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Music

Bandcamp falling

A bit sad, disturbing and violent.

It’s about to be over. Bandcamp is in the process of being sold. Half of their employees have been laid off.

Bandcamp has been profitable for years. I hoped that Epic buying them would keep them away from hard times, and could actually be a nice synergy. Goddamn.

Fortnite was making $1M a day on one single platform in 2018, and so that’s why Epic didn’t have any money left in 2023 to keep an already profitable business under its wing.

FOH

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Music

Isley

Who Loves You Better just came up on my sound system and, I’m reminded how great the Isley Brothers are at making music and grooves. Mmhmm.

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Music

2000 music

Going through a bunch of music from 2000. It’s not good.

It wasn’t then! But we were just looking where this would go. For instance UK Garage, seemed to be really cool. That 2 Step vibe? Yessir.

By 2001 it was dead though. Gimmicky. No substance. Horrendous remixes.

I had those compilations from Radio Nova, Nova Tunes. I had the first three volumes, which were very much underwhelming at that time and are just sad today. Producers discovering filters and sampling, looking at their expensive Genelec, that’s all I can think about when listening to them now.

Same with Kruder Dorfmeister. Every artist or edgy person in Europe had that album. Every single one of them. I just listened to it skipping all songs one by one because it’s indulgent or boring or plain lame.

I think it demonstrates that musicality is everything; production value in sound doesn’t add that much. It was impressive sound at that time, but musically, it was poor.

It still is.

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Music

Azealia Banks

Great interview of the artist.

I wrote about her before and I think that part is accurate:

She has her own way of eating words, changing her accent, inventing meaning and breaking lyrics convention while empowering and dissing over dance music. It’s overwhelming, dense and I love it.

I’m listening to Paradiso from her Fantasea mixtape and it’s just 49 seconds to transition between songs—an interlude but I feel like she could go on for 6 minutes empowering women or trashing niggas, or the opposite or both, and I would just bop my head all along.

I think I respect the hell out of her for being so 1,000% without this pretending veneer that is so often all over the place with artists these days.

I still so want to see what I could come up with collaborating with her.

Anyway looking forward to her 70ish new songs. I hope she can release her new music on Bandcamp and get most of the money. She deserves.

Categories
Me Myself&I Music

RE Dilla

The book never ever mentions Go Go music but that’s a huge influence: the groove’s steadiness and inner play on too soon, too far kicks and snares, is so much part of its DNA.

It shouldn’t work well but it does, for hours and hours.

As often at the end of winter and start of spring, I’m listening to some old school Go Go. It gets me going.

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Me Myself&I Music

Spotify

Look, Spotify is 16 years old. It grew to have 200M paying subscribers.

They were losing 39M euros last year and this year, they’re losing 270M euros. Net income: minus 430 million euros.

This is not even supposed to be possible.

If your company has 200 million people paying you every month and you can’t even turn a tiny profit, your business model is pure trash. Just trash.

Folks! Please buy music on Discogs or Bandcamp, and grab the rest on torrents™. Listen to podcasts for free on Obama’s internet like it’s 2004.

Categories
Me Myself&I Music

Dilla Time

Reading this phenomenal book about J Dilla. It’s so powerful.

I remember listening to some of his Slum Village tracks back in the early 2000s, thinking “this one was dope but this one is a joke, right?”. I was frustrated by the hype and either great delivery about the hype or very underwhelming content. The book explains why this was like that.

I’ve been listening to Robert Glasper plays J Dilla (with Chris Dave on drums) a lot since last year. A phenomenal live performance (Boiler room in NYC, gone from YouTube but I have my mp3s). Shout out to T3.

I’ve been making beat-heavy music for 20+ years. Playing bass every day for 25+. Always had a drummer playing in my head since I was a kid and heard my first snares, hi hats and kicks live.

Dilla is from Detroit, a city with a French name and tons of French culture artifacts because it was founded by French missionaries.

Detroit is Motor City (the car life in L.A.), Motown (one of the biggest achievement ever in Black America), P-Funk (ever bigger than Motown to me), and Techno (so absolutely massive in 90s Europe, where I was at that time).

He was fascinated by Brazilian music, its polyrhythms, textures and harmonics. Me too (that’s why there’s timbales in my latest below).

He moved to L.A. in Hancock Park. I live a short bicycle ride away from there. He also was in Silver Lake with Stones Throw Records, who’s head is Peanut Butter Wolf who I recognized in the restroom of the Cinerama Dome during the premiere of Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. Dilla also connected with Madlib and Little Brother, both acts that I adored in the 2000s.

I barely listen to any hip-hop.

The Pharcyde’s Bullshit track is probably the first hip-hop track that I truly loved to death. Labcabincalifornia is one of the best ever (shout out to Booty Brown and Diamond D).

In 2014 I was living next to Delicious Pizza, created by the Delicious Records guys, who produced Labcabincalifornia. I got to chat with the Ross brothers. They had a couple block parties and I got to hear Slimkid3 and Fatlip spitting live from my roof while bopping heads with friends.

I could never stand Jay-Z, Puff and Kanye’s stuff. I was annoyed that they were so huge. I wanted Dilla’s Elastic SoulFunk to dominate.

I wanted Dilla to do more soul. Ain’t nothing wrong with keeping doing something great. All the hard, tech, dirty beats didn’t stand the test of time, all his soulful ones did and are even stronger now.

The insanity of the music business in the early 2000s. The label consolidation really ruined so many careers. Had Dilla been in the Bandcamp era, he would have been eating vegan donuts making beats from his Detroit basement, fully independent, money going straight to his account, the way he wanted it.

The sad because so common tale of a man not caring about much while women take care of EVERYTHING around his ass. smdh.

I waited. I avoided music labels, baby mamas and homies telling you how you should line up your life.

But the connection is deeper than I want to recognize. My head is heavy with creative, musical, undone things that I want to lay down in notes and rhythms.

Many in Dilla Time.

It’s just funny how things float around, sometimes.

Categories
Me Myself&I Music

PFunkzilla

PFunkzilla. Raise your head on the beat.

(produced, composed and recorded by yours truly)

Happy New Year!

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Me Myself&I Music

RIP Q

Q Lazzarus passed away.

Everyone of course thinks of The Silence of the Lambs when hearing the classic song Goodbye Horses but personally, I always think of Marc Johnson ripping streets.

It fits so well. It fits skateboarding’s rhythm, pain, solitude and doing you. A masterpiece.

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Music

Diffrt Grl

Composed and produced during the 2016s, aka 2015-2019. Not representative of the current mood, but I wanted to ship it because that’s how it is. Bang. NEXT