eatsomething

2010-03-05T11:10:00.002-05:00

I've been living in Chicago since July, which is long enough to take for granted the stuff that I thought was weird about it when I first came here. I wanna keep that perspective on this place though, and keep reminding myself that this is a unique place to live, so I guess I'll have to write about things that make Chicago Chicago.

I thought the hardest thing about living here would be the cold, but I've gotten used to that. The environmental factor that's actually the hardest to live with, and in fact is the most terrifying, is actually how diabolically flat this place is. The fact that it's so flat here actually lends itself to the streets being laid out in a neverending and seldomly interrupted grid that stretches out for I don't know how long. Standing on Chicago Avenue where I live, about 20-some blocks from the lake, and looking in either direction, you will never see the end or even any change of direction of the street. It's a little mind-numbing, and I try not to think about it cause it can be sort of depressing. I mean, if you drive down Chicago, through some dangerous and dilapidated neighborhoods of the West side you'll eventually go past a super nice suburb where Frank Lloyd Wright and Earnest Hemingway used to live called Oak Park, and then you'll I guess continue on to some other suburbs, past where Wayne's World took place, and then I don't know what suburb you'll be in after that. And the road probably won't ever even change directions. I used to feel dwarfed by the size of New York, but here I feel dwarfed just by the structure of this place.

That same structure does make this place a pretty convenient place to live though. Easy to get around, easy to find stuff, easy to know where you are, bla bla bla. And it wouldn't make sense to make the roads go off in a bunch of jangled intersections and changes in direction just to keep things interesting. That would've been crazy. So I'm glad the streets are like that too. I guess the whole thing with the streets being straight is the same as the whole dizzying blankness of the prarie that existed here before the city did.

2010-03-03T16:11:00.002-05:00

I got an email from Obama the other day. He says he's gonna push for a Health Care plan to be pushed through Congress! Isn't that awesome? It's also a little confusing, cause I thought that's what's supposed to be happening for like a year now.... but anyway, here comes round 2! Or maybe round 1 million. Either way, he finally says he's gonna do reconciliation so he can push it through without 60 votes. Oh, wait, no, he didn't actually use the word "reconciliation." He's gonna leave it up to Nancy Pelosi or maybe Harry Reid to use that actual word. Awesome.

So, Obama is actually so popular, or he was so popular, that he's afraid to use his popularity to do anything! Finally after a year he's willing to do the same thing Bush did 2 times for his tax cuts. OK great, whatever, he's finally doing it. I don't know why he didn't just let them filibuster anyway. They've beaten filibusters before, and I don't know what the republicans could've done 8 months ago that would have made everyone hate them even more than they already did except for doing a damn filibuster. Sometimes you gotta call these guys on their bluffs. Hopefully the democrats in there will be able to get some type of a fucking skeleton of an actual bill through before the republicans mop the floor with them in the 2010 congressional elections. Way to go guys! Remember when we used to actually discuss a public option and stuff?

I guess I'm rambling now. Point is, whatever they plan to do now, this is their last chance to do anything. So, it should be exciting to see if anything gets passed! Oh, and when was he asking for congress to give him a bill? Tomorrow? Monday? Next week? No, actually, he's just asking them to do, um, Something, in the next uh... few weeks....? So, actually, disregard this whole post, cause basically nothing is any different now anyway.

2010-03-03T16:09:00.002-05:00

Hey! It's been a minute. How's it going?

I kinda miss writing. Time to start writing again. Don't know what I'm gonna write about, since I barely ever listen to any new music anymore. But I can still write about other stuff.

2008-06-15T12:56:00.003-04:00

"Misunderstood ain't gotta be explained/ but you don't understand me so let me explain/ stood in the heat/ the flame the snow/ please slow down hurricane/ the wind blow/ my dreads swing/ he had hair like wool/ like rain/ dropping ashes in the bible/ I shake them out and they fall on the rifle/ scary. Hail Mary no tale fairy/ all real very/ extraordinary/ perry mason face it/ the barrel if the tattle/ my god is my judge/ no gown, no gavel/ behind a rabble/ down to battle/ now or never/ i would never in the ever/ fucking fantastic/ fuck if you agree/ i'm bright but I don't give a fuck/ if you see me"

I think this is my favorite Wayne verse ever. I dunno if it beats "Oh No" or not, but it's definitely my favorite on the Carter III. I kinda like all the rambling that comes later, but it's cool he buries this shit in a 9 minute track, not even a song, at the end of the album. I like Fab's shit about pasta and pimp my ride and stuff, and I still love Lollipop, but this is a great moment of apocalyptic imagery that's gonna stick around in the same corner of my brain as "cell therapy" or the patter of Delia's feet. I like "Georgia Bush" but I think this goes a lot deeper than just the obvious anger at the government or "Get Your Hustle On."

2007-11-09T19:05:00.000-05:00

Yo! haven't posted for a couple months, but here's a new mixtape

This one's kind of a departure. I try to keep a certain continuity on my mixes where I don't use the same songs on more than one, at least that I'd write about. I also try not to use the same artist twice and I keep them to about an hour. The difference on this one is that it's chronological a-la High Fidelity. So it's a bunch of songs that have been like theme songs for me at different times of my life. This one was actually a lot of fun to make, especially just to look back and say "what the hell was I listening to in sophomore year of college." One thing I do continue with is trying to have the songs tell their own narrative on top of my own reminiscing.

1 - Outkast - "Humble Mumble" - Not to start out too heavy handed, but this is the song I put on when I came home after going downtown on 9/11. I had just lived in England for a year after High School and came to New York as this wide-eyed, bushy tailed kid, not exactly expecting to come face to face with devestation and hatred. This was one of my favorite songs when I was living in England, but it took on another level of meaning for me when I came home and sat in my dorm room. The chorus goes "Humble as a mumble/ in the jungle of shout and screams/ that's the way the cracker crumbles/ so I guess I'll have to reroute my dreams." It helped me keep my head above water that September. I'm sure everybody had their own song for the same reason then. I remember that Destiny's Child song "Survivor" was huge then, and I also loved that Outkast song about 9/11, "The Whole World."

2 - The White Stripes - "The Same Boy You've Always Known" - This was my favorite song way before I was ever in one of their videos and Jack White called my brother "some actor asshole." The lyrics are I guess about a breakup/ get back together situation, but I just liked it for the way this dude can carry a tune on just a few notes. It does get heavy at times, but this little whiff of reverb keeps the song from getting workhorse like some of their stuff.

3 - Mississippi Fred McDowell - "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" - It's embarrassing that this guy has to stick the name of the state he lived in so that hippies would snatch his shit up on some novelty workingman/nature worship paternalistic impulse back in the 70s, cause his music speaks for itself. He's a master of slide guitar, and actually forms the backbone of this song on a ridiculous amount of sliding and polyrhythmic fingerpicking. It's music for blues nerds first and foremost, but this is one of his more accessible songs.

4 - Johnny Cash - "Hurt" - I loved this as a Nine Inch Nails song, but I think Johnny Cash owned it. I like the way he changes "crown of shit" to "crown of thorns," cause he censors it but also changes the meaning and emphasizes what he's talking about in a totally different way. By the way, I swear not all the music I listened to in the first couple years of college was mad depressing.

5 - The Streets - "Could Well Be In" - I bought this album right when I moved to the Bronx. Living there actually is a great backdrop for the Streets, cause it can be gray and really colorful and vibrant at the same time. This dude is also from the part of England I had been living in. It was crazy to hear a popstar speaking in this think Brummy accent, cause over there this accent is universally laughed and more than any other. I think he blew up right after I left. On a side note, my boss's kid's half-brother's friends apparently sued Mike Skinner for stealing lyrics from them for his first album. True Story. This song jumped out at me cause I'm really a cheeseball at heart and this is unapologetically sappy without being weird.

6 - Big & Rich - "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)" - This is a fun song. A whole lot of elements come together that should be a complete mess, but for a minute these guys had tapped into enough tongue in cheek, self aware personality to make this work. I'll always remember driving this big 15 passenger van full of drunk kids and puke into Manhattan one night, cause that's what I did for a living, and the kids next to me totally geeked out when we turned onto Broadway just when they were singing about driving down Broadway.

7 - Rolling Stones - "I Got the Blues" - I had been hugely into the blues at one point, but by the beginning of Senior Year I really wasn't anymore This song jumped out at me as more of an homage to a style of music than an actual example of it. I remember listening to it on headphones while I conducted an experiment on a virtual rat in a computer lab and mentally devouring the random organ solo on this song.

8 - Kanye West - "School Spirit" - Still my favorite Kanye song, bar none. It's really thick, which is something dude has been getting better at, but this one still has that old soul music vibe. He was rapping about hating being in college, and by senior year, I hated college too, so there you go. What I like about his song is it complains about something but is still fun and sunny, kind of like the Voodoo Glow Skulls singing about jocks. That would definitely be on the prequel to this mix.

9 - M.I.A. - "Amazon (Diplo Mix)" - This is the song off the remix, with Ciara's "Goodies" beat over top of the vocals that had different music on Arular. I loved those first few Ciara singles, and I was all over that Piracy Funds Terrorism mix, so here I am killing 2 birds with one stone. I wish Diplo had left a Petey Pablo verse on this, but I guess it wouldn't have made any sense.

10 - Clipse - "Definition of a Roller" - I don't even really know the name of this song or who's song it actually is, but it's the one after the last song on Piracy Funds Terrorism. I didn't even really notice this track at first, until one time when I was listening real close to my headphones on the Chinatown Bus. This song's beat is actually creepy and desolate like the first half of Soul Food, but these guys rap with so much focus they bury it.

11 - Notorious BIG - "Things Done Changed" - "Back in the day our parents used to take care of us/ look at 'em now/ they even fucking scared of us/ calling the city for help because they can't maintain/ damn shit's done changed." I've said it before, but I wish I had known about all this awesome mid 90s rap back when it was coming out. I don't know why it took me this long to get into Biggie, but whatever. What can I even say about this song?

12 - Jay-Z - "It's Hot (Some Like It Hot)" I kept going back and buying up classic albums I had missed after I got out of college, and I remember living in the copycat building in Baltimore when I got obsessed with this song. I had busted windows and crackhead roomates, but this song oozed precision. I guess I haven't been paying enough attention to the themes discussed on these songs, but this one's easy cause it's just straight up shit talking. I guess at this time I was doing big things and setting myself up for better stuff to come, but the way I was doing it was by living in squalor for a minute so I could save some money for later. It worked out really well for me, and it was helpful to have this slick assurance in the midst of an off kilter minimal beat.

13 - 'Lil Wayne - "Oh No" - As soon as I heard this song, I loved it. The beat actually reminded me of that one Moby album, which would probably make the prequel too. There was something something in my bro's blog the other day about how 50 says 'Lil Wayne doesn't really make good songs even though he can rap. I guess part of what's great about Wayne is that he doesn't need choruses and hooks and bridges and stuff - he can do that, but here he just raps for 3 minutes straight. He's done some really good stuff like that on mixtapes lately, showing everybody that he can rap on all kinds of beats and whatever, but I still like him best when he's on some bass heavy, humid shit like this. "while you pussy n*ggas is sleepin/ I'm thinkin/ deep in thought/ the boy ain't even winkin'/ Bob Marley got me stinkin'/ stacking figures/ I'm standing firm/ life's a slinky."

14 - Otis Redding - "That's How Strong My Love Is" - This song immediately evokes warmth, which has obviously been missing from the last few songs. There are a few Otis songs I could've put on here but I think this one's my favorite. This is the type of shit where you come home from work, it's 104 degrees outside and you don't have air conditioning, and it's humid as shit cause it's Baltimore, and you just sink into your vinyl couch and become one with it to the point that you know you'll make a velcro sound when you stand up, this stuff will put you straight into a blissful sleep.

15 - Rolling Stones - "Moonlight Mile" - This is a song about how things never stop changing. It's not really a celebration or a lament - as far as that goes it's like it's flat. It kind of reminds me of "Oh Me." It's really orchestral though, and the ending goes a little long. It's actually the end of an era for the stones, really the last song on their last good album.

16 - Little Big Town - "Boondocks" - This is out of chronology a little bit as far as the story of my life goes, but it fits in well with the tape. I reviewed the album for the City Paper, but the only way I knew about them was hitting seek on the New Jersey turnpike one time and stumbling onto it. That was when I started really liking country radio when I was driving, so it's a shame that there's no country station in New York. This is just a standard country pride anthem, but it's funky and happy.

17 - Rodney Atkins - "If You're Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows You're There)" - This song is kinda dumb, but I like it. It's a great example of how country music has become arena rock but has also kept being country. If this song was a drink it'd be a Sparxxx.

18 - Waylon Jennings - "Are You Sure Hank Done it This Way" - This is just a thumping beat, 2 chords, and a lot of reverb as far as music goes, but Waylon totally wraps his voice around it. "Lord it's the same old tune/ fiddle and guitar/ where do we take it from here?" This song's all about looking for a change in direction but not knowing where to go.

19 - Bob Dylan - "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" - This song is night and day from the Waylon song before it musically, but they're ultimately talking about the same thing. One's disillusioned with the country scene, the other the folk scene, and they're both being hated for wanting to do something different. This is one of the last songs on Dylan's last album before he went totally electric. People were mad at Dylan for changing, which probably made him more determined to change than any other one thing, but it's too bad because he always actually was better at being acoustic. He could carry a rhythm and a tune and not become a huge sloppy mess like he does no Highway 61. He had a way of smacking one particular note even when he was playing a chord which nobody else does.

20 - The White Stripes - "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" - Dunno why so many of these songs have parenthesis, I swear it's not a theme. Right before the bridge in this song, you hear Jack White yell "Hey!" Not into the microphone or anything, it's hard to pick up - you get the impression from this guy that he still loves what he's doing, and he's almost surprised how well he's doing. It's like he's passed 300 on a streak in Guitar Hero and just finished a Star Power. The thing about him is that unlike Dylan, he's able to reign in his electric guitar to the point that he can still be staccato if he wants to be, and he has this great hollow, dry sound. It only works if it's aired out by some dead space and overreaching vocals, but he works all that together here. Plus it's just a catchy song.

21 - U.G.K. Featuring Outkast - "International Player's Anthem" - I really doubt anyone reads this who doesn't also read my bro's blog, so I'm sure you've read enough about this song. Had a nice moment with this song at his wedding, singing along with Andre's part and dancing to the rest. Outkast is still one of my favorite bands ever, and they're hit or miss now, but it always sounds great to listen to them let loose.

22 - Born With It featuring B.O.B. - "Stack My Paper Up" - This song is great. Too bad it'll never really come out. It's sentimental about money, and not ironic or assholic about it at all. One guy says "drill like Michael Jordan do" - I think it's not just about having money or even getting money, but working for it. This is the type of shit you listen to on the subway before dawn on your way to work. More than that Rodney Atkins song, it's motivational on a gut level.

So anyway, there you go. This was fun to write, I hope it was fun to read. if my computer didn't suck I'd post some of these.

2007-08-13T23:27:00.000-04:00

The video for "God's Gonna Cut You Down" by Johnny Cash is such a clusterfuck of random cameos it's ridiculous. I didn't even know this song had a video, I just found it by accident when i was looking at stuff like this. I wish I had been around when Johnny Cash had a TV show, it must've been so surreal. The set looks like he took over the home shopping network or something.

I finally got around to seeing that Buddy Holly movie with Gary Busey. I really like Busey in it! I don't know if Buddy Holly actually walked around beating up producers and threatening to kill people - he never seemed that macho to me, but maybe. I really liked it when he smacked this one producer and then hit the same fighting stance he did when he fought Chris Farley in that one movie: the open-handed shoveling motion that says "I'm not just gonna punch you, I'm gonna tear you limb from limb!" No, but it was a good movie.

2007-08-12T15:12:00.000-04:00

I saw the Hold Steady at Prospect Park a few days ago. They're a trip, cause they get away with being so cheesy that it just comes across as really sincere. They're like Indi-Emo. I think for me they're one of those bands that I like a lot better live than I like their CDs. I saw them once before, years ago at the Ottobar in Baltimore, which is this big bar/ little club. They seemed totally in their element there, and they made a point of saying how they thought they'd be a bar band when they were in the bandshell at Prospect Park. "This is a big bar we're playing tonight." They seemed a bit out of element in the park, but they ended up filling up the stage. It was a good show. For me, the best moments were when the keyboard player played accordian on one song and the Star Power moments when the guitar player threw his guitar over his shoulder.

2007-06-13T19:44:00.000-04:00

I took a road trip to Detroit this last weekend. It was a fun drive, you go over the Appalachian mountains and then these hills, and then you round this one corner, and suddenly the landscape is flat for as far as you can see. It's nuts. I opened the window to let some breeze in and all this wind was flying around in the van.
Yeah, Detroit is cool. I can't really say nothing much about it, cause I was a total tourist and didn't see much of the city. We drove into Grosse Pointe to get some pancakes though, and it's true about how you cross one road, that later becomes 8 Mile Road, and how all of a sudden it goes from boarded up stores and general dilipidation to English Manor-type houses on the side of the lake and stuff in no time flat. It's a little disconcerting. The pancakes in Grosse Pointe were good though. We also drove past the old lion stadium, and it just looked like some boarded up old movie theater on Main Street or something. It looks like they left it there, no as a monument, but just because nobody bothered to tear it down. There was this parking lot next to it that was covered with little tufts of grass. It was actually kind of cool.

Last episode of the Sopranos didn't piss me off too much, but they should've gone ahead and let something happen. I always figured they were putting off a big confrontation happening just cause they wanted to drag the show out, but I guess the show was actually always just about all the day-to-day bullshit rather than the traditional old Gangster Story Arc. I like that Dylan song AJ was listening to before his SUV burned up. Dylan is so hit or miss, I never got as into him as I always knew I should. I figured out the song is called "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)", so I went out and bought the album. It's a whole lot better than Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61, I honestly don't know what's so great about that stuff. I have one of those live recordings I like a lot, and I always like Nashville Skyline and Freewheelin', but that was it. Liked the book too. Anyway, this album's good, maybe I'll get back to exploring all that. I'm rereading the book now, and that is some great subway reading, especially on the way home from work. Reading him write about New York in the 60s reminds me of before I ever lived here when my Dad would talk about coming here as a kid from St. Louis and staying in the Bronx every summer. This place looks a lot different once you get used to it, but the rest of the world also looks different once you get used to this place.

2007-05-19T14:12:00.000-04:00

My bro posted a thing about Dan Deacon and mentioned that I hate him. Just to set the record straight, I obviously don't hate him personally. I even said Hi to him a couple times when we both lived in the CopyCat. For what it's worth, here's a story I did for the City Paper about a show where he opened for Grand Buffet. I also don't hate MICA kids - some of them were pretty good roomates, especially the one who would give me cheese on discount from Whole Foods.

I saw Devin the Dude last night. He put on a really good show, up on stage by himself and doing all these little turntable noises and singing a little bit. I just started getting into this guy, so I'm glad I caught this show. He's I guess this warmly eccentric rapper from Houston who is I guess has been around for a while and worked with big names but never busted out himself. He doesn't seem to mind though.

2007-05-16T22:03:00.000-04:00

Went to see Ghostface last night. It was a kind of weird show cause Ghostface was actually opening up for Spankrock, but Spank came out first so I thought maybe it was the other way around, but then he came back out after Ghostface. Anyway, Ghost fills up a stage better, running around with a big glass jug of something mixed with Orange Juice and a bunch of dudes on stage. He only did a few songs, and then Rza came out and they dide "Wu Tang Clan Ain't Nothin to Fuck With." After that Spank got a bunch of people to get up on stage and bump and grind - one girl sat on his face for a bit, and it was hard to find him in all that. Shoulda just left after Ghostface

There was this chick there called Roxy Cottontail who raps like Blondie in that one song. She would've been a pretty good white rapper show contestant. Jon Brown also showed up for 2 seconds. When I saw him at the White Rapper Show Wrap Party people took a few minutes to start booing him, but here it was more like Dick Cheney at Yankee Stadium. I felt a bit bad for him, cause he did better at this show. Lil' Mamma also came out, and she was a lot of fun. She did a verse on that "Show Me What You Got Beat" that was kind of blah, but maybe just cause I can't stand that beat. After that she did some accapella thing that won the crowd over more and she did the Lip Gloss song and that was it.

A couple weeks ago I went to my sister's prom. It was the same high school as mine, 7 years later, and it was a trip to see a prom from the outside looking in. It was kind of fun to look around and guess who I would've been friends with, but I liked everybody I met and it was actually fun to be around all these fresh faced kids. I talked trash and joked around for a minute with someone's dad who was dealing blackjack at an after prom party and he actually thought I was one of the High School kids. He was like "Be careful driving home - I mean it." Maybe he thought I was drunk. Stuff like that pissed me off all the time back then but here I didn't mind at all. I was a bit jealous cause they had their prom at Raven Stadium instead of some generic prom room outside DC, and they even played a little club music. The DJ also played that Kelly Clarkson song about getting abused as a kid and people slow danced to it, which was kind of awkward. DJ also played Fatboy Slim, for some dumb reason. The floor emptied out and he played "Baby Got Back," and I was the only one who knew all the words.

2007-04-14T13:21:00.000-04:00

Man, I haven't posted on this in a minute. I actually forgot my password. Part of the reason I haven't been blogging is because my computer takes about 20 minutes to boot up and another 10 to start Firefox, so by the time I check my email I don't want to spend another hour trying to do this. Should be getting a new one soon.

In Baltimore for the weekend, haven't been here since January, and it feels good to be back. I can feel myself decompressing bit by bit, especially cause I'm driving around listening to tapes I leave in my parents' minivan and only ever hear when I'm down here. Just Otis Redding and old mixtapes. Anyway, I'll be going to some party at the HnH building for my buddy Jason and my brother's old neighboor Justin and some other guy tonight. Plus I've been going to places like Cosmic Comics and the Sound Garden cause it's hard to find good music or comic book stores in New York that don't just cater to one particular scene or aren't always crowded. I still gotta go get some crab cakes and crab chips and maybe a Golden West Enchilada.

2007-02-06T22:57:00.000-05:00

Rodney Atkins is one of those country singers who hits his stride
doing sentimental ballads and inspirational shit. I saw Toby Keith
last weekend with my brother and he's the other kind, who only is
really good at bawdry humor and songs about drinking, but can't sing
with any gravity. Big & Rich was actually able to do both of those
alright on Horse of a Different Color, but that's a different story.
Anyway, Rodney Atkins album "If You're Going Through Hell" isn't
really worth buying, but the last two songs, "Angel's Hands" and the
title track are totally awesome. They're worth a couple bucks on
iTunes at least. This is the type of shit that makes country music
great for driving around to, cause they take on such heavy themes and
make it all so digestible and are able to tie all the loose edges in
their songs. Country music is even more of an industry than rap, with
so many really talented session musicians and songwriters constantly
churning stuff out in Nashville that you can just skim the surface and
actually hear good stuff as long as you're able to put aside whatever
reservations you've got about hearing people talk about god and stuff
in music.

I'm pulling for Shamrock, but I'm actually amazed that I also kind of
like John Brown.

2007-01-25T22:59:00.000-05:00

Okay, mixtape time
If I knew how to do this and I wasn't using my roomate's computer, maybe I'd put this on a podcast. But, here it goes

1 - Hank Williams - "Lost Highway" - I don't know much about Hank Williams, but obviously he was a big deal. This song sounds is full of these Hawaain dobro noises and it's actually real relaxing but the lyrics are all ominous and full of regret: "I was just a lad/ nearly 22/ neither good nor bad/ just a kid like you/ and now I'm lost/ too late to pray/ Lord, I paid the cost/ on the lost highway." Not just cause he compares life to a highway, but this really is great night driving music.

2 - Goodie Mob - "Dirty South" - If the Hank songs sounds a little scary, then this one is more like horrifying. It's not really the stuff they're saying as much as it is this dusty old bassline. C-Lo doesn't rap, he just squeals out "aw, yeah, the dirty south" and it's perfect.

3 - Mobb Deep - "Survival of the Fittest" - This came out in 95 or 96, and I really wish I knew about these Outkast and Goodie Mob and these dudes and all the other grimy New York shit that was coming out then. Maybe I wouldn't have thought Marilyn Manson was such a badass. Anyway, this here is another aired-out scary piece of music that doesn't celebrate at all that Lost Highway feeling that Hank was singing about, although it also doesn't moan about it. It doesn't question anything, it just rolls with it.

4 - Clipse - "Trill" - I think this is one of the catchiest songs on Hell Hath No Fury, which I guess isn't saying too much, but it's good. It's got that same emotionless detachment Mobb Deep does, but at least on this song they're having more fun with it. "Bankroll on overload/ I eenie meenie miney mo them hoes/ I'm so trill" That kind of stuff. Up to now all the songs sound contained, like there's more emotion down there than what whoever is willing to put on wax, but this here has a bit more abandon to it, just cause I think the beat is a lot more immediate. It ends with these firecracker noises which lead right into...

5 - The Clash - "I'm so Bored with the U.S.A." - I can't pick up half of the words Joe Strummer actually sings, but something about "yankee... always on the TV/ cause killers in America/ work 7 days a week. This is actually a great jukebox song, which I think is the best praise you could ever put on any kind of rock. It's got all this jangly momentum and slurred lyricism.

6 - The Pogues - "A Pistol for Paddy Garcia" - I love Spagghetti westerns, however you spell it, and this is totally a soundtrack to a movie. I don't know why nobody ever made this into a movie, cause the music is basically the most important thing. It's got the whistling melody, the overblown epic breakdown, like when you would look into the killer's eyes and see a tragic emptiness, it's got this military precision drummer boy thing and all that, it's instrumental - this song is almost perfect.

7 - Johnny Cash - "The Devil's Right Hand" - I think this is originally a Steve Earle song. It's in the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack. Anyway, Johnny Cash has Red Hot Chilli Peppers dude playing guitar for him, but it turns out pretty good. Song's story is about a guy buying a pistol despite his mothers protesting and then wishing he'd heeded her advice. A lot like "Don't Bring Your Guns to Town," although now that I think about it, that song's probably a lot better.

8 - Biggie - "Machine Gun Funk" - Nice little fade from the guitar in the last song into this one's bass. He says "I'm doing rhymes now/ fuck the crimes now/ come on the Ave, I'm real hard to find now/ cause I'm knee deep in the beats" but he also basically says fuck the cops, I'll shoot them. So it's like he knows he's got one foot in his grave even though he's made a better life for himself. I dunno, this song is actually really sad in hindsight but it's got a million of the lines you get stuck in your head for days and sing with your friends you barely know.

9 - Bob Marley - "Talking Blues" - I love the blues, but I'm not a purist or anything, so I don't know but I think this counts as a blues song. It has this sound of totally focused clarity, and it comes through in this transcendant bridge when he says "I'm gonna stare in the sun/ let the rain shine in my eyes/ I'm gonna take/ just one step more." He's talking about bombing a church and revolution after that, but it's not a mad song, it's more about progress than confrontation.

10 - Otis Redding - "That's How Strong My Love Is" - This is just basically a classic love song that makes you feel like a better person just for listening to it. I can't explain the warm feeling this song brings about, but it's no joke.

11 - Ghostface - "Save Me Dear" - This song is not like the Otis song, not by a long shot, but it's fun and it's got these cool soul samples, even if he does rapping about how you should beg girls to get their name tattooed on them. If this mix had a linear type of story, I guess this would be the point at which someone you like starts creeping you out even though you still like them. Or something.

12 - Blur - "Tender" - I lived in England for a year when I was 18, and I had this job that gave me an apartment and like 60 pounds a week, which I spent most of on beer cause I could go to any bar for the first time. I had a great time and I used to lay in bed listening to music and not caring if it kept me up cause I only worked 2 days a week, and this is one of the songs that stuck with me. It has this little riff that keeps coming in and out over or under this choir and all this echoey singing and an unobtrusive bass and drum stomp. It's almost 8 minutes long but there's no wasted time.

13 - Willie Nelson - "Hands on the Wheel" - I'm not a huge Willie fan, but I love concept albums, and so I end up liking Red Headed Stranger. This has stuff about finding yourself in another person's eyes and all that, and it's very melodramatic. I was actually thinking about taking this off an earlier version of this list, except one day when I was driving around in Baltimore, knowing that I was about to move back to New York and it had this line about "hands on the wheel/ of something that's real/ and I feel like I'm going home," which I guess is pretty melodramatic way to look at a city you're not from, but fuck it. I'm keeping this song. It's a very soft acoustic country song.

14 - Outkast - "The Train" - I wrote a tiny bit about this song a few weeks ago, so I'm gonna be brief about here. It's got this little ragtime sounding sample and Big Boi raps all nostalgically about the beginning of his career, and then these old horns come in which are very catchy. I would like this whole thing to be slowed down a bit, but whatever.

15 - the Rolling Stones - "Moonlight Mile" - I always thought this was a song about driving down some quiet old highway at night while you think about laying your head down. Then a friend of mine died down in Louisiana and I went down for the funeral, and a couple days later the night before I went back up to Maryland I'm driving a few of us back to Mississippi from New Orleans real late at night and the other kid who was awake said "this is the song I want played at my funeral." As far as this mix goes, I like bringing up the road analogy again much further along and having it being about the trip rather than some desolated destination. This was originally gonna be the last song but I extended the mix to fit it on a 90 minute tape.

16 - The Evens - "shelter two" - I saw the Evens without ever hearing their music, although listening to Minor Threat in 9th grade changed my life. It's very understated and almost distant, which I guess a lot of this mix is. The chorus is "it's all downhill from here." I think it's good cause for me that has a double meaning, like where you can say things are going downhill because things are getting worse, or you can be riding your bike up this steep hill and busting your ass and getting tired, but then you round over that crest of the hill, and suddenly you're relaxing, even resting, and everything is moving by more quickly. You've even got a breeze to cool youself down.

17 - the Game - "Old English" - Far and away my favorite song on the new album. I love the Game for having the stones to rap so sad, like somethimes it really sounds like he's gonna cry. I acually get chills every time when he talks about how he steals his brother's glock and then that night his brother got shot and Game says "I got high for three years off that chronic from the dock." and when he's talking about "20 funerals before the age of 19."

18 - Merle Haggard - "In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)" - This after the Game song is pretty much a perfect transition, I don't mind saying. Haggard catalogues all these memories of helplessness and poverty in his family, and then sings "No amount of money could buy from me/ the memories that I have of them/ no amount of money could pay me/ to go back and live through it again."

19 - UGK - "Diamonds and Wood" - Ridin' Dirty is a very cohesive album so it feels a bit weird to be talking about just one song on it, but it grabs me on this when C says "see drugs and plastic thugs aint gonna change the hood/ I'm smoking stuff and poppin the trunk to make me feel good."

20 - Nas and Jay-Z - "Black Republicans" - I like epic orchestral beats, so I would listen to this on instrumental. These guys have both dropped off, but they can both still rap their asses off when they want to. I guess what this song, and definately the whole mix is getting at is the way the same things that propel you can also drown you, and the same traits or qualities that get you through one situation will drive you into another but that not necessarily being a bad thing.

2007-01-07T16:36:00.000-05:00

The Colts are coming to Baltimore next week. It should be a fun game, a lot of people are still mad about how they left Baltimore back in 84 and left us without a team to follow for a long time. There's still a statue of Johnny U outside Ravens stadium and people still wear his jersey around town. I don't think the Colts can beat us, especially here. They won't be able to run the ball at all and if Manning tries to hold the ball for more than 2 seconds he's gonna get sacked like a fool. Whatever happens it's gonna be epic and old people are gonna be crying.

2007-01-05T11:45:00.000-05:00

I'm driving back and forth between Baltimore and New York a lot cause I'm moving, and I have the iPod plugged in through one of those tape adapters. The battery keeps wanting to run out but so far I've been able to make it there and back every time without having it turn off. I hit mad traffic in Jersey on Jan 1, so I was able to listen to the first 4 Outkast albums all in a row. I gotta buy that song "The Whole World," and stick it on there, I think that would put the cap on the good part of Outkast's career. Since then there've been some good songs though, even on Idlewild. They're easy to overlook cause there's so much bullshit, and even the good stuff is filled with these irritating little embellishments. On most of it though, in the back, you can hear these dope baselines and stuff that sounds like old Outkast, but at the forefront will be these tweedledum little blips and blops and shit. "The Train" is my favorite song on Idlewild and I think I like it better than anything on the double album. It's the only one Big Boi producted and the irritating little embellishment there consists of train noises and this acoustic twangy guitar line, so maybe the reason I like this song is cause I like 60s country, but whatever. It's also cause it's all about leaving stuff you like behind. When he says "It's been cool but I gotta go" that's exactly how I'm feeling about leaving Baltimore, especially cause I know this time it's for good and as many times as I come back, I'm probably never gonna live here again.

2006-12-29T22:47:00.000-05:00

I want to see Apacolypto. I was flipping through the channels with my little sister a minute ago, cause that's what I do on saturday nights, and Braveheart was on. She didn't want to watch it because the scene where the guy gets "unemboweled," but then came that part when the dude said "I never lie ... but I am a savage" in Latin. She's all into that Lord of the Rings stuff so I knew after he said that she would want to watch the whole rest of the movie and then go download the fan fiction and stuff. It's too bad, actually, cause I Superman 2 was on ABC family at the same time so I didn't get to finish watching it. But yeah, it got me thinking about the fact that Apacolypto is probably almost out of theaters so I better catch it quick.

So, Gerald Ford is dead, but they just killed Saddam too, so at what mast am I supposed to fly my flag? Fuck!

2006-11-10T11:48:00.000-05:00

I'm gonna go see Def Leppard and Journey at the Baltimore Arena tonight. I'm real excited about it, but I have to write about it and I don't know too much about either band. Does anybody remember the name of the song they did on the concert for life, probably 15 years ago, which was about a kid who didn't want to mow the lawn or something like that?

I was in Mississippi and Louisiana a couple weeks ago. Was real weird - even drove past a chain gang on the highway. Met some weird people too. Turns out the radio out there is the bomb. They play weird New Orleans jazz stuff late at night and lots of Metallica and Guns 'N Roses and stuff during the day. I also won a bunch of money playing poker in New Orleans, so it wasn't all bad. But I was real relieved to get out of there and be back in Maryland.

2006-10-09T18:30:00.000-04:00

I don't buy a lot of mixtapes, mostly cause all the guys who I've met that sell them here in Baltimore seem to think I'm a cop. That tends to piss me off, so I stop asking, but there's a guy in New York I've been to a couple times who always has a bunch of new stuff. A couple weeks ago I was up that way seeing about a job so I bought some tapes.

Young Buck and DJ Whoo Kid have this tape called the Chronic 2006, which is hosted by Jamie Foxx for some dumb reason. I think Buck has an album coming out before long so it makes sense that most of this is pretty blauugh. Even so, this guy is my favorite dude still rapping in G-Unit, and there's a couple songs that don't stick with you. "Don't Make Me Hurt You" and "Return of the Project Nigga" both have this epic menacing slick and thick sound, which is exactly the way Young Buck raps so it sounds great. They both have gun sound effects worked into the beat and they both do this thing where the song starts over again and repeats itself verbatim on some Telletobby shit. The first one starts over after about 30 seconds, but in Return it's almost just the same song twice in a row. It doesn't matter much, cause the shit is pretty much in one ear and out the other, so I guess they figure when they find something good they might as well just loop it. "In traffic we smokin/ sunroof closed/ hos pullin up like/ 'Oh, there he go!'"

2006-09-18T21:41:00.000-04:00

I probably shoulda posted about this earlier, but my friends Pontiak are on tour. They're somewhere out west right now, doing some vaudevillian riffing. They got an album just came out called Valley of Cats. It's got some Tom Waits moments, if the dude played guitars instead of human skulls and ukealaelis or whatever he's doing now.

I saw the Lil' Wayne video for shooter, which I guess has been out for a while. I guess in the video they decided to do some combination of the Nelly and Tim McGraw split screen where the two musicians never meet and the Run DMC/ Aerosmith playing the music through each other's walls and competing to see who's loudest thing from Walk This Way. The whole song is full of sound effects from a robbery in progress and police chase - I think that would've been a pretty good video.

I went to the Ravens game on Sunday and watched them humiliate Oakland. During halftime the marching band played a meddley of Iron Man and Mama I'm Coming Home. It was dope.

So I read Entertainment Weekly today, and found out that the Wire has been confirmed to go all the way through season 5 and that the new Jay-Z is officially coming out. Not bad

I went to Hampdenfest yesterday, which is a street festival they have every year here in Baltimore. It's fun, they have bands and little stalls selling stuff nobody would want and it was a nice day. I saw Long Live Death for the second time there. I had seen them before but I thought it was boring. They're this band with about 10 people on stage and most of them are playing drums. I had seen them open for someone in the Ottobar, and when you're standing up in a crowded bar nobody wants to hear that type of shit - at least not me. At this festival though, where everybody was just milling around and casually watching and kids were popping ollies in front of the stage it was perfect.

2006-09-09T19:19:00.000-04:00

I went to a death metal show last night. Versus the Mirror, Misery Index, From a Second Story Window, A Life Once Lost, and Darkest Hour. It's crazy man, this type of stuff is intense. It reminded me a bit of punk shows when I was younger but there was a lot more macho shit going on in the crowd and the music was more epic. I don't know what they were singing about, but I was thinking maybe Versus the Mirror was upset like I was when Giant stopped making Barbeque Corn Chips and they're singing about still missing them years later. There were a whole bunch of stage divers, especially during Darkest Hour - so much that people standing in the first couple rows were probably so wrapped up in watching out for someone jumping on them and shit that they must've been kinda distracted from the band. I saw one guy do a cannonball from the stage. There was lots of arm windmilling in the pit too, so you had to watch your ass if you were close to it. I was hanging back from all that, standing a few row back from the stage and kinda to the side, and some fool jumped on my head. I didn't see him till he was right on me, but dude must've took a running jump for me from the stage. I didn't have time to get my hands up and with me standing a head above the rest of the audience, the guy landed all his weight basically on my forehead and damn near broke my neck. I was having fun up until then, and it is nice to see a live crowd, but I kinda got the impression that for some people metal is an excuse to just get together and beat the shit out of each other while some dude plays guitar.

2006-09-08T18:53:00.000-04:00

What's up?

I went with my brother, his fiancee, and their friend to this cabin my parents had built up in the mountains. It's dope. I learned how to play spades and we made a fire pitt and a fire.

Preview for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. I'm excited about it, but apparently this is gonna really emphasize them being ninjas. I like them just keeping it simple and beating people up, not messing around with grappling hooks and James Bond gadgets. We'll have to see. The Ninja Turtles introduced a young boy to pizza, and I never looked back since. Best cartoon ever.

2006-08-17T16:20:00.000-04:00

I'm not really that much into comics but I was as a kid. recently my bro got me into the walking dead and one of my old roomates was down in Baltimore a few weeks ago, raving about this Civil War thing. I just picked up a few of those books yesterday from Comics Kingdom and I came back today to pick up the Spider-Man and Wolverine issues. This shit is totally off the hook, it's crazy. I only want to read comics that represent some kind of apocolyptic change I guess, and it's kind of expensive cause you spend 3 bucks on something that takes about 15 minutes to read, but this Civil War thing is pretty good though.

2006-08-15T17:53:00.000-04:00

If you're ever on 57th street in New York and see a place called Shelly's, whatever you do, don't go in and eat their alaskan king crabs. I had never eaten a crab that wasn't from the chesepeke bay before, and I'm never gonna again. That shit gave me some serious food poisoning - I'm totally outta commision.

I was in LA last week. It was fun. I think I saw Meg White at this place called Little Temple, but I definately did see Jon Voigt at Trader Vick's.

2006-07-15T02:43:00.000-04:00

I was hanging out at someone's house tonight and a bunch of people were in the living room banging on instruments. They were trying to make gospel music and sing the blues and stuff. I was hanging out on the porch and I said it sounded like dinosaurs trying to make music. Then I said it was like a band falling down the stairs.

On thursday J Roddy and the something is at the Talking Head. I saw them before at a Peelander Z show - which is a joke band and so it didn't make much sense. J Roddy is good, you should catch them.

2006-07-12T23:42:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in a minute - I haven't bought any CDs, been to any shows, or done anything that my public hasn't already probably done and formed their own opinion about. But, today my first feature article came out in the city paper, even though it isn't linked on the website for some reason I figured I should post something. I'm a little tipsy and I just lost 20 bucks playing poker.

Apparently the new Outkast single is out and Andre is rapping, my roomate says it's cool. I don't really listen to the radio much either, and seeing as how I don't do that or do any of the other stuff I was talking about, I dunno why I bother posting shit, but anyway, I can't wait for that album to come out. I honestly don't expect it to be anything much, but I'm still anxious to see. Has it been leaked to the internet yet? Cause I don't do that shit either!

My article in the City Paper is about this local band called Caleb Stine and the Brakemen, and my basic point in the article is that they're worth checking out.

I might be moving back to New York in a couple months, so start looking over your shoulder and get some bars installed outside your windows.

2006-06-28T01:44:00.000-04:00

I just saw Superman Returns and it's great. It's over the top and gets pretty cheesy at times, but it has the right to - how could it not be cheesy? All the technology they've got in movies now means that Superman can actually do stuff that he should be able to do, and they can put him in situations where you still don't know how he's gonna win. It's not, "Oh no, this lake is on fire, what're we gonna do?"
I saw it at the Senator Theater, which is this really old fashioned place here in Baltimore with one giant screen and almost a thousand seats. It's about a mile from where I grew up so I always like going there for that, but it's also good because people usually get really amped up about whatever movie's playing there.

2006-06-26T13:57:00.000-04:00

I work on the weekends washing dishes at a restaurant in Hampden called the Goldwen West. Food is good, you should check it out if you get a chance. I like working there cause it's so different from my other job, teaching Special Ed at Kennedy Krieger. That's a real job with professional people who take themselves seriously, and they should. At this place though, dudes with creative facial hair cook enchiladas and listen to Tom Waits, give me food whenever I want and just seem to not give a. It's night and day from my other job where people think I might be a little eccentric to come to the Golden West and be one of the most normal people there.

One thing I've learned about washing dishes is that it's really boring, so if you don't have good music time moves backwards. One time another dishwasher who dresses like a russian sailor put on two Led Zepplin live bootlegs in a row and I wanted to die. I mean, who want's to listen to an 8 minute guitar solo by some dude on drugs? Not me. It's time to create the perfect mixtape so I can start monopolizing that crappy skippy-ass old Sony we listen to in the dishroom.

1 - Lil Wayne - "Oh No" - "me I come out of that water like I was just bathing/ and watch my step on the wet pavement" ... "street sweeper in the back of the hatch/ make me pop the latch/ leave you bloody with the cops to match" ... "I'm sicker with it/ pick a city, buy a condo/ find a fine ho, let some time go" This is exactly the shit you want when you're washing dishes. It's got enough bass to have a whole seperate song pounding out of our shitty but big speakers but enough treble to cut through the din with the right shit to rap along with keep you from getting bored. This is the perfect song to wash dishes to.

2 - Juvenile - "Holla Back" - I liked this before I even heard it, when I read in the liner notes that it had an Otis Redding sample. The lyrics are dirty as shit, and there are a few hooks. That's all well and good, but what makes this song special is the relentless maniacal urgency of what sounds like 3 songs mixed up and thrown together.

3 - Notorious B.I.G. - "Hypnotize" - You gotta have shit on this CD that everyone will recognize. You got waiters walking by constantly, your manager milling around, maybe even your boss will be there to step on your feet. And the more people like your CD, the less likely someone is to come over with a scratched up doom metal album. This is another one of those intensely focused songs that will cut right through your thoughts and distract you, which is definately what you needw hen you've got a whole mess of pankace batter on your silverware. "Your crew run run run/ your crew run run."

4 - the Wu Tang Clan - "Protect Your Neck" - I think the Wu rules our kitchen, man, everyone listens to this stuff. Not just the group, I've actually heard a few more solo albums than I would've like to since I started there. This album is probably the best dishwashing album cause its so twichy and autistic - it's like you drank too much coffee and you're all tense but you're happy about something and you can't sit still and so when you're listening to ODB singing "c'mon baby baby c'mon", you don't mind attacking a few huge pots of burnt chili sauce that you'd been saving for later.

5 - Little Big Town - "Boondocks" - I don't like crowding any mix with too much of any one type of music, so you have to mix it up with some country if you've had 4 rap songs in a row. This song talks about the country, saying "it's where I learned about living/ it's where I learned about love/ and having a little was just enough." It sounds cheesy, and it is, but that's the thing - it totally embraces the corniness of what it's saying. "you get a line/ I'll get a whole/ we'll go fishing in the crawfish hole/ down in the boondocks/ poker on a saturday night/ church on sunday morning." That's actually about half of the song right there, so just imagine it being sung by 4 people back and forth while they've got steel guitars and pounding drums. Once again, it's crucial to get those shitty monolithic speakers something to pound out so loud it rattles the plastic, but still have a tinny enough sound going to be able to hear over all that. Steel guitar is perfect.

6 - Mobb Deep - "Shook Ones Pt. II" - This song here slows it down a bit, but so far this mix has been on some 60 mph in 3rd gear shit, so it's necessary to take it easy for a minute. Drink a ice cold glass of water. Sit down for a minute, bullshit with a waiter while he waits for his burgers to come through. I actually used to think this was a Wu-Tang beat, and it kind of sounds like it. All that mid 90s New York shit was so ominous and greasy, you still bop your head when it's slow, cause there's still a lot going on to wrap your head around.

7 - Scarface feat. Nas - "In Between Us" - On The Fix, this comes right after the bubbly happiness of "My Block," and I guess it's meant to be the other side of the coin from "I love these ghetto boys and girls." This song here is totally brutal and paranoid "money never changed me/ money changed the people around me ... fuck every soul that ever soul/ that ever felt like I owed/ them a goddam dime/ or a goddam line/ or a goddam chance ... and that goes for everbody/ thinking it's them/ fuck you you and you/ her him and him." This is far and away my favorite rap song with a blues sample, it makes that Nas song sound like a joke. Right when it's over it comes back to a little piano line to remind you of the song before. I read somewhere that Scarface has bipolar disorder, and this stuff totally comes across that way. Fuck it, if you want you could probably put these 2 songs together on the mix, it'd sound great.

8 - Ice Cube - "The Nigga Ya Love to Hate" - I don't know much about Ice Cube, his career peaked way before I was interested in hip hop. I picked up this album last week, this is the first song on it, and I like it. I think it's got the same production as old P.E., and it sounds like, totally overblown, like the sound is holding itself together, and it would evaporate if it stopped moving. That makes for some clean dishes.

9 - Big & Rich - "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy" - I remember at my old job driving a van back and forth between the Bronx and Manhattan full of drunk college kids, one night around midnight some girl puked all over the inside of my van while we were sitting in traffic on the Cross Bronx. We're on our way to the city, and the van is full of her friends, but the girl is all drunk and embarrased, crying unconsolably, the whole van smelling like whiskey and puke. I'm trying to tell the girl it's no big deal but she won't hear it - we were well on our way to an awkward ride. I didn't want that so I start busting out all the party tunes, and when I put this on everybody on the van was like, singing and dancing in their seats and having fun. That might be my favorite memory of that job. This is an infectious ass song though even if you don't have any good memories of it, it's even more groove laden than that Little Big Town song and a million times more tongue in cheek.

10 - The Streets - "Fit but You Know it" - The new album is good, but there's no track that matches this one for its rambling wackiness. "Hotel Expressionism" tries but that song's just irritating. This one fits perfectly after "Save a Horse," with it's repetative little staccato British invasion beat and storyline about a drunk dude in Ibiza trying to cheat on his girlfriend.

11 - Jay-Z - "Lucifer" - This is my favorite song on the Black Album. It's got some reggae sample that shows up occasionally on K-Jah West in San Andreas. I dunno how to explain it, but Jay kind of curls his verses around this Kanye West beat, like he's almost singing.

12 - the Clipse - "Grindin'" - This isn't old enough to really be a classic but not new enough to be on the radio or anything. The drums and finger snaps and little echoey noises sound epic on a crappy old stereo. Come and go, bring your silverware to the front, go take a piss, you'll still hear this out of the corner of your ear even if the people out front listening to unobtrusive folk music don't quite notice it.

13 - Sam Cooke - "Lost and Looking" - This is almost the total opposite of "Grinding." Totally melodic and thick - this man was a virtuoso just with his voice. All he's working with here is a simple bassline, and he just murders it. This song will make your head snap back if you don't know it, you'll stop whatever you're doing for 2 minutes and 14 seconds and zone out, which might be just what you need while you're waiting for some frenzied waiters to bus their tables.

14 - Ghostface Killah - "Child's Play" - Last song on the mix, this is a great one to ride out to. Ghost loves soul music and it fits after a Sam Cooke song, he keeps switching up his flow on a few different beats that get strung together, kind of like that Juvenile song but not as frenzied. For about the last minute Ghost doesn't even rap, he just kind of rambles on and on over top of this buttery guitar riff.

I hope somebody who reads this strings this shit together and listens to it - if someone actually does that who washes dishes it'd be a dream come true. Usually my mixes have to have some kind of narrative flow, but this one is just supposed to sound good. I would've linked these songs but I could only put up the iTunes files cause I don't have MP3s, and it just seems like a waste of time.

2006-06-24T11:41:00.000-04:00

I went to Taxlo at Sonar last night, and I thought my brain was gonna explode. The DJs couldn't stay on a beat, and I was glad! The shit they were playing was so bad, it sounded better all messed up.

I saw X-Men 3 again with my sister yesterday. Really is a good movie. Plus I saw the preview for Ghost Rider! Oh, man! He was always the coolest superhero so I don't think this could be anything short of awesome.

2006-06-23T13:46:00.000-04:00

Tonight at the Talking Head don't miss Pontiak!

Who wants to play poker? It's not easy getting a game going cause not enough people want to play.

People never apologize for stepping on my feet, so I think I'm gonna start screaming and then holding the foot they stepped on in my hands and jumping up and down on the other foot until they say sorry.

2006-06-23T09:02:00.000-04:00

I watched Godzilla: Final Wars last night. I was always a huge fan of Godzilla movies as a kid, and I watched lots of old ones from the 60s and 70s after my parents taped them off the TV. I don't remember all of them, but my favorites were Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Destroy All Monsters, and Monster Zero. These were all dudes walking around in Godzilla suits wrecking toy cities and fighting but I really liked them. Recently I saw part of a recent Gamera movie on TV that had a whole bunch of CGI in it, and it made me wonder what Godzilla movies were like now. I had seen Godzilla 98, which was the American made one where they threw out 40 years worth of Godzilla tradition so they could rip off Jurassic Park, and I saw Godzilla 2000, which was the one where the Japanese took it back. I really wanted to see just a regular run of the mill one though, where there's a whole bunch of monsters and a convoluted plot. All the ones with years on them weren't the same, including Godzilla 1985, they all kind of forgot about the episodic Godzilla movies and instead acted like they were just a sequel to the original one. So I typed Godzilla into the Blockbuster website and picked out Godzilla Final Wars.

There's a whole bunch of weird shit going on now, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that rips off the Matrix. X-Men too, cause there's a race of dudes called mutants who have special powers which seem to be limited to being able to do flips and stuff during fights. There were a bunch of monsters I recognized and some of them are way different now. Angilus is this big turtle thing that would always get his ass kicked because he was Godzilla's best friend, but he's actually a lot tougher now that they use CGI, he does this thing where he curls himself into a ball and rolls around wrecking stuff. Gigan was in it and at one point he had chainsaws for arms. Godzilla even breathes fire into space one time. Some of the noises they make are different and they only did the badass Godzilla score during the beginning.

It was pretty good as Godzilla movies go, except they focused too much on the plot with humans running around doing stuff and that always gets boring. It's just fun to see this stuff still going on and how they make the stories more and more insane and draw on a bunch of newer conventions to keep the movies fresh.

2006-06-21T14:37:00.000-04:00

I watched Miami win the championship last night at the Red House, which is some bar in Canton where they have an open mike night on tuesdays. I didn't know about the open mike so I was kinda bummed, it was tough to focus on the game with people screaming all shrill in my ear, but some of it was pretty okay. My roomate got up and samg a song about Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th movies, and that was pretty funny. This guy is in a band called Entertainment System and they just put on a show here in Baltimore that was all video game music and video game art on sale. There were a few other bands there and they were called Powerglove, pieNess, and I forget the rest. They had some TVs hooked up to video games systems so instead of watching the bands I was playing the Ninja Turtles Arcade game. They also had a little show where some big gnarly dude with a massive chin-beard and a Warriors patch on his jacket beat Super Mario 2 in something like 12 minutes. He was all dissapointed though, apparently he's done it in 8 before. Anyway it was a fun show, real different.

My review of the new Streets album is in the City Paper. Did you know that in England they say "bloke" instead of "guy?"

2006-06-11T02:23:00.000-04:00

Last night I got pissed of and called some guy a douch bag on a comment on my brother's blog. If you're reading this B-Side, I'm sorry about that.

Sometimes I get bored with this blog shit, wondering if anyone reads this and not really feeling like reading any blogs by people I don't know. I go a long time without posting shit just cause I don't really have anything I really feel like writing about, and then I post some inane shit just for the sake of putting something up, but other times I really like writing. I got a lot of love for music and I like the idea of being able to put people on to shit they might not know about and putting in my two cents in on debates that interest me. My brother does this stuff for a living but for me it's more like a hobby I get paid for very occasionally.

The thing is, there's a whole lot of hating out there and I don't really get why, cause if I'm discussing music with people at my job or something and they like something I don't like I'm not going to say they're stupid or they're racist or that they're wrong or anything like that. So why do people do that on the web? It's nuts. This B-Sides dude keeps posting things on my bro's blog, dismissing his opinion calling him a white boy, and putting all kinds of words in his mouth and oversimplifying the shit he says all the time. And I just looked at it and didn't post shit cause, you know, I think it's dumb when people talk shit on a computer keyboard. Finally I got pissed last night after the guy wrote a comment about how he really likes hip hop and he hates people who just write about it so they can be "cool." So I called him a douche bag. Thing is though, up until a minute ago I thought this was a black guy who was talking shit all over the place and saying basically white dudes aren't entitled to an opionion. Turns out he's a white guy, and now I'm not mad I'm just totally bewildered. I mean, why would you discredit a guy's opinion by calling him a white boy when you're a white boy too? This whole world of online music writing is on some total Twilight Zone shit. I mean, obviously I'm just as bad as anybody when it comes to this cause I'm acting like an internet thug too, but all this is just light years away from the actual music, let alone any serious discussion of racism.

2006-06-11T01:56:00.000-04:00

Last night I saw Peelander Z at the Ottobar. I had kinda dissed them earlier and I still think it's kinda dumb, but they do put on a pretty fun show. Listening to a CD by them would be some soul-wrenching shit though. My roomate's band Entertainment System opened up for them and they were pretty tight. They play music from old video games like Mega Man 2, and I honestly didn't know what to expect but they had their shit together. Played with a lot of conviction. They're doing a big show next week called 8-Bit Genocide next week so you should check it out if that's your thing. There was another good band there that was good called j Roddy Walston and the Business. The lead singer played the Piano a bit, all headbanging and pounding on it like Jerry Lee Lewis. The only band that I didn't like at the Ottobar on Friday was Baby Asprin. When they said something like "This song is about the thin pink line between mortality" me and my friends went upstairs and talked about some 3-D IMAX movie about bugs. Apparently it's pretty good.

Tonight I saw a couple bands play at the Golden West Cafe in Hampden, where I wash dishes on the weekends. Monarch is pretty good, totally relaxing. It got described to me as noise music so I was ready to not like it at all, but for was noise it was really toned-down and accesible. After that it was my buddies in Pontiak, and they crushed it.

I bought Gnarls Barkley. I think it's pretty good, but I think they should've covered Ballroom Blitz. And maybe the Monster Mash too.

2006-06-07T20:51:00.000-04:00

These dudes M.O.L. are gonna be on Deep Flow TV this sunday at 10PM, so if you pick up Comcast channel 75 you should check it out. They're a group and I know a few of them have been in Style Warz and won. The album Money on da Low is good and solid. There are no huge bangers on it but it's real consistent. I haven't heard much stuff from Darkroom but I like their beats! Some of them roll a bit like rock songs or something. They got a couple songs on here from the Hamsterdam mixtape and one that's supposed to be on the Wire next season.

I actually don't know too much local stuff, but it's interesting that these guys and Mully aren't trying to ape the shit on the radio, what they do is a lot more gritty and is more focused on being true to life than on carving out characters and shit.

2006-05-30T15:28:00.000-04:00

Hey

So, Syle Warz was a lot better a couple months ago than the one thursday. C-Love is gone, and the new host is the old DJ. He was a better DJ than the new one, although I dunno if he's gonna be their regular guy now or not. As an host P-Funk isn't that great - he kept forgetting the rappers names and he just didn't seem to be paying that much attention. The whole event just had a better vibe with C-Love there. They had only been using local beats, and I guess they abandonded that. They also took accapella out of the final, which is too bad cause I never got to see it.

My favorite rapper from last time, Charlie Brown showed up and did his thing but he never really hit his stide like he did a couple months ago. There was a guy who really impressed me called SL Danger. He pissed me off at first, cause he called the one asian rapper "Egg Foo Yung," but he had a good flow and a lot of personality. While whoever was battling him was rapping he'd usually be in the back dancing or pretending to sleep, and he totally stole a few dudes' thunder like that. He made it to the final but lost, which is I guess what my favorite MC is gonna do every time.

Mullyman was there performing and selling his new mix, Still H.I.M. It's good, I actually like it better than the album.

Saw X-Men 3 this weekend, it was good shit.

2006-05-25T13:49:00.000-04:00

Style Warz tonight at the 5 seasons, 830 Guilford Ave. I went a couple months ago and it was cool - might be a bigger deal this time cause Mully's gonna be there.

I can't wait to see Over the Hedge.

2006-05-14T21:27:00.000-04:00

Happy Mothers Day!

I went to a Pontiak show at the Talking Head last week. There was a lot of people there, it's good to see shit popping off for my friends.

Nothing is more important than food. Go eat something.

2006-05-04T20:54:00.000-04:00

I bought a Johnny Cash CD called Ride This Train last week. It's a concept album. Every song starts out with a skit, where you hear these train wheels clanking and then he starts narrating some story before he sings it. It's not his best, but it's got some good stuff on it. Now, I like Johnny Cash more than anybody I know, but I've always thought that some of his music had a weird racial thing going on. Like in this song that was in the movie, "Get Rhythm." "I said 'you're mighty little, boy, to be workin that way'/ he said 'I like it' with a big wide grin." This was a song that he wrote for Elvis before dude got signed to a major label, and I never like it much anyway. It sounds like he's trying to be rockabilly or something, so I never though too much about it. But some stuff on Ride This Train, which came out in 1960, is just blatantly insanely embarrasing. So I had to write about it.

In the Unearthed boxed set of stuff he did with Rick Rubin that didn't make any of the American albums, "I'm Going to Memphis" is an awesome song. Starts out with vocals carrying the rhythm and the melody just getting strummed out like on the chorus of "Don't Bring Your Guns to Town." The vocals are from the point of someone on a chain gang, looking forward to finishing up his time and going to a Honky Tonk in Memphis. "I got a gal in Vicksburg/ Bertha is her name/ lord, I wish I was tied to Bertha/ instead of this ball and chain." As an old man he sings this whole song without a hint of irony or melodrama. The only accompaniment is his own guitar in the background. This is the version I first heard.

Ride This Train has the original version, and in a lot of ways it's better. The narration in the beginning frames the story, talking about how levees were built by chain gangs which were raised by cops just rounding people up from bars for bullshit charges and putting them to work. It's got some totally badass lyrics that got taken out in the newer version too, like "a dude took all my money/ wouldn't let me see the cards/ I owe the boss about a hundred years/ sleeping in his backyard." It sounds totally overblown, with honkytonk piano in the background and a little shuffle played on the guitar, and with a chain gang percussion section. I think this was something kind of big in the 60s, when at the Newport Folk Festival they had a bunch of black dudes on stage wearing striped outfits and singing while they whacked away at something with a pick. There was a song like that in the beginning of O Brother Where Art Thou, but that was a movie. Anyway, in this song they play the racial shit up to the point that in the background there are exaggerated black accents going "Mmm Hmm" and "Memphis, lawd" and shit in the background. It's totally ridiculous, and it ruins the song. Still though, this song has nothing on "Boss Jack", off the same album.

This song was written for Johnny Cash by Tex Ritter, father of John Ritter, who died the same day as Johnny Cash. He also did the score to the old Gary Cooper movie High Noon, which is totally awesome. So it's a good thing that he did at least one thing I like, cause "Boss Jack" is a total piece of shit. The opening skit is Johnny Cash talking from the point of view of a plantation owner, who says "I had the best bunch of slaves you ever saw, and I treated them right." He talks about this one old slave who didn't come back from the fields one night, and how "Uncle Moses" was sitting on his cotton sack and being inspired to write Swing Home Sweet Chariot. Instead of then going and singing that song, Johnny Cash instead sings another song Uncle Moses wrote, about how cool Boss Jack is. You know, how his horse is all mean and everybody else is afraid to ride him and stuff. How he took them all out for a fish cookout and would free them someday. Then the chorus is all upbeat, "come on children/ fill your sack/ then you hitch up your wagon/ take it to the gin." I mean, how did this song happen?

The most irritatingly knee jerk conservative and ass ignorant modern country says stupid shit all the time, but I don't really care because I don't like that music anyway. It's not like I'm gonna just block out the lyrics to "Have You Forgotten," you know? The thing is, when a guy like Johnny Cash is singing it, it means I can't put my iTunes on shuffle when people are at my house. It also makes me wonder, cause I think that on the whole here was a singer who really had his heart in the right place and was pretty smart, so was he just singing this stuff cause he hadn't really thought about it? I don't know, but I guess this is one of those things where if you like country music so you gotta put up with hearing stupid shit sometimes.

2006-04-30T01:59:00.000-04:00

I went to a Round Robin party at the CopyCat building tonight. The deal was, there were a few bands and they would each play a song, the lights would go out, go on again pointing at another band, and they would play a song. What was cool about it was there were different types of music there. This dude Dan Deacon who lives in the apartment played. I kinda dissed this dude when he opened for Grand Buffet at the Ottobar, but seeing him in his own element he wasn't as bad. Picture the class clown from Middle School if he got a drum machine for Christmas and went apeshit on it. His first couple songs were actually catchy but then he just scarting making a lot of screechy twirly-whirly noises and shit. It was annoying. There was also this rapper Height who I like a lot, he performed with his buddy Bow & Arrow who I work with. Pretty good, but they didn't do that many songs.
Shodekeh was there doing beatbox. He teamed up with a couple saxaphones for some songs. They played "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone" and it was great. Some band was playing punk rock but they had a drum machine doing club beats, and it was actually real cool. I wish I knew their name. There were some other bands I had never heard of plus this MICA band Ponytail, which is just real twitchy noise music.
The audience was real supporting of everything, even when they shouldn't have been. Plus somebody drank our beers when we weren't looking. It was a pretty live crowd but I think the reason they liked all this stuff was cause it's okay to dance really badly to music that's undanceable. A couple times they had a little pit going, and this one dude wanted us to lift him up so he could crowd surf. With this crowd though, it was more like me and my roomate just picked him up and dropped him on the people next to us. It was all love at the Copycat tonight though, and I'm glad I had fun at this party so I have something else to remember aside from that place being a crappy place to live.

I copped the new Streets album. The shit is dope. More on that later.

2006-04-27T12:51:00.000-04:00

I'm back in B-More now, and my shit is back in the paper. Oh, you didn't know? Yo' ass better call somebody!

I saw United 93 last night with my friend Jennings. No lie, that was maybe the most harrowing movie I've ever seen. When it was over, and the screen went black before the credits rolled, you could seriously hear everybody in the theater breathing. They could've easily made a movie about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 into a cheese fest, with lots of back story and cuts to a phone ringing back at the homestead. This movie doesn't do that though, pretty much everything happens on the plane and air traffic control places and stuff like that. Like Jennings said, it's basically the first chapter of the 9/11 commission report put on film. People are attacking the movie and saying it's too soon and stuff, but it was five years ago and apparently all the families of the victims approved the movie. It's crazy to watch this and relive those events and then wonder how we ended up where we're at now. Seriously, this is a good movie.

2006-04-20T11:09:00.000-04:00

I went to Screwed Up Records & Tapes yesterday, the store that sells DJ Screw's stuff here in Houston. I found it on Wikipedia. The place wasn't open cause someone forgot his key, but the dude who worked there who was waiting in the parking lot was cool, he sold me some stuff out of his backpack. I asked him if he had heard of Baltimore Club music, cause he had been asking where I was from and stuff, and he said no. I don't really recognize much of the music that's screwed and chopped on these CDs, but it's all pretty good. Getting stuck in a traffic jam with this stuff playing in your car keeps you from getting agitated. Just in general the music's real atmospheric. My buddy Jusin said it would be good for a cop movie during a stakeout or something. It's hard to believe this shit came out while I was in High School. If he had screwed and chopped Tom Waits I probably wouldn've known about it.

I went to the last Rockets game of the season last night, they lost to the Spurs. Yao and T-Mac were both injured and couldn't play but it was still a good game. The rockets were down by 10 for the whole third quarter but they fought back into the lead and ended up losing because of two blown freethrows and a missed shot from the paint at the buzzer.

2006-04-18T22:03:00.000-04:00

So yeah, I got my bike stolen but it's not the end of the world. It's happened before.

Since I got down here to Texas I've heard about this dude Kinky Friedman, who's running for govenor. He's this Jewish country singer from Texas who wears a cowboy hat and is always smoking a cigar. I saw something about him on CMT and it didn't talk much about his politics. The closest it came was when he says he's in favor of gay marriage because he believes they have the right to be as miserable as everyone else, which was stolen word-for-word from Chris Rock, but it's still all good. I don't know if the dude is gonna be the Jelo Biafra or Jesse Ventura, but I hope he wins. We saw the columnis Molly Ivans last night, and she endorsed him.
I rolled up on this Molly Ivans talk at this opera house or something where it was wall to wall middle aged/ old people dressed pretty nice wearing an oversized Ben Wallace Jersey and cutoff jeans and my buddy was wearing flip flops, so that was kind of embarrasing. She's this humorous politcal columnist for a bunch of newspapers. She was pretty funny I guess. She made fun of Bush-isms, which is pretty tired, but her heart is in the right place.

Today we visited a house here in Houston which is made out of beer cans. It's actually more like the beer cans have replace the aluminum siding but it still looks cool.

2006-04-18T19:13:00.000-04:00

While I was here in Houston chilling in the pool, eating Mexican food, going to movies and all that shit, back in Baltimore some motherfucker stole my bike.

2006-04-15T13:07:00.000-04:00

I'm down here in Texas now. Last night my friend's brother Adam put me on to some old Houston shit, some Fat Pat and DJ Screw stuff. Also picked up a copy of the source that has dude's cover story about Houston rap.
Yesterday we went to this Mexican place called Ninfa's. There's supposed to be a debate over whether the Mexican food is better in Cali or in Texas, but I'll tell you what, they really know what to do with melted cheese down here.

2006-04-13T16:23:00.000-04:00

Saw Ghostface on tuesday at Sonar. Gotta say, it was a real dissapointing show. The opening acts were bullshit, there were too many people milling around onstage while Ghostface was up there, the sound was bad, and it was too short. Ghost didn't have his own DJ with him, just some guy from 92Q so they didn't really have any kind of chemistry together. The crowd didn't get into it much either. There was a real annoying contingent of white dudes who kept yelling "Wu-Tang" in between songs and wouldn't stop yelling "ghostface" when there was sposed to be a moment of silence for ODB.
M-1 from Dead Prez did a couple good songs, but he spent most of his time talking about how the crowd wasn't revolutionary enough and that he was gonna get high after the show. Big whoop. Ghostface had enough charisma and has enough great songs that he saved this show from being a disaster. Still, this could've been a lot better.

2006-04-09T13:29:00.000-04:00

I don't have MTV and I don't listen to the radio much so I couldn't really say what are my top five singles of the year so far, but here go the albums:

1- Ghostface Killah - Fishscale - I have a review of this I sent to the City Paper that hasn't been published yet so I don't wanna give anything away, but I like it. There's a lot to digest about this album cause it's so dense but it's instantly accessible.

2 - T.I. - T.I. King - Dude has a really slick, tight flow but what he raps about isn't usually anything that interesting so it's easy to detach yourself and listen to T.I. like he's just another element of the beat. On "Urban Legend" that made for some boring shit, but it comes together here. My favorite song is "Bankhead," which sounds like it could be the beat to an epic soundtrack of some postapacolyptic war, 50 years after Mad Max or something.

3 - Juvenile - Reality Check - Never really was into Juvenile much before and this one doesn't totally jump out at me except for a couple songs. "Get Ya Hustle On" is great but so is "Holla Back," the beat totally all over the place and schizo, enough hooks for a whole EP, and my favorite call and response I think I've ever heard just going "Mmm Hmm Uh Huh" The rest of the CD isn't amazing but it's solid, good beats and Juvenile's sing-song flow only really getting annoying on "Animal" and "Addicted" which are at least right next to each other.

4 - Little Big Town - The Road to Here - I first heard "Boondocks" on some country station in New Jersey in the radio vacume that exists between New York and Philly, pushing the seek button like some lab rat in a morphiene study. I heard the second half of this and kept listening to country stations all the way back to Baltimore trying to hear the song again. I did, heard who it was by, and bought the CD. I guess you could call it overproduced bluegrass modern country, and it really hits its stride on "Boondocks," male and female singers overlapping each other and singing about country shit like going to church and playing poker. I like it cause it's not preachy and it's not nihlistic on some stupid Hank Williams III shit, it just sounds normal. The rest of the CD is good but not great, perfect to sing along with in the car or the kitchen while you think about other stuff.

5 - Run the Road Volume 2 - This doesn't sound Earth-shattering like the first Run The Road compilation, but it does sound like this shit might have some longevity to it. Beat wise it sounds like a cross between "Sounds for the Jilted Generation" and Wu-Tang. A lot of it is just kind of blah, but even then it's still pretty unique to a dude like me who doesn't know much about grime. "Sick to Def" by Plan B is crazy, a pissed off and paranoid story-rap over acoustic guitar. "Bare Faced Dynasty" by Dynasty Crew is a total headbanger.

I think it's been kinda slow so far. These are actually the only 5 albums I've bought this year that came out this year, except the Little Big Town, which might have actually come out last year. So this list wasn't too hard to make. Oh yeah, I bought Tortoise too, but that was butt. I think I lost it when I moved, and I don't care.

2006-04-03T12:17:00.000-04:00

Man, new T.I. and Juvenile albums are growing on me. Especially "Bankhead," the last song on King. I might start putting up MP3 things cause I might be fixing my computer.

Going to Houston in a couple weeks. I gotta keep checking Houston So Real so I can find some cool shit to check out there. I like Houston, it's a weird place. Doesn't feel like a city at all, just a really really big suburb that surrounds a deserted downtown with giant buildings 80 stories high. They also have huge, epic, armaggedon-ready 8 lane in either direction highways.

2006-04-02T13:35:00.000-04:00

I went to Style Warz on thursday with Al from Government Names. It was a lot better than I expected it to be. There was some kind of repetative shit and some of it was boring but most of those rappers got took out in the first round. A friend of mine asked me if I was the only white boy there, but there was a few. There was one white rapper, who kind of looked like Sean Fennessey . He was pretty bad in the first round, but the dude he challenged was totally ass, so he stayed on to get challenged later. People started calling him B Rabbit and stuff and he laughed about it and seemed to get comfortable and had a really good freestyle dropping big words like OxyCotin and stuff. He got took out a couple minutes later by this big guy who was real fun to watch at first, all dancing while he was rapping and hitting exxagerated facial expressions making fun of people and stuff, but his shit got tired by the end. My favorite guy lost cause he got too drunk and he was confused in the final round where he had to incorporate three words the audience chose (money, respect, and 50 thousand). Earlier than that though he totally outshined everybody rapping about how he had just got out of jail after five years, talking about standing at the bars of his cell waiting to see if anyone was sending him mail. There was one guy who was wearing a tie, his name was Alcatraz, only one I remember, he was pretty good too. Said he came from Lexington Projects and he was about to show us why they got torn down. Style Warz takes place in this Ethiopian Restaurant called the Five Seasons next to a Dunkin Donuts and it's all colorful inside. Dudes were rapping about killing each other and stuff but it was mostly all hugs and handshakes when the battles were over except for this former champion who was really pissed off that he got chewed up and spit out by some kid in the first round. Yeah, I'll definately go to that shit again, it was fun.

My friend Justin has a blog now. It's dynamite.

2006-03-30T11:42:00.000-05:00

"Drag bodies to the Murdaland"

New house is working out, I'm eating good and we got big speakers in the living room.

I bought Supreme Clientele because I'm review Fish Scale for the City Paper and I wanted to be more familiar with Ghostface's work. Fishscale is great but Supreme Clientele is like Holy Shit, I should've gotten this years ago. New T.I. is cool too with some real catchiness and tight flows, but right now I'm feeling the real densely lyrical East Coast shit. Feel the same way about the new Juvenile, but I really like the song on there that samples Otis Redding.

Keep on the lookout cause I might be throwing together a new mix in the next couple weeks seeing as how I have all these new CDs.

2006-03-26T09:14:00.000-05:00

Well, the study I was supposed to be in didn't pan out. Kind of a bummer cause I was looking forward to having all that money. It's still all good though. I'm moving tomorrow to a real house. The Copycat building should've been fun to live in, but there was too much drama and not enough parties. There was only one in our place, just when I was moving in. Some MICA kid who apparently wasn't even drunk took it upon himself to light a box of clothes on fire in the basement and our landlord got mad at us. So there was a ban on parties. Not that it would've been that great anyway - there were actually high school girls at the party we did have, which is totally not cool. That was the thing, the copycat would've been my spot if I knew about it when I was in high school. Now when I meet 24 year old guys with hair hanging in their faces who drink every day and pour coffee for a living I wanna be like "dude, that sucks." Maybe I'm getting snobby or something.

The No Child Left Behind Act pisses me off so much. I work at a Special Ed school in a class where most of our kids don't even have functional speech. Instead of teaching them skills they're going to need to communicate and take care of themselves and manage they're emtions, we have to waste time every day trying to teach them grade level material that mystifies them and that they don't need anyway. The life cycle of a butterfly, what the fuck? Plus it amounts to a whole new mountain of paperwork for our teachers. Despite the republicans claiming to be the party of small government what they've done is just created a whole new level of beurocracy. In regular schools where the kids don't perform well, probably like most of the schools in Baltimore, apparently a lot of kids now are only taking math, reading and gym. What does that say? That having a high school diploma won't help you get a decent job anyway but to get it you have to just crunch numbers all day, and that's what education is. It's a sad fucking day. I just hope that the passage of this law isn't a watershed moment in the history of education in America and that this law ends up being repealed before all the drama and music teachers get jobs at Starbucks and move to the copycat building.

2006-03-22T17:58:00.000-05:00

For the next two weekends I'm gonna be a participant in a scientific study where they mesure the effects of coffee. I gotta go in for two whole weekends and drink 2 cups of coffee, and they're gonna pay me a $1000. I can't drink any alcohol or even coffee for the next couple weeks and I'm gonna be sitting around in some office doing nothing for the next couple weekends. But fuck a club, dog, I'd rather count a thousand bucks.

Diarheaastan. I hope they have HBO at this place. Oh and plus my NCAA brackets are all fucked up, I had Illinois going all the way to the final.

2006-03-17T07:55:00.000-05:00

Pontiak opens up for Palomar at the Talking Head tomorrow night. Come party.

2006-03-13T19:25:00.000-05:00

My sister is a Junior in High School and they're making her memorize the periodic table. What a monumental waste of time. I can't believe it.

2006-03-12T17:57:00.000-05:00

Hank Williams III has an album out called Straight To Hell. I heard it playing at some music store and it sounded all right so I bought it, but by the time I made it out of the store I was already getting a little tired of it. Dude sings with the same throaty high-pitched voice as his granddaddy and it has a really old timey feel to it. There are instruments on this album that I've never even heard of, like "Clawhammer [could be a good Metal band name] Banjo" and "Upright Pedal" as well as all the mandolins and fiddles you'd expect from some nostalgic country or bluegrass. Hank III sings about country music having lost its soul from the point of view of like a prince-in-exile, and takes it upon himself to represent for a world that CMT is obliviouls to where people pop pills and cuss.

All of this sounds great on paper, but it has none of the warmth and accessability that made Hank Williams Sr. great. There's a song called Country Heroes where he sings "I'm drinking whiskey from a glass/ and if that ain't country/ then boys you can kiss my ass." The chorus gives shout outs to guys like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, and the whole album is dedicated to covering the same topics as guys like this. What Hank III doesn't get is that the best of these down and out, singing from the bottom of a bottle singers was that they sang about trying not to be like that. He's singing about being proud to be singing about the same shit that underground conscious rappers are proud to rapping about not rapping about and it fails for the same reason, having a skewed frame of reference and only being relevant in relation to what it hates.

2006-03-08T12:54:00.000-05:00

Saw the Clipse up in NY this weekend. It was really short and totally to the point, them just doing all their best songs and leaving after about half an hour. Great show

Moving to the Patterson Park area this month, so watch out. I'll be living halfway between the ghetto and the Outback Steakhouse.

Some day I'm going to own a computer and I won't just be writing blurbs on this while I'm on break at work.

Check the City Paper for my write up of the Grand Buffet show.

2006-03-01T18:14:00.000-05:00

Today's my last day of being 23 so I'm trying to make it count as I sit here in a library posting on a blog. Tomorrow night Dizzie Issie's - come out and get me wasted.

The Carter II is the best CD to wake up to that I own. I wake up to that shit and I'm invigorated all day, it's better than a cup of coffee.

2006-02-25T14:16:00.000-05:00

The music in Walking Tall, the Rock movie about a dude from special forces coming home and becoming a sherrif to run the casino out of his hometown, is pretty good. Lots of atmospheric bluesy riffs as ambient music plus there was a Johnny Cash song thrown in there. If I remember, the Rundown also had pretty decent music and there was a Johnny Cash song in that one too. Does the Rock pick the music for his movies, or is this a coincidence? Maybe I should rent the Mummy 3 and see if they managed to stick "I'm Going to Memphis" or "One Piece at a Time" in there, but I don't know where it would fit. Ditto for Doom.

2006-02-23T13:47:00.000-05:00

What's up? All you paparrazi out there, I'm gonna be at the Ottobar on saturday for the Grand Buffet show so bring your zoom lenses.

I watched A Dirty Shame and it kind of sucked but I like the way it became a zombie movie for a minute. Speaking of which, I don't really read comic books but there's this series called the Walking Dead. About zombies and it's great.

I was driving my car the other day and some 78 year old lawyer was slowly walking up beside me. He was in my blind spot so I totally merged into him and it put him in a critical condition. I was like "Dude, you got to announce your presence."

That was a lie, but this here is a true story: I was in some bar in Federal Hill Friday night and this bouncer came up and wanted to kick me out because all of a sudden I was apparently violating the dress code. As I go over and say goodbye to my friends I'm taking my sweet time about it, but I was leaving. One of the three bouncers in the meantime started tugging on my arm, so I pulled my arm away, and all three bouncers reacted like I had smacked somebody. They tackled the shit out of me right in the middle of the dance floor and then told me to calm down. I know I don't have to tell ya'll that that shit ain't kosher. I don't really like Federal Hill much.

2006-02-09T13:39:00.000-05:00

Misery Index at the Ottobar tonight, awwww yeah.

Watching the Grammys and getting annoyed cause they give the wrong people awards is like watching the State of the Union and being pissed off that George Bush is still a republican.

2006-02-08T07:53:00.000-05:00

I saw my friends Pontiak play at Iota in Arlington last night. My buddies play some riffed out swampy rock that always makes the band they open for sound ass backwards. This time it was Red Wanting Blue, some band from Ohio, where apparently the only CD in the record store is Pearl Jam. The singer kept doing this thing where on the big "aaaahhhh" notes, which came really often, he would open his mouth and his eyes really big. It kinda made him look like somebody had dropped a piano on his toe or something. I should say though that the guys in the band were really nice dudes.

2006-02-07T13:57:00.000-05:00

Made it up to NYC and caught the Rub with A Track on saturday. I had a good time, music was pretty good. I think it got progressively better as I remembered less and less though. At some point I asked Ayres to play some Baltimore Club, and he responded that this was a Brooklyn Hip Hop Party. I don't know why I request a song every time I see a DJ, considering they almost never play what I ask them to and then I get pissed when they say no. They were playing some when I was leaving, so I guess somebody didn't get the memo.

Cat Power album is good. Gretchen Wilson album All Jacked Up is spotty but great.

2006-01-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

Here's my review, suckas.

2006-01-21T21:47:00.000-05:00

The Jimmy Jamma's got a review in the upcoming City Paper. Look for it wednesday, it's gonna be big.

2006-01-04T16:11:00.000-05:00

It's been too long, but here's side B of Caught in a Trap.

1 Nas - Ether - The last song on the first side was a track where Jay-Z disses Nas, so here's the response. This song is years old and the feud is dead so there's no reason to summarize all the insults and puns (like "Gay-Z and cock-a-fella records"). My bro wrote a post a while back saying that 50 might be the George Bush of Hip Hop and Jay-Z the Bill Clinton - if so, then on this track Nas sounds like JFK resurrected or some shit. "Burner at the side of your dome/ come out of my throne/ I got this locked since '91/ I am the truest/ name a rapper that/ I ain't influenced" ... "What's sad is I love you cause you're my brother/ you traded your soul for riches." Jay was making fun of Nas for not having been a real big time drug dealer and all that, so as well as fucking with the mythic image of Sean Carter before he started rapping "in '88, you was getting chased through your building," Nas defends his status as an influential rapper, no at some hustler-turned-rapper. I think that's like, cool and shit.

2 Elvis Presley - "Suspicious Minds" - This is probably one of those songs that you don't really know or even remember that you love. Like some oldie they'd play on a Burger King commercial that you wish you knew what it was called so you can download it. Elvis gets a lot of hate these days, especially in rap, for having stolen black culture and stuff. Dude really played music his own way though, and if you listen to the right songs you realize why he will always be the king. Anyway, after all these dis tracks we gotta have a makeup song in here, and it ties in with Nas's claim in the last song that he still loves Jay. "We're caught in a trap/ I can't walk out/ because I love you so much baaaaby." This chorus is totally beautiful and what else can I say? This is later than most of the Elvis stuff I like so it doesn't sound too rockabilly or even rock 'n roll, just a great, totally middle-of-the-road song.

3 Petey Pablo - "Let's Roc" - This song doesn't flow with Suspicious Minds, but it sounds even better coming out of nowhere. Harmonica and banjo thrown onto a spare beat that sounds epic when they're taken off and locked down in a way that kinda similar stuff on Bubba Sparxxx's Deliverance album wasn't when they're there. Petey sounds great growlin' out rhymes about being proud of who you are and where you come from, yelling out weird shit like a more grown up Lil' Wayne. "I gotta hear you say it/ 'Petey Pab Mothafucka!'/ That's right baby/ two scoops of raisins/ half man and half amazing."

4 Surfjan Stevens - "Chicago" - This song I guess is about being ashamed and/or remorseful about your life. "I was in love with a place/ in my mind, in my mind/ I made a lot of mistakes/ in my mind, in my mind." It's a really pretty song, totally over the top and overblown in a completely different way than "Let's Roc," with a gospel choir at the end rounding it off as being so triumphant as a piece of music that it feels more like dusting yourself off than really being self-pitying or regretful like the lyrics come off as by themselves.

5 Johnny Cash - "Give My Love to Rose" - I really like crushingly sad country story songs for some reason, and this one is right up there. The narrator comes across a guy dying in the road who's been on his way back from jail to see his wife and meet his boy. He asks the guy telling the story to give his love to his wife. What I really like about this song is the mystery of it - why was he in jail, and what is he dying of? There's a few versions of this song; I used the one off American IV cause the one he recorded as a young man has a little less gravity to it. Johnny Cash is probably the exception to this, but it seems like country is the most hated form of music out there as well as being one of the most popular. It's fucked up that our country is so polarized not only by politics, region, class, and race but also by art and culture. When people are surprised that I listen to country music I guess it's cause they can't see past their stereotypes of the people who sing and listen to it. But country definately has something to say and its own voice, and if you want your music to speak to you in all facets of your life you gotta have a diverse musical taste, you know? In terms of the story here and the point I'm trying to make, the next song fits right on top of it.

6 Lil' Wayne - "Shooter" - This here is Weezy planting his flag on the moon, taking hip hop to a new place. The beat is the story of a bank robbery in progress, starting out with shit about waving around a shotgun, ending with screaming sirens and all the while Lil' Wayne is ad libbing along stuff like "they want me to surrender, but not, I can't do it!" and occasionally rapping about some totally other shit - being region hated. This song (like the Surfjan Stevens one) has been written about a lot by my bro, not much else I can say that he hasn't already.

7 Young Jeezy - "TRAPSTAR" - This is the shit you play driving over the Verrazano on your way back to New York to finally get your fucking Futon out of your friend's basement in Queens and bring that shit back down south so you can finally sit and watch TV, cause you're feeling pretty good and proud of yourself. "I'm so materialistic/ so well connected/ just ask about me/ so well respected" So much bravado! Epic booming horn shit, almost on a Rod Lee level, slamming the door shut on the maybe overdone countryass embellishments that have maybe been a bit overused on this half of the mix.

8 Otis Redding - "Champagne and Wine" - Otis Redding covered songs by Sam Cooke and the Rolling Stones, wrote "Respect", recorded in a studio with an integrated set of musicians, and apparently wrote "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" after he listened to Abbey Road or maybe Sgt. Pepper. I don't think he's as well known as he should be, but oh well. Here he is singing a sweet love song over top of catchy and totally not pretentious or ironic horns with a piano and guitar flowing together like nooks and crannies. One lyric jumps out at me: "You've got me eating out the palm of your hand/ I don't mind eating, long as you feed me/ good love and good old sympathy."

9 The Rolling Stones - "Dead Flowers" - The stones might or might not have been the greatest Rock 'n Roll band in history (they're probably not anymore), but they had one weird drugged out bluegrass album called "Beggar's Banquet" and a couple wannabe country albums like "Let it Bleed" and to a certain extent "Sticky Fingers," which is what this comes off of. It almost sounds like a sequel to "Suspicious Minds," only now they love still the girl after she's left. I like the ambiguity here, like in the Johnny Cash song. The girl seems to have left him but might be dead, cause Mick Jagger keeps promising no matter how many dead flowers she sends him, by the mail or to his wedding, he'll still put roses on her grave.

10 - Big & Rich - "I Pray for You" - The new album isn't like "Horse of a Different Color" in that it doesn't start out with a promise to break down barriers between different musical genres. There's no rapping black cowboy or singles they're going to play on ads for poker tournaments. Still though, songs like this remind you that the best thing about them might not even be all that, it might just be the harmonies these dudes sing together with the down to earth and courageous lyrics. "When you're gone I miss you so much I do the only thing I can do/ I pray for you." These guys are also among the few and the proud who can sing La La La La La, La La La La La La La and not sound totally stupid.

11 - Cam'Ron - "Harlem Streets" - This song first jumped out at me after I noticed the line in the chorus "my life's based upon what I'm gonna do this year." Listening closer to all the babbling, it sounds like a stream of consciousness as Cam sits on the roof of his apartment building watching a sunset, thinking about leaving his life behind so he can try to do something new, something great, and realizing no matter what happens he'll still be the same person. The beat also stands alone on Purple Haze as like a low-key doodle by Surfjan Stevens and Kanye West.

Sorry it took me so long to get this shit out. I doubt if anybody actually makes this into a mix, but if you do, it fits right on a 90 minute tape. If you use an iPod you should probably stick "Boondocks" by Little Big Time right before the Petey Pablo song. I'd have put that on here but I bought that album after I made this tape. If you know me, and you want Caught in a Trap, just ask.

2005-12-20T18:57:00.000-05:00

It's crunchtime ya'll. Here goes another mixtape, this ones called "Caught in a Trap."

1 Green Day - Holiday - My friend Justin always wants to play this CD in the car but I always veto it, talking a lot of smack about how rock sucks now and all that. Then I saw these dudes on MTV where they were playing this stadium show in front of thousands of people and doing interviews about making this CD that they felt was like them against the world. It was all kind of inspiring and reminded me about why I got into Punk back in 9th grade. You know, the sense that you can take on the world and make it a better place just by rocking. This is a really solid song too, a good opener with a strong bridge and a part where all you get is pounding drums and bass. It's an antiwar song, talking about "the company lost the war today." This band trying to make punk mean something again I think is just one more sign of the left wing in America starting to finally get off its ass.

2 Dr Dre featuring Snoop - Rat Tat Tat Tat - This song sounds like fucking bomb, it's totally menacing and hard. If you hit the pause button just right or you're using MP3s, you can make the fade out from the Green Day song lead right into the big band in the beginning of this song. In this there's no idealism and instead just a lot of threats and yelling about bitches. Dre says "CPT, CAL my locality/ It's strange how I rearranged and changed/ the business by dropping shit like this." I think before the West Coast blew up the biggest hip hop group was Public Enemy, right? It is kind of strange!

3 Beanie Siegel featuring Peedi Peedi & Twista - Gotta Have It - This song is probably the most upbeat one on the B Coming, which isn't really saying much. It's a totally anxious song, like they all drank too much coffee and they're stuck in traffic. It's pretty typical 2005 drug dealer rap, no depth but it sounds great. "You see me with crack/ we strapped/ what's the reason for that?/ I got to have it!"

4 Kanye West featuring Paul Wall - Drive Slow - This song opens with the same kind of tinny drums that are all over "Gotta Have It," but it gives way to lilting saxaphones and Kanye telling a coming of age story, urging everybody to slow down and take it easy. Totally what this mix needs right now. It's also got Paul Wall bragging about his grills and his rims and stuff like always, but claiming "I could still catch boppers if I drove a cab." This is totally punk rock, especially when you consider how Mike Jones' second single was based around the line "Back then ho's didn't want me/ now I'm hot, ho's all on me."
What's up with this song being on both these dudes' albums?

5 Joan Jett - I Love Rock and Roll - I loved this song way before I knew what CBGBs was or had ever heard of the Offspring, before I knew what punk was. My dad even took my brother and I to an Orioles game where she sang the national anthem when we were kids. This song is just a great jukebox anthem.

6 the Beastie Boys - No Sleep Till Brooklyn - I think the main problem with the Beasties is that eventually they got convinced that they were rappers and they had to rap. They were way better as a bunch of punks yelling shit that rhymed with the dude from Slayer playing a solo. This song is totally effortless, a bunch of white kids who stumbled onto this new music style and ran with it, doing their own thing with it.

7 Notorious BIG - Respect - The Beastie Boys kept yelling about Brooklyn, so I had to put the best Brooklyn rapper next. This song makes sense after the rock sampling Rick Rubin beat before it, with some staccato guitar riff throughout and a girl singing about respect in the hook. I love story raps, and this song encompasses Biggie's life from even before he was born "I wish moms could hurry up so I could get buck/ wild juvenile ripping mikes and shit/ New York New York!" and then later "Now I'm 13/ smoking blunts making cream/ on the drug scene/ fuck a football team" and then finally deciding "rap was secondary/ money was necessary/ till I got lucked up/ kinda scary." We're still there, hearing rappers talk about how they're rapping cause it makes more money than drugs or whatever, not a lot of talk about doing it out of love. I'm not judging this shit though, cause it's great.

8 Black Mountain - No Hits - The singing in this song is all a lot of mumbo jumbo you can't really understand. Something about "let me holler against the rockstar dream." I don't usually like this kind of stuff, but this song just sounds so slick with the little hand claps and the guitar thrashing in the background, like these dudes could rock you off your ass if they weren't kind of bored with it. These dudes are hating just a little bit but you need to relax again after all that twitchy Brooklyn shit.

9 50 Cent - Window Shopper - I had a dream where I met 50 and all I could really think of to say was that I really like this song. I'm a little sick of this guy and like a lot of people are, but you can't deny the catchiness of this song. It's like, half hook. "Listen man, shit changed/ I came up I'm doing my thing/ homie I'm holdin holdin holdin." I've seen people write about this embodies everything that's wrong with hip hop today, but it is what it is, doesn't claim to be anything else. I think dude is capable of a lot more but fuck it, almost nobody sounds better bragging.

10 Jay-Z - It's Hot (Some like it Hot) - Oh man, more handclaps! Timba works them a million times harder than Black Mountain though, creating this totally infectious beat. You gotta hear this shit. And this is the song where Jay dissed 50, back in '99. "Go after Jigga/ your ass is dense/ I'm about a dollar/ What the fuck is 50 cents?" Jay sounds like a million bucks on this. I don't know what else to write about this song, except that it's addictive.

11 Jay-Z - The Takeover - I don't think mixes are supposed to repeat the same people, definately not twice in a row, but I'll do whatever I want. Instead of a hot song with a diss in it, this is just a total diss track. Jay's going after Nas and Mobb Deep here. "I'll kill you motherfucking ants with a sledgehammer" is my favorite line, but there's a lot more. He finally levels his biggest diss at Nas when he says "there's only so long fake thugs can pretend." Does that mean you have to have sold drugs to be the best rapper now?

I don't have the strength to go on. This here is the first 45 minutes, in a couple days ago the Empire Strikes Back on side B. I just wanna say that I have all these diss tracks not cause I'm such a huge fan of feuds or anything. Just so far this mix is all about a conflict between love and greed, or something, so I gotta have the conflict play itself out.

2005-12-18T15:23:00.000-05:00

On the radio I heard this country song called "Boondocks" by Little Big Town. It's totally awesome, gotta be one of the best singles this year. I'll write more about it later.

At my holiday Gala for my job we were at Martin's West, which is one of those buildings with big chandaliers where they have proms and stuff. They had some middle aged white DJ who refused to play either "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" or "Laffy Taffy," but he played some club music. It was cool.

Keep on the lookout for a new mixtape I'll write about this week.

2005-12-13T17:31:00.000-05:00

I watched this boxing match a couple weeks ago on Pay Per View. They had R Kelly come out and sing the national anthem, which was a big mistake, cause he did some king of slick and breezy R 'n B remix of it and had 2 couples doing ballroom dancing and shit while he was singing it. He even tried to get everybody to clap their hands over their heads, it was terrible. The reaction he got was kind of similar to one I got after I played Ludacris' "Roll Out" in a redneck bar in Baltimore last week. I felt kind of bad about it later but I just didn't think, you know? They had all these old Now! CDs in there.

2005-12-12T12:14:00.000-05:00

I went and saw my buddies' band Pontiak last night in Arlington. I don't really like much indie rock cause I think it's all pretty monotone and boring but Pontiak isn't afraid to rock! Right after them was some band called City State that was just everything I just said I don't like about indie rock. It sounded like the shitty score to some 80s Hong Kong action movie - I kept expecting to see subtitles that said stuff like "Love is like a snowball, rolling down the hungry mountain!"

Harry Potter is awesome!

2005-12-04T10:38:00.000-05:00

The new Big & Rich album is pretty dissapointing. There are some good songs on it like Filthy Rich and I Pray for You but there's nothing that stands out and begs for attention like Rollin or Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy on the first album. Cowboy Troy doesn't even rap on it!

I haven't been posting much lately cause I been real busy looking for a place to live. I'm only paying a little but I'm gonna party a lot, you know what I'm sayin? It's this floor of an old warehouse with a big huge open space where art school kids throw parties at. It should be real fun to live there and maybe start DJing at some of these parties. They're also filming the Wire, like, right outside my house. I'm gonna try and get in touch with the casting people to see if they'll make me an extra.

2005-11-25T19:24:00.000-05:00

I like the I Walk the Line. I think it painted a picture of Johnny Cash being a much more one-dimensional character than he actually was, but I guess that's what you gotta do when you condense a man's life into 2 hours.

Juelz Santa was on Jay Leno last night. It was all soldiers in the audience, looking all spiffy in their uniforms and making it real awkward for Juelz. There was no reaction in the audience until I guess he got desperate and started running up the aisles. Then at the end during the call and response part when he told them to yell "Ay! Ay! Ay!" they were all deafening and perfectly sycronized together. It was like he was performing for his totally disciplined Dipset Army.

2005-11-17T11:43:00.000-05:00

So in the 50 Cent movie the wet naked dudes fighting in the shower scene kind of surprised me. I wasn't expecting to see any balls in Get Rich or Die Trying, you know? I also liked the part where he listened to Window Shopper in the car before he recorded it.

2005-11-14T12:12:00.000-05:00

The gladiator scene in Rome last night was nuts. No TV moment has turned my world upside down like that since Chris Jericho first won the Heavyweight Title from HHH on an opening segment of Raw or Smackdown when I was in High School.

2005-11-11T21:46:00.000-05:00

The White Stripes video that my brother and I acted in is out now, and you can see it on the White Stripes website. I thought I had been cut out of it, but they actually ended up using a take I was in! When I found out I watched MTV , MTV2, MTV Hits, and MTV Jams (now I call it MTV James... Breihan) for hours, but I haven's seen it on TV yet. Anyway, Jack White called my bro an "asshole" in this British music newspaper called NME. Jack said "some asshole actor that was an extra on the video went online the next day and told everybody what was in the video." The funny thing is that my brother isn't an actor, he's actually a writer. The fact that he wrote about this shouldn't be any big surprise. Anyway, shit, this isn't The Sixth Sense or something, some movie with a cliffhanger ending, it's a music video. I guess I should't say too much though, my bro can watch his own back. I'm actually a little pissed off Jack White didn't say anything about me though - I was the one who ran up and asked his wife an inappropriate question ("Yo, are you Jack White's wife?").

2005-11-06T12:39:00.000-05:00

I went to the Johnny Cash party at the Ottobar. They had a whole bunch of bands, 8 I think, all playing Johnny Cash stuff. The only dude who sang with a deep voice and just played acoustic guitar was the first one out, almost like they wanted to get that shit out of the way. After that came totally annoying Ukalale and little recorder/keyboard toy instrument dudes making me wanna throw shit at them. They seemed to be the most popular though, probably cause they rolled deep with a bunch of MICA people who really like to whistle. Come on though man, this shit isn't a gag, it's Johnny Cash. Some of the punked out bands were pretty good, like Secret Crush Society. some were boring like band that yelled "We're gonna super-Fuck Johnny Cash graaaaah!" or something. This group called Land Speed Record though, they only played three songs and they totally blew up "Long Black Veil," totally capturing the epic tragedy of that song with their 2-piece electric guitar and drum thing, doing the shit right. After the bands they did Karaoke and the Jimmy Jamma rocked the mike on "Don't Take Your Guns to Town." I think Al Shipley of Government Names might have thought it was kind of funny that I kept running to the front to get promotional T-Shirts and stuff and that I knew pretty much every song and shit, but I'm a total nerd when it comes to Johnny Cash. Can't wait for the movie.

2005-11-04T17:06:00.000-05:00

Jarhead a pretty good movie and it's way less cartoony than 3 Kings. Far as I know those are the only Desert Storm movies and I like them both. It got a bad review in the City Paper for not being anti war enough but that's garbage. It didn't bang you over the head with how anti-war it was, not like Born on the Fourth of July or something, but it does make the way the war was fought seem completely gratuitous. Aside from maybe Jamie Foxx's character it also definately doesn't put the Marines up on any kind of plateau either like a We Were Soldiers or something.

2005-11-02T12:31:00.000-05:00

I was gone for a minute
now I'm back again

Last time I tried to post my computer ate it and I got pissed off. I wrote about Pontiak rocking at a house party in Arlington. They're gonna be at the Talking Head tonight. I won't be there cause it's a school night.

Al Shipley is making waves over on Government Names.

Johnny Cash Party on saturday at the Ottobar. Eat something will be there.

2005-10-23T19:46:00.000-04:00

2005-10-20T19:53:00.000-04:00

I bought some mix CDs last weekend up in New York, from some dude who was selling them openly out of a tiny storefront in Chelsea. It got me wondering how this dude stays in business, selling something completely illegal out in the open. Not only him, but also the dudes who are always there by the A-C stop on Canal Street and even the dude who sold bootleg movies out of his Deli on Fordham road close to my college. Do they buy protection from the cops? Do the cops not care? Do they not understand what's going on? The guy in Chelsea was playing the music he was selling pretty loud and hanging out on the sidewalk, enthusiastically greeting people who had already been there a few times like they were old friends. It was almost like he thought he was supposed to be there. Kim's Video in the East Village used to sell mix CDs but they got raided since I left. What did they not do?
Some guy who sold me a Snowman shirt on Greenmount Ave here in B-More said after he saw me a few more times maybe he'd sell me some club CDs or maybe even some rap mixes, but the second time he saw me I guess he'd decided I was a cop and looked up in the air when I asked about CD's saying "No, no, I don't sell that. What is that?" pissed me off, dude thinking I was a cop, especially cause I still don't know where to go to get mixes down here.

2005-10-15T23:48:00.000-04:00

This has been a kind of crazy week for me. I came up to New York to be in a White Stripes video directed by Michel Gondry, the same dude who directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the White Stripes video with the legos.
You can check my bro's blog for details on the video - I'm way to tired to type all that shit now. Here are the highlights:

- I met Jack White and took a couple pictures with him on my camera phone. He's bigger than I thought, and more laid back.
- I pissed off Jack White's wife, by asking if she was his wife. It was kind of an introductory question, cause I was gonna ask if they really got married in a canoe on the amazon or whatever. But when I asked if she was his wife, she laughed and turned away from me. I thought she had walked away, so I turned to my brother and was all "That was some cold shit! What am I, a fucking peon?" I don't know if she heard that, but I kinda hope she did, cause I think it's pretty fucked up if some lady who's married to a rich famous guy thinks she's too good to talk to me, even if just to say to mind my biz. I guess on the rare occasions that I meet famous people I prefer to talk to them as equals, hence my blurting out questions and cracking little jokes (I did this for the White Stripes and Michel Gondry, not for Conan O'Brien or George W Bush), but apparently this lady didn't consider me worth talking to.
- I met Meg White. She was really nice, and cute, and quiet. I talked to her a little longer than any of the other famous people.
- I met Conan O'Brien. The one I met was the badass Conan, with a leather jacket and shit, not the guy on your TV who's all cute looking in a suit. He was just like he is on the show in real life, only tougher.
- After I got cut from the video I went to the chiropracter they had in the back for the famous people, and he cracked the shit out of my back. It was great.
- I got a pair of new shoes and a shirt. The tie I wore in the video they took back, and then the White Stripes manager took the hat they had made for my bigass head. This guy was all dressed up (and already had a hat), so when I met him I assumed he was an actor in the video. When I asked him what he was playing he looked confused. Anyway, he said he had a whole box full of red feathers, so I guess he'll take better care of that porkpie hat than I would.
- Fuckin weirdos.

Yeah, it felt a bit funny to see all these people running around creating his video. It's cool to watch something happen as it's being filmed, and then to watch a TV where what you just saw looks like a real music video. and it's funny to see this little snippet of showbiz, where people take this shit and themselves Really Seriously but don't bother paying me and my bro like they said they would. It was filmed a day later than they said and I was only in New York because of Yom Kippur and my school being off. So when it was all over at about 12:30 on thursday night, I went to Penn Station and took a train at 3, got to Penn Station in Baltimore at about 6, took a taxi home to drop my stuff off, ate breakfast, changed my clothes, and got on a bus and went to work friday morning at 7:45. I'm glad I do special ed full time and this type of bizzare shit only when it falls in my lap.

2005-10-11T00:18:00.000-04:00

I went to another K-Swift party at the H&H building. Going to these parties is a lot of fun but they kind of remind me of being a ska fan back around 96-97. Only all the frat boys who were bigger than me and used to annoy the shit out of everybody with their moshing and crowd-surfing have been replaced by these spindly art kids who do the same shit. I literally had to grab some kid by his shoulders and hold him down to stop him from trying to mosh. Come on dude, it's dance music! And then later on some guy tried to get me to take my shirt off, so I could be one of the 4 cool guys sweating on people. I guess I can't talk though, cause when I went last month I got trashed and threw my roomate up on stage to dance.
There was a DJ before her called TitWorth or something, who I guess is like a DC Hollertronix type dude and he was alright.
I'm in New York this week, eating lots of pizza by the slice.

2005-10-07T20:55:00.000-04:00

Here's another playlist. This is one that I actually have made, just now, and recorded it onto a 90 minute cassette. But it'd work on a playlist or maybe a CD if you shaved off a song you didn't like and accounted for the time after the last song on each side.

The last mix I made had a kind of a theme that it loosely revolved around, but this one is more out of my old-school Ram Van days, when I would make CD to play for strangers I was driving around that had storylines obvious enough to jump out and bite you on the ass.

1 - Kenny Rogers - "The Gambler" I love starting out with country songs that have storylines, and this is a great one. Guy sits on a night train across the aisle from some drunk dying gambler who imparts some wisdom in the form of gambling advice. "Every gambler knows that the secret to survival / is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep/ cause every hands a winner, and every hands a loser." That basically forms the basis for this whole CD along with almost constant running and moving. The song itself is top notch driving music, with a strong steady beat and guitar picking that comes and goes depending on the gravity of the lyrics. This story and advice are stuck somewhere between wisdom and dejection, and it actually contains great poker advice. In the chorus the gambler warns "You never count your money when you're sitting at the table/ there'll be time enough for counting when the deal is done." I used to play Texas Hold 'em at my apartment every week up in the Bronx, and that shit actually helped me out on my rent once I started knowing what I was doing. And whenever it got down to the last two people, fighting it out over the pot, if my opponent started nervously stacking his chips and counting them, I knew I had already won. Even if he had 5 times as much as I did, and it would take an hour of everybody else being real bored, those chips he was counting were already mine.
2 - Jay-Z - Public Service Announcement (Interlude) The ominous piano line, leading right into a triumphant over-the-top beat with words that can't not be sang along to: "My name is JOVE!" Just Blaze's beat keeps dropping out with the piano coming back and these speeches being read, just shovelling on atmosphere in this track, even more than Kenny Rogers. This is on the Black Album, which is supposed to be Jay-Z's last, so now that he is done I guess he can count his money "check cheddar like a food inspector" and look back. "I used to move snowflakes by the O-Z/ I guess even back then you can call me/ CEO of the R.O.C."
3 - the Rolling Stones - "I Got the Blues" I can't resist putting a great "I miss you" song after the Jay-Z track from his last album, even though the dude is definately not retired. The first time I really listened to this song I was sitting in a computer lab by myself, doing experiments on a virtual rat. This song came in with the wailing horns and thumping beat, plus the sliding up and down the guitar neck shit I like, bending and dragging the notes but never overdoing it. I was jumping in my seat in that lab cause the Stones seemed to take everything I had been thinking about back in the beginning of that semester and spit it out into this perfect song. Mick Jagger prays that the girl who's gone is with a guy who "will bring you alive/ won't drag you down with abuse."
4 - Three 6 Mafia feat. Frazier Boy - "Don't Violate" This song seems to be by the dudes Mick Jagger hoped his girl wouldn't end up with. "If these bitches make you mad put your foot up they ass!/ tell that ho 'Don't violate me, Ho, don't violate me.'" To be fair to these guys, they say "bitch" can refer to male or female, and aside from the chorus above, their rapping just seems to be threatening haters and stuff, not girls. Of course it's fucked up though. Still, the Stones song flows right into this catchy piano beat and this shit's kinda hard not to sing along with.
5 - Nas - "Thief's Theme" Another overblown angry threatening scary track here, only this one's got insane flow instead of yelling. "Leanin on broke down cars with flat tires/ flash iron on anybody tryin on the blocks I'm supplyin' on" Holy shit, this even looks cool written down. Nothing's being celebrated here but there's plenty of bravado. This story is so far going from the two only voices of wisdom being a dead gambler and a guy who went from dealing drugs to making records to being a CEO and supposedely finished with rapping. What are we left with? Dudes who make their money off of more muscle than hustle, scaring and hurting people to make a buck.
6 - the Mountain Goats - "Mole" This is a beautiful song, and especially after the Thief's Theme, it sounds so soft you could blow it over with a feather. I think it's about this dude visiting someone in the hospital who tried to kill himself. You could fit it on this mix either by looking at the shit they rap about in the last two songs being so self-destructive, or just as someone who gets hurt by some fucked up thug. The song's sad as shit and plods along but I think it's hopeful, waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel. "I came to see you up there in intensive care/ out in the desert we'll live care-free."
7 - Kanye West - "Roses" Another song about visiting a hospital, fits in with the same vibe but it's warmer and fuller. Kanye puts a lot of personality into this song, rapping about loving his grandma and waiting with his family by her bedside. "We outside of the emergency room, room, room/ you could feel my heart beat, beat, beat/ if she gon' pull through we gon' find out soon/ but right now she sleep, sleep, sleep" Right here the mix is getting more hopeful again, some more uplifting shit with a happy ending.
8 - Guns 'n Roses - "Sweet Child of Mine" What can I say? I grew up on this shit. It's great, but have you listened recently? Like, do you even remember how awesome this is? Not my favorite G 'n R song but it doesn't flow as clunky as you'd think here. It works right after Kanye's slick production and shit cause it's another song about love and it's on some sunny shit, in a dusty kind of way. At the end, after the guitar solo, it goes from all this "Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place" shit to Axle asking over and over again "Where do we go? Where do we go now?" Totally throws a spin on what the song's about, and it's like the hero in our story wants to live right but doesn't know what the fuck to do.
9 - MIA - "Sunshowers" This is a totally sunny fun bonanza, but it's also a confused song about terrorism. I guess enough has been written about it already, but it fits here cause it bounces around enough to come after G 'n R sounding like it belongs, and cause it's message doesn't know where to go either, except to say that the way we look at this shit has to be updated, we have to keep thinking, keep moving.
10 - Johnny Cash - "I Walk the Line" Johnny Cash learned how to play guitar and sing while he was stationed in Germany, bored, writing home to this girl he met at a skating rink or something. He came home and married her. Then he got signed by Sam Phillips after waiting on the sidewalk for the man to come to the studio one day so he could play him a song on the street, and then proceeded to blow up all over the place along with Jerry Lee Lewis and fucking Elvis. He's still married to this sweetheart and he's suddenly this star on the road, meeting a country singer he'd had a crush on since he was a teenager and all the groupies, plus he's popping uppers just so he can keep up with all the party animals and musical geniuses he's suddenly around. This song is a promise that couldn't be kept. "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine/ I keep my eyes wide open all the time."
11 - Notorious B.I.G. - "Just Playin' (Dreams)" Before the beat even comes in, this ridiculously catchy bassline, Biggie starts rapping "As I sit back, relax/ puff a blut, sip a becks/ think about the sexy singers that I want to sex/ I probably go to jail for fucking Patti LaBelle." I guess this is Biggie's "I walk the line," only he's this married superstar who's airing out his fantasies and at least having fun with the whole thing. The mix has gone in the last few songs from confused good intentions to saying "Fuck it!" "Pimpin' aint's easy but it sure is fun/ when I bust my nuts I bust 'em one by one/ so what's the 4-1-1, hon?/ Dreams of fuckin and R 'n B bitch"
12 - Sublime - "Garden Grove" This song doesn't stand up as well after Biggie and Johnny Cash as it does by itself, but I still love it. What's the reason this dude's head isn't up in the clouds, inhaling and exhaling love and good will? "It's you! it's that shit stuck under my shoe." The song lists a couple dozen little things that piss off the singer and turns him into this bitter dude that he doesn't want to be. The little dinky dub noises or whatever at the end go a little long, but I don't mind because this is the end of side 1.
13 - Outkast - "Return of the 'G'" If Garden Grove is about what pisses off pothead skater kids in Southern California, this song is on some apocolyptic shit about what makes a society fall apart. The beat is think and scary and slow. Back then Andre had this crazy stream of consciousness rap, like he had too much shit to say to have any time to pause. "It's the return of the gangsta/ thanks ta them niggas that got them kids that got enough to buy albums but not enough to bounce them kids to the zoo or to the park so they grow up in the dark/ never seein' light till they end up being like your sorry ass/ robbin niggas in broad-ass daylight, get down!"
14 - the Game - "Put You on the Game" After our song about why the gangsta is back, here goes the Game rapping about the west coast being back. Whatever you think about thugged out rap or even the Game's ability as a rapper, this shit sounds great. When Timbaland drops the percussion and Game goes "My Unit is the realer/ fuck with my la familia, I will kill ya/ I know that boy not familiar/ but you got to feel him if the doctor sealed 'em/ [impossibly deep voice] Is Compton in the house?" This syrupy beat feels natural as hell after the Outkast song and flows right into the next track like they were next of kin.
15 - No Lay - "Unorthdox Daughter" This multilayered Grime beat comes in one element at a time so there's already a buildup going on before No Lay goes "How these boys gonna chat about berreta/ when you never had a metal tucked unda your sweata?'" One bar in, this shit is already amazing and it just keeps going as this pissed off menacing chick with a totally out of control flow keeps going and going. 10 times hungrier than the Game.
16-18 - Rod Lee - "Dance My Pain away", DJ Lil' Jay - "Down the Hill (Rod Lee Remix)", Blaq Starr & Rod Lee - "Get Yo Handz Up" Usually I don't put more than one song by the same guy on a mix, but it's hard to only put on one club track at a time. These are all of Rod Lee Volume 5, but they're basically one Rod Lee song, and then two songs by other producers that he mixed into his own CD (I don't know if "Get Yo Handz Up" was a collaboration or what), which is the way these mixes work. All these songs were probably most of the mixes this summer. Anyway, they all mix into each other so they don't sound like 3 separate songs anyway. The first one might be the most written-about-by-crackers Club Music song ever, where Rod Lee is evicted, laid off, and now dancing his pain away. The "Down the Hill Song" is a bit more typical, with the beat building up, dropping off, building up, it's like a fidgity masterpiece. Calls out the names of neighboorhoods in Baltimore, starting off with Greenmount, which is an Avenue 3 blocks away from where I live and where I buy my groceries. Hey! At the end, the way the gun blasts and shattering glass become the pounding heart behind the song makes the whole fucking track. I only put in the first 30 seconds or so of "Get Yo Handz Up," long enough to hear the incredibly awesome riff and shouted beat, but not long enough for the song to get totally repetitive. Usually, 5 or 6 minutes of club music is plenty unless you're dancing. I cut out during a brief fraction of a second of silence after the DJ says something. The way the club part of the mix works is that it's dance music like the No Lay song, but you know from the "Dance My Pain Away" that the hard lyrics and shit are just for dancing to, and it's really music that's keeping the hero of the mix's mind off his problems.
19 - Geto Boys - "Nothin' to Show" This isn't a towering monster of a song like "Get Yo Handz Up," but it's so slick that it stands up to it. These old rap legends are still here, and they're spitting out wisdom like Kenny Roger's gambler. Scarface - "They say the first law of nature is self preservation/ fuck a playstation, my bills don't vacation." and Willie D "Fuck the fame, I want the dough/ cause when times get drastic/ you can't take a fucking ego to the bank and cash it." This shit sounds thugged out but still grounded, less about making a point than bragging.
20 - Bob Dylan - "Bob Dylan's Blues" I love dropping country sounding shit in the middle of some hip hop. The Geto Boys sound hazy and this shit sounds mysterious. Here Dylan is dripping amazing notes off his guitar and almost going off on incredible tangents, you can feel them come and go, but he just keeps stumbling through this great and unique blues song. Lyrics bring us right back to where we started from, and right up to where we're going in this mix, too. "I been gambling so long lord, I ain't go much more to lose/ right now I'm having trouble, please don't take away my highway shoes/ well I'm bound to get lucky/ or I'm bound to die trying."
21 - Beanie Siegel feat. Cam'Ron - "Wanted (On the Run)" The Bon Jovi sample they use in this sounds like the Dylan song's redneck uncle. Fucking great. Beanie raps about "wakin up in cold sweats piss scared with the rumblings" and sounds totally paranoid and mad. This dude doesn't have to pretend any of this either. My brother actually happened to write a great post about him today, so read it. I think he's another rapper like the Game or Young Jeezy who's personality overshadows his actual verbal skills to the point that you just wanna hear what he's got to say. Which is all good, especially cause Cam'Ron comes in and kills the beat.
22 - The Clash - "I Fought the Law" This is a cover song of some kinda rockabilly song that the Clash ride in on rolling thunder. Listening to this shit you'll wonder how punk got so fucking lame. The music stops in the middle except for a drum pounding gunshots as Joe Strummer yells "Robbin people with a 6 gun! ... I fought the law, and the law won." Now, I guess this song and the next won are kind of like two alternative endings, like a choose your own adventure book or a video game.
23 - Young Jeezy - "Go Crazy" I used the version with just Jeezy, not the remix cause we already used Jay-Z. The much more subdued drumroll and horns beat flows with the Clash song and chills it out just a little bit, cause Jeezy's the one who got out of a life of crime on time! Remember? When to walk away, when to run? "It's kinda hard to stay drug-free/ when Georgia power won't give a nigga lights free/ switched hustles, been killin them ever since" The Clash should've listened to Jay-Z I guess. These songs aren't really then ending though, I guess they're paranoid dreams or hopeful dreams that Beanie's having, cause our mix keeps going.
24 - Otis Redding - "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" This song reminds me of my own life, especially when I'm sitting down drinking coffee in Fells Point, looking at the tankers in the Harbor and the Domino Sugar sign. Moving down to Baltimore from New York, like Otis sings about moving from Georgia to the Frisco Bay, here I am in a place where I don't know that many people and there doesn't seem to be the much going on. It's all familiar from my childhood but nothing like what I'm used to. The city I was born in, where people think I'm a New Yorker because of the way I talk. This is our mix leaving behind the whole life behind it, all the shit it loved and hated about what it knew and looking for a new horizon, not knowing what to make of it once it got there. I'm not bellyaching and I like it here, but it's different. Otis sings all these sad lyrics, but he's whistling a happy tune.
25 - Eric B. & Rakim - On the back of this album there's a picture of some gang from Ft. Greene who were friends with Eric B. & Rakim, and one of the dudes is the original 50 Cent. Some stickup kid who coined the phrase "Get Rich or Die Trying" (maybe not, look at the Dylan song) and ended up getting killed in his early 20s. Rakim raps about how he used to be a stickup kid, but "now I learned to earn cause I'm righteous/I feel great, so maybe I might just/ search for a 9-to-5/ if I strive, then maybe I can stay alive." This song makes me feel great too. I didn't used to be a stickup kid, obviously, but here I am with my first 9-to-5, and plus I'm sitting at my stereo with a pen and a paper listening to Eric B & Rakim and a whole bunch of other stuff.

2005-10-03T19:09:00.000-04:00

So, is Baltimore the cool place to film a video now? After being blown away by the 'lil Mo video a couple days ago, I turn on MTV today and I see Boyz in the Hood with their video where Young Jeezy is beefing with Cutty from the Wire! What? "I'm a east-side resider." Well, I work on the east side, shit, that's cool man. And what's on after that? Akon and Young Jeezy, tryin to take it easy? Not filmed in Baltimore, but they've been turning out some cool videos in the last month.

On the "Soul Survivor" video, the censors edit out "the law" on the part where Akon goes "If you're looking for me you could find me on the block, disobeyin' the law!" I mean, come on. Aside from being totally annoying, do you think there could be any better way to force your teenage kids to go out and buy this music than making if impossible to hear the shit on the radio or TV? It makes sense to edit some stuff, but it's no secret these dudes are breaking the law. What's next, are you gonna ban that Hair Metal song where the guy's like "I can't drive 55!"?

2005-10-02T10:39:00.000-04:00

Holy shit! Have you seen the "Dem Boys" video? I finally have cable after a month of no TV, and I'm watching MTV, and I see that smokestack by 95 that says "Baltimore" on it. No way! Good song too.

2005-10-02T10:27:00.000-04:00

The new Three Six Mafia is all menacing and shit "There ain't no bitch in my blood, nigga, it's nothin but thug/ I knock the black off yo' ass! I knock the black off yo' ass!" This would be good music to have on hand if you were going to some pre-arranged fight like you were in middle school or something. Other than that, I mean, I can't really see myself putting this on while I eat my breakfast, or while I'm driving cause I'd probably get road rage and try to kill someone with my car.

2005-09-27T11:47:00.000-04:00

I met this dude who said he was in some old Scottish gang, like the Dead Rabbits in Gangs of New York. I asked him about the movie and he said he never heard of it. Then he told me a story about getting stabbed by some Irish dude, and talking to him in Gaellic, and making friends with him. I think he might have been lying.

I saw some middle aged lady kissing on an older man on the Hopkins shuttle today, right in the middle of the aisle. That's some irritating shit to see at 7:30 AM on the way to work. I also saw a little sign on a lampost while I saw waiting for the bus that said "Are you a desperate housewife? OR Are you sexually frustrated?" and it had the guy's number. No picture or anything. Maybe it was the old guy on the bus.

2005-09-26T12:22:00.000-04:00

A few years ago I did this outreach trip out of my college to stand up for kids in San Diego, which is this organization that works with street kids. Part of that trip was education on what the kids go through, so they took us to this big park where there's a street that goes in a big. They call it the Fruit Loop because that's where all the male prostitute teenagers go to get picked up. I stood there on the road for about 5 minutes and this car pulled up, and a guy got out, talked to me about my shoe size and the hair on my chest and stuff, and then asked if I wanted to go for a ride with him. You know, just like everybody else on earth I've been made fun of and stuff when I was a kid, but nothing can match how disgusted and pissed off I was when he offered me a ride. I can only imagine what it's like for the kids who have to do that to eat, or for the girls who put up with getting harrassed on the street everyday. Now I'm no feminist, I don't even really have any idea what the tenets of feminism are or what it stands for, and sometimes I say "bitch," so I'm no enlightened dude I guess, but I think it's fucked up when guys think they go through the same hardships as women cause they used to get made fun of or whatever. On Julianne Shepherd's blog some guy posted a comment on one of her blogs that "We all have hard lives Julianne!", and then offered up as proof of his hard life that he got made fun of, and also that he plays rugby(?). You think you know but you have no fuckin idea.

2005-09-22T11:38:00.000-04:00

I have Netflix now, and one of the first movies I got was Duel. It's this made for TV movie from the 70s, Steven Spielburg's directoral debut. The movie's about this dude driving through the country to some meeting, and along the way he pisses off a truck driver, and the rest of the movie is about the truck trying to kill him. At one point in the movie the guy says to himself that it's like he's back in the jungle again. It reminded me of my old job, driving a van around in New York. One time as I was getting ready to merge onto this bridge between Manhattan and the Bronx, a big MTA bus totally cut into my lane, way before the lanes even met and way way before the solid white lines became a dotted line. I had to slam on the brakes, and with girls on my van screaming, this huge bus came within 6 inches of barreling right into us. There really is something about having a huge piece of metal coming with some demented fucking bastard behind the wheel, not caring if you die, that can make an hour and a half movie about it not get boring.

2005-09-18T15:41:00.000-04:00

With my mixes I like to tell a story or at least make a point. I also don't see the point of making a mix if it's not going to have a diverse mix of music on it. Here's a mix I never actually made, it's kind of a mix of my favorite mixes.

1 - Johnny Cash - "Don't Bring Your Guns to Town" This is a story song about a cocky kid who rides into town strapped and ends up getting shot in a bar after he pulls his gun when some "dusty cowpoke" laughs at him. It was recorded in the 70s but it has the same bareknuckled production values that made Johnny Cash's albums that he recorded with Rick Rubin towards the end of his life so popular, even for people who don't like country.
2 - The Game feat. 50 Cent - "How We Do" It might not seem like it, but going from the Johnny Cash song to this is a totally great, natural transition. The simple guitar rhythm feeds right into this precise series of ticks and booms laid down by Dr. Dre, and the songs are basically about the same thing. 50 and the Game rapping about fronting on people "We make a move and act a fool while we up in the club," Game saying he'd shoot someone for stepping on his shoes. It might seem just silly except the shit actually happens, someone did get killed for stepping on somebody else's shoes in a club not too ago down here in Baltimore.
3 - Young Buck - "Bang Bang" The only dude still in G-Unit who I still actually like, here he is praying "Lord forgive me but he tried to kill me" and rapping about guilt. The beat is the Nancy Sinatra song of the same name. These first three songs are like a trilogy. A lot of people make the point that Johnny Cash probably made more songs about killing people than any rapper, but he always sings from the perspective of guilt and/or regret, which rappers apparently don't do. But here you go. Now you got this Johnny Cash song plus two rap songs all looking at what could be the same scenario from 3 totally different points of view. And they all sound real good together too.
4 - Nelly feat. Tim McGraw - "Over and Over Again" I saw part of some VH1 special on the 500 worst moments in Hip Hop, or something like that, and this song was on there. Whatever, VH1 doesn't know shit about shit. Beyond being a solid breakup song, here you've got a country dude and a rapper from East St. Louis singing, asking why do we have to keep fighting about the same things over and over again? It's some Barak Obama shit. This song, even if you don't care about bridging the gap from rap to country, it still sounds good. A lot warmer than the Young Buck song, but there's a flow between these two songs about regret, one about crime and one about love.
5 - Rolling Stones - "You Got the Silver" Keith Richards sings on this instead of Mick Jagger, sounds totally perfect alongside the slide guitar. "Baby, what's in your eyes?" This song sounds like kissing in the snow, but ends up on the note that Keith Richards doesn't care.
6 - Otis Redding "The Glory of Love" This song is awesome. Otis has a lot of strength in his voice that the song builds up to, but it starts on a whisper. The horns, the drums, the piano, everything on this song comes together perfectly when the song switches up the tempo and keeps building. The song is about love making you cry, move over and give up, but still being something amazing. This song turns a corner, in the way it sounds and it's message. Up to this point this mix has been on some dark and depressing shit, but now it starts looking at some of the same issues from a more positive or at least upbeat feel.
7 - Nas - "Halftime" Illmatic was recorded when Nas was real young, something like 18, before he was even signed I think. No fancy production, just this one young kid with crazy flow rapping about real dark shit on all these four and a half minute long songs. Like my brother once said, it's got no fat on it. Halftime is easily the most upbeat song on there, with a fat baseline and Nas rapping about loving rapping. "Back in '83 I was an MC sparking/ but I was too scared to grab mikes in the park and/ kick my little raps cause I thought niggas wouldn't understand/ and now at every jam I'm the fucking man." Closes it out with a dedication to all 5 boroughs.
8 - Young Jeezy - "My Hood" We keep the gravy train running with this song about how much Jeezy loves his hood, my hood, and your hood. He paints a fun picture of a scene that sounds like something straight out of The Wire: "Ford Taurus pull up, everybody run/ White boys jump out, pointing with they guns!/ Ford Taurus leave, everybody came back/ Hey! Hope them boys didn't find my sack." Just like Nas he compares the rap game to the crack game.
9 - Aretha Franklin - "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)" As the story goes, this song was recorded with Aretha singing and a bunch of white dudes playing instruments, in Alabama, in the 60s. Jerry Wexler or somebody under him fucked up. After they recorded this song and knew it was the shit, like, the fucking bomb, they all had some drinks. Someone pinched Aretha's ass, with her boyfriend standing right there. They got through maybe one take of another song and the whole situation got so bad and close to violence that the rest of the CD ended up being recorded up in New York. Which was a shame, cause this song definately lets you appreciate that laid back southern vibe that allows Aretha to scream, shout and moan and sound totally beautiful, not overpowering or being overpowered by the instruments. "My friends keep telling me that you ain't no good/ but they don't know that I'd leave you if I could." She loves this dude the way America loves violence, gangsters, and drugs. Different picture of love than the Otis Redding song.
10 - Jay-Z feat. Eminem - "Renegade" The first time I heard this song it was in a class at my college, where my professor played this song and told us to write an essay about it. I think I wrote something about Jay-Z and Eminem pointing the finger back at all the people who attack their music, at the society who condemned them to poverty then turned around and condemning them for what they did to get paid. Anyway, Nas was right when he said Em murdered Jay on his own shit here - Eminem's beat on this song and his verses speak for themselves. But Jay's are great too nonetheless, he's painting pictures with his verses just like story singing country singer. "I penetrate pop culture, bring 'em a lot closer to the block/ where they pop toasters and they live with they moms" and later "by the bodega, eyein' under my coat feelin' braver/ doo-rag wrappin my waves up, pockets full of hope."
11 - Biggie - "Things Done Changed" It's funny to think about, but when my parents grew up there wasn't any such thing as crack, there hadn't been a real heroine epidemic and the white flight had only just begun. No matter where you live, that shit affects your life and how you see the world. As we can all see from the hurricaine, our cities really are on the verge of anarchy but a lot of the people who want to put stickers on CDs or bleep cusses don't want to think about that shit, they want to blame the downfall of society the people who "fell through the cracks." Biggie here isn't blaming anyone but he's kind of asking what happened. "What happened to the summertime cookouts/ seems like every time I turn around somebody got took out/ and my mother got cancer in the breast/ don't ask me why I'm motherfucking stressed/ things done changed."
12 - Kanye West feat. the Game - "Crack Music" "How we stop the black panthers?/ Ronald Regan cooked up an answer." Totally clunky beat on this song, almost demanding that you listen to what Kanye's saying. Not just being pissed off at republicans either, there's also more rapping comparing crack to music . Someone doing a spoken word thing at the end says "What we gave back was crack music and now we ooze it through they nooks and crannies. ... Now the former slaves trade hooks for grammys. This dark diction has become America's addiction."
13 - Mike Jones feat. Paul Wall - "Whatch'a know about (Screwed and Chopped Remix)" This song actually does seem to be oozing, with impossibly deep voices rapping a phone number you can call to get ringtones. Seems to epitomize the idea of crack music, even though it isn't about drug dealing. The totally slick screwed up beat sounds amazing after Crack Music, kind of like how "Drive Slow" sounds like it fits on Paul Wall's album.

On my own mix, I stuck on a Rod Lee song at the end, but Baltimore club tracks are hard to come by sometimes, and they don't sound good on mixtapes or burned CDs anyway because they're all on DJ mixes anyway, and you hear the end and beginnings of the surrounding tracks. The song I used is the Horn Theme, this totally fucking epic pounding horn beat with orchestral singing or something in the background. This music seems like the type of shit that should be being played in clubs you'd be afraid to go to. Like the screwed and chopped Houston shit, this song represents an indiginous musical form that could fit loosely under the umbrella of hip hop, but unlike Mike Jones and Slim Thug, this shit hasn't broken into the mainstream at all yet.
I guess the story of this CD is kind of, what it's like to love something or someone that isn't always good for you.

2005-09-16T12:03:00.000-04:00

I saw Crash last night on DVD. It kind of reminded me a lot of the Wire. There were almost no really clearly defined good guys and bad guys, not even really a main character, not a lot was resolved, and it was a totally epic movie about normal people. I think that it might be my favorite LA movie after the Big Lebowski.

Battle Royal is cool too. I love how in Japanese cinema you can have this ridiculous, over the top movie about a bunch of middle schoolers killing each other, and at the same time do this whole coming of age story that seems like it's really actually directed at middle schoolers.

2005-09-12T14:26:00.000-04:00

Had a great weekend up in big fat New York. Played poker on friday up in the Bronx. And saturday had a great time celebrating Tom's birthday. We had dinner with Julianne Shephard and Ryan the Mack cold macking it, occasionally threatening me with violence. Then we saw Lungfish at Southpaw. Never saw Lungfish before, and it was the first good time I had at an indie rock show for like, a while. They don't try to hard and they're not afraid of simple riffs and hooks. That's all I need. Then Sean came out and we hung out in some bar that had Bill Monroe in the jukebox. Tom's friend Nick from the Voice kept throwing shots at him and my bro got stupid drunk.

I had a thought that it would be funny if the Cookie Monster forgot about cookies and became obsessed with eating brains instead.

Speaking of which, when a kid at my work bit me the other day I realized I had seen way too many zombie movies to not take that seriously, and I spent a couple hours in the hospital taking Hep C tests and getting perscription pennecillin. Special Ed is awesome.

2005-09-05T18:24:00.000-04:00

Whenever people talk about the Department of Homeland security not being able to deal with the hurricane and the flooding because they were only preparing for terrorist attacks I wanna puke. I mean, what are they gonna have to do in the event of any breakdown of law and order or a situation where people have to get out of an area? They have to be able to mobilize the National Guard, establish leadership, and open lines of communication to areas that are cut off. They would need to have resources available and ways to get them distributed to people who wouldn't necessarily be in shelters. Right? I mean, they'd have to do this stuff in the event of another 9/11, anthrax, smallpox, an explosion at a nuclear plant, or whatever you could think of, just like that's the same shit they should've been able to do last week. On top of all that, anybody getting ready to deal with terrorism would have to be able to be flexible and creative with their responses. The people who were on the planes who got hijacked probably didn't fight back because nobody had ever heard of terrorists using planes as missiles before, except the people on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. You gotta figure that if and when the terrorists attack us again they're gonna do something else we haven't heard of before and we gotta have leaders who aren't going to only be able to do shit about scenarios they've already rehearsed. I mean, people actually knew that New Orleans was in a precarious position and a lot of people had predicted what happened and we still got caught unawares. I wish people on the TV were asking real questions about what the fuck the Department of Homeland Security is good for besides color coded warning systems.

2005-09-05T12:17:00.000-04:00

I just saw something on Crooks and Liars about a Geraldo and Shepard Smith segment on Fox news, I guess on Friday. I don't know how to link video but you should go to the website and watch it. I didn't used to like Geraldo, but here he is on FOX News at the Superdome, crying, holding a baby, saying "I don't know, man! Let them walk out of here. Let them walk the hell out of here!" And Smith yelling at Hannity when he says lets get some perspective. I watched on Wednesday or Thursday when Hannity reffered to people saying there was no help and asking why as "whining." This is why I'd rather watch FOX news than CNN any day, or why I always rather talk politics with a republican than a democrat or a liberal, cause I think it's real important to know what other people are thinking and not to close your mind or preach to the choir. Sometimes this means I watch TV that makes me so mad, like Hannity's "Whining" comment, or when I've been in a conversation where some girl from South Carolina said that women on welfare should have to have their tubes tied. But sometimes you get surprised by a fresh way of understanding something, or you get totally blown away by something they don't show you on CNN or the Daily Show. So I got nothing but respect for everybody at FOX news involved with that, and just like I'm glad it was a rapper saying "George Bush doesn't care about Black people," I'm glad that it's on FOX news that people are yelling at Hannity and pleading, begging, for the government to do something.

2005-09-05T11:59:00.000-04:00

I like that show Rome. I dunno if they're doing it on purpose but if you take it as an analogy for today's political climate, like the last Star Wars movie, it must be the only show that looks at it from a republican standpoint. The bad guys are the ones who hate Ceasar because of the war and the way the common people love him. I guess Ceasar isn't really the good guy though, and that's what I like about all the HBO shows, how they don't have black and white, good vs. evil characters and storys.

I'm gonna miss Entourage, that's really the only sitcom I watch on TV now. I guess I've heard that Arrested Development is funny but I never watched it.

2005-09-04T16:52:00.000-04:00

It's crazy to see Kanye West tripping over his words and shit, close to tears and rambling when this dude is always so collected. Someone had to say that shit though.

Went to a K-Swift party last night, shit was fun. My new roomate, kind of shy dude never heard of club music, I invited just cause I didn't wanna be rude. Was afraid it wouldn't be his thing until the Darth Vader song where the dude was doing a full body headbang. Awesome.

2005-08-31T07:49:00.000-04:00

I got the new Kanye, it's not bad. Maybe I gotta give it a couple more listens but nothing blows me away. Favorite songs are Roses and Hey Mama. Nothing great like School Spirit on it. Should have given Game a verse on Crack Music.

The Brothers Grimm isn't even a movie, it's just a bunch of stuff that happens. For no reason. Plus it's a huge Van Helsing rip off, only nowhere near as good. And Van Helsing wasn't a great movie, not that you would wanna rip it off or anything. It's just a good dumb movie, and you can't get dumb from dumb, you can only get ass stupid, like the Brothers Grimm.

2005-08-29T07:51:00.000-04:00

MTV Video Awards last night. They were kind of boring and I got pissed off at some of the awards. Like whatever award "Number One Spot" got. I love Luda, but that's gotta be his worst, twirly-whirlyest, most annoying and gimmicky song. Dumb, and also dumb that Ciara didn't win anything. Plus, the Game deserved more than just one head-shot when the dudes were Krumping or whatever. My favorite moment was actually before the awards on the White Carpet when Kurt Loder called Young Jeezy "Lil Jeezy." Then he got made fun of by Jay-Z, and the only thing Jeezy ended up saying during the whole interview was "That's what it is" at the end of the interview when Loder got his name right.

After Fat Joe made his little sarcastic comment about being glad there was so much police presence with G-Unit being there, you could hear some dude in the background yelling "Fuck you Joe! Fuck you Joe!" and then 50 and Yayo called him a Fuck Boy and a Pussy Boy before MTV got wise and started bleeping. The only thing that surprised me was that Diddy din't make any comments about losing his best friend to a rap beef, especially considering how he's trying to put himself out there as some Hip Hop elder statesman. Speaking of Diddy, I don't really get why people think that an orchestra lends them any musical respectability or credibility that they didn't already have. That shit is insulting and doesn't even sound good.

I hate Fallout Boy. and I'm glad I'm not from New Orleans.

2005-08-22T21:08:00.000-04:00

Here it goes, suckas! My and my bro's interview with Wiley. Yeah, boy, I write for Pitchfork now, so get ready to drop my name and shit! You read my blog back when I was mostly writing about how I hate Craigslist and writing political rants about old Bond movies.

2005-08-20T17:13:00.000-04:00

The price of gas is gouging me right now. I'm half and hour away from baltimore, so that means it's about a $7 round trip depending on where I buy my gas. Since I'm on vacation and have no money at the mo that means I pretty much can't afford to go kick it in the city. So what can you do for free in Ellicott City? Watch old Bond movies on AMC is about the best I can come up with. I'm watching some of them today and I get to thinking. In those old movies Bond isn't just fighting random bad guys like he is now, he's always up against S.P.E.C.T.R.E. - the "Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion." It's this organization which is devoted to evil, hijaking nuclear weapons, capturing space shuttles, whatever. The way they work is they just pit the great powers against each other, the USA and the USSR. At the end of almost all these movies they're poised to go to war until this wiley British dude who bangs a lot of girls and sometimes smacks them around foils the plot. He's always the dude in the corner who's going "What about S.P.E.C.T.R.E.?" And the Americans are like "No, it's the Russians!" It all seems real hokey, but they make sense within the context of the day. I wish Kissinger had watched these fucking movies. I'm saying, this evil organization wouldn't be shit without the Cold War, and the whole arms race and paranoia between the great powers. The Cold War actually did propel a lot of crazy people to way more prominance than they would've had without support from one power against the other. Kinda like how we used to supply weapons to Osama and Saddam just cause they were fighting their enemies, Blofeld (the dude with the cat) sometimes counts on the Americans and the Russians to destroy the world for him, taking advantage of their kneejerk reactions. See "You Only Live Twice." Now there's no more Cold War, there's just the War on Terror. I think the first Bond movie they made after the Cold War was "License to Kill," a really bad one about him fighting a Colombian drug lord or something. Now they've gotten a bit better again, though, and the last one was him fighting some North Korean psycho. Now Bond is Bush's bitch, fighing agains the "Axis of Evil." It's a shame though, cause the idea of the truly evil people as not necessarily being on either side of the Cold War or the so-called "culture war" between the West and Islam but actually being the ones benefitting from it still applies. I got into an argument with some of my friends up in New York about whether or not the terrorists who blew up the WTO really gave a shit about American culture. My friends seemed to think all these dudes decided to blow themselves and 3000 other people up because they really care about bikinis and gay rights on the other side of the world. That's the kind of mentality that leads us to ally with Musharraf. Here's a dude who came to power in Pakistan through a military coup, who's now a dictator ruling a country with Nuclear Weapons, not in production but in the barrel, and we stand shoulder to shoulder with him cause, uh, he closed some Madrassas and helped us fight the Taliban. Who probably hated him anyway. Plus he's on the brink of war with his nuclear armed neighboor that's got the 2nd biggest population in the world, and most of his own population probably would love to overthrow him if they got the chance. What the fuck? We didn't need him to fight the dumbass Taliban, and we probably would've captured Osama years ago without all that outside help. And like the America of the old Bond movies, we're still overly fixated on fighting whatever government we think is behind all our problems - like Iraq. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia, the country that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists and if you belive FOX News, most of the insurgents in Iraq, is still sitting pretty with America. Why? We have to keep a good relationship with them and all those other little pint-sized monarchies over there because then we can count on a plentiful source of oil, right? Course, that brings me all the way back to my original point, which is why the fuck am I paying $2.70 a gallon for regular unleaded?

2005-08-20T12:15:00.000-04:00

I saw the 40 Year Old Virgin yesterday. I kind of thought it would be funnier.

I think Bob Dylan is pretty overrated, especially his whole foray into folk-rock or whatever. I think the Freewheelin Bob Dylan has some great songs like Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall but also some filler. But Bob Dylan's Blues is such a great song I'll put the tape in just to hear that. Where does this song come from? These perfect notes keep falling off of this stuttering faltering rhytmm until you realize the song could go in 5 different directions but it just keeps chugging along instead. It doesn't sound like any other song in the world.

2005-08-19T17:35:00.000-04:00

Every time I turn on the TV there's all this stuff about the Israeli evacuation from the Gaza Strip. It's sad and all, but the only way they were able to build these settlements was by evicting people from their homes and bulldozing their neighboorhooods. At least the Israelis are getting compensated.