I pretty much spent all of last Saturday ballin’ in a nice hotel room drinking champagne and watching BET with my special lady. When the video for Rich Boy’s “Throw Some Ds” came on a few times, I was hooked.
Just listen to it: Nothing says celebrating success by spending obscene amounts of money on novelty rims for your car. He isn’t out to change the world, or rap about how he feels. He just wants people to know how much he has to throw down on car accessories.
The best line of the song is when he says that the reason for not putting tint on the windows is so that those motherfuckers can see its him driving.
Say what you will about his music, you’d at least think a guy spending that much money on car accessories would invest a little green in the design of his MySpace page.
No, actually you know what? A guy ballin’ as hard as Rich Boy probably doesn’t care about his MySpace page. Not when he’s so busy Tweeting as Cartier Benjamin.
(And while you’re peeping his Tweets, check out 199X on Twitter)
After listening to Dj Tuco’s all-Juke mixtape about three times today, I’ve fallen in love again with the music I know so little about.
I mean, what’s not to like about “minimal use of analogue synths, and short, slightly dirty sounding (both sonically and lyrically) vocals samples, often repeated in various ways. Also common are 808 and 909 clap sounds, and full “rapped” verses and choruses.”
Reading DummyMag’s love letter to Chicago Juke didn’t help matters. Pure Juke lives in the bedroom production studios and gymnasium dance-offs of Chicago’s high school kids. It’s constantly changing, and while it might just be a cultural blip it’s one that I can’t get enough of right now. Being a white guy in Canada probably means that I won’t ever even get real juke, either - just the scraps that I can pick up off the interwebs. And nothing says juke scraps like that Die Antwoord track, a Dutch/South African electro jam re-worked by a Prague-based DJ.
Catch these juke tracks, and don’t ever confuse them with jook music: the latter is from Trigga City, the former from the Chi (am I allowed to refer to those cities like that?).
Finnish group I Was A Teenage Satan Worshipper dropped me a couple of their eerie tracks last week, and I gave them a listen. One of the tracks was titled ‘Martin’ and it was eerier for that fact the day they sent me that track, I’d gotten into a long conversation with someone about ‘Martin,’ a 1977 film by George Romero. Watch it just for the when teenaged-Martin moves in with his uncle who greets him by saying “Nosferatu. Vampire! First I will save your soul, then I will destroy you. I will show you to your room.”
Unfortunately, the song doesn’t seem to be about that movie. Its still pretty creepy, and so is their other track, Strange Lights.
I have no idea what to think about Die Antwoord - they’ve got samurai swords and ninjas (I mean, the front man’s name is Ninja!), breathy female vocals and amazing electro beats. But there’s something about them that just doesn’t seem right, and I think that’s part of the appeal - you just don’t know what is really going on. Even their website makes it hard to find out more.
Ninja reminds me of a skinny white guy I used to work construction with who had tattooed the words “Thug Life” and a dragon ripping through his flesh on his chest all by himself. The style was exactly like Ninja’s - a little shaky, and you’re glad he didn’t go for anything more complicated.
But listening to the Die Antwoord’s music and watching their videos, you should be glad he did go for Yo-Landi Vi$$er. Wikipedia says they’re married, but Wikipedia could say anything and who cares as long as she keeps balancing Ninja’s hard raps.
Rounding out the trio is DJ HI-Tek, his hat is awesome.
I don’t really know what role Leon Botha plays in the band beyond artistic support, but he’s one of the elements of Die Antwoord that you leave you with more questions than answers, and affirms the fact that their style is “UFO.”
Ryan from Pitchfork Tweeted that “DieAntwoord.com just made 2010 official. I think BoingBoing called it a memesplosion and I think you’ll be hearing a lot of them over the next few weeks. After that? Who knows.
Maybe its the cold weather (or maybe its because I’ve been using those Bose noise-canceling headphones instead of iPod ear buds) but I’ve really been digging that spacey electro sound these days.
Also - did you know that 2009 was the International Year of Astronomy? I only found that out the other day via post about Simon Page’s Astronomy posters on Sci-Fi-O-Rama. I guess that makes Twenty-Ten the Year After The Year of Astronomy.
Anyways, The Diogenes Club dropped me some of their tracks via email a week about, and while I don’t like all of them “Tie Ourselves Around” has sound I like. You can listen to a few of their other tracks here.
And Kenji Kawai? That’s some good scene-stealing background music.
Remember The Infinity Gauntlet? What a seriously epic comic series. I mean, you’ve got Thanos so in love with the personification of Death that he wipes out half the universe with using the Infinity Gauntlet, a huge glove with with gems that give him power over the different aspects of the universe: Time, Space, Mind, Soul, Reality and Power. Looking at the picture above, I probably couldn’t tell you which gem gave which power.
I feel like one of the big yellows ones is probably “Power” though, and they’re all way better than the Captain Planet power rings.
If Thanos gave Death a USB key with his favorite songs on it, I feel like these would be included:
Gotta Dance Dirty is one of my favorite blogs these days. That’s partly because they post some great tracks, and partly because they’ve got such a great header image on their site. I mean just look at it: King Tut rockin’ some sweet shades with a disco-ball background. Some over there has some serious design skillz.
Here are a couple of my faves that I’ve picked up from them over the past few months
At first glance, Dr Hollywood and The Girls Can Hear Us come across as pretty similar -they both produce totally danceable, electro-rap and they pretty much look like the same guys in their promo shots.
I guess the major difference is that while Dr. Hollywood is from the sunshine state, The Girls Can Hear Us rep London, Ontario.
Although I’ve been listening to that We Run LA track on my iPod almost non-stop this week, I think The Girls Can Hear Us edge them out for having also done a remix of Wouldn’t It Be Nice
The Girls Can Hear Us on Myspace and their official site
It turns out that one of their members used to be in another band called Europe in Color and he sent me a couple of their tracks as well, equally good:
