eye of the storm

watcha listenin to, crisp? dub. the real shit.

alright so i just got through teaching michael veal's wonderful book dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae, and i've been addicted. dub illustrates about a thousand important points about the nature of art, technology, postmodernism, the concept of the song, intellectual property (not), etc. plus it is at its best an intensely excellent music and anywhere in the ballpark an extremely pleasant background to your various activities.

sound systems in jamaica in the mid/late sixties started demanding versions of hit songs with the vocals removed so that their deejays could chatter over them. considering that the songs were two-track or four-track, they accomplished these isolations at first largely by, for example, shutting down the treble, so that the bass came up, which changed the way people moved, the way they heard, who they were.

before long the great king tubby, in the back of his stereo shop, was engaged in secret manipulations of music, and sound systems and producers would bring him songs to be destroyed and reconfigured by insane analog manipulation: extended, reconfigured, echoplexed into whole worlds. then there could be multiple, or many, versions of the same material. by the late seventies, it was a style of music in its own right, with whole dub lps and engineers as stars, including tubby protoges scientist and prince jammy. eventually you could hardly trace the origins of these collages.

this sort of thinking has been fundamental to music ever since: the remix,the hip hop turntablist, sampling, etc etc: our music world is inconceivable without it.

ok the output is very uneven. tubby remixed thousands, tens of thousands of songs. it's easy to find the mediocre stuff; i like dub with an extremely vicious or evil bass line. so let me give you a few albums: king tubby, the fatman tapes; scientist vs the space invaders (the first dub album i bought, make it 1976); apeology by lee perry; keith hudson's pick a dub; and the astounding glen brown's rhythm master vol 1. the latter 2 are producers, not dub engineers, and the dubs are by the tubby combine. great dub versions are all over augustus pablo's records, by pablo and tubby, the classic being king tubby meets rockers uptown. here is the playlist for the disc i made for my non-western aesthetics course:

King Tubby, "King Tubby on the Throne"
King Tubby, "Dubbing My Way"
Augustus Pablo, "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown"
Scientist,  "De Materialize"
Scientist, "Red Shift"
Lee "Scratch" Perry, "Super Ape"
Lee Perry, "Noah Sugar Pan"
Lee Perry "Zion Blood"
Augustus Pablo, "Satta Dub"
Augustus Pablo, "Vibrate On (Version)"
Yabby You, "Chant Jah Victory"
Yabby You, "Jah Victory Dub"
Errol Thompson, "Extraordinary Version"
Phillip Smart, "Cool This Dub"
Prince Jammy, "Dub There"
Dub Syndicate (Adrian Sherwood at the controls), "African Landing"

everything adrian sherwood (a later english outgrowth) ever produced is great, especially the dub syndicate albums, especially murder tone.

you'll do better on itunes but here's amazon.



here's what you should read about reggae.

that the rough guide is out of print is absurd. an immense work of excellent excellence. bass culture is written rather badly, and with way too much irritating quasi-clever cuteness, every strained metaphor made more useless by the phrase "quite literally," and with no sourcing of any kind for the myriad facts it asserts. editing bradley must have been a form of martyrdom. but the info is amazing and the research indispensable.

let me also point you toward blood and fire, steve barrow's wonderful reggae reissue label in the uk.

well that "distant relatives" reggae/hip hop thing was desperately bad. sorry bout that! it was completely unfocused, and came off more like nas half-heartedly promoting his next album on mtv or bet than any kind of historical investogation. truly the choice of sway to mc was ridiculous: nat geo needed someone with some vague scholarly chops or some notion of something beyond self-promotion. jeff chang, sitting right there, has done great work on these themes and should have run the show..

it was an amazing line-up of foundational figures, but they didn't do anything coherent with it.

tonight at 7ET national geographic (!) is hosting a panel discussion on the relation of reggae to hip hop, featuring quite the unbelievable cast: nas and damian marley, kool herc (the first hip hop dj), u-roy (pioneering reggae dj ['dj' is used differently in the two traditions*]), jeff chang (author of the great history of hip hop can't stop won't stop), rakim (wu-tang clan), king jammy (dub pioneer) etc. astonishing and they'll stream it live. meanwhile you can see what i make of this connection in a rough draft of a chapter of my next book (political aesthetics), or in the paper version at contemporary aesthetics.

*it's a long story, but roughly a dj in reggae is a rapper; a dj in hip hop is a turntablist, or the guy that stands at the back of the stage constructing the tracks.

rarely have i been as disappointed in an album as i am with julian casablancas's phrazes for the young. i loved the strokes, whose singer casablancas was. i loved the bashing garage-rock of the first couple of discs, which had a lot of good music bubbling beneath the smashed surface. and i really loved first impressions of earth, more or less the best rock album of the oughts, which took the sound much more toward some sort of craft (specifically, excellent songcraft), but retained a lot of rock urgency and straightforwardness. and casablanca's lyrics were interesting throughout. well, you know it's hard trying to keep young rock guy from going baroque. really, jc has lost everything that made his music interesting: now he's got synths and drum machines; like everyone else he's trying to sound like the cure, but he missed the revival by five years; the lyrics about alcohol are ok but only ok. etc. there's not a single cut i really like or don't actually find tedious.

i think now that the beatles are on every third television ad, they're finally getting their due. consider the following, heard on television at all times:

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy.
There's nothing you can make that can't be made.

No one you can save that can't be saved.

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time - It's easy.

etc. in my best stab at interpretation of this goop, i would say that that it is a series of tautologies: that is, if you can do it, it can be done, which would be hard to quibble with. or to put it into first-order predicate calculus with modal operators, it is not the case that there exists a thing such that someone can do it and it is not possible to do it. or, simplifying: (x)(y)(Sxy -> ^Sxy) (where the little upside-down v is the possibility operator; should be a diamond): that is, for anything x and anything y, if x sings y then it is possible for x to sing y. or cutting to the chase, p -> ^p: if p then it is possible that p. or if p is actual then it is not impossible. love is good. but it's probably not all you need.

correction, 11.20: actually, i guess there is modality on both sides of the conditional, so maybe it just says ^p -> ~~^p: if it's possible, then it's not impossible. or ~(Ex)(Ey)( ^Dyx & ~^Dyx): there is nothing such that it's possible for someone to do it and it's not possible for someone to do it.

saw lyle lovett this morning on morning joe. bizarrely, he talked about music rather than global warming.

even in death, michael jackson sucks. if i could, i'd revive him from his permanent anesthesis and kill him again: you know, drive a stake into his heart and bury him at a crossroads; soak him in kerosene and toss a match like a pepsi commercial; hang him high at a little boy's birthday party and use him as a quasi-human pinata; etc.

bono really always has a profound, comprehensive vision, as measured by the profundity and comprehensiveness of his astounding sunglasses. that's why i take him seriously, even while he's muttering cliches in unison with everyone else.

new eminem song. must be real new, as it had less than 500 hits when i got to it today 10:45. dude has got to stop rapping kardashian. i don't know. he's still amazing. but i feel lke the schtick's gettin a bit tired.

history of hip hop wiki

hey thanks, marriott! ok so i put the list on wikia, and you can have at it. let me know how it's working, if at all. if so, especially direct the attention of hip hop experts/fanatics to it.
history of hip hop wiki

i'll also go do a series of deletions from the original 120-or-whatever it is.

so i am working on various projects, trying to get stuff in before the semester starts. but i am slowly auditioning all cuts proposed for the hip hop list, but having final say. but it strikes me that we should do this as a wiki; it'd be a great way to find new music. but...how or where does one set such a thing up?

hey y'all know listentoyoutube.com? you can pull mp3s off youtube, which is a nice free way to get music, although quality is extremely iffy.

still workin the hip hop list. any of y'all listen to, like t.i. or young jeezy? i'm weak on now.

i'm slowly making additions/adjustments to the hip hop list per online and offline suggestions, by editing the entry below. what a remarkably rich and various form. i can do a similar thing with country at about the same length, but country starts (recording-wise) in the 20s. anyway, this beats the healthcare debate. or: it represents my healthcare program. i know you gonna feel better. "death panel" would be a pretty good name for a hip hop act. euthanizing that ass. easy-e, tupac, biggie, big l, and jam master jay would make a good death panel.

History of Hip Hop

This playlist, at something more than a hundred songs, is intended as a history of hip hop for my class on "Hip Hop and Politics," for Spring 2010 at Dickinson College. It is a compromise between trying to get items of definite historical significance and the songs and artists I actually like best to listen to. So, for example, Eminem and Immortal Techinique - whom I believe are the best mcs ever - are overrepresented, while perhaps Jay-Z and Nas are a bit underplayed, though present. I actually don't like listening to Public Enemy; they're pointedly abrasive just on the beat. But I admire their records, and they are the biggest single influence on world hip hop, and on the idea of hip hop as a political discourse. There's a lean toward the west coast in the war; I love Dre's tracks.

There is a pretty elaborate representation of underground hip hop - Immortal Technique, Brother Ali, Atmosphere, Aceyalone. I think this work is more important for early-2000s than, say, Ludacris, or 50 Cent. I tried to cover very poppy stuff - Salt n Pepa, e.g., or Eve - which shows the effect on the music in general. But I also have basically too-hard-for-the-radio stuff.

One reason to put this up is so people can tell me what has to be on here that isn't: either what you love or respect, or what you think is a movement or a moment or an artist that is under-represented. Well, the South is, for one thing. So tell me what my students have to hear. If one way or another you try to download this list, or otherwise assemble it, I'd also love to hear what you think about the overall effect. One thing is for sure: there is a shitload of amazing music on this list.

Some artists I listened back to, and didn't necessarily hear something that I felt needed including: Ice-T and Big Daddy Kane, e.g.

I'm going to put this in rough chronological order. There are anomalies and it's hard to represent very early hip hop because the artists didn't record, or recorded only later (Kool Herc, Cold Crush Brothers, Grandmaster Flash).  Also for the most part I've grouped all the songs by an artist together even where they have had long careers.

Hip hop is a cultural/aesthetic system in various media. Traditionally it has four elements: djing, rapping, graffiti, and break dancing. But it also encompasses styles of dress and comportment, body modification and festival, politics and substance abuse, gender and race. Jamaican dj and dub music is at the base of the form, not musically but in terms of technique and performance style and context, whereas the initial directly musical materials are provided by funk and disco. Defining features of hip hop as a musical form: The music is constructed to some or a large extent by sampling, using turntables or digital devices. This makes the instrumentation of hip hop coincide roughly with the entire history of recorded sound. The beat is 4/4 and rigid, characterized by pretty extreme repetition. The lyrics are for the most part chanted (rapped) rather than sung. It is the most text-heavy of all popular music forms, by a long way, which opens up the possibility of full-scale short stories, political speeches, and so on.

(1) Sugarhill Gang, "Rapper's Delight"
(2) Grandmaster Flash, "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel"
(3) Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force, "Planet Rock"
(4) Spoonie Gee, "Love Rap"
(5) Sugarhill Gang, "8th Wonder"
(6) Kurtis Blow, "If I Ruled the World"
(7) Kurtis Blow, "Basketball"
(8) Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, "The Message"
(9) Run-DMC, "You Be Illin'"
(10) Run-DMC: "Walk This Way"
(11) Fat Boys, "Can You Feel It?"
(12) LL Cool J, "Rock the Bells"
(13) Whodini, "Five Minutes of Funk"
(14) Whodini, "I'm a Ho"
(15) Beastie Boys, "She's Crafty"
(16) Beastie Boys, "Fight for Your Right"
(17) Blondie, "Rapture"

Newcleus, "Jam On It"

(18) MC Hammer, "Can't Touch This"
(19) MC Hammer, "It's All Good"
(20) Vanilla Ice, "Ice Ice Baby"
(21) KRS-ONE, "You Must Learn"

Marley Marl and the Juice Crew, "The Symphony"

(22) Public Enemy, "Don't Believe the Hype"
(23) Public Enemy, "Fight the Power"

Ice-T, "Original Gangsta"

(24) NWA, "Straight Outta Compton"
(25) NWA, "Fuck the Police"
(26) Eric B and Rakim, "Soul"
(27) Eric B and Rakim, " "Paid in Full"
(28) Kool Moe Dee, "How Cool Can One Black Man Be?"

Heavy D and the Boyz, "Black Coffee"

(29) Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Dogg, "Nuthin' but a G Thang"
(30) Dr. Dre featuring Snoop, "Fuck Wit Dre Day"
(31) Warren G, "Regulate"
(32) Warren G, "Do You See"
(33) Snoop Doggy Dogg, "Tha Shiznit"
(34) Snoop, "Gin and Juice"
(35) Snoop, "Murder Was the Case"
(36) Coolio, "Gangsta's Paradise"
(37) Ice Cube, "It Was a Good Day"
(38) Wu-Tang Clan, "C.R.E.A.M."
(39) Rahzel, "Wu-Tang Live Medley"
(40) GZA the Genius (RZA), "Shadowboxin"
(41) Ghostface Killah, "Assassination Day"
(42) Ghostface Killah, "Fish"
(43) De La Soul, "Me, Myself, and I"
(44) Tribe Called Quest, "Can I Kick It?"
(45) Digable Planets, "Rebirth of the Cool (Cool Like Dat)"
(46) Salt-n-Pepa, "Shoop"
(47) Da Brat, "Funkdafied"
(48) Da Brat, "Fa All Y'all"
(49) Tupac, "Hit 'Em Up""
(50) Tupac, "Shorty Want to Be a Thug"
(51) Tupac, "Gangsta Party"

Tupac, "Death Around the Corner"

(52) Dr. Dre featuring Tupac, "California Love"
(53) Us 3, "Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)"
(54) Notorious B.I.G., "Juicy"
(55) Notorious B.I.G., "Big Poppa"
(56) Jay-Z, "Hard Knock Life"
(57) Jay-Z, "Renegade"
(58) Jay-Z featuring Beyonce, "Pray"
(59) Jay-Z featuring Lil Wayne, "Hello Brooklyn 2.0"
(60) Gang Starr, "Work"
(61) Fugees, "Fu-Gee-La"
(62) Fugees, "Ready or Not"
(63) Wyclef Jean, "Apocalypse"
(64) Wyclef Jean, "Staying Alive"
(66) Black Star featuring Black Thought, "Guerilla Monsoon Rap"
(68) Talib Kweli, "Move Somethin'"
(69) Talib Kweli, ""This Means You"
(70) Mos Def, "Ms. Fat Booty"
(71) Mos Def, "Got"
(72) Nas, "If I Ruled the World"
(73) Nas, "Life's a Botch"
(73) Nas, N.I.G.G.E.R."
(74) Kid Rock, "Paid"
(75) Kid Rock, "Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp"
(76) Eminem, (several obscure downloaded freestyles)
(77) Eminem, "My Name Is"
(78) Eminem,  "The Real Slim Shady"
(79) Eminem, "Square Dance"
(80) Eminem, "Business"
(81) Eminem, "Lose Yourself"
(82) Eminem, ""My Mom"
(83) Nelly, "Country Grammar"

Timbaland, "Luv 2 Luv U"

Eric Sermon, "Music"

(84) The Roots, "Proceed"
(85) Self-Scientific, "Love Allah"
(86) Self-Scientific, "Return"
(87) Jedi Mind Tricks, "Trinity"
(88) Jedi Mind Tricks, "Exertions"
(89) Jedi Mind Tricks featuring R.A. the Rugged Man, "Uncommon Valor: A Vietnam Story"
(90) Beatnuts, "Se Acabo"
(91) Spooks, "Other Script"
(92) Eve, "Let Me Blow Ya Mind"
(93) Everlast, "What It's Like"

Outkast, "Sorry Ms. Jackson"

(94) 7l and Esoteric, "Operating Correctly"
(95) Atmosphere, "Scapegoat"
(96) Atmosphere, "God Loves Ugly"
(97) Aceyalone, "Cornbread"
(98) Murs, "Murs Rules the World"
(99) Demigodz, "Captivate/Deactivate"
(100) Brother Ali, "Three-Day Journey"
(101) Brother Ali, "Soul Whisper"
(102) Delinquent Habits, "Here Come the Horns"
(103) Cool Calm Pete, "Cloudy"
(104) J-Live, "Not Satisfied"
(105) Non-Prophets, "Fresh"

Big L, "Put it On"

UGK, "Front Back Side to Side"

Dead Prez, "Police State"

(106) Immortal Technique, "Obnoxious"
(107) Immortal Technique, "Freedom of Speech"
(108) Immortal Technique, "The Cause of Death"
(109) Immortal Technique, "Obnoxious"
(110) Immortal Technique, "The Point of No Return"
(111) Immortal Technique, "Peruvian Cocaine"
(112) Immortal Technique, "Hollywood Drive-By"
(113) Immortal Technique, "Golpe de Estado"
(114) Immortal Technique, "Payback"
(115) Collie Buddz, "Come Around"

Third Mind, "Sold Your Soul"

The Streets, "Prangin' Out"

Li'l Wayne, "Fireman"

you could get a bit of a preview of political aesthetics in the online journal contemporary aesthetics. it's one of the case studies: essentially on black nationalism and twentieth-century popular music. i'm kind of proud of this bit. it's maybe not my best sheer piece of writing, but it draws together the garvey movement, rastafarianism, reggae, the nation of islam, and the history of hip hop in a way that's only made possible by recent research by people like like jeff chang and helene lee, and which i think sheds light on the history both of political movements and music.

friends, let us all pray together for the destruction, expungement, erasure, annihilation of the "music industry."

more tammy wynette:

suggest we forget the king of pop and recall the queen of country.

well i love tammy wynette, and as i watch these videos, i swear, i shiver. my hair stands on end. she's almost unbelievably emotional, and the impassive performance style just intensifies the unbelievable pathos. now, it may be when i first started listening to tammy, and doing things like putting on "stand by your man" when i was djing "new wave night" at the one flight up, i was drawn to the kitsch aspect, which is immense. also it's hard to resist a singer who, when you put her on, actually makes people start yelling or howling in pain, or pisses off every woman you ever knew. on the other hand, you can appreciate something as kitsch and, at the same time, as art. and that is in part the heart of country music. you think "that's doofy," but then you realize that it's actually, truly, about your own experience, about the human condition. i loved tammy before my various splits and divorces, each of which was in its own way a shattering experience, sometimes with children in them. but i really, really loved her during and after those experiences.

just a brief defense of "stand by your man," or her overall kind of passive, shattered pose (the very opposite of her great contemporary and rival loretta lynn). i think "stand by your man" is about learning to let go by fully experiencing the insane pain of hanging on. this reading would be borne out by the fact that most of her hits (including of course the masterpiece "d-i-v-o-r-c-e") are actually about the subsequent split. but what it's really borne out by is just the hyper-intense emotionality of the delivery; it's not an anthem of affirmation; it's a complete embodiment of pain. and obviously, it also asserts that men are incomprehensible and pitiful, which it would be silly to deny.

i might remark, in correspondence to this, that no pop singer has ever made more extreme use of dynamics, which has to be also set down to her songwiter/producer billy sherrill; obviously it's not only the voice but the whole band and the whole idea that suddenly swells.

so, what are the ways to love a man? is this about oral sex, or doggystyle? or cooking a good dinner? or what?

oops, this classic song ("the ways to love a man") can't be embedded. 

tammy was genuinely a kind of naive or untutored genius, and after her first burst of amazing music, she never really sounded good again. i remember her saying, when "new traditionalism" and specifically dwight yoakam hit, that "that's the kind of stuff we've been trying to get away from for twenty years." so there was album after album of pseudo-sophisticated, smoothed-over crap. she didn't understand the source or nature of her own power, which is sad, but also what you might expect when you promote a hairdresser from tupelo to queen: she begins to express in her music the aspiration and the reality of her upward mobility, like sarah palin on a shopping spree.

for purposes of comparison: