Songs 2008

Photo by Matthew Nistor.

Mp3 blogs are mostly an indie-rock medium. This is an mp3 blog, and yet, indie rock has never left me more cold than it does now. I spent time this year with probably 75% of the records listed on Pitchfork's year-end Top 50. It felt dutiful, like being in a relationship where you're trying to talk yourself into being in love. To indie rock, I say this: it's not you, it's me. I've changed, I guess. I now only need three things from music: songs, soul and good beats. What I no longer need are obtuse lyrics, affected anger or fashionable disconnect.

So what I use this blog for is more of a celebration of what moves me than just another series of blips on our increasingly ticker-fed radars. The emphasis is on my own personal connection, and not the fact that I got there first. And though the handful of readers I do have is a form of pressure to post in a relatively timely manner, I try not to pro-rate the quality of a track just to get something fresh in your RSS feed.

I said all that to say that making a year-end-best list makes even less sense on this blog than it does elsewhere. Although I do seek out and try to celebrate new music, I'm usually late to the party anyway and couldn't give a shit if it's trendsetting or not. But I do find it exciting and surprising to look back on 2008, a year in music culture that I think of as celebrating cold, dated or obnoxious sounds, and see how many things came out that made my soul (and/or ass) quiver.

I am all for the fact that music is moving back to a singles format, and so I wasn't disappointed to find that 2008 was not a good year for albums. (If you are the type that still enjoys owning the physical artifact of your favorite records, browsing the artwork, displaying it in your home like a stuffed boar's head - then I'd say the records to have are: Al Green Lay It Down; Joan as Policewoman To Survive; The Walkmen You and Me; NOMO Space Rock; Raphael Saadiq The Way I See It; Kardinal Offishall Not 4 Sale; Black Milk Tronic; and - if you could only buy one - Jamie Lidell Jim.) But if you're like me, and only have a thirst for concentrate, here, for your consideration, are 15 songs that made my year. Songs that never seemed to wear out their welcome.

Al Green "Lay it Down"

The miracle. Or sign of musical end times. Or both. A furious God casts judgment on a soulless urban music culture by sending his messenger Al Green - resurrected prophet, his flesh, face and dexterous voice still youthfully in tact - back to earth to show the motherfuckers how it's done. Nobody could have predicted it, or that it would sound so vital. Compared to elder Green, the state of youth seems dire.




Gnarls Barkley "Who's Gonna Save My Soul"

Al Green's record could make me despair that soul singing is a dead form. Cee-Lo's performance on this track is the best proof that the end is not yet nigh.



Portishead "The Rip"

When I first zeroed in on this track, it was as much about Portishead's strange, clunky neo-krautrock production, and the hypnotic casio keyboard riff. Then I heard it out of context, when Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood showed up on YouTube covering it with acoustic guitars. I saw the timeless Kate Bush-ness in it then. Beth Gibbons has a strange sense of melody. I'm convinced that she writes more conventional tunes, keeps them secret in her head, and then sings harmonies to them on the record.



The Reflecting Skin "Cavedweller"
I sometimes daydream video concepts when listening to my favorite music. The one for Cavedweller involves some lonely guy at a party. He sits in the same armchair all night long, ignored, while the party rages around him. Then in synch with the pummeling, distorted climax of the piece, his head shoots back, his mouth snaps open, and he suddenly vomits hideous light out of his mouth, eyes, nose and ears while the house is shaken to its foundations.



Santogold "L.E.S. Artistes (XXXChange remix)"

Sometimes the remix is better.



Jamie Lidell "Little Bit of Feelgood (Mondkopf Remix)"

Sometimes the remix has absolutely nothing to do with the source material. And is better.



Jim Noir "On a Different Shelf"

Fugue-like synth noodling gives way to distorted classic rock and vocal rounds about finding inspiration and getting unstuck. Glorious all over the place.



Jonny Greenwood "Prospectors Arrive"

Jonny Greenwood began his foray into absolute music with the score for Bodysong, a wordless documentary with the modest goal of representing the entire human experience - from bloody birth to muddy death - in pictures. His music lived up to the task. It was actually that primordial and base. Greenwood understands the way that orchestral instruments are tools of vibration, and that, when wielded with the right combination of coloring and harmonic perversity, they can strike a frequency so heavy and ancient it predates good and evil.



John Legend "I Love, You Love"

Legend is almost too smooth for his own good. But if you strip the production down enough, say, to just 909 kick drums and Dire Straits guitar swaths, his flavor of over-pretty can really work.



Jamie Lidell "Another Day"

The first video they shot for this was bananas - (somebody help me find this! They've purged it from the web) just Lidell in some toddler's bedroom, playing with puppets and exuding joy. It was a perfect way to communicate why Lidell's retro experiment is more relevant now than it should be. Happiness is always in style, as long as you can dance to it.



Kleerup "Thank You For Nothing"

Hits all the right '80s notes with all the right sincerity.



Q-Tip "Move"

J Dilla will never die. Here his production lends an ass kicking to the most urgent hip hop track of the year.



Raphael Saadiq "Sometimes"

Personally, my song of the year. Wore this one out, up and down. As soon as that filtered organ loop crackles in at the intro, the goosebumps just erupt. I can't explain it.



Black Milk "Bond 4 Life"

With no disrespet to Flying Lotus, he is not the successor to Dilla. Black Milk is.



Fennesz "Glide"

[Untranslatable]

A New Hymn

It's hard to shake my conditioning, raised, as I was, slanted as a row of pews. It's hard to delete the want of soulful communion with fellow travelers. Or to end the search for a liturgy that I can get behind, some kind of text that speaks to the bursts of reverence emanating from my own heart. Because those bursts seem to have a very uncommon frequency, and I've never found a hymnal that could contain them, let alone enough kindred spirits to form a choir.

I've been going out a lot the past few weeks. Some of it has been edifying, some of it simply fun. I've tried reconciling the irreconcilable. I've tried stretching my heart. Holding my liquor. Owning the room. Reaching always deeper. Sometimes you can make a little church in a bar, but the little preacher's kid in me occasionally wakes up wanting to shower off the noise and smoke and projecting in dark rooms to make way for something brighter, quieter and more reflective. When I feel that way, I wish there was a church for my people, with hymns of peaceful uncertainty, blessings of affirmation, a congregation lit in the eyes and hot for the joyful noise.

In another world, my kind of world, 2006 would have been the date entered in Wikipedia for the creation of a new, timeless hymn. A fresh entry into the cannon of Works of Truth. Brian Eno would have been the author. I fantasize about whole groups of people singing, in booming unison, a text this confused and sacred: High above the single bird/ it drifts above the dead volcanoes/ Who's to lose and who's to find/ There's nothing here that I could choose at all.

I imagine that and it's hard not to feel the pang of spiritual exile. But then I think, if Eno wrote this there is at least one other. And probably more.

Brian Eno "Caught Between"



Caught between the earth and the sky
One too low, and one too high
Falling free
and holding on
Nothing there at all

Dropped
and lifted
Gotta breathe
Bottom drifting
on the wave
Holding just a few poor words
or nothing at all

Reaching out to still the sand
The light connects the breaking moments
Drifting to another shore
There's nothing here that I could change at all
Nothing at all

Forced to bend a broken line
Let to hold what we can't find
Then to let it go again
Nothing said at all

High above the single bird
it drifts above the dead volcanoes
Who's to lose and who's to find
There's nothing here that I could choose at all

Movies 2008

Photo by Matthew Nistor

I really hate the idea of making lists of things I like. It seems a little petty and like a symptom of cultural gluttony. But I also know that I read the lists others make at this time every year and that it works as a filter for me so that I can get a sense of what to go look for. I'm at a conflicted point in my life about culture - feeling both that there's just too much of everything but that, on the flipside, I'm seeing popular culture - including hit movies and records - that are great humanist works of art.

I'll start out with film and move onto other things later in the week. Though nothing struck me as strong this year as my favorite movies of 2007, there was a lot that excited me. But rather than try to organize and rate it, let me do a little celebrating and a little bit of advocacy.

There were three films in 2007 that I got worked up over - The Fountain, Sunshine and No Country For Old Men. The great news this year was that all three of those directors put out new movies: respectively Darren Aronofsky, The Wrestler; Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire; and The Coen Bros., Burn After Reading. I haven't had a chance to see The Wrestler yet (which is getting great reviews), but the other two did not dissapoint. Burn After Reading is very funny, and very dark. It's a twin to Fargo in the sense that it portrays a world where everybody is an idiot, and blind to their own idiocy, and in which that idiocy often results in cruelty and brutality. But it's funny as shit. Boyle can do no wrong by me (28 Days Later, A Life Less Ordinary) and Slumdog has his trademark vibrancy and energy, only it's far more sentimental than his previoius movies, in a good way. The lovestory that comes out of the story is epic.

Moving quickly through the rest: If There Will Be Blood was the best thing I saw all year (I was sick with a fever but sat riveted through it's heavy running time without feeling a thing - I would pay money just to watch Daniel Day Lewis read the phone book) Step Brothers was the funniest. I haven't gotten bored yet with Will Ferrell or John C. Riley the way some of my friends seem to have, and I think this movie might be the one they were both born to make. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly might be as good as There Will Be Blood if it had Daniel Day Lewis in it and Johnny Greenwood's score. WALL-E is astounding - the fact that the year's most hyped summer animation blockbuster was essentially a silent film for the first half is hard to believe. And yet, that wordless first movement was my favorite part. So gorgeous and also very nostalgic for me in an '80s way in its Speilbergian romance of space and robots. Having said that, Kung Fu Panda is just as good, if not better, in its own way. It's a perfect movie, really funny and with the same exquisite pacing and direction as any Pixar film - actually the first non-Pixar animation that I've seen to hit at those levels. Elegy and The Savages were sharp, elegant independents that I'd see again. Iron Man was a better film than The Dark Night, and possibly the best superhero movie yet. I had no idea John Favreu had it in him. Quantum of Solace carried on the rehibilitation of the franchise by delivering a sequel to Casino Royale that has all of that film's rage without any of its respite or romance. Like the Dark Night, it's just endlessly grim. But unlike Dark Night, it's lithe and gorgeous to look at, and doesn't have silly bat cowls and batvoices to take your attention out of your movie-trance. I heard the budget for this film was astronomical, and when I saw it I could see every penny translated.

Advocy-wise, I already made my case for Religulous here on my personal blog. But I don't get tired of pointing one thing out: it's less about religion than the way religion is practiced. Some people have criticized Maher for taking on easy targets: the feeble and easily persuaded everydaymen, rather than professional apologists. But that's a smarter angle, because the true dangers inherent in religion come from those little and numerous lowest-common-denominator moments of minds closing. Maher exposes not just how quick people are to apply a lax set of standards to a particular belief system, but how that standard is incongruous with what they'd apply to anything else - all because they've been conditioned to do so. And Maher captures hundreds of those moments and uses them to support a persuasive thesis. Religion touches everybody in this world, no matter what you believe. So I really feel that everyone should spend the two hours it takes to engage this movie. And it's not like it's homework - it's hilarious.

Rent The Promotion. It's the most overlooked film of the year. A really sweet, unassuming comedy featuring John C. Riley and Sean William Scott and directed by Steven Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness) that manages to avoid a lot of message-cliches while delivering tons of laughs. I quote this movie all the time. Think Groundhog Day.

You Can Have Me, Julie

This is my all-time favorite Christmas track. It's sex in a can. Julie London just kills it.

Julie London - "I'd Like You For Christmas"

Fennesz's Full Blast

Followers of the Hebrew g-d believe that h-s name is so holy it can't be spoken, only referred to. Muslims believe it's a sin to make an image of their prophet, and aboriginal Australians won't let you take their photograph lest you capture their soul. I'm a shitty mystic, but there is something about the music of Christian Fennesz that makes me want to avert my descriptive gaze - to shuffle in backwards, eyes downcast, to the sacred temple of his sound when trying to write about it. It would seem crude to do anything like talk about process, or actual instrumentation, or, g-d forbid, his software. Because in the end it all ends up dumped in a sea. The black fathoms of hot crackling blast. The liquid void. The holy drone of his music.

This time last year I was compiling a year-end best-of list of sorts and a sentence kept popping up in my mind that I never posted: the best album of 2007 was the one Fennesz never released. By that I didn't mean that I had gotten my hands on a leaked draft of a new work by the Austrian sound sorcerer; I meant that 2007 was both the year of my discovery of Fennesz and the period of my life most suited to resonate with the disembodied beauty of his work. It was a year of psychic house cleaning during which I destroyed more fixtures of false belief than ever before. I spent a lot of hours staring at candles, cross-legged on wood floors in dark rooms, fighting with silence. Hours of peeling away the layers of mental dust and paint that had caked onto the walls of my thought. It was subtractive work - taking my mind down to its most minimal, looking for the Still, Small Voice underneath it all. I don't know what, if anything, I found in all that subtraction, but what stayed with me was a better sense of my environment and a certainty that the great spiritual battle of our time is to make war with clutter - the full blast of stimulation and information gushing at us on a daily basis. (Sadly, I'm barely fighting it. I spend more time on my computer than ever. If this blog goes dark, feel free to hope that I left to care for my soul.)

The more I allowed myself to melt the more Fennesz I played. On thick summer nights I'd find the room with the best cross breeze, throw a mattress down and smoke out to Venice. As I listened with chemically widened ears, I knew that Fennesz was making the true music of our age. An ambient requiem for an entire generation of souls sizzling in a digital frying pan - cell phones, microwave ovens and power lines, piping us full of disease and bathing us in a black sea of anxiety. Fennesz, it seemed to me, was the only artist making any music of spiritual concern. It was wordless, wide stuff. Our own voices, bouncing back to us off canyon-like walls of city buildings in reflections of distortion and smeared melodies.

That summer I also took Salvia, the diviner's sage, a few times. I loved and respected it as a leafy portal to lucid dreaming as well as a dangerously powerful magnifier. With Salvia environment is key because it will take the slighest sights and sounds in the room with you and project them up on a massive wall like flickering puppet shadows cast ghoulishly by candles. Idiots cocktail the stuff like a party drug and get sucked screaming out windows and have their souls steam-rolled like doomed 'toons in a Warner Bros. cartoon. I only did it alone, in silence and in the dark. But this one night I was careless and took too big a hit. I came to on all fours, sweating the shapes of my forearms and shins onto my yoga mat, without memory. The fan of my macbook's hard drive eight feet away, a barely perceptible hum under normal circumstances, became a deafening helicopter blade chopping the air just above my head and descending upon my bedroom like the whirling, flaming sword of an archangel.

That Salvia trip taught me something about our true natures and how we weaken them. That we humans are engines of power and dream who muffle the godlike boom of our souls by smothering them in paper-mache nests that we build our whole lives, strip by flimsy strip, until they are as hard and containing as a bomb shield. A piece of information here, some empty stimulation there. NPR, cable, radio, magazines, blogs, records, movies. We're caked over in false security like the shivering homeless - passed out on winter benches, swaddled in makeshift newspaper blankets.

That is what Fennesz's music sounds like - the quiet beneath the debris. It's a vital hum that never competes, never tries to rise above our filters. We can only go diving for it, and once submerged we are given over to dream. Sitting down for the first time to listen to Fennesz's new recordings, Black Sea, immersed in headphones and staring out the window at a heavy snowfall, I saw things. I saw a lumbering dark giant carrying a black Santa sack over his shoulder in which he carried light. I saw him sidle up to the side of a house at night and peek down into its chimney. I saw the giant dump the contents of his bag down the chimney like an electric Pentecost which poured through the home, blanketing every sleeping person in it in currents of white-hot healing.

Fennesz - "Glide" [From Black Sea]



Fennesz - "Rivers of Sand" [From Venice]



Fennesz - "The Point of it All" [From Venice]

Kanye.2

Love him or hate him, Kanye West is simply the most interesting thing happening in pop music right now and before his style-shifting new album 808s and Heartbreaks could even drop it's been something to both anticipate and argue about. Not to add to the glut, but let me add to the glut.

I guess at some point I started looking to Kanye to become what Bjork was in the mid to late '90s, the avant garde Manchurian Candidate - an artist sneaking into the mainstream to thwart it from within with bombs of futurism and audacity. It's not an even comparison; Kanye is much more of a high-stakes player and his worst record sales probably dwarf Bjork's best. And Bjork was far more perplexing at her MTV-friendly peek. There was little to no context for her clothes, haircuts, artwork, videos and mannerisms, to say nothing of her sounds: a strangely workable mix of the machine-hollow cold and blood-pumping warm. Post matched left-of-center dance production with pop songs in a pre-Timbaland world and Homogenic was practically just string quartets and beats under Bjork's techno hippy couplets and elf scatting. She seemed like somebody from an alternate version of our world, whereas Kanye is so nostalgic and given to fad that he is more a lucid reflection of our past and present. Almost everything he is about right now - auto-tune r'n'b, Tron retro, tribal minimalism - has a reference point somewhere else nearby in the modern conciousness.

So what makes Kanye so fascinating to me? Why do I believe he is a key to the what-next? The answer is the way he has brought immediacy back to pop star-ing. Like a hip hop John Lennon, Kanye, for all his musical genius, is a communicator first and a musician second. He's got that Beatle's impatience with the way things are done in the limelight, as well as his excess of energy. He might lack Lennon's reflective nature - there is an inane quality to a lot of Kanye's public statements - but he is a bona fide game-changer. In culture the snake tends to eat the tail and Kanye is the Internet, which used to follow the art, coming full circle to birth new thinking about what music can be used for. He's the first artist of his profile to be truly operating at the speed of blog. There was no better example of this than the success story behind "Love Lockdown." In one of my more psyched blogs, I documented this new trajectory for pop singles: Kanye peformed the song for all the world to see at the VMAs, only weeks after writing and recording it for his forthcoming album. Days after the performance he streamed his unmastered version on his blog, caught some negative feedback from fans, went back into the studio to retool the recording, then dropped the thing on iTunes, where it went to number one within 48 hours. Back in more golden days, an artist like Al Green could have rushed a new single out to radio immediately after cutting it. But they could never have been this interactive - the mediums for it didn't exist.

While I have hope that Kanye can one day take music into some second territories, for now I'm happy to enjoy 808s and Heartbreaks for what it is, a pop experiment about real-time. To put it in context you don't have to look any further than the man's blog, a never-ending stream of cold-surfaced furniture, Bladerunner couture, James Bond gadgets and poached web culture. Kanye's mother dying this year seems to have erupted a torrent of nostalgia in him that goes beyond simple irony to the level of psychic comfort food. Listening to 808s you can practically see him wrapping himself in a memory blanket of the day glo '80s. Knight Rider cars, Akira colors, low-res midi keyboard patches, all sung through an android's vocal box and punctuated with bleeps and laser blasts. Again, seen it, but Kanye has taken the personal loss of his mother and the breakup with his fiance and used them to power these retro elements with a sincerity and emotionalism that's been missing in their re-use.


If Kanye's blog is a real-time document of creative inspiration, 808s is the logical result of that. He's stayed true to his turn-ons. The structures of these new arrangements are as spare and function-first as any of the modernist architecture he's been geeking out on. "Say You Will" has more movement than it should - pick apart the beat programming and you'll see that there's nothing in there subdiving the crushed tom tom groove the way a high hat usually would, and yet it bounces along, buoyed more by the space he leaves for your mind to connect the dots. That's Kanye giving a masters class on minimalism. And so it goes for most of the record, with that restraint paying off more than not. (Although less is not always more - there is still something uncooked about the studio version of "Love Lockdown" and I'm not sure even the gorgeous "Say You Will" deserves it's 6:18 running time.)

Let's talk about the auto-tune. There are good reason to hate on it. 1) it takes Kanye out of the role of trendsetter and puts him in the company of some real tacky shit. But we shouldn't hold Kanye responsible for T-Pain's sins. Pop robot vocals have a distinguished lineage that includes Daft Punk, Air and Kraftwerk. Kanye might not be the first person to bring it to black music but he might be the first person to do it with any class. 2) it's fair to say you probably shouldn't base an entire record on a single vocal effect. I thought the Strokes made that point once and for all when their singer used the same filtered mic sound for three straight albums - it freed Casablancas to be a more energetic vocalist, but it made every song start to sound the same.

Is auto-tune a crutch for Kanye? Of course. But I prefer to think of it as a boost, a way that Kanye can play against his limitations to expand what he's capable of. It would be a shame if the auto-tune abuse obscured the bigger picture here, which is that Kanye, not content to be a restlessly inventive rapper and producer, has set his sights on soulsinging. If an auto-tune plugin gave him the cover fire he needed to get from hook-crafter to songwriter and crooner, I'm glad for it. Kanye's melodies have the deepness and he sings them like he owns them. We're not talking played-out Top 40 tunes, but old-world soulful dirges. "Street Lights" and "Bad News" feel like Pharrell producing Gershwin and "Love Lockdown" and "Coldest Winter" have the swamp and sweat of old slave spirituals that Nina Simone used to reinvent. "Welcome to Heartbreak," "Amazing" and "RoboCop" are just insanely catchy. I'm not saying he should abandon rapping, he's one of the few who can hold my attention. I'm just saying, maybe his feelings ran out of room in the rap form. Or maybe there are things that can only be said in song.

Kanye West - "Welcome to Heartbreak (Ft. Kid Cudi)"




Kanye West - "RoboCob"




Kanye West - "Say You Will"




Kanye West - "Street Lights"



Kanye West - "Bad News"

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship

(L-R, Trevor Naud and LTD)

Back in June I leaked some early mixes of Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship, a new project of my good friend Trevor Naud in collaboration with Pas/Cal drummer LTD. (I hesitate to mention that Trevor is kin because I don't want to imply that my fascination with his music is in some way pro-rated by my affection for him as a person. The majesty of Trevor's gift is wide and timeless and I just happen to know him.) And now, I have the final album in my hands and I need to talk about it.

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship is like some rare exotic flower that flourishes in the secret dark and contains double helices of hallucinogenic gunpowder entwined deep in its stems if you know how to unleash it. Trevor told me he made it in a period of extreme personal blockage. No doubt, part of that frustration was with his own band, Zoos of Berlin, who, with over four years of stunning gigs and avant-garde alchemy under their belts have yet to produce a full-length album (there is every indication that dawning of the Zoos long player is finally nigh). So Trevor set up some mics and a computer in his kitchen and made this in a season. His impatience emerges in the ADD'ness of it all, the quick-acting brevity and the conjuring of swift, but complete, worlds of sound. They are less songs than glints of melodic hooks strung together like Christmas lights to form a shimmering path. The best way to listen is to avoid grasping - just let the vignettes fly by fully formed in their warbled and buttery baroque shapes.

HGBS came out more gentle than early mixes suggested. The first mp3 Trevor slipped me last summer was "A Head For Gabriel Dove," two and a half minutes of compression-crushed jazz drumming and reverb-soaked baritone that was as carnivorous as it was surging. But a listen to the finished record shows something much more haunted than hunting. It is a quiet anxiety slowed into sadness, more in keeping with the winter around me and things falling into sleep and death. It's a pop requiem for emotional shut-ins and the spiritually claustrophobic.

Fans of Scott Walker, David Bowie, Arthur Russell and Eric Matthews - in other words, artists trying to repossess dead rock forms with the jagged spirits of 20th century classical and avant garde - will come pre-primed for going deep with these tracks. But it doesn't require some kind of exclusive, arty membership to respond to something this gorgeous and immediate. It's very tuneful, very lucid stuff.

As far as I know he's currently figuring out the terms of the record's release. Go bug him about it.

NOTE: For some reason my audio player is being weird about these files. You might have to hit play, then pause, then play.

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Glass Case"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Jonaccce"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Nineteenth Usher"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "A Head for Gabriel Dove"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Once Outside"

Beyonce, Another Race

For "Single Ladies" and its accompanying video alone, Beyonce had my jaw-dropped awe. But her performance of it this past weekend on SNL only furthered underscored my deepening suspicion that angels once walked the earth mating freely with humans, and that their progeny are gorgeous big-bootied divas with digitally-perfect banshee voices, special-action swivel hips and complexions as golden and creamy as a smear of stars. I mean, let's be honest here - it's Beyonce's world and we're just swimming in it. Goddamn I love the "ring finger"dance. I love it good!







Beyond the first couple singles, "If I Were a Boy" (meh), and "Single Ladies" I've seen some love given out for "Halo" on the blogs, and rightly so. But my heart belongs to "Sweet Dreams."

Beyonce - "Sweet Dreams" [From I Am... Sasha Fierce]


Beyonce - "Halo" [From I Am... Sasha Fierce]

On the Tip

Q-tip has returned, but I have a confession: I'm only just discovering his solo work and his old band A Tribe Called Quest, both at the same time. I'm not a devotee yet, but I adore his flow and I'm always up for rhymes this thoughtful. This is from his new record The Renaissance. Can I just say that it's so good to hear D'Angelo's voice again:

Q-Tip - "Believe (feat. D'Angelo)"



This is what piqued my interest in Tip, a track from Tribe's The Low End Theory. When I heard this I finally understood what Tribe's legendary status was all about. This is easily one of the best tracks I discovered all year.

A Tribe Called Quest - "Vibes and Stuff"

The Mynah Byrds

True or false: Rick James and Neil Young used to be in a band together, called the Mynah Byrds.

From Wiki:

James and [bassist] Palmer soon formed a new Mynah Birds lineup with guitarists Tom Morgan and Xavier Taylor, and drummer Rick Mason. In early 1966, the Mynah Birds auditioned for the Motown label in Detroit. Morgan was unhappy with the label's attitude towards the musicians and left, with Neil Young taking his place. With Young on board, the Mynah Birds returned to Motown to record an album, but their manager pocketed the advance money the label had given the band. The band fired their manager, who in turn told the label that James was AWOL [from the Naval Reserves]. Motown told him to give himself up to the FBI, and the Mynah Birds' album was shelved. James spent a year in the Brooklyn Brig, after which he briefly returned to Toronto. During the summer of 1967, Rick James formed a new version of The Mynah Birds (sometimes spelled "Myna Byrds") with Neil Merryweather. The band returned to Motown and Detroit and recorded a new version of James and Neil Young's "It's My Time", but the band broke up soon afterwards.

The Mynah Byrds - "It's My Time"

The Mynah Byrds - "Go On And Cry"

Eccentric Soul Picks

No archival music project that I know of has unearthed more quality forgotten music than Buda Music's Ethiopiques series, which restored and re-presented a wealth of Ethiopian jazz from the '60s and '70s. I spent a good year picking through those audio mines - for every gold nugget there are mounds of granite - and it was worth it to get ahold of something that sounded so harmonically and rhythmically bizarre, but with a recognizable soulfulness.

Now I've got a new obsession to rival my Ethiopiques craze: Numero Group's Eccentric Soul series. It's a similar concept, collect works of unrecognized genius, the kind of music that might have had a fighting chance at a legacy in the electronic age - in this case a whole bunch of American soul labels that never rose to the status of Motown, Stax or Hi Records - and package them together for new consideration.

I first became aware of the series during the release of Volume 3, which featured Miami's Deep City Label. I'm still wading through it all, but so far that volume seems the best place to start because it has some of the series' strongest work.

It takes some digging and sifting to get past the mediocre stuff, but the same could be said of the recently reissued Complete Motown series. And besides, in my experience having to do a little work for your music only brings it closer.

Check out some of my favorites so far:

Them Two - "Am I a Good Man" - Eccentric Soul Vol. 3: The Deep City Label

Moovers - "Someone to Fulfill My Needs" - Eccentric Soul Vol. 3: The Deep City Label

The Rising Sun - "One Night Affair" - Eccentric Soul: The Outskirts of Deep City

Tokay Lewis - "What Can the Matter Be" - Eccentric Soul: The Tragar & Note Labels

Eula Cooper - "Heavenly Father" - Eccentric Soul: The Tragar & Note Labels

Obams Away

New Remix Action

I just wrapped up production and mixing for Millions of Brazilians, a real up-and-coming Detroit band and a fine bunch of idiots. My so-called production consisted of shitting synthesizer over their rock tracks and then editing and mixing in as much of it as they would let me. On "Happy Dagger," though, they put a stop to it and told me I had gone to far. "Fine," I said, "then I'm doing a remix." And so I did.

Millions of Brazilians - "Happy Dagger (The Clapp Remix)

John Legend: Butterboy

Note: Blogspot took down this John Legend entry a few days ago. There was no discussion, no requests to remove offending content or to stream my mp3s instead of hosting them. They just sent me an email saying: "Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog infringes upon the copyrights of others." I went to look at my post and see about altering it, but it was just gone. Which bummed me out because I spent the time to write something very favorable about Legend's record, which was released yesterday, and host a few of the tracks I was talking about. Thankfully, my girlfriend still had the page up on her screen and was able to salvage my text. I am reposting it, with streams instead of downloads for the tracks. I am also changing my policy on this blog to stream-only for tracks that are currently being promoted. So, if it's in a year of its release, I won't make the download available, and hopefully if you like it you will go buy it. This is something I've been thinking about for a while, and now seems like a good reason to make the switch.


There's an over-smoothness to John Legend that has been broken through to produce his best music. This has also meant, for me at least, ignoring the schmaltz that has cluttered his past records to find the 2 or 3 vital tracks that have real soul and sandpaper (the Raphael Saadiq-produced "Let's Get Lifted Again" from Get Lifted is what I'm talking about).

Evolver seems to be more of a "producers" record, in the sense that it has more of a diversity of sound and collaboration than Legend's previous two albums. And there is an evolution of style, as well - less retro, more buzz and bump. As singles go, "Green Light," which was produced by Andre 3000, is perfection, completely charismatic and fresh. Other tracks featuring collaborations with Kanye, Brandy and Estelle are no slouches either, but I find myself drawn to the sharper corners like "Satisfaction" - a kind of soul-meets-scandinavian-electro that is half retro/half bubbly apocalypse - and "I Love, You Love," which is matches Legend's croon with stuttering kick drum samples, snaky electric guitars and atmospherics.

John Legend - "Green Light (Feat. Andre 3000)"


John Legend - "I Love, You Love"


John Legend - "Satisfaction"


John Legend - "Let's Get Lifted Again" [From Get Lifted]

Lo and Behold

I thought there was something familiar about "I Will Not Apologize" from the new The Roots album Rising Down. And then I had it: it reminded me of Camp Lo. These guest spots by Porn and Dice Raw have that staccato, machine-gun-in-slo-mo rhythmic approach that I love so much about Camp Lo's Sonny Cheeba and Geechi Suede. Camp Lo's Uptown Saturday Night is one of the few rap albums I will listen to all the way through. It's got a timeless sound and doesn't sound today at all like a 11-year-old urban record. They have a unique delivery style where they go on and off the beat, rapping straight on the high-hats but lazy at the same time. It's super musical and just interesting to me, as a drummer.

Wiki says Camp Lo signed to Universal this year and are putting a new record out with a name alteration to just The Lo.

The Roots "I Will Not Apologize (Feat. Porn and Dice Raw)" [From Rising Down]

Camp Lo "Park Joint" [From Uptown Saturday Night]

Camp Lo "Luchini (This is It)" [From Uptown Saturday Night]

The Walkmen, Sculpted Again

There are a lot of reasons why I failed to listen to You & Me, the new album by The Walkmen, when it was released this summer. Most of those had nothing to do with The Walkmen at all and everything to do with the fact that I've drowned myself in a hot sea of black music. But to be frank, I had also lost a lot of the love I once had for the handsome New York-based quintet, its preppy clothes, its dylanesque post-punk.

I had become a fan from the first thing they ever put out, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (2002). This album worked on all the band's levels. The secret to The Walkmen's success is their chemistry as players and performers and on Everyone all of the sprawled paint of their animalistic live show is framed neatly in their minimal arrangements, which are intended to overpower with simplicity (...let's see how much effect we can get out bringing the bass in and out...). But what really made Everyone so special was that it was a studio album. It sounded tinkered with and sprinkled in crude ambient textures and hard-panned piano doodles. It was a one-of-a-kind sound, and maybe that's why the band figured it didn't need replicating. Fair enough.

But then they they became a touring beast, wrote a thunderous and fast song called The Rat which sounded like a man begging for his soul and which became the kind of song everybody wanted The Walkmen to be, and completely turned their backs on the studio-as-instrument, choosing instead to go for a band-in-a-room aesthetic that relied on natural room reverbs and tape saturation for character. The problem was that these recordings sounded increasingly unfussed over - but not in a good way. Bows + Arrows felt merely unloved, but A Hundred Miles Off sounded like it was recorded and mastered with a, well, Walkman.

The Walkmen were chasing a frustrating, elusive rock alchemy. The problem with music groups making band-in-a-room recordings is that they are usually self-defeating exercises. It's a condtradiction in terms. The process of studio recording itself - the clinical nature of it, the closeness of the walls and the lack of sweating bodies to bounce frequencies off of, not to mention the general abscene of white noise, generally results in recordings that don't faithfully replicate what the band sounds like live, or even in their practice space. But The Walkmen are a phenomenon in concert, and this deserves documentation and so, unfortunately, the alternative - a studio-manipulated album like Everyone - doesn't really seal the deal either.

I'm finally settling down with You & Me and I feel that this album is the best of both worlds. The recording quality is beautiful, with just enough additional instrumentation (the horn work, in particular is gorgeous) to make it sound "produced." But you would not be betrayed by seeing these numbers performed live - the album arrangements leave all the space of their live sets intact. The tempos are slow, but the band feels more comfortable in them. To me The Walkmen sound a bit forced as agro rockers and more natural playing expansive, ambient Americana; much of You & Me is the sound of tugboats, muddy southern rivers, fireflies and lemonade at dusk.

The Walkmen - "In The New Year" [From You & Me]

The Walkmen - "On the Water" [From You & Me]

The Walkmen "New Country" [From You & Me]

The Walkmen "Roll Down The Line" [From Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone]

The Walkmen "Stop Talking" [From Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone]

The Walkmen "What's In It For Me" [From Bows + Arrows]

The Walkmen "My Old Man" [From Bows + Arrows]

The Walkmen "No Christmas While I'm Talking" [From Bows + Arrows]

The Walkmen "All Hands and the Cook" [From 100 Miles Off]

Simone Pace

Simone Pace is one of my favorite drummers of all time and is also sickeningly cool.

"This video joins Simone Pace, best known as one-third of Blonde Redhead, on one of his vintage Italian motorcycles, from an East Village garage, across the Brooklyn bridge, to the band's recording studio. Simone shares some of the design elements that make him a fan of Motoguzzis, offers some insight on Blonde Redhead's music and tells the story of the first time he played drums."

Molly McGuire and the Bleary Roar of Kansas City Hardcore

I'm going to take a break for a moment from all of the R&B and old Soul I've been writing about and focus on the white man's music for a sec. I've been wanting to do a post for a while about Kansas City hardcore, a scene and a brand of sound that was way ahead of its time and that was a huge influence on me at one point. But trying to get all musical-historian on this topic is probably out of my reach, and besides I can't find half of the CDs I would need to do it proper. However since, upon my request, a friend recently mailed me a copy of Molly McGuire's last album Lime, on Epic Records, I can use posting a few of those tracks as a chance to reminisce a little.

I was a student from 94-98 in Springfield, MO, which was a few hours drive from either St. Louis or Kansas City. Since Springfield had no fewer than four universities it was actually a decent market for touring national acts, and we were spoiled musically, considering the size of the city. We also became part of the circuit for regional bands, who could pop in and do a weekend set every month or so and then get back home. When I showed up in '94, the Kansas City hardcore sound had already solidified: gutwrenching epic, a mix of melody and scream, the most dissonant guitar intervals possible, and, in general, just a darker, sadder, and angrier take on post-punk than anything grunge had offered. Fragile Porcelain Mice and Dirtnap were local favorites, since they seemed to hit Springfield the most. But Shiner, Season to Risk and Molly McGuire all had a bigger profile nationally and, of these, Molly McGuire actually signed to a major label (You probably won't be surprised to find out that they never made another record and broke up after their first major label release, Lime).

Listening back to Lime, I'm shocked at how a few of these tracks still hold up to today's sounds and styles. They were so ahead of their time. The Kansas City sound was essentially what would become emo and then post-emo, and even part of the sound of bands like Failure and Queens of the Stoneage. Besides Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary, there were few groups in the mid '90s making anything like it. Fugazi and the Jesus Lizard had the angry math and post-rock thing going, but the difference was in scope. The KC sound was a symphonic smear, and the arrangements and drumming were built to lay back and open up, almost like English shoegazer groups, but harder and more angular. The Kansas City bands also usually had more of an ear for melody and their dissonant roar often masked more traditional songs than their D.C. counterparts. But what really set them apart, to my ears, was the kind of melodies they wrote: their hooks were atonal (i.e. not in the key). If you were to analyze the melodies in the two Lime tracks I've posted below, you'd see that, harmonically, they are pushing and rubbing against the key pretty hard, and yet, they stick. That's the genius of it, and a rare one at that. Today, the only music I'm hearing that comes close to replicating the use of atonal hooks is some of the forward-thinking pop and hip hop like M.I.A., Missy Elliott, and Santigold.

Listening now, these tracks I'm posting might seem safe or even out of style. But that's mostly because their sound was absorbed and then replicated to death. I remember hearing the Deftones White Pony in 2000 and thinking, this is no different than the Kansas City hardcore I was geeking out on six years ago. Weird that it's on the radio now.

Molly McGuire - "Love Two By Four"

Molly McGuire - "Humansville"

The Baptism of Diana Ross

I'm reading an excellent bio of the Motown label by Gerald Posner. My ass is engrossed! The stories are unbelievable, almost as unbelievable as the music. So there will probably be a lot of Motown-related posts coming on this blog.

Diana Ross... she comes across pretty badly in the book. Like just this side of demon. Posner paints the picture of a skinny, pretty young woman with cosmos-sized ambition and anger. It's hard not to be disgusted. And then you watch this performance, which took place in the '80s, and you see nothing but purity and gentleness.

The video starts on a smiling and soaking wet Ross onstage in Central Park in front of thousands of waterlogged fans. It's just started to pour rain and if you listen closely you can hear the holy spirit crackling in the monitors. Somebody is in her ear aggressively trying to get her to cancel the show because of safety reasons, but Ross barely registers that he's there and just wants to sing sweet soul lullabies to the audience. The song is schmaltzy 80s wedding ballad stuff - pretty corny. But there's nothing corny about the way she turns her entire tiny body into a cavity of sound, throwing her head back and singing without a filter of any sort. When she finishes the tune she beams and seems lost in a trance, basking in the power and truth of the moment. She sings a half lullaby and you can practically see her sins washing away.

This is totally in line with a strange fact of life I've been observing and meditating on this year - how beautiful artistry and ugly humanity often live in the same person. I used to think this was a contradiction in terms, but now I think it's a confirmation. Music is the manifestation of an energy that is bigger than us, bigger than ethics or decency. It's only natural that the shittiest people are sometimes plugged in to the highest-grade juice. Love belongs to everybody.

Smokey - Flat Out Soul

Even growing up in Detroit, even having the Motown sound in my blood, I never thought much of Smokey Robinson. That opinion is being rehabilitated. Somehow an mp3 of his, "Cruisin,'" ended up on my iPod. That tune filled me to overflowing with happiness and lightingbolts of soul and I listened to it non-stop for days. Now that I'm doing some digging in old soul dumptsters, I've found some real heartstopping gems. Like "Fallin,'" which provokes two questions. One, when did this track win the gold medal for sexy? And two, why has anybody bothered making slowjams since?

I remember now why I never used to like Smokey. I thought he was singing too flat. I just didn't understand that he was singing flat-out soul. I see now. Some of the Miracles stuff is cool, but I'm making my way through the later solo stuff. His voice sounds a little worse for wear, and he is just working that grit up and down. Miracles Smokey doesn't live up to the name. It's Silky Robinson, not Smokey. But the solo stuff, his pipes sound charred and that ugly croon is just beautiful.

Smokey Robinson - "Fallin'"

Smokey Robinson - "Cruisin'"

Love Lockdown - The Kanye Experiment

It's no secret that the way music is made, sold and listened to is in a state of reinvention and that many of the old models are getting shown the door. A perfect example of an old practice that's outstayed its welcome is the frustrating delay between the white-hot moment of conception - that original burst of inspiration when the artist believes in their new work the most - and the moment a recorded version of that music actually reaches the listening public. Musicians have bitched about this for years. They'll write a song, which will be demoed and set aside until enough songs are collected to amass an album. Then, depending where in the album-writing process the song was written, you could easily be talking a wait of a year or more until that tune is officially recorded. And once it is, it then has to suffer the time-eaters of mixing and mastering and - the biggest lag of all - the time it takes for a record label to lay the groundwork of promotion and tour planning. That last bit is usually another year or more, depending on the size of the act and how full the label's hands are. Sure, this kind of wait is a part of other art forms like film and books but, with pop music, it's just not necessary. And worse, by the time the music is finally being performed, the artist is bored with it.

In recent years technology has given artists and fans ways to chip away at that foolishness. For one, albums generally leak months ahead of their releases, allowing the faithful the opportunity to get in on the listening action early. And to combat piracy, more and more albums are being rushed into an online digital release first, followed by a traditional CD or Vinyl release a month down the road to tap the funds of the loyal few actually willing to pay for the tangible product. Radiohead have been one of the most vocal gripers about the big delay (among other things) and they surprised everybody last fall by releasing, online and without warning, their new album In Rainbows the very same week it was mastered. A physical release came much later. It was the first time that the enormously successful and powerful group had had the pleasure of giving the public something new to listen to that was actually still fresh to the band as well. By using the internet, they got some of their control back.

It hasn't always been this way. I just finished reading the autobiographies of Al Green and Quincy Jones back to back and they are both full of stories of singles that were tracked, pressed onto acetate, and shipped to radio stations the next day in strategic rushes. Stand alone singles are still released today, but it's so rare that the majority of artists are forced to wait it out and play the album game.

This has turned into an overly didactic post, when I really just wanted to write about something that has excited me: the saga behind Kanye West's new single "Love Lockdown." I should say, first of all, that I love Kanye. I love him almost without reservation. I love that he's a spazz and says a lot of off-the-cuff things that look idiotic in print. Half the time he's just having fun anyway and even if he's serious, I love the fact that in that moment he clearly believes whatever's he's saying. But most of all, I love his energy and constant innovation. I love the way he might be one of the only high-profile black artists willing to call out the black community on its blanket homophobia. There are very few public social or political stances that actually take this much guts. I love that he was one of the first hop hop artists to try something new with fashion and take it into the present. And I can't help but love that he's mining for inspiration in the mountains of my own nostalgia: Akira, Miami Vice, and '80s futurism. The bottom line about Kanye is that he has little to no filter, and it's that lack of a "waiting period" that makes the story of "Love Lockdown" so interesting to me.

Kanye has a blog which is updated all day long, all week long, and far more often than anything else I subscribe to. It's a regurgitation of the wide variety of stimulation he is soaking in on any given day. Lots of fashion, art, poster girls and, of course, music. And his readership is intense. A single post can generate between 500-1000 comments in a few days. He's used his blog not as much as a promotional device for his own music, or even as a journal of real-time experience, as a journal of real-time inspiration. He wants you to know, right this second, whatever is turning him on. And of course, the by-product is a promotional opportunity for him - a fan base of people looking to Kanye for a road map to the zeitgeist.

I said all that to say this. A few weeks back, on the evening of Sunday Sept. 7, I was busy working when my girlfriend called me into the living room: "Kanye's performing on the VMAs." (She knows I love Kanye.) I remembered hearing something about the fact that Kanye had promised to perform a new song at the awards show which he would release the next morning on iTunes. Within seconds my jaw had dropped. The first shock: he was singing, not rapping. And I mean singing. Some people said he was pitchy. I say he was feeling that song up and down and to me it was soul singing of the highest order. His performance began in almost total darkness, save the glowing red LED heart pinned to his suit's lapel, as he crooned acapella over a simple 808 drum heartbeat, clasping a microphone and rocking forward in time with his inflections. The tune itself had an old-time slave spiritual quality to it that reminded me of something Nina Simone would have dug up and reinvented. "I'm not loving you, way I wanted to" was the first line, obviously targeted to his ex-fiance Alexis Phifer , whom he had just publicly split with, and that topical urgency made the performance more electric. The verse kept it clipped close, but the chorus blew up. He belted "You keep your love lockdown. You lose," as a small army of ninjas weilding drum sticks sprung up behind a wall of taiko drums, pounding out a heavy, stark rhythm and his singing grew more forceful.


You could hear heavy auto-tuning on Kanye's vocal, not in a corrective way, but abused for effect, Daft Punk style. The autotune wasn't a crutch - it was responding to his voice in real time so that the harder he sang the more it bent his notes in the wrong direction - and all of his soulful embelishments came through untouched.

I don't know if what I just described sounds awesome, but man, it was awesome. Watch it here.

The next day that shit hit youtube and the entire internet was full of props for Kanye, everybody saying that he was the saving grace of a dismal VMA awards show. Kanye himself posted photos of the performance on his blog with this caption: "Love Lockdown... wrote a week and a half ago, it's my favorite song 2 date!! Go where your heart takes you..." I posted the youtube clip on one of my blogs and searched iTunes for the single, which didn't appear after all.

Then, two days later on Sept. 10, the single finally popped, not on iTunes as promised but on Kanye's blog. It was available as a stream which was not downloadable, and the post included artwork: a deflated red balloon in the shape of a heart on a typeface and plane background that played with shades of white and gray.



It was true to the modernist sheen exhibited daily in the architecture and art featured regularly on his blog. The art wasn't the only thing that stayed true to that minimalist impulse. The arrangement of the music itself was just as bare - only that 808, some digital piano, and Kanye's heavily auto-tuned vocal, with a watered-down version of the taiko drum figure that had made the VMA performance so propulsive.

Listen here.

Unfortunately, the recording paled in comparison to the VMA performance. In the same way that Kanye's use of real-time auto-tuning for effect was an interesting use of technology with a sense of immediacy, the release of the single online, smack in the middle of the buzz he created the night before with that amazing performance, could have been a major cultural event only possible in today's climate of tech-fueled culture. But it wasn't. This seemingly hastily prepared studio version of Love Lockdown kind of sucked. And the fans agreed. A gush of blog comments by Kanye's devotees (829 to be exact), which seemed eager to echo Kanye's enthusiasm but confused by what they were hearing, actually damned the track with faint praise. Or worse, flat-out told him that it didn't measure up to the live version and that he ought to go back to the drawing board.

An example of one of the kinder but disappointed fan posts was this one by "theinfamousamf": Thanks! Been checking itunes everyday waiting for it to drop. I have to say though, the chorus was more powerful in the VMA performance...but i think it is genius either way. Thanks again! Others were more blunt: ok....um kanye...what happened

I myself was really shocked at the frankness and honesty of Kanye's digital family, who were blatantly giving their hero a gentle thumbs down. Several online music sites and blogs linked to Kanye's stream of "Love Lockdown" within hours, and all, without exception, inferred in one way or another that, compared to the VMA performance, the single was a letdown.

I could only imagine Kanye's disappointment at having tarnished the public excitement he had just created with his phenomenal performance. Especially considering the fact that, based on his own words, he was still really feeling the song. One thing is for sure, he was in a foul mood the next day when, at LAX airport en route to Hawaii, he got arrested for assaulting a paparazi photog and smashing his gear. I couldn't help but wonder if the state of mind that led him to react that way was in any way related to the public flop of the "Love Lockdown" single.

On Sept. 12, the day after his arrest, he addressed the scandal in a matter of sentences on his blog. We back in the lab!!! I'm cool with the paparazzi. This guy wasn't cool. I gotta work now... I'll rant later!

The rant never came, but true to his word he did get back to work. And a few days later, posted this: Your prayers have been answered!! There's a new version of Love Lockdown coming. We used new taiko drums and I re-sung it... it's being Mastered now...

This was incredible. An artist of Kanye's popularity and single-mindedness was responding directly to the voice of his fans and reshaping his art to meet their expectations. He also posted a touched up version of the artwork with this caption: Here's the newer artwork with perfected type 4 all design snobs lol... Sidebar... if you don't like autotune... too bad cause I love it and have been using it since the College Dropout!!!

Dig the complete lack of filter! Kanye is demystifying the process of creating pop art. He's admitting he didn't get it right the first time and telling us the steps he made to fix it. He's making mention of the technological minutia that plagues all successful artists, but which most try to pretend doesn't exist so that they perpetuate the myth that fame comes easy. And to further push the power of all this real-time interaction, the song itself was a public grievance addressed to his ex.




On Sept. 16, nearly a week after the initial version dropped, Kanye posted his reformed "Love Lockdown." As promised, it had fatter, more kinetic drums and a re-energized vocal, plus a cool distorted effect on a bit of the verse vocals. It wasn't as energetic or as passionate as the VMA performance, but it was a marked improvement over the initial mix.

Check it out here.

The fans were feeling this one a lot more. g1n1sth3maN wrote: Damn Ye you smashed it this time...this is what I'm talking about, can really feel your voice now.
"§y§t3m 0verload!" And ilpadrino6 said: The song needed a little change and it has been done by a master...Awesome Song!!!!

The music-buying public was feeling it too. After being validated by his jury of blog readers, he put the track for sale on iTunes that night. It was a hit. The next day he posted a screen grab of the iTunes ranking with this title: WE WENT #1 @ 745 NY TIME!!!

Three days later it was still at number one, with over 215,000 downloads already.

The man is obviously energized. After just releasing his extremely successful Graduation album last year, there were surprised reports in the press during all of the "Love Lockdown" commotion that a release date had showed up on Amazon for a new Kanye West album slated for December of this year. Today, Kanye put the rumor to rest with a picture of him hard at work in the studio and this: I CHANGED MY ALBUM TO NOVEMBER SOMETHING CAUSE I FINISHED THE ALBUM AND I FELT LIKE IT.. I WANT YALL TO HEAR IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

I'm sure that Kanye could probably benefit from a little bit of self control, and practicing a cooling off period could have saved him from a few bouts of public embarrassment, but I for one appreciate his urgency and I predict that the way he has been working without a filter is the future of music and that people will look back on Kanye's methods as one more example of his innovative spirit.