- The 2007 album I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is one of my favorite albums ever. For real; no hyperbole. So when I saw El-P talking about putting the finishing touches on his next studio LP on the net — tentatively titled, but the title would remain, Cancer For Cure – I knew 2012 would be a good year for me musically. Then I bought the thing and it started with an ominous William S. Burroughs — my favorite writer ever; for real, no hyperbole — reading from his Nova Trilogy, I knew the album would be one of my favorites before barely a shred of material even hit my earholes. Let me back up though.
A great friend of mine heard the album before I did. No, not cause he torrented that low-quality, shit leak weeks in advance; because he pre-ordered the album and it came to his place a week beforehand. I didn’t because I miss buying albums the old fashioned way: waiting with anticipation for the release date (typically a Tuesday), then going to the record store and buying a copy without previously hearing any of it. His initial impression was that I might not like it as much as ISWYD because it lacked the progressive conceptualization of that album, and to a lesser extent El’s first solo-trek Fantastic Damage. He also said the features weren’t quite as jaw-dropping as ISWYD (Mars Volta blow me away every time). These things are true, but Cancer For Cure is still a hell of a victory in its own right.
The album is as cohesive — and definitely flows as well — as El’s previous albums, even if it is not as conceptual. Not a bad thing at all. And as much as I’d like to have seen C4C come across as the final piece in a trilogy of 2000′s albums for El, it’s refreshing to see him step so boldly into the post-DefJux, post-2000′s, latter-half, of his career. Lots of the reviews have been calling this “future music”. Though I would not argue with that description, El’s been banging out that brand of dystopian rap since Fantastic Damage. The obsession with paranoia, the nature of reality, and future landscapes has been there since he went a go at it himself; these themes, and many more science fiction based themes, appear vehemently on both his previous albums. This is not why C4C is “future music”, at least not for El. It’s future music because of what it represents to his already impressive catalog.
Easily and without question, this is El’s most accessible solo record. Accessible does not equal bad, accessible does not equal good. Accessible is a descriptive term on the nature of the sound, not of the artistic merit itself. You can very easily bang this album in your vehicle, with all the windows down, annoying someone next to you at a stop light who’s trying to carry on a cell phone convo. You can walk to it. Run to it. Shit, you might even be able to work out to it if you were inclined. Generally speaking, it is nod-your-head heavy shit: incredibly hard to play quietly, or dislike.
But not always. Flashes of that signature El-P break/coda/dreamscape production step in front of the rattle your teeth beats from time to time, always a welcome site. In fact, the end of the record might be my favorite third: a sort-of “cool down” period (maybe the work out thing is legit?) where C4C gets introspective and more complex musically. Feels good after being blasted to the ground and kicked in the ribs for 9 tracks or so. But before that we do get a little relief in short phrases and pieces throughout the disc.
That seems to me is the difference between C4C and ISWYD: the melodic breaks are still there, just not nearly as long (or, in some cases, repeated). This could be a lesson El learned on his last Megamix album: beats/phrases are presented to the listener, run through a single cycle, then shoved aside for the next thing in line. Probably what makes it so accessible. “You don’t like a certain section? Give me 30 seconds, you’ll have something else”.
C4C might not be the complex urban masterpiece of paranoia that ISWYD is, or the raw and unsettling post-9/11 triumph that FanDam is… but it certainly is it’s own complete and very well produced album, and probably as good as either of the other two. A very welcome addition to his impressive, if short, catalog. Here’s to hoping it isn’t another 5 year wait until El’s next solo adventure.
- The BBC should be switching the word “wimps” for “addicts” when discussing the abuse of prescription pain killers in the United States, the “Nation of Wimps”. The USA consumes 80% of the world’s pain killers. And maybe we are complete pussies, but I personally know several people who have been, or are, addicted to pain killers (one being a former employer). It’s a big problem. We don’t think twice about it because, hey… ya know, a doctor told me to take these so it’s okay right? Getting prescribed something from a doctor certainly makes it more acceptable, but not necessarily more safe. As the BBC video and accompanying article explain:
“Prescription drug abuse is the fastest growing drug abuse in the USA with more overdose deaths than heroin and cocaine combined.”
- Currently going through a huge Buck 65 kick. This song is awesome:
- Updates on Ridley Scott’s upcoming projects. Including a sequel to Blade Runner (or… “spin-off”), a Prometheus sequel, and some sort of thriller with a script written by Cormac McCarthy. I’m so glad he got all that epic, historical war shit out of his system.
- Mentioned Blade Runner yesterday. Here’s a link to the original production sketchbook. Lots of really great conceptual art, everything from vehicles (the “flying cars” in the film, and pictured in PKD’s mind when he wrote it, are some of the more realistic we’ve seen) to weapons to locales. One very odd connection between this film and Metropolisis the use of a very massive and towering complex in the middle of an already massive metropolitan, skyscraper riddled city. Both are surely references to the biblical Tower of Babel. Which is significant.
- Brian K. Vaughan explains some interesting, and logical, viewpoints on what it means when comics sell out. Not in the “maaan, you’re such a sellout… you used to be cool” type way; as in when a comic gets ordered by suppliers enough to the point where no copies remain for ordering from the publisher itself. Long story short: great for buzz, not so much for practical sales. It’s simply “creates a roadblock between readers and the material they want to read, and between retailers and the books they want to sell”, in Brian’s terms.
His new book Saga seems like it’ll be wonderful. The first issue was charming and funny and romantic. Not to mention timely yet very otherworldly. Cover:
- Awesome video of the evolution of the Moon. Courtesy of NASA (I thought they didn’t have any money?):
- List of foreign films to see according to Martin Scorsese, a pretty solid authority on films to see I’d say. A few surprises, many expected. I’ve seen a number of these but would like to see more.
The first film is Metropolis, one of the best science fiction movies of all-time. If you haven’t seen it, I’d suggest getting a copy shipped to you courtesy of a rental service. It’s amazing, especially for 1927. A remake is in the works. Anyways, here’s a cool re-imagining of the original movie poster from Deviant Art (original link):
- And speaking of awesome science fiction flicks, Ridley Scott will apparently be doing a sequel/prequel to Blade Runner, which I saw bits and pieces of yesterday at work. I’m certainly all for exploring the dystopian Los Angeles depicted in the first film. The city is somehow ugly and scary and beautiful and appealing all at the same time.
I found this on my hard-drive last night. Forgot about it. I’m not even sure where I was going with this. Maybe I’ll elaborate on it next week sometime.
Leaves rustle across street, embedded into the morning’s papers and waste, finally clinging to the front glass of towering commerce. SmartSoft Center: free-standing erect at 83 stories, swaying slightly, peering over miles upon miles of Earth strewn out below its feet. The river cut into the horizon, suffocated by concrete and piping, eventually emptying into the ocean. Expansive window lights dimly flicker in the dawn’s late shine. The city wakes.
On Hammond, Wednesday’s business begins with traffic thinning out and sidewalks emptying. A SmartSoft maintenance man installs a new output bus on one of its thousands of USB information hubs scattered like rats across the city. The floral branch of The Wall receives a shipment of engineered magnoliophyta roots, condensed down to some four-odd thousand per cubic centimeter. The package tumbles out of the vacuum seal onto a shelf marked “RE: EXPANSION”. A wanderer crudely (a wired port system feeding a Frankenstein-ques converter) hacks what he can while no one’s looking… with the naked eye. He knows he’s on camera though. Those newly installed and up to date, his primitive rig cannot touch. Read the rest of this entry »
- Kristoff Krane, over the past few years, has evolved into one of my favorite rappers. And songwriters. He’s a captivating performer, inspirational and wholly original, and he writes excellent lyrics. If you don’t know much about him, a good introduction to him might be his dual release from 2010: Hunting For Father/ Picking Flowers Next To Roadkill. The latter features Slug, the late Eyedea (RIP), and POS. The former features very experimental production from Krane and Eyedea, and blends a singer-songwriter sensibility with Krane’s stream-of-conscious brand of hip-hop. “Hunting For Father” is one of my favorite albums to come out in years.
He’s back with a new release titled “Fanfaronade”. The album will be a FREE download, which is awfully kind of him. However, to offset the cost of making the album, he’s started a Kickstarter page for it. Any little tiny bit helps. There’s an excellent video of him explaining all this at the link (I’m having a hard time re-coding it to embed here). The album is apparently going to be pretty dark, on account of him losing his best friend over that period of time, and features some awesome rappers like Crescent Moon, Sage Francis, and Illogic.
- There’s probably no quote that better sums up my feelings of presidential elections now, and the one this year than:
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s palace”
- Lot’s of good comics coming up this spring (I believe a few came out today). I’m especially pumped for:
China Mieville‘s DIAL H. Mieville’s a batshit crazy enough genre writer to turn an old series about dialing “H-E-R-O” into your telephone and becoming a superhero for a short period of time into a modern trip through popular culture.
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ SAGA. This, I think, came out today. A creator-owned from Vaughan about new parents trying to raise their baby through an ongoing galactic war? Sure, why not. Also, it promises “Star Wars style action and Game of Thrones-esque drama”.
Hickman‘s MANHATTAN PROJECTS. Which is already out I believe. Don’t know too much about this one, but if it’s a creator owned from Hickman, one could guess the concepts will be very high-brow and I’m certain the art will be beautiful judging by the preview. Also from Hickman, SECRET, which came out today.
The author of Freedom and The Corrections, regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists, said consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology. “The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.
“I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”
- Since the announcement that the White Stripes were no longer going to be a band, Jack White has been busy. He’s been involved with a litany of side-projects (most of which are good) producing, writing, drumming, and playing guitar and singing. Now, he’s announcing his debut solo album on his own Third Man Records. I would assume he’ll be doing damn near everything on it, he’s an excellent drummer at least.
“Jack White has launched his solo career, announcing he will release his debut LP in April. Recorded over the last few months, Blunderbuss is “an album I couldn’t have released until now”, he said, revealing the first single on his new website.
“I didn’t really even think of recording under my own name for a long time,” White told Radio 1′s Zane Lowe on Monday night. “I thought, ‘I’ve got the rest of my life to do that.’” The release comes almost a year after the White Stripessplit. The singer and guitarist has hardly been twiddling his thumbs: he continues to play with two other bands, the Dead Weather and the Raconteurs, and is one of rock’n'roll’s most sought-after producers and songwriters. But his solo album was an accident, he told Lowe.”
- Should Art Be Austere In A Recession?It’s an interesting question, and one that Guardian writer Jonathan Jones tackles sure-handedly. His answer is no.
In art, thinking about luxury is not the same as grasping it. Art can imagine everything from a feast to a fast – and yet it is always an idea, an image. This is not confined to artists: it is an aspect of how people think about food and fashion – we don’t necessarily leap from thought to action. Fashion fans do not all have the money to purchase everything or anything they see in a magazine, any more than an art lover has to have the clothes they see on a fabulously dressed person in a portrait. Fantasy is part of looking and thinking.
Leave it to clergymen to blame society’s ills on images of the unattainable. Imagining luxury is as human as imagining want. The real ugliness of the age of austerity would be to limit innocent pleasures, to force misery on the modern mind. It’s bad economics (someone has to buy some stuff if the economy is to grow), and it’s hopeless human psychology. You can’t impose austerity on the imagination.
The corporate society has been an enduring wellspring of stories over the last century. Inspired by the factory production line, Aldous Huxley predicted a future where humans were born and bred only to fulfil a corporate function in Brave New World. The cyberpunk vision of William Gibson’s Neuromancer charted a future where government had collapsed entirely, and society was ruled by a few super-powerful corporations.
In the midst of a global economic crisis that has shed light on the darker workings of the capitalist system, these days corporate society seems less like SF fantasy and more like a living reality. Whether it’s the revelation of the “super-cluster” of 147 companies who have grasped control of 40% of the world’s entire wealth, or the barely-reported $16tn loans made by the US Federal Reserve to banks and business soon after the 2008 financial crash, multinational corporations seem to wield incredible and unaccountable power over our democratic society.
- I cut my fore-finger pretty deeply yesterday, right on the tip too. So typing is kind of a bitch right now. Not that I normally write a TON on here anyways, just saying. Guess I can kiss any guitar playing goodbye for at least a good week (probably more).
- I wish I could write a ton though, the new CASSANOVA is badass. Matt Fraction is back on that title, returned from the depths of the mainstream heroes, and it is a pleasure to read. Very, Very good comics:
- BleedingCool has an article titled “When A Seven Year Old Girl Reads The New Starfire”. (DC, in their infinite wisdom, has been accused a bit lately of sexism in their company-wide reboot. A combination of a tasteless appearance of Starfire wearing a translucent bikini and Catwoman turning into little more than a man-hungry tramp.)
This is what she thinks of the old Starfire.
“She’s like me. She’s an alien new to the planet and maybe she doesn’t always say the right thing, or know the right thing to do. But she’s a good friend, and she helps people. She’s strong enough to fight the bad guys, even when they hurt her. Even her sister tried to kill her, but Starfire still fights for the good side. And she helps the other heroes, like Superboy and Robin and Raven. She’s smart too. And sometimes she gets mad, but that’s okay because it’s okay to get mad when people are being mean. And she’s pretty.”
This is what she thinks of the new Starfire;
“I can see almost all of her boobs… Well she is on the beach in her bikini. But… she’s not relaxing or swimming. She’s just posing a lot… she’s not fighting anyone. And not talking to anyone really. She’s just almost naked and posing.”
And when asked if the new Starfire is a good hero, replies;
- I’ve been away on “holiday” for a few days and haven’t been around. Although I worked quite a bit over that period so it really wasn’t much of a holiday for me. I have mixed feelings — that I won’t get into — on the 4th of July.
- I’m quite surprised that Djaffar Chetouanedoesn’t have Wikipedia page yet. Or a book deal. True, he’s only written one book that came out earlier this year, but his story and personal history is one that I would assume some publisher would want out there (perhaps not the case though if you spend any time looking at New York Times best-seller lists). I listened to part of his interview with local radio personality/all-around weirdo TD Mischke a couple nights ago and it blew me away. Forced to pick-pocket his way through northern Africa for bread, pose as Jewish to enter Isreal, pose as Muslim to escape an Egyptian prison, Chetouane roamed Western Middle-East for years on end, looking for a purpose, until finally being thrown into a military prison for his part in the “Black October” riots in Algeria, 1988. In prison he was repeatedly brutalized and beaten and burned and maimed until he made the decision that he was going to try to escape (in the interview he said he didn’t care if he died trying, he’d rather have died than lived in that prison for another month). He picked out of his cell in the middle of the night and walked past a couple sleeping guards holding assault rifles. This is the stuff of a political-espionage thriller. He said he could literally hear his heart beating. He slinked through the barbed wire fences on the outside and ditched his clothes (apparently in Algeria they often times use German Shepherds to track prisoners). He then roamed over the border into Morocco where he finally started to feel free, even surrounded by a police state’s worth of military in a country cloaked in political unrest. He eventually made it to America where he went to school to be a writer. Donkey Heart Monkey Mind is his first novel, chronicling this amazing story. Here it is on Amazon, and here’s the official site. Here is his lengthy interview with TD Mischke:
- I’m just now discovering The Philosopher’s Magazine, a wonderful site and mag based out of the UK that will talk interestingly on just about anything. Their “genre” under the archives tab labeled “Ideas Of The 21st Century“ is particularly of interest to me. There’s 50 of them, ranging from “The Equality of Intelligence” to “Saving a Child — Easily” to “Human Enhancement”. I’m going to go throw one on Facebook just in the vague hope that someone, somewhere will read one.
(This is the article I saw recently that introduced me to the site. It’s about how reported UFO sightings have drastically changed the speed of said UFO from decade to decade, generation to generation; the author examines why this is happening.)
- Really cool, mystical, other-worldly illustrations at Josh Courlas’ Tumblr. I’d recommend following him if you’ve got one. Example:
- I can’t stop listening to this song (it made me cry the first time I heard it):
