KID KOALA
I remember when it first came out, it wasn’t like people just got it right away or anything.
DAN THE AUTOMATOR
That’s just how it is, because you’re giving them something that they’re not used to. You’re in the music world, and you know everything has to be categorized. And once you do something that’s not categorized, it messes people up, it trips them up.
KID KOALA
We finished that record, we did a ten city tour, I think, but we were all literally coming off of other tours, so we just stopped it at that. A few months later, Gorillaz came out and just super-nova-ed.
DEL THA FUNKEE HOMOSAPIEN
When it first came out, wasn’t nobody tripping like that. Of course, I knew that ahead of time. Nobody’s going know when it first drops. You got to give it time for people to listen to it and figure out what it is. It was some years.
KID KOALA
It took three, four years before it found its audience and then that audience just kept multiplying somehow. The record was being passed around to people. I guess it became a little bit of a cult classic in a sense. It was odd how excited people got when I would even mention Deltron, or that we were working on some new material.
The first time I heard about Deltron 3030 was on VIVA2, a more cultured, German-speaking MTV, and it didn’t stick. I rediscovered it years later and realised what I had missed. A truly groundbreaking hip hop record.It became a favourite amongst some of my friends, even those that wouldn’t normally listen to rap music much.
Saturday, 29 March 2025
— I did not know there was a 30-minute extended film to Beastie Boys’ Make Some Noise.
— This mashup of SNL musical guests, that acts as the intro to Questlove’s upcoming documentary, is brilliant. Can’t wait to watch the whole thing now.
The whole experience is the same as “Summer of Soul.” At first, I said, “Just let me get the 20 coolest performances, let’s cut and paste it, and that’s it.” But I’m not at the place where I’m ready to say: “OK, here’s what you asked for. Where’s my money?” I want to make history buffs and nerds feel good about this show, and I want future creatives to get a master class on how to take risks and be creative.
Funding member of groundbreaking hip-hop group The Roots, member of the Soulquarians, Fallon’s in-house band (neglectable), author of books on music history and creativity and music-history documentary film maker. Questlove is manifesting himself as one of the most important and influential cultural icons of our times.
Sunday, 22 December 2024
— Soul legend Al Green covers R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts”.
We’re so lucky Al Green is still around and releasing new music. Few artists embody the very definition of “soul” like he does.
Friday, 20 December 2024
— I love this early and very innocent rendition of MGMT’s “Kids.” It’s just too lads in college making music, having the time of their lives. Kids, also notice, no-one in the crowd is holding a smart phone taking selfies or filming the gig.
— Body Count feat. David Gilmour – Comfortably Numb. As one commenter on Youtube put it neatly: “This is a song about a whole nation having a psychotic break.”
— A new single from BADBADNOTGOOD and Tim Bernardes: Poeira Cosmica.
Wednesday, 13 November 2024
— Is the Love Song Dying? From the Pudding, a visual exploration of the evolution of love in popular music.
The love song didn’t die; it evolved. People are loving, losing, and connecting in more ways than ever before. We argue that modern pop is just as love-struck as ever
— From the department of “albums I used to own that I can’t find anywhere anymore”: The Soul of Stax Vol. III, a compilation of recordings from the infamous Stax Records label including some bangers from Otis Redding, Issac Hayes and Rufus Thomas. I put together an Apple Music playlist for your and my listening pleasure and future reference.
In 2002, before Madlib and MF DOOM finished Madvillainy, the first demo sequence of the album leaked online – early vocal cuts from DOOM, recorded then quickly mixed in LA at Madlib’s Bomb Shelter studio. The leak spread around the world, and while the tracks may have been unfinished, it was clear that this was a hip-hop album unlike any other…
— There is, as far as I know, no Hip-Hop equivalent to dad rock, the music that reminds white men in their forties of their younger days. There should be because The Auditorium Vol I falls squarely into this category.
Common and Pete Rock are legends of the genre. Anything they touch on their own will likely be good. A collaboration has to exceptional. And this album is. 15 tracks reminiscent of the boom bap era, the golden years of hip hop, paired with Common’s smart create an all too familiar atmosphere. Get some cold Mixery, let’s meet at the skatepark and see what happens tonight.
“Vol I” it says in the album title indicating there might be more. I hope there is.
Sunday, 10 November 2024
— Amyl and the Sniffers is the kind of music the world needs these days. It’s raw and loud and unapologetically anti everything. Just like the Sleaford Mods or the Idles. It’s telling that this kind of music comes out of Australia or the UK while the US swamp the world with mindless pop music.
The way he used technology to change hip hop makes it feel like the miracle of the pyramids. As a former hip hop beat maker myself, I can’t figure out what the fuck he did on some of that record, almost 10 years later, even though technology has now made it easier to do what was then not achievable in music production. And yet it’s not cerebral to the point of losing the funk or the soul of human feeling. His use of technology is only to accentuate the emotions of the music, not overpower them. It sounds simple until you hear the original samples that were used. Then you really appreciate Dilla’s craft at creating and in general, the art of sampling to make original music.
— Condé Nast is closing Pitchfork and folds its remains into douchebag magazine GQ. This is indeed an absolute travesty but it follows a familiar pattern. A niche publication becomes successful with a dedicated audience. Big publishing house acquires the publication to „develop the format.“ Big publishing house realises there are limits to the growth within the niche audience and that the revenue isn’t what they expected. Big publishing house expands the topics covered in the publication—here to include pop and rap coverage—but still the numbers aren’t satisfying for the suits. Big publishing house closes the publication. It’s an ongoing cycle of money destroying culture, unless the culture is Taylor Swift or Beyoncé.
Wednesday, 17 January 2024
— The Internet Archive now hosts more than 350 thousand hiphop mixtapes from DatPiff. Kids, before Spotify started numbing you with algorithmically curated playlists, we used to discover new music through other humans. Rap music had very little airplay on the Radio or music television; sharing mixtapes from friends and popular DJs was the only way to find new stuff. Mixtapes are an essential part of Hip Hop culture and this is an invaluable archive of the genre’s history.
Ken Fritz built a custom stereo system, with massive speakers and a 750 kilogram floating record player to reduce vibration affecting the sound. Not just that, he also built a room around it optimised for audio.
This is truly impressive. Shame the documentary doesn’t feature anyone describing if and how much better Fritz’ system sounds compared to other hi-end stereos.
Sleaford Mods cover West End Girls in the most Sleaford-Mods way possible. Barely change the music, Jason Williamson doing the talking, done. Brilliant.
Monday, 04 December 2023
— Micheal Stipe is working on a solo album. What a lovely portrait of the former R.E.M. singer. “Stipe had been invited downstairs to say hello and, finding Swift standing in the doorway, extended his hand and said: ‘You must be Taylor’ — an objectively cool thing to say to Taylor Swift.”
The Beatles have released one last song, with vocals salvaged from an old demo tape and isolated using AI technology. It’s a good song, but still it doesn’t feel real because you know they couldn’t be in the studio together to finish it. Shame that.
Jeff Tweedy and co’s 13th album bears a close family resemblance to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but with Cate Le Bon in the producer’s chair, it has an appealing wash of left-field weirdness and its lyrics express an older man’s anxieties
And he’s right. I’m not the greatest Wilco connoisseur, but to me, both Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Cousin are great albums, whereas the other Wilco stuff never grew on me.
Now there’s a universal voice, and the verses sound and feel like a string of buzzphrases. Any song could be by anyone from anywhere. The songs convey a shallow, one-size-fits-all black cool. It’s hip hop muzak. On another podcast JPEGMafia and Danny Brown talked about how impossible the old methods of beat-making were, and how layered the rapping. Hip hop these days can be made more quickly, easily, and cheaply, and can spread farther faster. Anyone, anywhere can do it, without vetting, and find an audience.
This resonates a lot. I don’t understand today’s rap music. Today’s rap is cheap, both musically and lyrically. It’s created to sell, not to create or to educate. Rap has lost its soul.
Thursday, 24 August 2023
— How Hip Hop Conquered the World “Wesley Morris traces the art form from its South Bronx origins to all-encompassing triumph.”
(I swear this is the last post about Hip Hop’s 50th)
Thursday, 17 August 2023
— The 150 greatest Hip Hop music videos according to the Rolling Stone. So many brilliant hip hop videos have been produced over the years: The Pharcyde’s Drop, Beastie Boys’ Sabotage or Tyler, the Creator’s Yonkers. And you end up with Missy Elliot on number 1? The artist dancing in front of a fish-eye lens, big cars, half-naked women dancing in the rain, didn’t every music video look like that at the time?
— The greatest Hip Hop movies, according to The Guardian’s Radheyan Simonpillai. Beat Street is clearly missing from this list. And if you include The Forty-Year-Old Version, you might as well include other movies that explore the social environments from which rap music originates, such as Menace II Society or Boyz n the Hood.
The sample technique that stands out in terms of complexity and intricacy is J Dilla’s Don’t Cry who took 23 samples from just one song and created something entirely new. That’s why there are books about his life and music.
Thursday, 10 August 2023
— Singer Sixto Rodriguez has died aged 81. Now is a good time to rewatch Searching for Sugarman, a documentary about Rodriguez that revived his musical career.
— “Madvillainy” is the best Hip Hop album ever produced. Its origin story is sufficiently hazy, the stuff of folkloristic legend. A lot circumstance and coincidence led to Madlib and MF Doom finally coming together in a studio, the possibility of them never meeting was very real, and we’d miss out on this masterpiece today. The album was leaked online before it was finished and completely re-worked after.
The production is so otherworldly. It sounded “different” when over-produced tracks from Timbaland or the Neptunes took the final steps to Hip Hop’s full commercialisation. Madvillainy is a collection of short tracks composed of intricately layered jazz samples, perfectly matched by DOOM’s word smithery. There were no hooks. This isn’t music you blast in your Nissan Micra, trying to impress the ladies sitting outside the cafe with a stereo system worth more than your car. You listen to this album at home; alone, sipping whiskey, smoking a pipe.
Once you get past the boring parts of the Will Hagle’s Madvillainy, where he explores how Madlib and MF DOOM met, who introduced whom to whom and who dropped records where and when; and who deserves credit and who doesn’t—once you get past those ego-centric accounts, the book turns to Madvillainy’s music and becomes interesting. The album’s artistic significance is rooted in Madlib’s and DOOM’s interplay and cross-reference between sample, beat and rhyme. One example: the track “Meat Grinder,” in which DOOM never references meat, or grinding, or the grinding of meat.
The opening sample, about a jar beneath a bed, draws from Frank Zappa: a kindred genre-blurring, jazz-influenced weird with an absurdist sense of humor who experimented with Quasimoto-style tape effects. The name of the album from which the sample was taken? Uncle Meat.
Hagle unveils puzzle pieces to many of the Madvillainy’s songs, which makes you appreciate a great album even more.
2023, Bloomsbury Publishing, 152pp. Buy from Bookshop.org.
I always had a soft spot for the band and Damon Albarns work (well, with the exception of Gorillaz, which never clicked for me)—so, yeah, I’m looking forward to this.
— Non-fiction is at its best when you learn unexpected things. In a book about a hip-hop producer you’d expect to read about colonialism and segregation but not necessarily about city planning or the economic decline of a city.
These inter-connected topics define the environment for James Dewitt Yancey growing up in Detroit to become one of the most prolific rap-music producers. Going by his stage name J Dilla, he is the mind behind classic rap tunes such as De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High”, Common’s “The Light”, or The Pharcyde’s “Running”.
J Dilla invented a new sound that would not only define the sound of Hip Hop going forward but also find its way into RnB, Jazz, and even pop music. Before J Dilla, there were two ways of musical timing: straight time, where the rhythmic pulse is divided equally and swing time where the pulse is “divided unequally, such that certain subdivisions (typically either eighth note or sixteenth note subdivisions) alternate between long and short durations”. J Dilla combined both these styles; he layered, stretched and compressed them to create a new rhythmic feels. The resulting sound is unexpected, a little off, and very different to the style du jour during the boom bap era—but also more intriguing. Most of the Hip Hop music I fancy today uses J Dilla’s rhythmic feel.
Soon big names started emulating Dilla’s production. Questlove wanted to play he drums like Dilla. D’Angelo wanted his album, though recorded with a live band, to sound like it came from J Dilla’s MPC. Pharell Williams and Kanye West cite him as influences. And yet, despite all of the industry recognition, J Dilla never had a commercial successful pop hit. The closest he came was probably Janet Jackson’s “Got ‘Til It’s Gone.” N’Sync, yes, the boyband, enquired about a remix that could have led to a lucrative contracts, but J Dilla turned them down. Instead Timbaland went on to remix N’Sync, to later produce Justin Timberlake and subsequently built a career by pulling faces in music videos.
Based on hundreds of interviews with Dilla’s contemporaries, Dilla Time sheds a light on the musical theory of his sound and how it inspired plenty musicians that came after him. But it also paints the complete picture of a conflicted man: Dilla almost exclusively worked with artists know for their soulful music, spreading messages of love and empowerment. But privately, he loved simple things, money, fancy clothes and going to the strip club. J Dilla had a temper he often took out on the people closest to him. He fathered two children with two women and apparently paid for several abortions.
Dan Charnas wrote a lovingly crafted homage to J Dilla that puts a man at the centre who often worked in the background and rarely got the recognition he deserved when he was still alive.
Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022). Farrar Straus Giroux. 480 pages.
Saturday, 29 April 2023
— The big Dilla Time playlist is now complete. It is now a whopping ten hours long, containing over 150 songs, spanning all sorts of musical genres and eras.
Friday, 28 April 2023
— Datpiff, a central archive for historical and contemporary hip-hop mixtapes, is pivoting but will hand over its library to the Internet Archive. It’s nice that sometimes good things just don’t disappear from the Internet. (via)
Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was introduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether.
Can you imagine working at Kmart for eight hours a day and you have to listen to the same 90-minute tape on repeat for a whole month?
De La Soul on stage with a classic track, The Roots as the background band, Black Thought standing in for the late Trugoy and a wonderful tribute to Trugoy—this De La Soul performance is perfect and utterly moving.
Monday, 24 April 2023
Glorious Game by El Michels Affair and Black Thought
— Although not the norm, rap music recorded with a live band has a long history: Guru’s Jazzmatazz pioneered the genre, The Roots perfected it, and BadBadNotGood’s feature with Ghostface Killah is now a classic. Glorious Game by Black Thought, of Roots fame, and El Michels Affair, of Enter-the-37th-Chamber fame, fits neatly into that line. It brings together an incredibly talented band, many of who have a staggering track record, first and foremost as members of the Menahan Street Band, Daptone Record’s house band, and an MC at the height of his game. Glorious Game is a fantastic album, laid-back and smooth like an Old Fashioned on a Friday night.
— 33 1/3—I mentioned the series of books about seminal albums of music history when I linked to a recent addition to the series about Madvillainy—also have a series of podcasts accompanying the books. Like the books, each episode is about one album and features high-profile guests such as Peanut Butter Wolf, the RZA, De La Soul’s Posdnuos, and Prince Paul.
What a band: Some of the members have played with Marc Ronson, Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones, or Charles Bradley; they are members of the infamous Menahan Street Band who are also behind many releases at Daptone Records. And Freddie Gibbs is a wildly underrated MC.
— I’m currently reading Dan Charnas’ excellent Dilla Time, a biography of acclaimed Hip Hop producer J Dilla and his music. In the book, Charnas makes extensive references to a vast number of songs—songs that influenced J Dilla’s work, songs that he sampled, and songs that were influenced by J Dilla.
The book’s experience is better when you listen to the tracks while reading. I started keeping a list of all the songs and put them in a playlist in Spotify for my reference and your pleasure. The list contains 83 tracks (so far, I’m still reading so it continues to grow), lasting 5 hours and 30 minutes.
It’s an astonishing body of music spanning different musical eras and genres, and containing many classics but also obscure tracks. Remember, at Dilla’s time, hip hop tracks were produced by sampling snippets from records, actual vinyl records—and now imagine that record collection!
Thursday, 09 March 2023
— Seth MacFarlane, you know, creator of Family Guy and American Dad, director and producer of Ted, now also sings hooks for hip hop tracks. Like in Self Medication by Logic:
I know he is into show tunes and has been performing on stage before, but damn, some people really have endless talents.
Tuesday, 07 February 2023
A grand tribute at the Grammy awards marking 50 Years of Hip Hop. It perfectly recreates the time when Hip Hop took the final turn off the street into show business: Missy Elliot has her moment. After that, everything is less about words and mostly about choreographed dancing.
Dr. Dre’s 1992 solo debut The Chronic is arguably the most important rap album in history — the record that turned hardcore rap into blockbuster entertainment, showed the uncompromising street music could sell in numbers that nobody had ever predicted, and introduced a vast cast of characters, the young Snoop Doggy Dogg chief among them.
[…]
The Chronic returns to streaming services today, and this is supposedly a celebration for the album’s 30th anniversary, which actually happened back in December.
Small detail: Spotify shows 2023 as the release year for The Chronic. Shows how much they care about music.
— A song from the television series Atlanta reminded me of a mixtape I used to play on heavy rotation: Zeb Roc Ski’s Horny Loops, an absolute classic, contains funk and soul tracks that were sampled by Hip Hop artists during the 80s and 90s. I owned a—completely legal—copy on tape, an actual cassette tape, which I must have lost during one of my many moves over the years.
I still own a tape deck, but I couldn’t find Horny Loops on sale anywhere. I’m sure most copies are either lost or got tape jammed and destroyed, and those who still own one hold on to it tightly. So I made a playlist with all the songs on Spotify; for you to listen to when you snuggle up with your significant others tonight.
Side note: I found every single track from Horny Loops on Spotify, even obscure stuff like the Ultramagnetic MCs. It’s no wonder everybody streams their music these days.
I’m loving Vibin’s Boom Bap instrumental mixes. They remind of the olden days, driving to the Baltic Sea in my friend’s VW Golf III. Now they are great background music for work.
Smalls—whose real name was Christopher Wallace—was in fine form on Meta’s Horizon Worlds metaverse platform on Friday: heaving between stanzas, pumping his fist rhythmically, and seeming very much alive. The performance can be seen here but may require logging into Facebook.
The allure of old music—and art, generally—is that it can’t be recreated if its creators aren’t around anymore. You can paint a picture that looks like a van Gogh, except it isn’t; you can create a digital avatar of the Notorious B.I.G. or John Lennon, but it’s not the person. As much as I’d love to attend a B.I.G. concert or see the Beatles play, an avatar performing playback to a recorded track isn’t the same as seeing the actual person doing their thing. I don’t get the appeal of cover bands or the tenth special remastered edition of an album that happens to be released just before Christmas. Not even the Glastonbury recordings the BBC broadcasts every year. It’s the original recording or the actual musicians on stage.
If we can digitally reproduce everything, what’s the point of venturing out of our homes to see art where it is performed? What’s the point of theatres, concerts and museums if I can just sit at home with a pair of huge goggles over my eyes? In these places—theatres, music venues, and museums—you experience art differently, unmediated. You go to a theatre because a great movie hits differently on a big screen with great sound. You go to a gig to feel artists’ emotions when they play their music on stage; you can hear the sound of their voices before a sound engineer adjusts the controller. And you visit a museum because a painting looks different standing in front of it; when you can see how the paint has been applied to the canvas.
Hand-cut audio made with 1135 scratches. Hand-drawn video made with 1038 drawings.
Wednesday, 14 December 2022
— Ooh, how did I miss this? Karate re-released three of their albums Unsolved, Some Boots and Pockets alongside the Cancel/Sing EP as a limited-edition vinyl bundle. It’s mostly sold out already, but if you’re quick, you can still snatch a copy.
Why yes, I did get myself an early Christmas present.
Tuesday, 13 December 2022
— I stumbled across this Kid Koala mix while digging through old Solid Steel episodes. The 53 minutes embody everything I love about Kid Koala: The vast, eclectic but assorted record collection, technical skill, paired with an insatiable hunger for experimentation.
It’s beyond me how Kid Koala only has a relatively small following; this mix has amassed only 18,000 plays since it was released in 2003.
— This is the story of three friends from New York City, the story of the Beastie Boys—told by the Beastie Boys. Micheal Diamond and Adam Horowitz, live on stage at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, are recalling significant events from their 30-year career. How they started as a punk rock band (everyone was in a punk rock band), how they got into rap (everyone got into rap in New York in the 1980s), how they met Rick Rubin and Russel Simmons (Rick Rubin had the equipment they needed for a gig). Moving to California, trying to leave behind “Fight For Your Right,” and finally becoming proper musicians.
As you’d expect, their story is hilarious and a little crazy. But Diamond and Horowitz are well into their fifties now; they have grown up. Between the stories of juvenile silliness and lousy decision-making, there’s also much introspection. Both take significant time to reflect on how they treated former band members before the Beastie Boys broke out and the sexist lyrics they wrote; that it was the late Adam Yauch who shaped the Beastie Boys into grown-up artists and humans.
— I listened to all tracks of the Guardian’s 20 best songs of 2022, and I’m reminded that pop music generally isn’t for me.
Steve Lacy sounds like a poor man’s Ben Folds. Listening to Beyonce reminds me of Madonna’s Music; desperately trying to sound young. And the rest is just the dullest House for the Ibiza-beach-club generation. Three artists show up more than once on the list—it looks like it wasn’t a good year for new music.
I enjoyed the new Arctic Monkeys record though; they sound different than their earlier recordings; I like it when bands evolve.
Wednesday, 23 November 2022
— Last.fm turns twenty. One of those services that have been around for what feels like ages and, apparently, still have a thriving community.
— I have kept coming back to Some Boots once every year for the last fifteen years. And I listen to it on heavy rotation for a couple of days. The whole album aged so well. Karate must be one of the most underrated bands out there.
— Hands down, Cheat Codes is the best rap album in the last five years. Danger Mouse’s production is on point, as always. Black Thought is one of the best MCs out there; I’m glad his gig in Kimmel’s show band leaves enough time to create something worthwhile. The album is delightfully old-fashioned without sounding too much like it was made during the boom bap era. It’s modern hip hop, but it sounds old. I’m old, hence I’m loving Cheat Codes.
Wednesday, 19 October 2022
I have been a fan of both Loyle Carner and Madlib ever since. Now I want an entire album between the two.
Monday, 17 October 2022
— Public-transport stations worldwide play music to discourage loitering and anti-social behaviour and deter crime inside stations.
At Parliament Station in Melbourne, it might be Fleetwood Mac if you’re lucky, but it’s mindless pop music on most days. They should be playing funk. At Penn Station in New York, it’s classical music; same as at Euston Square Station and 64 other stations in London, and it had an effect on crime rates:
Initially set up in 2007, the initiative proved successful, within 18 months, robberies dropped by 33 percent, assaults on staff were down 25 percent and vandalism by 37 percent.
