Category: Music

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.

PFunkzilla. Raise your head on the beat.

(produced, composed and recorded by yours truly)

Happy New Year!

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.

I watched a bit of the first episode of The Beatles: Get Back, until Paul actually creates the song Get Back.

It happens in the morning and it’s so awesome to see his mind work around his bassline, repeating the line, finding a quick melody on top, then words. He knows he has something and wants it, chipping away.

I’m not a Beatles fan but I imagine this must feel so great to see the creative process when you are one.

It makes me want to see the same quality footage of recording of albums or hot R&B #1 songs from the Isley Brothers, Parliament, Erykah Badu, Dilla or Midnight Star. Man, I wish I could see that stuff. There’s probably some footage here and there but nothing like the Beatles have.

LMAO

Adriano Ferreira da Silva Filho, a 19-year-old fan from Ilhabela, a beach town in the state of São Paulo, told Rest of World that he wanted to boost “Envolver”’s popularity as a means of paying back an artist who was influential in his life. So, Filho created a series of different playlists to play the song over 2,000 times a day using his laptop and two cellphones to be able to have them all playing simultaneously from different usernames.

“If you only play the track on repeat, Spotify doesn’t count it as a stream,” Filho explained. “They think it’s a bot. So, you have to create a playlist with different tracks and alternate them with the one you want to boost.”

All numbers on platforms are fake or fake-ish. Number of followers, likes, plays, views? All fake. Database 0s and 1s that can be edited however one is pleased. All those numbers are gamed.

I’ve seen someone with half a million followers on Twitter get 3 RTs in four hours. For something about her business. That makes no sense.

Those numbers have zero value, are constantly manipulated and far too many people OBSESS about them.

You’re obsessing about the void, a black box designed for retention, dear. No status here. Focus.

Some 177bpm bass for your senses.

“This was the dawn of a new digital-era way of experiencing time, something we’ve since become totally familiar with. And every gain in consumer-empowering convenience has come at the cost of disempowering the power of art to dominate our attention, to induce a state of aesthetic surrender. Which means that our gain is also our loss. It is also becoming very clear that the brittle temporality of networked life is not good for our psychological well-being; it makes us restless, erodes our ability to focus and be in the moment. We are always interrupting ourselves, disrupting the flow of experience.”

Simon Reynolds in Retromania.

Bro. It really explains well how ten years later we are now slugging through mountains of art and entertainment, how we are basically intellectual zombies. My good friend R was telling me last week how he downloaded a new album and listened to it without listening to it. How he didn’t understand what had changed, why he didn’t enjoy music as much as before (he’s a big music fan).

We have too much. We don’t make any choices. We are drowning.

And it feels like there is no end. It’s one of the most bizarre thing about the West today.