Trapped In The Closet: Volume 2 – August the 21st!!!
(No comment needed)
Noz on why Common is shit in 07 and was the shit fifteen years ago.
“He mistakes timidity for vulnerability and the poor listener mistakes this for maturity.
There’s also this weird People Magazine aspect to Common’s current incarnation. Like many a great rapper, Com’s been digging into pop culture for punchlines since his Sensible days, but usually that meant rapping about a Facts of Life or Glenn Robinson not Jennifer Anniston’s break up and Lance Bass’ coming out party. It’s like he’s already transcended bougie urbanite status to a state of late in life suburban soccer mom tabloid whore boredom. But maybe that’s part of his new definition of maturity as well.”
Sticking with Noz, as a casual aside he mentioned that Outkast “are the Greatest Rap Group of All Time”. Yes, they are, but you can’t actually say that shit without a million trad-rap dudes jumping down your throat. I think he gets off on that shit actually so he probably won’t mind the shitstorm.
Noz has his stubbornly good taste and hordes of readers to annoy with it, but he isn’t Just Blaze. Just can blog about last minute work on the T.I.P. album, with video, with special effects. Plus The Megatron Don is a nice bloke and the only person to respond to my request for a rare Redman remix a few years ago on Noz’ site. Small pond.
Hurk marks the death of his iPod with a phenomenal picture of Bukka White. Silver linings.
Most people in this country are staying indoors watching The Wire DVDs and staying out of the WORST SUMMER FOR TWO HUNDRED YEARS. Being a contrarian I’m going to spend next week very near here, and play out.
Its nice to remember that The Wire, Just Blaze and the best song of the 21st century are all combined in one video.
The best Kate Bush meets Rod Stewart disco song ever? You bet your right ball it is!
Capricorns – Live in Lausanne
Saw my iron bro Nathan’s band the other week, not in Lausanne but in sunny London’s eerily smokeless Underworld. The gods of instru-metal (yeah, it has gods) shone through them and they sounded monolithic. Stereolithic even. Five weeks of touring makes for a tight band, and metal without singing is the future of jazz.
Miles Davis – Live at the Isle Of Wight Festival, 1970
I just finished reading Miles’ autobiography and in it he says he was due to meet Jimi Hendrix in London, right after the festival to plan an album together. Miles got stuck in traffic entering London and missed the meeting. Jimi was then due to meet Miles and Gil Evans in New York to get it sorted but missed that meeting due to dying… On the bright side: Jack DeJohnette on drums!!
Camp Lo – Black Nostaljack
Sugah come on! Camp Lo have a new album out today and it’s produced by Ski, from top to bottom! This is good news like “bad even for a British summer” is bad news. The end of this video has the beginning of “Krystal Karrington” on it!?! Geechie Suede is the fucking man. Have some more !!!! on me.
Daft Hands – harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
You probably already seen this at any one of a million other places but it is clever and worth posting on the off chance that somebody hasn’t seen it yet.
These aren’t embedable (what?) but Funkdoobiest’s greatest single, “Rock On” is now on Youtube and so is Slick Rick’s “I Shouldn’t Have Done It”. Dopes.
Jerry Fielding is best known for composing the scores for films such as The Wild Bunch, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet and Straw Dogs. His big brass sound can also be heard on TV’s The Bionic Woman, Hogan’s Heroes and Bewitched.
The above song is taken from 1967’s “Near East Brass, West Coast Style”, his only recording for the Command label. Command is famous for its “Persuasive Percussion” series, and the MOR/lounge work of Enoch Light and Dick Hyman (there aren’t any good Dick Hyman jokes left, sorry).
The album features “bachelor pad” renditions of near Eastern standards alongside Fielding originals like the above “The Uplifted Veil Of A Downhearted Frail”. I’m not as big a fan of the Command sound as the rest of this country’s Hiphop crowd seems to be, but this album is brassier and dancier than the usual, and puts me in the mood to round up the cast of Disney’s Aladdin, put them in mini-dresses, and have a freakout party. Maybe round Will Kane’s house. Jerry meant it to be this way.
Random fact: One of the producers on this album is none other than the then head of Command’s then sister-label, Impulse! Was Bob Thiele lending experience gained from the East/West fusions of Coltrane and Yusef Lateef?
The sleeve reads:
You’ve never heard anything like this before because music has never been played like this before!
One Mr. Ronald “Tubby” Zeigler on drums and purcussion. Feel it in your stomach.
The cover rescued this LP from a box of “Don’t wants”, and its a good job, cos this track is a motherfucker. The rest of the album unfortunately sees our man Tubby chained up, locked in a casket and thrown into an Ocean of MOR. I can’t imagine anyone ever enjoying swimming in this ocean. It smells.
Thankfully his bandmates let him out of his cage, gave him back his broken wings and he learned to fly again, albeit for one track at the end of side one, then back into the sea for side two.
I can’t find much on the band, just a lot about Elephants (endangered, except in the areas where they are overpopulous, wherin they are a pest) and frankly I don’t care to know more about them. The LP is on Big Tree Records, a label that was at one point home to Hot Chocolate AND Demis Roussos. You know?
Tubby played trap on a Stephen Stills album and maybe a few more things here and there in the mid-70s yadda yadda etc…
