from Markus Fussell on Vimeo.

Oh shit I just noticed. DJ Cornbread's all up in this piece too? In a word, bananas.

here's the number to my therapist, you tell him all yr problems, he's fuckin' awesome at listening

Somehow I've ignored Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.* Only every blog since SXSW has been telling me to check them. But why would I want to do that? Fuck the internet in all its wisdom. It rilly took Khori Johnson to sit me down and introduce me to them.

A lot of nasty words there, particularly for a crew of teenagers and barely twentytons. The video is pretty striking and the mythology hypnotic. I said hypnotic, not coherent. The worm has been in my ear all week now. It's evil is strong. I should mention there are an indeterminate number of them, not just Tyler.

Yeah, I love them. They don't offer the option of neutrality, so I pick the positive option, despite the scatological death that makes up the imagery. I just like watching these kids perform and wish I was young again.

I told Khori I would like to see them live. He affirmed how good they were, but noted that he did not want to get punched in the face. He may be right.

*Odd Future if yr nasty

dj cornbread's "pink played out"

I get it, it's hard out there for a beat scholar in a world where the great pop canon is compressed to 1200 songs and 50 albums for many people. It can be terribly lonely and alienating, which is why at some point I settled for being a beat enthusiast. Regardless of their actual quality, diamond sellers can be infuriating. By their nature they set the limits of awareness for so many. I just can't let this vex me. It was a relief letting go of all my negative connotations of frat boys and suburban culture blanks and learning to enjoy Bob Marley's Legend again. Yes, it barely scratches the surface. Yes, it uses those blanded out bassless rock mixes. Yes, it is still great. If that's all you know of Bob, I feel sorry for you, but I'm afraid you can't have any of the skin off my back.

DJ Cornbread doesn't feel the same way, and he still hates Dark Side of the Moon. Too bad for him, but still hatred is a passion infinitely preferable to indifference. Maybe that's why the new beat mix is so good.

substance has khori

That's Childish Gambino, the nom de rap of my Community obsession Donald Glover. I mean, he's no Alison Brie, but dude is funny as hell and it turns out he can also emcee. I actually felt proud of myself for turning my friend Khori Johnson on to the ChildishDonaldGambi

noGloverCommunityVerse.

Khori is one of the funniest cats I know and, as seen in the silhouette image, a heroic soldier. He also has an ace taste in the musicalism and was one of my greatest supporters in sets at Substance before an unfortunate detour to Iraq. Substance, or as I always like to spell it, Subsdance, is an open decks DJ night at the Belmont on Tuesdays. It is one of the coolest nights of music constantly percolating in Norfolk presided over by some of the nicest people you ever could meet.

The wonderful thing about Subsdance is that it gives you music you don't hear at the bars and clubs every night, but the personal favorites that smart music obsessives are passionate about. It is not streamlined for massive acceptance, but

when you don't like something, a whole new flavor of deep cut is coming up within the half hour. It is a rare oasis of true pop eclecticism in this crazy town.

It is my pleasure to tell you that Khori is back from a war and in town for the next week or so, just in time to do his first Subsdance set. I have no idea what it will comprise, as I could never predict his mp3 shuffle. He does have soft spots for colorful underground hip hop, eccentric mainstream hip hop, French house & its fallout, and winning indiepop, because that is how cool he is. In any case, it is sure to transmit the giddy joy he is known for infecting people with.

Catch him at the Belmont on Tuesday (April 12, 2011 if yr nasty). You won't be sorry for long.

schrader/moroder

You probably remember this David Bowie gem from a striking sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. It is one of the filmmaker's fantastic anachronisms that show his strengths as a director-as-dj, scoring a key sequence of an alternate-history movie set in the '40s to a pop song that so thoroughly oozes '80s.* The song is notably not a David Bowie album track (though it was re-recorded and shoehorned into Let's Dance), but the kind of beautiful collaboration that could have only happened in the DeLorean decade.

The music is by living legend, '70s visionary and '80s titan Giorgio Moroder. In the '70s, on his own and with muse Donna Summer, he had a heavier hand than most in imagineering not just disco but modern music as we know it. By the '80s, Moroder was really too much of an artiste to limit himself to pop production, and he was branching out into film scores. At the time, this made the movies he blessed sound invigoratingly modern, then later dated, and now timeless. Even Bowie was lucky to land the promo single/theme to such a movie. The rest of it was pure instrumental Moroder bliss.

1982's Cat People, which spawned the Bowie track, is very much a product of its decade, despite being remade from a 1942 classic.** Ubiquitous horror remakes are currently something of a blight on the ol' pop culture, but there was a golden age from about 1978's Invasion of The Body Snatchers to 1988's The Blob. This period included John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing and David Cronenberg's 1986 The Fly, both all-time greats that improved upon the originals. Cat People isn't that good, but it is an unjustly half-forgotten stylish, sexy '80s ride.

The movie's director, Paul Schrader, isn't always thought of for such films. He's more likely to be thought of as an independent writer/director of good-to-great stone-cold-bummer movies. He's still more likely to be thought of as the intense, Calvinist-raised writer of Martin Scorsese masterpieces. Schrader, however, left a big stamp on the cinematic aesthetic of the '80s, and not just with Cat People.

Even more emblematic of the emergent style was his earlier collaboration with Moroder, American Gigolo. This movie's fingerprints can be found all over Mary Harron's viciously hilarious adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Like Cat People, American Gigolo had a splashy promo single/theme, in this case featuring Moroder collaborating with Blondie.

Schrader has outgrown his association with this period. Moroder will always be attached to it, having invented so much of it. Without Moroder, Schrader made another unique, half-forgotten product of the '80s, written and titled after a Bruce Springsteen lyric. Light of Day was an attempt to create a screen vehicle for Joan Jett, who seems like she should be a movie star anyway. Schrader's instinct was to throw her in a working class drama with a popular, talented young comic actor eager to prove his dramatic chops, Michael J. Fox.

*Thoroughly Oozing '80s is, incidentally, the title of a nostalgia movie I'm writing for Lady Gaga, kind of an homage to Desperately Seeking Susan.

**Back to the '40s now. As mega-genius Stephen Hawking famously noted, "Time is all sorts of fucked up."

they are a crew of comets of death. what more explanation do you need?

From the dark alleys of the '80s and the twisted psyche of Rammellzee, I encourage all of you to join me in anachronistically championing Death Comet Crew.

this is it, what?!

Prepare for an splendiforous golden age team-up when Camp Lo's new ablum arrives, produced by no less than Pete Rock. This is going to hip hop built to the highest level of classic craft, lyrically and production wise. Whet yr appetite below with the mixtape 80 Blocks from Tiffany's. Camp Lo will be blessing the area personally with a Hangar 09 blowout on April 28.

GO w/ MOE!

"Hierocore" by Moe Hendrix

produced by Blocade

video by Mark Fussell

it's just another wet wednesday

Liquid Liquid was part of NYC's No Wave scene of the late '70s and early '80s that took the freedoms afforded by punk and took them in an artier, funkier direction while being, technically, a lot more primitive and wild than the emerging sounds of New Wave. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth fame co-wrote the definitive book chronicling the movement. There were a few sub-sets among No Wave artists. Generally, there was a side to it that was very noisy and performance art, and a side that was more into funk and rhythm. Liquid Liquid belongs more to the latter. 99 Records in the early '80s was responsible for much of the commercially released recordings of No Wave artists, including "Cavern". After many silent years, DFA Records tracked down Liquid Liquid and released a trickle of new music. The best compilation available for original No Wave is New York Noise on Soul Jazz.

Because of the time and place No Wave emerged, some shards of it became intermingled with the seminal hip hop that was also going on. A great example is ESG's oft-sampled "UFO".

Of course, "Cavern" has a formidable hip hop legacy of its own.