My blog has gotten bigger and bloggier. This is a good thing, but the specter of monetizing hangs over everything, chilling my rosy prospects of not running ads with the cold reality of what the future will bring.
What I mean is, I'm getting 500+ hits a day from all over the world, so now I have to do something like sell ad space and that's a real drag. I appreciate everyone showing up here so you can certainly expect me to spruce up the place and makes sure it's worth showing up for.
As for running ads, I'm certainly not going to put pop-ups on my blog or those irritating hyperlinks that appear like ninjas and force you to go to some weird site where you just know the Russian Mob's best hackers are lurking, waiting to break into your bank account through your email when you hit the button that says, "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO LEAVE THIS SITE?"
Realistically it's probably just going to be something non-intrusive, like a Paypal donation button. Later, my real goal is to only run ads for music companies, films, games and other, similar websites. Shoot, you'd click on a link to the new Thor flick, right?
Some of you great people have already noticed that I was posting quite a bit, and then suddenly I slowed down. What happened? I'll tell you. My computer got sick on me. It just kept dropping dead, and I lost megabytes of information.
I couldn't figure out what it was. The processor? The motherboard? The graphics card? The OS? It drove me crazy, no, wait, past crazy, I remember at one point I thought to myself, "Dear Lord, if I had a .38 Rossi I would put a bullet in the monitor and a bullet in the tower, just to be sure."
It's called the total geek double-tap.
Eventually, the computer died and I ended up replacing the power supply and then finally refurbishing my entire system. Screw it, I'd lost enough time and work, so it's time to invest.
The fact that it was the power supply really made me feel lame. God, it was like falling for the old electric joy buzzer gag. How did I not figure it out? It was easiest thing, but by the time my small brain put all the clues together, I had already re-installed Windows XP (Vista is the Mark of the Beast) and ran my virus checker twice.
Now I have two computers, side-by-side, and one of them is running Linux Mint 11 so I'm set. They are both connected to a backup server. If one dies, the other is there to take over so no matter what, I can finish that article.
So that's one reason why the writing slowed. Second, I'm an actor so there's been auditions, callbacks and acting, so my other career, writing, has suffered a bit. It's a good thing...every actor wants to be busy...but it's also a bad thing because the blog suffered for it.
A final reason is that I started working for ReGen Magazine. My first article with them is up, a ReView of Daniel B.'s new album, Not Bleeding Red by Nothing but Noise. I had a great time talking to Daniel B., who is one of the original members of Front 242. He's like the Roy Orbison of industrial.
But the bad news is that I can't post it here. ReGen Magazine is paying me the big bucks so I'm fine with following the rules, which means that I have to post a link to the article instead of putting a copy on my blog. Here's the article, I hope you like it. Once my InterView with Daniel B. goes up on their website, I'll post a link to it there, too.
ReGen Magazine is a solid website and the editor really knows what he's doing. All the industrial/electronica information you could want is on that site, so now you know where to go for all of your mechanical musical needs.
Baltimore rapper Wordsmith is another talented emcee in a long line of musicians who make rap that hits your soul by way of the cerebrum, combining stylized vocals with hard-hitting hip-hop to deliver an album you could either place next to your Arrested Development and KRS-One LP's or between Frank Herbert's Dune and Yamamoto Tsunetomo's Hagakure in the philosophy section of your personal library.
The album, King Noah, is Wordsmith's third solo project, dedicated to his latest, greatest personal success, an already highly respected, much-anticipated son known as Kingston Noah Parker.
As a result, King Noah is both a solid rap album reminiscent of the old-skool productions that form the bedrock of modern first rate, intelligent hip-hop and an illuminating walk around the mindscapes of a musician, father and philosopher as he weaves words and music to make an LP with a positive message both to his son and to the youth of America.
I use the term "positive message" not because it's a literary cliche' (technically, The Lord of the Rings has a "positive message" about chucking jewelry into volcanoes) but because you can't help but feel good as the album opens up with the title track, "King Noah" where Wordsmith tells his own newborn son how he feels just after the boy's birth.
"July first, 2011 during the one o' clock hour. That's when my son, Kingston Noah Parker was born," he says, beginning a 4 minute, 20 second combination of insight into Wordsmith's own personal, spiritual perspectives and a shout out to the hopes he has for his own future generation.
"Only peace and love can be the centerpiece," is only a small part of the message Wordsmith has for his son, which is vastly different from the usual creed most rappers give about their greater access to prostitutes, big bank accounts and firearms.
Don't get me wrong, I love N.W.A. and I'm bowing down with Westside Connection. I don't judge the players, I just play the game, too. But hearing the joy and wonder in a father's voice as he speaks to his son about the power of peace and benevolent persistence is about as positive as it can get, without the usual mechanical sound of a 9mm being locked and loaded, or just gunshots in general.
Wordsmith's music boasts a production value that's crisp and crystal clear. There's craftsmanship in each track. You can hear the quality not just in his third album's rhymes, rhetoric and lyrical ability but also in the cool beats and swank samples. Without going into too much detail, the record is born vintage and best appreciated on a sound system that does it justice, with a bass you can feel in your backbone five blocks away.
It's hard to believe the young artist began his career just a hip-hop, skip and jump ago with his first album, 2007's Vintage Experience, which featured tracks like "The Next Level Experience" where the rapper delivers lyrics with both authority and aplomb that speak of the harsh reality of how hard it is to make it in a rap industry that grinds out the good along with the goons.
Another writer wrote that Wordsmith is a thinking man's emcee, but a lot of rap has a rep for being think man's music. Back in 1993 Arrested Development wrote songs that got you thinking with their album, 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of... which practically required a history text in one hand and a genuine appreciation for the subtle nuances of inner city slang in the other.
There were also groups like De La Soul who composed songs like "Me, Myself and I" that were more philosophical than boastful. By the time KRS-One wrote "Self Destruction" a lot of other hip-hop artists knew that young black America needed to wake up, and rap was a good alarm bell to do it with.
That's not to say that Wordsmith wastes words by preaching to the proselyte about what the herd has heard before. He's better than that. Maybe it's because when the tracks on King Noah open up with his own personal message to the youth, there's no arrogance or ego.
When he talks about the evolution of his career in "Music for the Masses" he wants his son to understand the responsibility even a successful musician has to the world with the ethics he practices. "On My Job" warns of the evils of money, but reminds us all that while labor is bitter, dreams are sweet. "With you being a Parker man," he says, "one thing you need to know is we work hard."
"Generation X," the third track, is not only about the importance of leadership but how the world really needs good leaders with solid ethics, not just powerful ones, which is the same sentiment expressed by Yamamoto Tsunetomo hundreds of years before, when he penned his own treatise in order to inspire young professional warriors to act with honor.
When you read books like the Hagakure or Dune, there's a similar feeling that you get when listening to rap albums by artists who don't just want to make a fast buck, but want to make something that's a bedrock for a better society.
The authors of those books wrote about relationships between father and son, one generation to the next, emphasizing not only the virtues of a previous generation but the importance of virtues, which transcends generation, genre and geography.
Wordsmith has a message that preaches traditions like honesty, integrity and loyalty, but with the same experienced, strategy-laden advice Duke Leto Atredes gives to his son Paul Atredes in the science-fiction ultramasterpiece known as Dune, an awesome literary menhir full of advice that contains philosophies that parallel Wordsmith's own experienced observations.
Both men want their sons to make their mark upon the world, to attain power, but with the patient wisdom that only comes from loving benevolence and selfless, transpersonal commitment. That's a beat we all need to rock to.
King Noah won't put you to sleep at the wheel like some sort of recorded dissertation, though. Wordsmith has brought on A-list talent to make this album happen including artists like ELiM, Phil Ade and K. Sparks. The album has jazz-laced beats, innovative rhythms and enticing samples mixed with honest, poetic lyrics about racial profiling, dealing with haters, enduring the blues and going after your dreams combined with an excellent production by Centric, Capish, Certified, Rednaz Beats, Strada, DJ Eclipse and Benny Rome. To hold the LP is to have a handful of iron-strong, anvil heavy hip-hop. My advice is to invest.
King Noah will be available on June 19th. You can follow Wordsmith on Twitter right here. You can like him on Facebook right here.
One day when I was in high school I was listening to Rabies by Skinny Puppy on a cassette tape in my bedroom while I was studying for a history exam. "Rivers" had just finished up and "Choralone" was starting. Time to stop the tape and either unwind or flip it over, you know how it is.
No, you don't. We all don't. Now we just hit buttons and songs come instantly to you, popping up out of some infinite electric void. We just conjure music now, and it's a realm of science fiction for people like me who remember that when you wanted to listen to that favorite record wherever you went, you played it loud, left a tape recorder on and left the room. An hour or so later and you had a tape of whatever you wanted. Now we have cd burners, computers and iPods. The music is ours, to command at will. A golden age.
In fact, tapes were weird because every cassette tape would eventually die on you. The tape would snap or flip over, sometimes while you were listening to it, and suddenly it would sound like you were listening to space aliens. Gotta love analog.
"Choralone" is a really weird song. Don't get me wrong, "Rivers" is it's own particular flavor of weird, but "Choralone" is bizarre.
The song sounds like a hymn to Anton LeVay, homeboy. I mean, it's like a hellish, soulless dirge or a grand, malefic chant to some eon-etched chthonic deity. I don't even know what the hell the song is saying. From what I remember, the first lyric is, "UNFURNISHED," whatever the fuck that means.
Seriously, the voice is this deep, dark, almost devilish rumble, like it's coming from a vampire that's buried in the soil three feet to your left. What is this song even fucking about?
I don't know, because I usually skip over it. Like all of us, we have favorite bands and songs we hate, no matter who made them. For instance, I hate the song "Jangling Jack" by Nick Cave. It's just a dumb song that not only does nothing for me, but it's actually a negative integer that subtracts from my happiness, just like "Choralone."
So I'm in high school listening to this tape and my mother barges in and says, "What are you listening to?" I respond, "Skinny Puppy, it's an industrial band." For those of you who don't remember, growing up with your parents is a lot like growing up in jail, and your mom and dad are wardens, guards, and parole board officers. Any infraction could land you in solitary.
Mom freaks out and takes the cassette tape. The song was just too much like Satan, so she swiped it.
"Can you tell me how to get?
How to get to...
SESAME STREET!!!"
I tried to tell mom I never really liked that song, and that to be honest I was still more of a Ministry man, but the problem is my room couldn't take a thorough inspection by The Man. One, I was hiding like two boxes of condoms in my underwear drawer (it was somehow poetic to store them there) and two, I still had my copy of Too Dark Park. If I couldn't explain my way out of Rabies, I certainly couldn't talk my way out of that album.
Before I go discussing TDP, my point is that some moms think everything is Satan when you are in high school and that some Skinny Puppy songs are inaccessible.
By inaccessible I mean that sometimes, the art is just, well, not going to do it for you. That is different than a song just not being your thing. For example, some people just don't care for Roy Orbison, because they just don't care for classic American rock and roll, and because they have no soul and probably devour the flesh of babies and live near dumpsters. What I mean is, if you don't like Roy Orbison please leave my blog and never visit this hyperlink again.
An inaccessible song or artist or album is just something that is so totally out there, or maybe even chaotic, or even a little too minimalist like "MONOCHROME" by Kodo. Too Dark Park is crazy, it's almost too much Skinny Puppy for neonates to handle, but you can enjoy it. Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed is just plain fucking inaccessible.
Friends don't let friends listen to this album. It's kind of like
listening to really loud radio frequencies having an orgy.
Like I talked about in my last post, it's fun to be into music that's weird. The problem is, "Choralone" has that deep, chanting voice that just makes me feel weird listening to it. I kind of have to pay attention, but then the lyrics are very weird so it's pointless to figure them out.
The lyrics of Skinny Puppy add to the intense defamiliarization a normal person might feel when confronted by cutting edge industrial music. It's got a weird bet, I guess I could dance to it, but what is he saying? When you think about your favorite songs, it's kind of a prerequisite that you sort of kind of have to know what the fuck the message is before you go chanting the song as if it's a mantra to joy.
Remission, the album I spoke of earlier, has a lot of cool songs like "Far Too Frail," which certainly sounds like Satanic disco, but it also has songs that are nearly as bizarre as "Choralone," like "Film."
Do you know what's going on in this song? You do? Can you tell me? Because I certainly don't know, and this is one of my favorite songs from my favorite album by my favorite band. Go figure. Maybe that's what happens...you listen to a band for so long that every song they have on that one favorite album they made is perfect, and if people don't like it they just aren't hip.
By the way, just so I can wrap up that whole story about my mother, what finally happened was my father got home, explained to mom that whatever modern industrial music had to offer had nothing on The Rolling Stones, especially "Sympathy for the Devil," my mother's favorite song, so maybe she should lay off my record collection. Fathers can be very cool like that.
The lyrics of Skinny Puppy basically seem to be stream-of-consciousness, although I certainly don't believe the consciousness that is streaming is anything remotely sane. Poetry is somewhat like that. If you read a poem and know what it means, you usually either have college degree in a relevant subject or the poetry is awful.
Since you already heard "Assimilate," I'm sure you quickly realized it was a song about man's decay and descent into some sort of cybernetic, dystopic, hellish future. "Oil remove shred tear radiation everywhere it's the fear so unclear man in motion going nowhere..." ok, we get it, stop driving your car all the time, plant a tree and just recycle, I get it, you don't have to scream it.
Ladies and gentlemen, here it is, Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate.
Up in Canada there are actually Caucasians
who are so white they end up looking
light blue.
The next time you have a Halloween Party just turn the lights down and turn this up. The atmosphere will spook in no time. That's not to say it's the kind of album that's just too weird, but rather that, this album is just more ambient than industrial. It's a whole lot of beats, samples and sound effects. You just can't dance to this.
There are good songs, but for the most part this is a big collection of some pretty dense, experimental stuff. If you enjoy algebra, this is calculus. If you like Moby Dick, this is Billy Budd.
Industrial does that, sometimes. A band just comes out with an album, and it's just the soundtrack to a horror flick, and not something you play as the sun is coming up and the road trip has just begun. I mean, songs like "Fly By Night" by Chilliwack or "Freebird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd is fun, sun and good times. Driving just a little too fast on the freeway while blasting something with guitar solos is an American tradition.
Yeah, baby, program the cruise control and crank this up...
The mighty Adam Yauch has passed away, or as I prefer to think of it, he's fighting evil in another dimension. This depresses me in ways that cannot be written about, blogged out or even effectively communicated in any way, shape or form. The sadness I feel transcends normal human comprehension. It is a dearth that has it's own dimension, zip code, website (www.horriblydepressing.com) and phone number. You could navigate the Earth by it.
The fact that Adam Yauch will no longer tour with the Beastie Boys and compose music is terrible, terrible, terrible. String theory theorizes that there are 11-12 dimensions that make up what we call reality. I theorize that one of those dimensions is the mass depression that exists because Adam Yauch is gone.
Totally fucking awesome.
When I found out about Adam Yauch I was on www.rollingstone.com and there it was. WTF? I didn't even know he had cancer. If he had been in his 80's, old and falling apart, sure, you'd hear that he'd passed away and feel bad, but when someone dies young and great, it just feels very, very unfair.
Saying the Beastie Boys are great and that their music is legendary and that they are all very talented musicians is a waste of fucking time. Writing about how the Beastie Boys are awesome is like writing about how the sun is bright, hot, and important to life on Earth.
So liking the Beastie Boys is easy. They are quality. They kick it next to Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, whoever. In fact, from what I heard Obama has just declared it a national week of mourning, and if anyone says anything bad about the Beastie Boys you can punch the really hard in the mouth until a police officer shows up to arrest them for not having any taste at all for good music.
I found out that Adam Yauch died and eventually called my best friend for no damn reason. I had seen him just a few days ago, but just like me, he grew up Beastie, so I knew he was in the same dimension of sadness the whole world is, even little children who never heard of the Beastie Boys. There was a death in the family, so that's what you do, you call up your friends and mourn.
No, seriously, right now little kids living in the Amazon Jungle who don't even know what a compact disk is are scrawling rap lyrics in the mud with a stick, maybe even trying to beatbox, and they are crying because the Beastie Boys are gone.
I have to admit that I had not bought a Beastie Boys album for some time. I had grown up on the Beastie Boys. Starting with License to Ill, and then was astounded by Paul's Boutique, and then just couldn't believe how Check Your Head changed music, changed everything...maybe I'm crazy, but every rap album after Check Your Head sounded better, as if the industry knew that the Beastie Boys had once again wrecked the bell curve for everyone in music.
Growing up punk in Southern California back in the 90's was basically an invitation to get your ass kicked on a daily basis. Having a shaved head, a leather jacket, military green Dickies work pants and Doc Martin's (with black or black-and-white checkered laces, never red or white) with an Exploited t-shirt was an open invitation to get your ass beat by everyone in Ass Kicking City.
I got harassed by cops and the school administration because I had a copy of Living in Darkness by Agent Orange. I got beat up by the captain of the school's football team (he was a junior, I was a sophomore, so as you could imagine I lost that fight awesomely) for wearing a Dead Kennedy's t-shirt. Apparently, he didn't care for the Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death album as much as I did.
I knew one kid who got beat up for having a mohawk, which started a brawl involving everyone who listened to punk rock and heavy metal against all of the kids who were into football at my high school. So my point is, at that time punk rock wasn't just music, it was a culture, a counterculture, and it was dangerous to publicly admit to listening to it.
To us the Beastie Boys were punk rock, too. At any party where the radio was on it was perfectly legitimate to replace a cassette tape blaring The Adicts or the Red Hot Chili Peppers with License to Ill. Yes, it was rap, but no, it was cool, they were punk. Turn it up.
I've always believed that this was the reason that Adam Yauch, aka MCA and everyone else in the Beastie Boys were always fucking cool. Their music was always very, very relevant. They were also extremely prolific, which is why I hadn't purchased an album from them in a while. Ever since Ill Communication they had kept composing album after album that I just couldn't keep up.
The reason was, if you listen to Paul's Boutique, it is an extremely complex, compellingly deep album. It weaves disco, iconic Old West cowboy imagery, growing up in New York City and rebellious rap. Don't forget, rap was just catching on at the time. American and the rest of the industry didn't really respect fucking awesome badasses like LL Cool J, N.W.A., Public Enemy, Run DMC and a lot of other bands were doing at the time.
Just as the Beastie Boys reshaped not only music, but the awareness of what music was to the general public at the time, they also reshaped what was expected of a great rap album to people who liked rap. I write about hip-hop a lot because hip-hop artists are basically poets, philosophers and logicians. They really belong to the same groups of people that told rhyming stories about the deeds of gods and men long ago in ancient Greece. Rap is an art form because of this, which is why when you think about it, artists like Tupac Shakur or Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are no different than Plato or Shakespeare. Poetry, logic, myth and a beat. That's all you need to have a good time, B.C. or A.D.
The reason I suddenly rocketed into this wild ass-tangent about high school, punk rock, the hip-hop and ancient Greece is because with the Beastie Boys, purchasing one of their albums was always a solid choice. If you had a road trip to go on, a party to go to or people to entertain, the Beastie Boys was the perfect choice and Paul's Boutique was perfect for any mood.
In the copy I have the text for all the lyrics run on after another, in lower case across the paper, and it tells a story of a person who is an American outlaw of sorts, stealing cars, shooting other criminals, hooking up with girls at parties, smoking and drinking across the U.S. frontier.
With this album Adam Yauch and the rest of the gunslingers were saying, "Wait a second, we were just kidding, but fuck that, we're good at this..." When you go on YouTube and watch the music videos for "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn" or any of their old videos, there's something very ironic in their manner and appearance.
The video for "Hey Ladies" does it all. They make fun of disco, they make fun of themselves, they mock being cool and concepts of machismo...I mean, fuck it, it ain't comedy unless a body is lying on the floor, and with the Beastie Boys, no matter how big they ever got, or how talented they became, or how rich they got, it never seemed like it got to their heads.
That's why their music stayed relevant, all the way from the 1980's to the 2010's. The Beastie Boys never sold out. With the death of Adam Yauch (meanwhile, in another dimension, Satan and his devils are losing whole fleets of demonic starships to this awesome new commander fighting alongside the forces of good known as "MCA") artists across the industry, from LL Cool J to Perry Farrel are talking openly about how the Beastie Boys forever shaped their perceptions, their music, and their perceptions about music.
"Looking Down The Barrel of a Gun" was always the perfect song to play when you were mad at the world. It was a powerful song, an angry song, and MCA always had the powerful voice, the angry voice. He had this throaty rasp to his lyrics, as opposed to the rest of the boys, who could sometimes come across as a little goofy, so you knew when MCA talked bout shooting you he probably meant it.
Album after album they kept making these classics, and I knew that when I bought one you could just hear it, you had to listen to it. You had to feel that music. Just like Edgar Allen Poe or Chekhov or any great work of art, to truly appreciate the Beastie Boys you had to memorize their lyrics, and believe me, my friends and I all tried. More than one person at a bar in L.A. has the lyrics to "Brass Monkey" ready to go, perfectly memorized, with a crystal clear precision.
That's why I feel so bad that Adam Yauch is no longer with us, even though he is now commanding whole legions of angels that are currently obliterating five (count 'em) of Satan's death stars at the same time. Not only is Adam Yauch that awesome of a military commander as he currently fights evil in another dimension on behalf of the forces of light, it's also because he was an awesome musician, and with the Beastie Boys he created music so powerful, so intelligent, so driven by a real personality who was down for the music and the fans, not the industry, that to this day buying three of their albums, no matter which one, will always be a solid purchase no matter who you are.
I remember at one point a friend of mine said, "Hey, check this out," and popped in a cassette tape that was a single of "Shadrach." I listened to it and couldn't believe what I was hearing. Was this just rap? There had to be another term. Why wasn't this on MTV all the time?
But they got on MTV and David Letterman and played all over the world. The Beastie Boys did it, whatever you had to do to be a legendary hip-hop band, and it's so painful I can't see them all play live anymore. What's wrong with the world?
I still remember how all of my friends and I felt right before Check Your Head came out. The air had been electric with anticipation. For a young man listening to music and watching MTV back then, it was an uncertain time. The Poison and Phil Collins and hair metal music videos had been replaced by Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Jane's Addiction. The culture of music had shifted. The punk, goth, industrial and alternative music people had just about taken over.
But MTV had rap videos, and by the time Check Your Head was on it's way, there was a lot of hip-hop to check out. You could hear so much more diversity with rap coming out of the tape players of your friends or bumping off the airwaves, so the pole was very high for the Beastie Boys to jump. It suddenly scared the hell out of all of us that our favorite band had gone into the studio, but now they were going to have to face a whole new world of music. Did they still have the magic?
Between using fuzz distortion that emulated the spirit of industrial that seemed to pervade all music at one point in the early 90's, playing their own instruments and delivering tracks that alternated between dub, punk and rap, Check Your Head was a fucking party in heaven. I remember that for one summer, the Beastie Boys were all my friends and I could listen to, aside from The Chronic and the original Cypress Hill album. We'd rap along with the lyrics, even watching their music videos and imitating the jumps, leaps and gestures the trio made for the "So Wat'cha Want" video. They were back, and of course they dominated.
What I always admired about them as musicians is how every album felt like they really did give a damn. We've all seen those fucking VH1 specials where a band puts out two good albums, crashes to the ground, delivers a third, and then fades into an embarrassing vapor, aside from the inevitable Greatest Hits album.
The Beastie Boys never, ever, ever did that. You could stand by the group, as a fan. They were the football team that never fumbled, broke up or lost. They were the racing horse at the track that was always the sure bet. With just about every other band out there, ever now, there's always a feeling of it being some sort of gamble when you buy their latest LP without checking it out on the internet. Not so with the Beastie Boys. You could always leave the music store with a handful of their CD's knowing you had a fistful of platinum.
I'm going to miss them, and now I feel that, as a fan, I took them for granted.They were like the Grey Goose or hip-hop. Always awesome. Every one of their albums was as cunning, as original and as timely as License to Ill, Paul's Boutique, or Check Your Head. The much-anticipated Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is going to really hurt to purchase. I grew up with friends who where very devout fans of the Beastie Boys, and just like MCA, I really wish they were here, now.
Just the same, it's ok. We'll always be able to listen to the music Adam Yauch and the rest of the Beastie Boys made on the car ride to where we need to go, for the rest of our lives. No matter who you are or where you are going, busting out "So What'cha Want" on your car stereo as loud as you can will not only drive away the blues, it will always be so powerful that it makes your whole world shake, rattle and roll forever.
.jpg)
