So I apologize for the last blog. I haven't heard any complaints, but I knew going in that my screed, my decree, might be decried as grandiose. That it might tickle some of you as off-topic, even though it WAS the topic.
((Well! Don't say I didn't warn you of My Awesome Powers when the Christo-Pocalypse rains upon the earth.))
But I know that you come here not for spiritual revelation, but musical revelation:
AND THUS IT SHALL BE.
{{updated August 5th, with some streaming audio and direct links to select MP3s!}}
If you know me IRL, then you have heard me discuss how I am the Second Coming. The Secular-Second-Coming, that is. I discussed it last night in fact, at Alexi's. But I can never remember all the reasons (so many reasons...) that could prove My Divinity to skeptics. Even the (Re-)Christ forgets things, okay? (It makes it easier to forgive, BTW!) Here are the reasons that I always remember: My name means bearer of christ (and who would bear christ more than the Re-Christ?) Almost nothing bad ever happens to me I have stigmata: one from an ACTUAL NAIL going through my hand; the other JUST SHOWED UP ONE DAY and has a way bigger/better scar than the nail one people love the shit out of me (with this corrolary: while I love everyone, in my own special -often despising- way, Jesus did not really love ALL THINGS, just all people: I love all things, even Us Weekly and dirt, so that makes me BETTER THAN HIM) I have a beard
((This is Soutine. It is supposed to be a self-portrait, with a beard, but I see no beard... Well, let's cut him some slack SINCE HE'S DEAD))
But just moments ago, I remembered another one, a really key reason. Everything in my life is connected in a productive way. I don't mean 'connected' as in "Man, my yoga guru and I are like, totally connected", nor do I mean it in the sense that temporally distant and causally distinct events might be thought to 'mean something' or 'belong' together. I mean that something happens- I hear something, I say something, I see something- and then something else happens- I am told something, I am shown something, I post something- and the connection which is established between the 1st and 2nd thing/event is E P I C.
It's like this: Went to the Barnes Institute the other day. Saw many painters that were new/s to me. One of those was Pacsin. (others of note were Corot, Rouault, Demuth, Sefarbi, Pippin, Glackens, Karl Priebe, Soutine, Settani, Dimock, Wols, and Gritchenko) Of these, Pacsin may have impressed me the least -- BUT -- there is a Divine Connection lurking...
I went to my WC today, just as I was thinking about writing a lil' weblo' about the Barnes Foundation http://www.barnesfoundation.org/ (people gotta know, ya know?). In the WC I have a copy of Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast'. I don't love Hemingway, by the by, this is just a physically small book that will fit in the WC. (I scavenged it from Villanova Katie.)
One that I got recently, too, which makes me more likely to read it (oh, the backlog of books...). Plop down for a read and what do you think the very next chapter is called? 'With Pacsin at the Dome', that's what it's called. One and the same Pacsin as of the Barnes. HAH! The Supremes were playing on the jukebox (hereafter 'juxe') aka ITunes, which is also weblo' material (Past and Future). Dr.J and I were just talking about the Supremes here, and she had this genius insight about how the sample in question basically added a comma ('love child' vs 'love, child...') to the meaning. That changed the meaning from a comment about the status of the child, to a comment about the love this child has for someone else. Then I read the following in my German book (yes, the book from that OTHER blog).
Friedrich the Great was friends with the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Let’s pretend this Matisse below is Friedrich the Great, shall we?
And let’s pretend this Cezanne is a young Moses Mendelssohn.
Mendelssohn invited Friedrich the Great to dinner, and was keeping poor Fred waiting. The Great wrote a note and told his servant to place it on the missing philosopher's plate. The note reads: "Mendelssohn is an ass. [signed] Friedrich the second." Mendelssohn finally arrives, reads the note, puts it in his pocket. Friedrich says jovially, 'Hey, Moses, what was that note? What did it say?' Mendelssohn smiles and loudly reads HIS version of the note: "Mendelssohn is an ass; Friedrich: the second". Get it? Change the emphasis/punctuation a little, and The Great is just one of multiple asses. (Also densely connected within Blogville because Chet probably has read this note in the Official National German Archives- in the original German, no doubt.)
See? I was going to write a blog anyway, and then all these other related things pop up to jiggle my memory box and get themselves inserted into the blog too! And see how then it got WAY BIGGER and then mutated into a blog about how my blogs can mutate into other, bigger blogs? And when these things come together in a really big, really effective, really truly awesome way, then we have such a greatness that we have no option other than to declare the birth of a divinity. OBVIOUSLY (that's El Greco's version of the vision of my ascension. They're trying to take off my clothes! Gasp/Giggle!)
Now, in no way, shape, or form do I think that my Father is GUIDING these things. There is not something or someone planning/directing/guaranteeing this good-into-Awesome development of reality. No, no, three times no. The new Christ is not a piece of a 'tripartite good', but an equiprimordial 'bipartite AWESOME'. Meaning, that my father does not guide these things, but rather they happen simply as a direct causal effect of the ontological depth of my reality. Holier than thou? NO: REALier than thou. I am, in the strict sense, 'more real' than you are: I have more formal and objective reality than you.
Don't get offended- it's a dirty job, but someone has to be the new improved Christ.
I am 'causa sui' (that means 'self-caused') -here, I say causa sui not as strictly as I said 'more real', but close: I am the primary cause of my own increase in reality. Hence the so-called bipartite awesome: I sprang fully formed from my own forehead- also, just heard Missy Elliot say "I don't brag I mostly boast..." --told you it was all related!!!)
Now, if there is not a transcendent/external cause, but an immanent/internal one (immanent to the caused, even- hence the 'loose-sense causa sui'), then you can understand why I stand in no need of a father. The result being: two parts (me as cause, and, me as effect) not three; and no need to go outside of the connected things to find a 'reason' why they are connected. (An important corrolary of the above is that no things BELONG together, but that many things can be productively combined, which is precisely the means by which I increase my being). Diana Ross does not BELONG with Hemingway; but she can (as it turns out- you could not have predicted it!) be placed right alongside, or superimposed upon him, and we can then see an increase in knowledge, power, or being (the three being very nearly synonomous: very tightly related). (The above is Karl Priebe- admit it: you'd never heard of him either. That is not ACTUALLY a painting of Diana Ross- her hair is not that bad.)
And, to go back to my love of all things, Jesus was a dirty dirty humanist: people are different than, and better than, things, according to him (Jesus= Augustine here; same diff, right?). But I know (this would be 'The Newest/Bestest Testament') that people are not different than things: people are simply made up of things. (Trust Me: Spinoza proved this for us.)
In my case, the things of which I am made up of are : The Supremes, Hemingway (just a little Hem though), a really big and badass bookcase, asphalt, a selection of works from the Barnes, coffee (aw, you could tell by this weblo, huh?), Missy Elliot, the day of Sunday, shoes, ties, special-bought shoelaces to ghetto-match with my shirts/hats (yup, made of those too), etc. etc. etc.
The above things have a shit-ton of being or reality (or, perhaps a dick-ton: I am willing to admit when I don't know something- I am a modest little DIVINITY after all), especially when combined. I am nothing but those things of which I am made. I am made of the above things THEREFORE I have a shit-ton/dick-ton of being. QED
(DEMUTH- I was probably the most taken with him) (Demuth again duh)
Degas
Matisse
Modigliani
Toulouse-Lautrec
(It pains me to say this, but most of the above pictures are NOT the ones at the Barnes. It was surprisingly difficult to find pictures of the paintings that I remember online; partly because, beyond the Matisses, and the Picassos, and the Cezannes, the Renoirs, etc., most of these artists are not so well-loved and so well-documented that many would take the time to put up significant numbers of their works. Plus old museum people are scared of the ones-and-zeros. The last 4 are at the Barnes Foundation; the Great and the Philosopher are as well; the smoking girl is Picasso's and I think there too.)
Sampling- the best thing to happen in music since strings?
Probably. Ignore for a second that they make it possible for someone to create a song without being able to play keys, drums, etc. That's a democratizing effect; but I'd rather talk about what it does musically. When you recognize a sample, it's like you are simultaneously hearing two songs at once-- and if one song is good, then two must be better, right? (This doubling can also induce a sense of deja vu when you know you know the sample, but can't place where it's from. I always find that disconcerting but pleasant too.) Many times, a sample is just a straightforward looping of a drum- nothing wrong with that;
jungle/drum and bass is built around looping a few really well-known breaks, and we all love jungle.
But today I'm showing you a few well-known samples that get used sort of against the original. So here is a sampling (hahahahah) of sampling songs and samples.
Lova and happiness, by The Most Reverend Al Green, you love that song. Upbeat, yeah, good things going on there, organ all zippy. But remember how he sort of mourn-moans in the beginning?
"something that can make you do wrong, make you do right..."
Well, Twista and Lil' Kim just keep that. That track uses the guitar too, which is not zippy, but all Sunday-having-coffee and reading the paper. It's all about 'doing wrong' at the club, zero of the 'do right', and getting with someone that you DID NOT come with ('now you know it ain't right, got a girl at home, but tonight, but [this other girl is] the type that'll "make you do wrong..."' ). Look, see how I have to quote Twista, and then, in the quote, I quote The Rev? Like, postmodern, see right?!?!?! And when you quote my blog- all the time, obv - you have to quote me quoting Twista quoting the Rev.
Yes, it's Twista, not the tippy-top of the hip-hop game, but this song is slick, and you aren't trying to diss Miss Kim, are you?
What else do we have here?.... Princess, of Crime Mob, released a 'mixtape' a while ago- not really a mixtape, but just an album, but for whatever reason (street cred, no doubt, or maybe just to make it seem like Princess wasn't going solo, but just messing around in the studio) they insisted on marketing it as a mixtape, even though you could probably buy it at FYE.
So she here is using another great famous song- Love child by the Most Supreme Diana Ross and the Supremes. Similarly, she keeps just the pained part of the vocal. The Supremes "Love Child" sort of stomps, doesn't it? God, I love that song. "Tenement slum" sure, but with these rad little chimes in the start, then it goes all horns in the chorus. Stuttery funk guitar.
But the Princess track ,like a fair but of the other tracks on that 'mixtape', is almost R&B, a slow sad thing. Listen to the way she isolates the saddest vocalization of the whole track (around 2 minutes in): listen to Diana's voice shake. "I'll always love you: you you YOU". Another thing about samples, they allow you to sense things hidden in the original. All of that great instrumentation in the original hides what Ms. Ross is doing.
Oh, what's she doing?: SHE IS KILLING IT is what she is doing. Her voice, never so big as Aretha's for instance , is really good at this shaking-shaken-broken thing. Like she's broken. I mean, Aretha can get sad, sure, but you can't break a woman like that. But D Ross is broken, always; she is the high school girl, just a pretty little doll in a pretty little dress, whose world just ended because the boy she loves, will ALWAYS love, just dumped her. And the Princess song recasts that sadness, that stupid stupid devotion to the stupid and lost boy.
Princess' track is about abuse, though, so when DR says, I'll always love you, she is the girl who never grew up, who never figured out how to be without that boy, even when he beats her, or at the least, emotionally abuses her. Princess has doubled and hence deepened the powerless hurt of a girl in the wrong relationship, and one that gets more wrong and more intractable as the song/the relation goes on. Try doing that with a really great bassline, or a funky vocal: can't be done, and that is why
I am learning German right now: Iche lerne die Deutsch. I have some books, and all of them are quite boring, except one: Elementary German Series by Peter Hagboldt.
I'm aware of how thrilling this sounds. This book is only of note (to you, at least - to me, es hilft mich mit die Wörtern!) because of it's drawings. You know, children -- feeble minds -- must be kept entertained, and I am much like them in this respect. It was illustrated by W.T. Mars and Susan Perl. Susan Perl also illustrated "The Sex Life of the American Female". What I have here is aimed down a little, as far as age goes. Roughly, this age:
Just some of the best illustrations today (I might post more later- these are not the only good bits PROMISE). All of these appear to be woodcuts, but I'm no expert (you won't hear me say that very often) Come on; I know something about everything, not everything about everything.
Speaking of, let me here justify the posts tagged "Archive Fever". Blogs should be a particular form of narcissism. They do it well: displaying bits of whatever catches someone's attention about themselves. But if a blog is up there so you can discuss yourself, I mean your 'self', then that is generally in very poor taste. (I'll tell you why later: it's my anti-humanism at work.) It reminds me of this song
It has choice lines like "Hey all you Renaissance Geniuses you know we wanna see it all your vaginas and your penises your feces-es masterpieces oh".
I am not a Renaissance Genius myself. I am a Renaissance Dilettante: hence knowing something about it all. So I am archiving my GREAT stuff, not because it is mine, but because it is GREAT. It's interesting stuff (Vinyl records, woodcuts, tins, Italian anti-drug pamphlets, skateshop vinyl figurines, etc.) It's all AWESOME first, and mine only secondarily. That they are mine just makes it easier for me to present them to you (I'm not lazy: I'm just efficient). Plus, some of it's three-dimensional, so I am bringing analog and three dimensions to the digital and 2-D internet. EVERYTHING SOUNDS BETTER/BEST WITH ME.
'On to the pictures, please', right?
I particularly like this one. The lion has its right paw raised, giving a balance to its raised tail. Even better, the roots of the trees snake around its feet, so that you know that the lion is in the forest. If the roots didn't come into the foreground, the tree would seem to be in the background. But the story clearly says that the lion is in the forest; I know this because I read the story BECAUSE I AM SMART AND I AM LEARNING GERMAN.
And to bring it back to the text, here is one with a little Deutsch thrown in. It says that the wolf ate a little lamb, "but was still hungry: a wolf is always hungry!" So it went back, but the farmers caught it and beat it with their sticks until they had "beaten the wolf as soft as butter".
Funny people, these Germans.
(FYI I bit the title of Archive Fever from Derrida- the only thing you'll ever get of him from me.
"ain't shit worse than a waste of talent still, life goes on without it still, real ni**as do somethin' about it- Smash Brothers doin' somethin' about it" That's from Illy by S.A. Smash.
HEY are you listening? I said, You Can Still Download The Songs. Download them thru the link w/ the song title- the MediaFire link. Easy Breezy.
Camu Tau was half of S.A. Smash (with Metro) and he died this May. He was a sick, sick rapper with a unique style. His gruff and fierce style was helped out (on the S.A. Smash album) by fittingly on-point production from El-P and PRZM (who also died recently).
He also did an album with Cage that's supposed to be pretty good, but the album I know best is "Smashy Trashy".
"Smashy Trashy" is a good album, all the way through. What is unusual about Smash shows up right away- "seen you acting up, from the bottom of a plastic cup": Smash get drunk, get WASTED (see [How'm I gonna] "Get Home"). Most rappers don't get wasted - they don't rhyme about it at least - but why not? because rappers have to act (act) hard, all the time. Remember, like Fat Joe told you:
"Said my ni**as don't dance, we just pull up our pants and, Do the Roc-away. Now lean back, lean back, lean back, lean back..."
But Smash ain't fronting- if they wanna dance, they gon' dance. And if they wanna drink, then they are getting right ready ripped. I mean, they have a track called "A.A.", nahmean? And it's Natty Ice, Steel Reserve, not Moet and Kris: so they're real ("You seeing where I'm layin', and you sayin' I'm making it up?"). Anyhow, they might get splitfaced and they might dance, lose their keys, chase groupies (ugly or not: a thug doesn't care, I guess).
Oh yeah, they're thugs too though- but weird thugs. Like misanthropic sadists, not just rough to avoid getting hassled, or rough to own a corner. No, they threaten you with weird shit like getting a "shovel in the face", chasing a punch to your face with a glass of stout (also to your face), and so on. Cos enough of this same-old-same-old "thugg"ery. Rappers talking about guns you don't use: it's experiencing diminishing returns these days, right? So Smash keep the violence-- and we keep the little thrill from thinking about some UltraViolence-- but flip it into something more interesting. More like this (from "Clout.mp3"):
"now that everybody rhymes, it's time to battle for souls, start a single-file line and pay me after the show... the monster and we conquered half of the globe with an attitude like that'll get you clapped in the dome we be the menace, we like the sound of shatterin bones... my intentions are infected and I'll pass it along You askin if the passion is gone? Motherfuck you and that watered-down rappin you on pipe ni**as smoke crack to this one, fake ni**as practice packing a gun the aggravated immigrant, African son, smoke a blunt with you, punk, put a stab in your lung" Etc.
(see how the rhyme scheme switches from the sound "oh" to "own" to "on" to "un"? Not Easy: Guys can flow, right?
And if you're rapping about new thangs, you should have some new-sounding beats under you: S.A. Smash produced 10 of the tracks, getting serious help from El-P on a few others. ("Illy" is produced by him.) The beats lurch around- makes sense, they were probably wasted when they hit the studio- jumbled and dense. Guitar comes in and out, but this isn't rock and rap- that never works, does it. No, but here, the guitars=gutter. You know El-P's style, and the album has that feel, and that level of quality too, no matter which producer did which track. Yeah, El-Producto did "Illy", but that other dope jam "Slide on 'Em (Escapade).mp3", which has a truly awesome rhyme on it (by Vast Aire), that jam was a S.A. Smash production.
Well, Camu's gone. Here's a few tracks, by him solo.
Music; musing; must-haves.
The curatorial agenda. Sealing up a void whose vacuity was a source of distress to no one. The seed I am most likely to sow is a certain jargon. Built on tilt. The center of a new universe of counterfeit. Increasingly random and increasingly increasing.
THE SNAPBACK, ISSUE 1
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I created Soul Sides 20 years ago because I wanted an outlet to write about
my favorite records. The blog era feels bygone — and I clearly stopped
regularl...
Hotel Bar Sessions, Ep 31: Whose History?
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The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Charles McKinney, Jr. to talk about whose
history is (and isn't) being taught.
Following on the heels of a recent and ...
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