Rap Won’t Save You.

Ah the joys of social networking.  Late last night El-P wrote:

i have finished recording cancer for cure. now its getting mixed.

To many, this probably isn’t that big of a deal.  But for me — and if the reaction is any indication, lots of other people too — this is a huge deal, and probably one of my most anticipated albums of the past 5 years.  I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead opened my eyes, to a lot of things.  In my opinion, that album epitomizes the post-9/11 life in America theme we’ve seen in so many different forms of media and art since the early 2000s.  It is a perfect album.  The production itself is mind-blowing, with melodies weaving in and out and popping up here and there throughout the entire disc.  Plus it features samples ranging from Kill Bill to Anchorman and Twin Peaks; and performances from Trent Reznor to Mars Volta, with the omnipresent cuts of Mr. Dibbs.  If you haven’t heard it I suggest getting it ASAP and listening to it straight through when you have the time (it’s about an hour long).

[Speaking of Mr. Dibbs, he's going through some medical complications and his insurance isn't covering the necessary surgeries he needs.  He has a Facebook page setup: Pay It Forward 2 Mr. Dibbs.  And for people who don't use Paypal, anyone who wants to give to him can mail a check to (payable to Kristin Rose):

Brad Forste
4830 Poplar St
Cincinati, OH 45212

Dibbs, for those who don't know, essentially re-revolutionized turntablism.  He'll go down as a legend.]

El-P’s next album should be a treat.  Throughout last year, he’d been updating a blog for the making of the album, with some very eyebrow-raising pics and statuses popping up now and again.  In a good way.  Here’s to hoping he’ll be playing Soundset this year.

I found this list at HipHopSite.com (great name guys!) detailing 60 reasons “to live another year” in 2011.  It’s a list of albums that were slated for release that year.  Problem is, not all of them came out in 2011, like Cancer For Cure.  Which means we (or… I) have the pleasure of getting these hip-hop albums into our greedy hands in 2012:

• El-P – Cancer For Cure
• Slaughterhouse – Welcome To: OUR HOUSE
• Dr. Dre – Detox
• Madlib & DOOM – Madvillian 2
• Q-Tip – The Last Zulu
• Cage – ???
• Aesop Rock – ???
• Ghostface – Supreme Clientele 2
• Ghostface & DOOM – Swift and Changeable
• Talib Kweli & Mos Def – Blackstar 2
• Brother Ali & Jake One – Mourning In America, Dreaming In Color
• Freeway -  Diamond In The Ruff
• Busdriver – Beau$Eros
• Kristoff Krane – ???
• Kill The Vultures – ???
• I Self Devine – The Sounds of Low Class America
• J Dilla – Rebirth of Detroit
• Tyler, The Creator – Wolf
• Wu-Tang – ???
• Public Enemy – Most Of My Heroes Don’t Appear On No Stamp/The Evil Empire of Everything

Rap Won’t Save You:

-Sonny

Dos Passos and Today.

I was paging through some John Dos Passos at the library today and noticed some lines that eerily apply to today’s cultural environment.  It’s astonishing:

“It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.”

“I make the prediction that unless those in charge and in whose hands legislation is reposed do not change the present system of inequality, there will be a bloody revolution in less than a quarter of a century in this great country of ours.”

“Law-Hating Gatherings not to be allowed in critical time threatening social upheaval.”

“Bankers Hail Era of Expansion”

“These are men for whom the rabid lawlessness, anarchistic element of society in this country has been laboring over since sentence was imposed, and of late they have been augmented by many good law abiding citizens who have been misled by the subtle arguments of those propagandists.”

-Sonny

DANGER… Or, True Face.

-  The social-networking feeds, blogosphere, and internet media outlets of the world are fluttering alight right now with memories of 9/11.  Everyone seems to be saying something, but the hard truth is no one is really saying anything.  All these “We will never forget”s aren’t necessarily accurate, as it seems to me we cannot forget what we never learned.  Sadly, 9/11 could have been one of those rare, transcendent moments for a group of people (perhaps, even, all people) that forever alters their very existence.  One of those once-in-a-few-hundred-years moments.  Where an event is so mind-bendingly huge, so utterly foreign yet so familiar, and so deeply personal that we take a step back to examine where we’ve been and where we’re going; not out of curiosity, out of necessity.

-  Meanwhile, The Atlantic is taking a reasonable, honest look at life in the 21st Century (particularly in America).  A rebuttal, of sorts, to that awful Heritage Foundation report blaming the poor (it’s what happens when you run out of scapegoats) for the recession.

-  The true face of America:

-Sonny

Defacing the Slick Six.

Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America was a novel I bought a while ago.  Before I went to Mexico in November, in fact.  Needless to say (if precognition or foresight is real) I never got into it.  Well I just started it a last week, and I’m quite impressed with Brain Francis Slattery’s writing so far.  In a way, he is the American writer I wish I could be.  His style weaves surrealism, realism, grit, high-concept, history, present, and future, and somehow it is extremely cohesive and sensible.  He is cynical and optimistic at the same time; recognizing the past flops and triumphs of the United States. His story has been thus far heart-warming and unnerving: squatters shooting up in an abandoned office building until they die, a father reading a classic children’s book from a past America to his daughter in front of a blazing fire.  It may be obvious what this book is about (on the surface): the future collapse of the United States.  Economically, bureaucratically, and functionally, but perhaps not philosophically or idealistically.

What may not be so obvious is the writer’s background and history.  He is the perfect man for the job in this case.  You can find Brian Francis Slattery‘s entire impressive resume at his WEBSITE.  He is currently the editor of a New England based newsletter.  This, the New Haven Review is his baby.  His home town job.  But he also edits Eastern European Economics and Emerging Markets Finance and Trade. He holds a masters in international affairs from SIPA, specializing in economic development and international law, and a bachelor of arts in English from Williams College.  He works for the Columbia University Press.  He writes Non-Fiction American prose for his own newsletters, but also many others; think This American Life type, minus the great voice of Sarah Vowell.  Come to think of it, Slattery’s voice is similar to Vowell’s (though still distinctly different).  Liberation is his second full Fiction Novel.  On top of all this, he is a musician.  He plays fiddle and banjo in the great spectre of Appalachain style American bluegrass.  This may be the one vital piece of information which lends itself best to his writing: Slattery is a folk/bluegrass player who’s style hearkens back to nearly one hundred years ago.

Anyone with a Masters from Columbia University on Economic Development, specializing in Human Rights, has the perfect knowledge of the American Market System to write a fictional account of that system’s collapse, not to mention the fall of the Great American Dollar.  Two excerpts from very early on in the book jumped out at me and I’d like to share them.

We are not the first or the last.  Everyone should relish the interesting times we live in, the changing of an epoch, the chance to start over.  In the mountains, mere hours from where we stand, bears kill for food under trees pointing at the sky; off the coast of Chile, whales swim through cool water; on the Ocean floor, tectonic plates shift apart and the seam bleeds magma that boils seawater and scabs into the stone.  These things the death of the dollar can never touch.

AND

“You should see Monaco, Kuala.  You can’t pass a streetlight without a suicide hanging from it.”  That was the thing about economies collapsing.  The more you had, the more you lost.  The pensions, the bonds, the savings accounts, the money put aside from decades of work, all gone in two days; the collapse was a tsunami, and all of us and the American Dream had been on the beach, eyes closed, chairs angled at the sun, too close to the water to get away.

In the spirit of what the previous excerpt says about the Dollar.  I’d like to post some beautifully defaced Dollars from THIS Flickr Account.  I discovered this via SuperPunch.

-Sonny

Miss Alexander’s Poem.

… from you-know-what.  I thought this was a remarkable piece of poetry; for me personally, the most beautiful part of the ceremony.  Here it is:

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

-Sonny

Punkabilly Pebbles.

The Pretenders – Break Up The Concrete

Somehow this is a punk album, WITHOUT any punk drums or punk guitar, and WITH a steel-pedal guitar and accordion.  Punk, though heavily influenced by the sounds of Rock-ish Country, which of course spills into Rockabilly.  The Pretenders started during the end of the original British punk music scene; they came out hard and fast, dedicated to keeping that scene alive into the early 1980s.  But Chrissie Hynde grew up in Akron, Ohio, and the band showed inclinations towards American music, specifically Rockabilly, directly after the death of founding guitarist James Honeyman-Scott in the mid and early 80s.  The lead guitar work here, by James Walbourne, is sporadic, full of Tele-esque tone, and plucky.  No typically punk power chords, very little palm muting, and very atypical rhythms and syncopation.  The steel guitar feels like it waltzed straight out of Nashville.  That is not to say it’s a carbon copy of country music lap guitar, not only because this is a slightly different instrument (steel PEDAL guitar, not lap guitar), but because it’s played with a more desperate and rhythmic quality not seen in typical steel string guitar work.  Eric Haywood plays his pedal guitar as if it were a part of the musical base, or framework, instead of simply adding another layer of color to the songs.  The drums are great on this record.  Most of the beats are drastically different from one another, even if the songs are similar in structure or tempo.  So what makes this a punk record?  Well, besides Hynde’s vocals (which are almost always punk), as I said before with the lap guitar, the songs are performed with a desperation only felt in punk music.  Without that desperation this would be yet another example of an artist or band trying desperately to be something they’re not (think the awful attempt at the “dark” aspects of his life in Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines).  With it, this is an album which stays true to the band’s original spirit, that punk desperation, while simultaneously experimenting in another genre or form (think Neil Young’s brilliant Prairie Wind, which coincidentally also features excellent steel pedal guitar).

Dillinger Four – C I V I L W A R

This band, hailing from my neck of the woods, creates a sound that is much more typically punk rock.  Though this new album speaks with a more melodic and relevant presence than their previous LPs.  I just listened to CivilWAR earlier today in its entirety and when the first chorus kicked in on “A Jingle For The Product” (the first song) I was surprised at how the two guitars played off of one another melodically, especially in relation to the VERY melodic vocals, knowing all about Dillinger Four’s sound and approach.  In every sense of the term, this album represents this band growing up.  The lyrics are incredibly relevant while maintaining the sardonic quips and daily frustration which stem from punk rock.  I.E. From “Parishiltonisametaphor” to “Fruity Pebbles” (which repeats the idea of “tonight I’m drinking alone”).  This track listing is one of the most awesome I’ve read in quite a while.  Just by reading these titles one can ascertain what exactly this album is about: the seeming death of everything that was cool about America (hopefully we’ll see a resurrection ala Ra’s Al Ghul and his Lazarus Pit; not to be confused with Nick Cave’s Dig!  Lazarus Dig!!!).  This album took years and years to produce and actually put out, and that’s frustrating for anyone who’s ever been involved in music, but I think it’s worth it.  This is all the hooks and catchiness of popular punk, without all the bullshit and WITH some lyrical content that matters and is relevant.  And kudos to Lane Pederson, because the drums on this disc are amazing.  Track list:

1. A Jingle For the Product
2. Contemplate This On the Tree of Woe
3. Parishiltonisametaphor
4. Gainesville
5. Ode to the North American Snake Oil Distributor
6. Minimum Wage is a Gateway Drug
7. The Classical Arrangement
8. Americaspremierefaithbasedinitiative
9. The Art of Whore
10. Fruity Pebbles
11. A Pyre Laid for Image and Frame
12. Like Eye Contact in an Elevator
13. Clown Cars on Cinder Blocks

Random, but I just listened to some Citizen Cope after rattling through these two punk records, that Clarence Greenwood cat can sing man… wheeew.  Wow.  I mean… fuckin’ WOW.

-Sonny