Never Gonna Let You Down

Anyone who caught the NFL matchup on Sunday, Sept. 27, 2009 between the Minnesota Vikings and San Francisco 49ers, or at least the last five seconds of it, saw what was an unquestionably amazing moment in sports. His team down 20-23 with two seconds remaining on the clock, the inexorable Brett Favre launched a 32-yard pass into the back of the end zone with the hopes that some backup receiver they'd stuck in would somehow get his hands on it. Favre lay sprawled out on his stomach watching the action downfield, fully assuming the game was lost. But when the receiver managed to drag a second toe across the edge of the end zone, ball in hand, and the referee threw his hands up signaling a touchdown, Favre was yanked up at once by both his teammates and the sudden euphoria. As Minnesota paraded victoriously around the field, you could see that look in the elderly quarterback's moist eyes: THIS is why he had done it "one more time" for so many seasons now; THIS is why he had flirted with and dodged retirement, pissing off legions of fans and the management of at least two professional football teams in the process; THIS is why he could not leave the game he loved so much. He had done it "one more time" not because he wanted to; not because of fame, fortune, or to prove anything to anyone -- but because he HAD to. He knew in his heart that playing this game was what he was meant to do, it was the fabric of his existence, and doggonit, it's what he would do until he were no longer physically able to drag his surprisingly resilient frame onto the field. And though no doubt there are those times when he questions whether it was the right decision to come back, it is the moments like these that remind him the choice was correct -- that yes, I HAVE to be here, I HAVE to be doing this, I HAVE to be a part of this thing right now.

I recently had the opportunity to observe what I think was the same phenomenon in quite a different backdrop. Fast forward a few days later, it's Friday night, and I find myself in the most, er, eyebrow-raising of venues. It was on the Lower East Side, and by Lower East Side I don't mean your boutique-hipster, yuppie-trying-not-to-look-yuppie standard Friday night fare congregating at the latest hotspot, I mean the fucking Lower East Side. Tucked away at the literal end of Rivington Street, Recoup Lounge was certainly not within the circles of any kind of gentrification, nor of any cognizance of inviting interior design. We had come to see JT Maple, and so had the bartender. Well actually, the bartender probably would have been there anyway. So it was just the two of us.

I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I've completely offered myself up to the mercy of anonymous public attendance, but I can imagine how much of a blow it might be to one's morale. No matter for JT that his only audience was a bored bartender and two yawning twentysomethings, lulled half to sleep by the previous two sets (attracting similarly-sized audiences). Acoustic guitar in hand, he climbed right up on that awkward stool, all lurking in the sallow Pacifico beerlight on the fake ass stage, introduced himself in a low mumble a la Johnny Cash, and proceeded to play his songs as if there had been a room packed with cheering fans. I suppose that being able to perform in spite of the audience is a necessity for any good performer, but I dare muse that it's probably a little more psychologically challenging to play in front of a smaller group: there's no mob mentality, you can turn back if you want to, and there's less anonymity to be gotten away with. But still, there's no arguing -- it sucks when you have a show and two people show up.

As I watched this kid up on the stage, with its wires and shitty garbagebag-wrapped broken flatscreens erupting from the ceiling and God-knows-who denizens of the night occasionally creeping out of one side door and back into another, and listened to the soothing songs and expert guitarsmanship, I realized that JT Maple and Brett Favre weren't all that different after all. Yeah, it sucks when two people show up to your show, but that's what you're up against when you get into the business of pursuing your hopes and dreams. Brett knew he'd be going to be up against the naysaying sports pundits and the tens of thousands of skeptical fans each time he stepped on the field. JT knew that sometimes there'd be let downs and crappy gigs and thin audiences. He was up in front of us not because he necessarily wanted to be, but because he had to be. The path to stardom is paved with frustration, moments of despair, and empty dive sketchbars on the fringe of urban society. This was where he had to be and what he had to be doing, right now, no matter what the past or future held.

We all have something we HAVE to do -- the question is, do we have the courage to do it?


Everyone's favorite song. Skip to 2 minutes in.

http://www.myspace.com/jtmaple <--- JT Maple myspace

Summer Every Day

Summer is here! To celebrate, I've created a Summer Every Day mix. I previously popularized the "Every Day" mix series with such acclaimed mixes as "Party Every Day," "Road Trip Every Day," and "Ornithology Every Day." Look for the next installment coming soon to an internet near you!

Impress your friends on the beach blanket, in the Hamptons, or in the parks this season with this failsafe summertime playlist. With a strong backbone of everything cool to be listening to and a limbic system of strategically placed throwbacks & obscurities, you'll be the champion of the iPod sound dock in no time.

Download below -- oh, and the track sequence is essential, so if you have half an iota of respect for mood and flow, don't go switching it up or hitting shuffle or anything like that.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/3tkqgy

1) Happy Birthday "Subliminal Message"
2) Cocteau Twins "Fotzepolitic"
3) David Bowie "Win"
4) The Pains of Being Pure At Heart "Stay Alive"
5) The Fresh & Onlys "I'm Gonna Be Your Elevator"
6) Vampire Weekend "Taxi Cab"
7) The Avalanches "Two Hearts in 3/4 Time"
8) The Chameleons "Up the Down Escalator"
9) Deerhunter "Vox Celeste"
10) Feeder "High"
11) Best Coast "This Is Real"
12) Oasis "Fade Away"
13) Neil Young "After the Gold Rush"
14) Pavement "Major Leagues"
15) Red Hot Chili Peppers "Walkabout"
16) Washed Out "Belong"
17) Animal Collective "Taste"
18) The Cranberries "Linger"

I Wonder What Your Boyfriend Thinks About Your Braces

Sleigh Bells -- Treats

And the winner is....Sleigh Bells! Winner of what? They're the artist in my Acts To Watch: 2010 list who are first to hit the market with a full-length album. Treats was released May 11 and my speaker system, inner ear, and the retired cop downstairs who knows me only as "the a-hole who plays electric bass at 3 AM" have regretted it ever since. The songs make like some misproduced diabolical incarnation of bitch-girl pop-rap. Remember those first-generation headphone jack speakers you used to connect to your discman to create a ghetto-ass portable stereo? Imagine turning the volume up on those as high as possible -- so they're all crackly and shit -- and pressing them against your ears. "Just turn the volume down, moron," you might say. It doesn't quite work like that. Believe me, I tried -- this music just demands to be played at full volume, and if you try to turn it down, well, you can't.

So here's a question you might ask: is it any good? Yeah, it's pretty good. But there's too much going on here to get caught up in that debate just yet. You might turn your nose up at my association of Sleigh Bells with "bitch-girl pop-rap" -- like, who needs more Ke$ha? It's hard to describe what I'm talking about until you hear it. In hindsight it seems like an obvious maneuver, but the Brooklyn-based duo seem to have one day woken up with the idea of combining trendy off-kilter production and indie ethics with bum-rush, beat-based dance jams. Except that description's an understatement. These songs will elicit bodily movements more carnal and voracious than harmless dance (insert "that's what she said" joke here), and the production completely flips the bird to any conventions of respectful input mixing. The songs are usually formed around some over-gained synth or guitar lick, underscored with syncopating clappy sounds and other bass-heavy percussive thumping, topped off with the rich multitracked vocals of babe-and-a-half leadwoman Alexis Krauss -- and then punched into three dimensions with a crank to 11 of every knob on the soundboard.


it's not just youtube, it actually sounds like that.

Now back to whether it's actually good. I, and most other sources, believe that, yes, Treats is good. However, I (1) think I find the concept of the music more intriguing than the music itself, and (b) find it, by the end of the album, quite honestly a tad annoying. Maybe I'm just not "ready" for it. But, I don’t know, I just can’t picture myself ever being unwaveringly appreciative of hearing Alexis recite in monotone “Got my A-machines on the table, got my B-machines in the drawer” thirty-four times over alternating patterns of screeching static in “A/B Machines”. Elsewhere, brief blurts of noise like “Rachel” and “Straight A’s” seem superfluous besides to reinforce the testy demeanor of the album. In general, the music seems less concerned with being good than with offending; more intent on existing than being listened to.

But isn’t that what rock and roll is all about? I keep thinking of Run-DMC: though acknowledged as pioneers of rap, the music they made was, all at once, rock and roll, just a new approach. Maybe that's what Sleigh Bells are -- a new approach to rock and roll. Nevermind whether it's good. It pushes boundaries, insists on itself, and promises to offend parents everywhere – sounds like rock to me. Like so many before them, the duo find new ways of fashioning chaos and destruction into a coherent concept of music. Whether that concept is something beautiful and something worthwhile to listen to is up to the listener to decide. But it I can tell you this much: it is certainly something, something to behold and something to ponder, and, in the case of me, something to blast incessantly at max volume until the dude downstairs is pounding his ceiling with a broomstick like that time when I was playing my electric bass at 3 AM, my bad. I suspect I'm not alone.

Nate Terepka: Sunriser EP

Hit this shit up pretty soon, or now:

http://music.nateterepka.com/album/sunriser?auto=mp3-320

The Wind That Brings On the Bloody Fookin' Change

A few months ago, after years of well-publicized internal feuds, sibling rivalry, and cocaine abuse, the 90s alt-rock colossus of Oasis finally -- officially -- disbanded. The dissolution of their relevance preceded that of the actual group by about a decade, but I think the latter will help to facilitate some important developments in music trends over the coming twenty-four months or so. You see, don't mean to patronize, but trends move in cycles. With the swathe of "nu-gaze" that's cropped up over the past few years, the winding path of Retro has found its way to the Nineties. Who knows whether early 90s Shoegazer music was actually good; what matters is that it wasn't very cool during its "heyday," for lack of a better term, and thus serves as a perfect emblem of coolness now. So everybody and their mother jumped all over it. But as it did sixteen or seventeen years ago, this new generation of Shoegaze will inevitably give way to what will end up being labeled as the reincarnation of Mid-90s Alt-Rock, and possibly even -- dare I say it -- Britpop.

With Oasis officially out of the picture, they're now fair game -- nay, ideal candidates -- to be repurposed as kitschy retro-novelty. That's right -- bust out the t-shirts. Personally, I'm going to promptly go dig through my old CDs and rip all the Oasis I can find onto my iTunes in preparation for heavy rotation. You might be laughing now; just wait until you're the unassuming butt end of any conversation you'll be having with someone cooler than you circa mid-2011. "Oh, what's that you've got there? A Jesus and Mary Chain tee? Listening to some Slowdive? That's pretty sweet. Me? Oh nothing, just listening to my Parklife cassette...and wearing my Suede '93 tour shirt" Burned.

To celebrate the pending trend shift, I've featured some non-album Oasis songs that many of us stateside may not have been exposed to. These are nothing short of straight fire:

"Cloudburst" from the 1994 "Live Forever" single:


"Whatever" from the eponymous 1994 single; also a prime example of Oasis' frequent, err, "misfortune" of getting into hot water for lifting lyrics and/or other musical elements from existing songs:

Shaken AND Stirred

"Your budget on my neck," brags Cam'Ron on the latest installment of an increasingly diverse and promising line of output from producer Alex Kresovich. The project is Gold N' Fly: 007, which uses the music from Goldeneye 64 -- arguably the best video game ever -- to remix hip-hop acts that are probably more popular than they deserve to be. Cam's line is funny considering the budget for the project was probably not much higher than $0, but as such its presence here is a bold statement, even if unintentional, on the ever growing accessibility of the music industry and the blurring line between amateur and professional (and which is also starting to become a recurring theme of this blog).

And thank G to the D, or else we'd never have gems like Gold N' Fly knocking at our front door. With this collection of innovative tracks, Alex reaffirms his breadth of skill as a sample-based producer and his penchant for tackling challenges of thematic creativity. I guess the ultimate litmus test for any kind of narrow-focus concept art is, does the audience actually enjoy it? In this case, it's hardly a question. Even if you've never heard of Goldeneye 64, Nintendo, or James Bond, you'll be hard pressed not to get a kick of head-bobbing pleasure out of the stuff here. For those of us who've spent countless hours of our youth (and, uh, in times more recently than we'd like to admit) huddled in basements with friends in front of the namesake video game, the music will assume a dimension of nostalgia, and remind us that those were hours well spent.

Some listeners might find it to be too much to digest all at once. A few of the tracks err on the side of drawn-out or repetitive, but die-hards will appreciate the proof that the hip-hop epic is still alive, somewhere. That being said, nobody will disagree that the 22-track, 70-plus-minute album could have stood to have some of the fat trimmed. Luckily, though the whole may not outweigh the sum of the parts, the parts themselves will assuredly shine in countless other contexts; e.g., I see deep and rich fodder for "best-of-my-fave-rapper" playlists for years to come. There are miles of trunk-thumping jams for cruising around town with your brahs next Friday, and plenty of partytime essentials. Though Alex's multi-angle stylistic assault can be overload for newcomers, after a few listens you'll start to appreciate the colorful patchwork; it warrants repeating that, at the very least, there will be something for everyone here.



Once you get down with the producer's modus operandi, you'll have trouble denying or resisting his musical allure. Alex has always had an uncanny grasp on tone and flow, particularly as it relates to aligning that of a given rapper's with that of his beats, and the tracks here evidence definite growth in this vein. Lil Wayne's "Fireman" is handled particularly deftly, the beat accentuating and augmenting the dramatic slowburn of the original track. Obie Trice's "Cry Now" channels raw energy, and Cam'Ron's "Get 'Em Girls" finds a brooding, subterranean beat that rivals the original. I can't pick out a clear standout track -- but I can say that the album's first lyrical track (its second actual track; Alex's albums necessarily have "intros" and "outros," a drama-heightening gimmick that will most likely summon the skip button, but which I suppose is standard in hip-hop), Tech-N9ne's "Everybody Move", might be the most memorable. It blows the door down with its singeing, relentless jabs of snare-y percussion and guitar distortion, while the rapper's tongue-twisting lyrical onslaught sets the stage for the rest of the album.

To dip back into the theoretical, Gold N' Fly really ends up as both an homage to each of the gun-toting, rim-riding, drug-hustling, money-flaunting, woman-disrespecting mainstream rappers who made the cut and a play on them. For all of their countless boasts of cash, cars, and other tokens of wealth, they're humbled by a bedroom producer fucking with some video game samples. Fucking with video game samples to create songs on par with their originals, might I add. Thankfully, we're no longer living in a society that would have punished such abandon for class disparity with gruesome execution, but instead in one where communicative and electronic advances have enabled such indulgences and facilitated their widespread distribution. So download Gold N' Fly: 007, and support the advances the last 7000 or so years of human civilization have brought us!

Download fo' free HERE: www.GoldNFly.com

Nobody Says It Like Wikipedia #1

I get the best laughs out of the way things get phrased sometimes on Wikipedia. Like some things, sorry, you just cannot discuss with a straight face, as Wikipedia attempts in ubiquity. For instance, rap feuds:

When asked about the beef between 50 Cent and Rick Ross, The Game sided with 50 Cent and said that things are not looking good for Rick Ross. However, he offered to help Rick Ross get out of this situation, stating "Rick Ross, holla at your boy, man," and, "50 eating you, boy."

Damn I wish I knew someone had my back like that.