YMD Summer Jams 2010 #7

Robyn - "Dancehall Queen"

"Dancing On My Own" is still an official summer jam, but since this morning this has been dominating my brain so thoroughly that it must be declared one as well. It's the second song in a row in which Robyn is dancing by herself, but unlike the last one, in which she is specifically dancing on her own to highlight her loneliness and rejection, this one is more ambiguous and, I think, more interesting.

"I came to dance not to socialize" is a great line, an example of how the narrator of the song foregrounds her objectives (dancing superiority and the recognition thereof) and methods (solitude) but not her reasoning. Is being Dancehall Queen an end unto itself? Should we, especially in the context of an album that includes "Dancing on My Own", assume that there are other emotional factors in the narrator's choice of solitude? ("I'll go down low like she won't..." in the bridge suggests this might just be a completely different way of dealing with the "Dancing on My Own" situation) (A different way of dealing with it through dancing, of course).

It wouldn't be nearly as moving, though, without the chorus melody, which I have to admit has a pretty ridiculous effect on me. It legit almost made me tear up on the train no less than three times today, and I fear what it might to do me if I hear it out/drunk.

That big dirty stinking bass

In case this interests anyone, here's what I ended up playing at our fairly successful, last-minute-venue-changed party on the weekend. Perhaps I got a bit anxious and played more vocal and pop stuff than I had intended too, but hey it happens.

- Jean Claude Van Damme - "Troop-rallying Speech From Street Fighter"
- DJ Mujava - "Township Funk"
- Shystie - "Pull It (Ill Blu Remix)"
- Business Man - "Dubby Games"
- Aaliyah - "Rock the Boat (Ill Blu Remix)"
- Ame, Henrick Schwarz, and Dixon - "D.P.O.M.B. (version 2)"
- Noze - "Remember Love"
- Tatu - "All the Things She Said (Dave Aude Remix)"
- Outkast - "B.O.B."
- Kingdom - "Mind Reader"
- Ludacris - "How Low"
- Kyla - "Do You Mind (Crazy Cousinz Remix)"
- Ricky Martin - "La Copa de la Vida"
- Donae'o - "Party Hard"
- Public Enemy - "Bring the Noise"
- Whitney Houston - "It's Not Right But It's Okay (Thunderpuss Club Mix)"
- Vitalic - "La Rock 01"
- Big Country - "It's a Big Country (Pure Mix)"

Then the Tay-Tay and Gucci came out.

My big thing from the past few weeks dance wise has been rediscovering how hard Ricky Martin's 1998 World Cup Anthem bangs. I wasn't planning on a Ricky rediscovery but friend Balls suggested we put it on at HQ the other day and it exploded the speakers more or less.

If you enjoy me playing house music along with free drinks and photography, I will probably be playing stuff with a lot less vocals at this opening on Friday from 6 to 9. Come by and shake your ass in a way that suggests you're admiring art. More on that later.

YMD Summer Jams 2010 #6

Robyn - "Dancing On My Own"

Initially, I kept wanting to see this in the same electro-pop tearjerker vein as Annie's "Heartbeat", but it's not really fair to compare every electro-pop tearjerker to one of the best songs of the last decade. It is quite good though, and if I was still frequenting Trash or whatever I would be very disappointed if this hadn't been added to the playlist.

And maybe it's instructive to compare Robin to Annie anyways. On "Heartbeat", Annie registers for me far more as a part of the track than as a distinct character (the thinness of her voice and ethereality of the vocal production might be a start as to why) She leaves a space in the song; this makes it easier for me to lose myself in it. Robyn, on the other hand, functions more like a traditional (post-Elvis, let's say) pop star. Her personality always comes through much stronger than Annie's, and that's not necessarily good or bad. On "Dancing On My Own", Robyn is clearly present as a well-defined character within the song, a character she's built throughout her career (this is even clearer in the video, where her dance moves become almost too distracting for me).

This all needs editing and expansion, I'm sure, but anyways, "Dancing On My Own" is a jam, and besides being yet another Valiant Heartbreak Anthem from Robyn (I'd imagine it will be balanced on the album by a song about how she'll kick your ass), proves yet again the unbeatable power of the wordless vocal hook.

YMD Summer Jams 2010 #5

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - "Bottled in Cork"

Who said we don't summer with guitars anymore? Ted Leo, who I've seen live more times as all but 2 or 3 other bands, put out a very good record earlier this year, and the most suitable song for summer jamming is this, his newest travelogue. Something about the acoustic guitar actually reminds me of frisbee-rock also-rans Guster, but I promise that I mean that in the least insulting way possible. The closing repetition of "tell the bartender I'm falling in love" doesn't seem like it could be any more perfect for summer daydrinking at bars that have backyards (and especially for those Saturdays on which you realize there's not gonna be a break between the daydrinking and the nightdrinking, is there?).

Random Ad Links and the wonderful LOLS to be had

Forgot to post this when I capped it last week, but anyways, is it just me that suspects that maybe authorities have caught a random senile old man, and the real Paul Clouston is hiding in plain sight, sticking out his tongue at the law and enjoying, I dunno, a fairly priced new life insurance policy?

Work the middle

"What better way to spend a day off," I thought, "than to make a little mix to practice for the party we're throwing soon?" So I recorded this mini-mix and figured it went well enough (barring one or two less-than-professional transitions) to post. It starts with a few seconds of the homie Neil and moves through some UK Funky updates of a few classics, some techno, a classic Chicago jam, and YMD fav Tensnake's new remix of Mano Le Tough. It's summer! Come party!

Maciej's AMBASSADORIAL FUNK MIX:
- Neil Young - "When You Dance You Can Really Love" (Reprise Records, 1970)
- Lil' Silva - "Perfussion" (Night Slugs. 2010)
- Matthias Meyer - "Tout Va Bien" (liebe*detail, 2008)
- Geeneus & Katy B - "Good Life (Remix)" (2010)
- Aaliyah - "Rock the Boat (Ill Blu Remix)" (2009)
- Wighnomy Bros. - "Exvola Stupp" (Kompakt Extra, 2009)
- Lucien-N-Luciano - "House Tool's House" (Cadenza, 2010)
- Pierre's Pfantasy Club - "Dream Girl" (Hot Mix 5, 1988)
- Mano Le Tough - "Eurodancer (Dances For Euros) (Tensnake Remix)" (Mirau, 2010)

Download that shit! (Mediafire)

YMD Summer Jams 2010 #4

Big Boi - "Shutterbug"

Obviously. Despite the fact that we're going to know the words to like half of Sir Luscious Left Foot's songs by the time it leaks, anticipation at YMD Headquarters and environs couldn't be higher. Big Boi has a very legit claim to the title of Best Rapper Alive right now, and he maneuvers this talking bassline with the ease and deftness we've come to expect ever since he was "catchin' buzz like a bumble bee" back in the 90s. The singing part of the chorus is maybe even more crucial than the raps though, as far as making this something to cruise summer streets to. "Baby baby" indeed.

YMD 2010 Summer Jams #3

Gyptian - "Hold Yuh (Remix ft. Nicki Minaj)"

It's not very often you hear a song on Hot 97 without a kick drum (for good reason), but Gyptian and Nicki have been getting a decent amount of play both on the radio and here at YMD headquarters. Entrancing summer jam, though I think it could be a decent sweaty dancefloor break too.

YMD 2010 Summer Jams #2

Terror Danjah - "Acid"

Yet more heat from both Hyperdub and Terror Danjah. The ravey build up in the first minute is hype as hell and the one-note synth riff is nothing if not insistent. Definitely a summer night jam, as much as these things can be controlled.

YMD 2010 Summer Jams #1

jj - "Into the Light"

Maybe the only summer jam to ever feature audio commentary of a Zlatan Ibrahimovic goal, this is my favorite track of Swedish Balearic duo jj's new album. Their rap and R&B covers are for the most part decently fun novelties, but gorgeous stuff like this keeps makes them a legitimately interesting band (the fact that you can dance to this one sure doesn't hurt its summer jam status).

(PS, seeing if this embed ting works, will find a better way soon).

It's my life, and I'm living it now

54. Armand Van Helden - "U Don't Know Me (ft. Duane Harden)" (Ffrr/Armed Records, 1999)

Starting a song with a sliver of a sample and then unraveling that sample after the intro isn't exactly an obscure technique, but I'm not sure I've ever heard it used to more ecstatic, glorious effect than it is on "U Don't Know Me", the Boston-born Van Helden's 1999 smash (#1 in the UK, don't you know). It's a song about how it feels to be misunderstood and judged harshly by folks who don't know you, and it sure is euphoric.

HYPERPOOP

When I saw Cube back in the early 2000s, I was pretty impressed. I rented it with a friend to get drunk and laugh at, but a few minutes into it I realized I was honestly enjoying it, and even fairly scared at points. Which is why I was so pumped when I saw that its sequel Cube 2: Hypercube was on Netflix Instant. Disappointed isn't the right word, I mean I guess I was disappointed that it was so terrible, but I sure did laugh a lot, which I think makes it all OK. Although it's hilarious, it's such a train wreck that it becomes difficult to watch, even at its paltry 80 minute run-time. I'll save you some trouble and give you a detailed synopsis.

The plot is the same as the first, at least in premise. Six strangers are stuck inside a mysterious cube, with a door on every side that just leads to another cube. Sadly in Cube 2, these strangers are all terrible Canadian actors who try to mask their accents with what appear to be lisps. Among my faves, a blind Asian girl with super sonic hearing abilities, and an old lady with Alzheimers who can't find her dog. This character is more offensive than you can even imagine, but I feel perhaps it might be less offensive than actress Barbara Gordon's new Canadian TV series "Little Mosque On the Prairie." Oh boy.



With brilliant minds like these at work, it doesn't take them long to figure out that they're not in your average, every day regular massive cubic structure with hidden traps and moving walls, but a HYPERCUBE, or a cube with four dimensions." You see a hypercube isn't supposed to be real. It's just a theoretical construct" says one character. Oh but it's real my friend, and it's folding space time, trying to kill them by...collapsing them...in space time...with transparent, oozy...wall stuff?



And Windows 95 screensaver thingies...



Wait, let me fix something.



Yes, much better. The movie continues with absolutely nothing remotely resembling a plot and gives the view the feeling that at any moment it could turn into pornography. Spoiler alert: it doesn't, save for one Skinemaxesque scene in which two characters, without explanation, bone while floating in zero gravity (also not explained). But then things keep happening! Like crazy diamond pillars that are also somehow related to space time, and come out and...kind of...stab...people?



Aaaand then it turns into a black hole. Maybe not. But there's like, a space tornado, as seen here:



Or as I prefer it, here:



And now you've seen Cube 2: Hypercube. Congrats.

Electrocute a barracuda, I'm here to bring the drama

55. Craig Mack - "Flava in Ya Ear (Remix ft. Puff Daddy, the Notorious B.I.G., Rampage the Last Boy Scout, LL Cool J, and Busta Rhymes)" (Bad Boy Entertainment, 1994)

Before we get to the complete headfuck that is LL Cool J's verse on here, let's discuss the stuff that's good in the conventional sense. First, there's Easy Mo Bee's beat, an unquestionable East Coast Rap classic, two notes and hazy waves that are perfect whenever they come in. It's not Biggie's best verse ever, but it's still a Biggie verse. Busta is 1994 Busta, so he's one of the most joyfully unhinged rappers ever. Mack has "your album couldn't fuck with one line," which is wonderful (in a recursive way) because if that's true of any line Craig ever said it's that line itself. Rampage is solid if unspectacular and Puffy, well, it's actually kind of impressive how sure he was of his impeding world domination (even for a rapper), considering they were pretty much just getting started here.

But the LL verse is what really elevates this to sublime. Remember this was after 14 Shots to the Dome, a relative commercial failure for him, and just before Mr. Smith, which had "Doin' It" and "Hey Lover" and pretty much established the grown up loverman LL we have today. So the vocal style at the beginning of his verse does, I think, prefigure that sort of thing, more calmly seductive than on his late 80s songs for the girls. But the content! What the fuck?

HEEESHEEE!
Uh! blowticious
skeevy (mmmm)
delicious
Give me cous-cous, love me good
Hollis to Hollywood, but is he good?
I Guess like the jeans, uh!
Flava like pralines
sick daddy knaamean?

They way people use the term "ironic" when it comes to enjoying music means either "enjoying something bad" which, you know, why would you, or "enjoying something for a reason opposite to which it was created" which, you know, how the hell would you know and who cares? Is it safe to assume from his MO directly following this song that LL thought screeching "HEEESHEEE" was sexy?

However you explain my enjoyment of LL's verse here, it's good enough for science to rocket this song up to #55 on our countdown. We should all be using the word "blowticious" more often.

Hey London

This is the best dubsteppy thing I've heard so far this year, I think. It's called "Picture" and it's by Subeena, who keeps bringing the rhythmic variations subtly enough for them to flow together but often enough for it to be quite exciting. It's all pretty and danceable and interesting and fun, and you should go to Beatport or your preferred dance music mp3 merchant and cop it.

Heaven is Whenever is whatever (?)

It's one thing writing about why I dislike something totally different from what I've liked before, or something from a scene I used to be into but have more or less given up on. That's easy enough. It's harder, I think, to write about why I don't like something by a band I've loved for a long time and for whom a new record isn't that huge of a departure.

That's as much of an excuse for the following lack of insight as it is my usual obsession with why I think and write the way I do potentially getting in the way of my writing, but anyways, I don't like this new Hold Steady record very much and, this being the first time I've not liked something by Craig Finn, I've been thinking about it a bit.

I don't think that Franz Nicolay leaving has much to do with it. As much as I enjoyed his presence (yes, on record too), I doubt any piano fills could liven up the stuff I don't like here. That stuff starts right off the bat with "The Sweet Part of the City", which is right now my least favorite Hold Steady song ever. It sounds them finally getting pulled into a 90s facsimile of classic rock they've always been more interesting than. That I, on balance, prefer Finn ranting to him singing should be no surprise, but this is the most that his lyrical hooks have ever felt lost in a song.

It's not all bad, of course. "We Can Get Together" is even softer than "The Sweet Part of the City" and references a bunch of songs and is mostly about Heavenly, of all bands, but does well with a sweetness that is one of Finn's more underrated attributes. And I've come around on "Hurricane J", a song about a girl that, for once, isn't named after a saint. But in the end, it mostly sounds to me like a bunch of anthems without nearly enough hooks. I might go read the lyric sheet.

I'm set free to find a new illusion

Oh, Bono

It's not about Politics, religion, or the economy
It's not about borders, history, trade, oil, water, gas, mineral rights, human rights or animal rights...

I realize that this being Bono's voice makes it extra-annoying, and I realize that ESPN is trying to position the World Cup to US viewers as an Olympic-style, world-uniting event (which it is), and that might be a pretty decent tactic.

But does this ad rub anyone else the wrong way, this explicit call-to-apathy, the idea that the World Cup is so wonderful (it is very, very wonderful) that it makes everyone's problems go away? Especially as they're running ads for the ESPN documentary about the political importance of the '95 Rugby World Cup during the same commercial breaks (a TV network trying to have it both ways, ring the alarm, I know). The World Cup is one of the happiest things in the world, and I will enjoy it immensely, but trying to depoliticize an event as Global as this seems odd. The histories of the nations involved and their current place in the world don't diminish the spectacle or the efforts on the field. At the very least they enrich the narrative and at best maybe some new bit of social consciousness can sneak through to the millions of people watching.

(I'm sure when ESPN is running human-interest stories instead of analyzing football for hours a day next month I will run a furious retraction)

Sobre el fascismo

Has any Spanish-language (or English-language) (or bilingual) rapper done a version of this yet? If not, let's get on that, stat.

New Caribou album, people rejoice

I finally listened to the new Caribou album (finally in 2010 parlance = less than a week after it was released, obviously) the other day and I'll be damned if it hasn't been haunting the stereo at YMD headquarters pretty much non-stop ever since. After five or six listens, it's pretty solidly my favorite record of the year (with only the Yelawolf tape in striking distance, really). I'm not sure what I was expecting from Mr. Snaith after the sunny psych-pop of Andorra but a House record wasn't really it.

Lead single "Odessa" shows the most obvious traces of Snaith's collaboration with the Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan, sounding more or less like a good Junior Boys track done with Snaith's textural preoccupations. It's great, but the second track, "Sun", is where things really start to open up for me, as warm as it's title implies and building on a familiar drum pattern to build something I would love to dance to outdoors this summer. On the next track Snaith starts getting crazy with the stereo panning and I love every second of it. It's exactly what a Caribou dance album would sound like, now that you think about it, and full of surprises at the same time.

Snaith talks in this Pitchfork interview about how both the structure and compositional tools of modern House opened up all kinds of possibilities for him and, while I'm cynical enough to think about how this won't stop Swim from influencing some terrible "it's like dance music, but by a real artist" writing (why do I Google things*) the more people on the dance floor the better, right? Best Caribou/Manitoba yet? Too early to tell, but maybe.

* Okay, I know, what's the point of getting upset about a site I only stumbled upon by googling "Caribou swim Jeremy Greenspan" but they gets advertising so it must be something, right? And I'm too old to be surprised by people having condescending attitudes towards dance music, but god damn, "a reputation for rigid structures" my balls. And the bit about Kelley Polar and Junior Boys (both of whom I love) "often ditching cliched components of electronica like auto-tuning and forced flanging for more structurally daring feats" is even dumber, right? Because what could "structurally" even mean that Auto-tune and "forced flanging" would have anything to do with it? And they're being structurally daring by applying pop structures to, respectively, disco and, err, electro-pop?

I am 100% for exploring and writing about music from genres and scenes you don't know shit about. But you have to be humble enough to admit that you don't know shit about them. I'm certainly guilty of not doing this once in a while too, but I promise, I'm trying.

Long nights crying by the record machine

57. Elton John - "Crocodile Rock" (DJM Records, 1972)

Good to great songs about dances are a dime a dozen, as are songs about nostalgia for a rock and roll childhood. However, songs about doing an imagined dance to an imagined song during your rock and roll childhood are, as far as I know, quite a bit more rare and the creation of such a thing by Bernie Taupin is a wonderful move. Whether not actually inventing a dance to go with is laziness or allowing for creativity on the part of the listener or both I'm not sure, but it doesn't bother me. The famously and excellently annoying hook is either more important than the lyrical content or just a cherry on top, depending on my mood.