Sunday, May 31, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Repost: In Search of Champ
(My post "In Search of Champ" has gotten more feedback, by far, than anything I've ever published on this blog (21 comments to date, compared to the average 1 or 2 tops). I'm glad everybody loves this track as much as me and it's amazing how many people went through the same steps I did to try and find it. Glad I could help.)
The things I'm about to tell you are incriminating. Multiple laws were broken to bring you this mp3 and I'll have to break a few more just to tell you the story of how I found it. I'm talking unauthorized captured screen grabs, illicit insinuations and flagrant violations of copyright laws. But such is my love for you. That I would go all Indiana Jones to rescue this pearl from the vine-covered tomb of anonymity.
I can hardly believe it, but here is the story.
In the summer of 2006 I borrowed the Season 1 boxset of the HBO series Entourage from my girlfriend, who had gotten it as a present from her macho boss. To my surprise, I got hooked. I say surprise because it's sort of a show for meatheads. It follows a posse of mid-twenties dudes living out their fratish fantasies in Hollywood, all childhood friends and all riding the coattails of Vince, the next big movie star. Every episode is a parable without a moral, about excess; of pleasure, testosterone and douchebaggery of every kind.
But that's a surface description because Entourage is smarter than that. And underneath all the weed, whiskey and women is a steady theme of Daoist resignation in the form of the lead character. Vince just takes things as they come, he never strives. He's completely in the gush of the universal stream, his lack of effort the very secret to his success.
It works for Vince anyway, but for the rest of us sometimes a little striving is in order, which brings me back to the subject of my hallowed mp3. In episode 10, "My Mazerati Does 185," all of the entourage bros show up to a slamming LA party - something which happens every fifth scene on the show - and the most phenomenal slice of bump is playing on the loudspeaker; this hoarse croon spouting a clipped lyric over distorted claps and clangy percussion. Half relaxed, half relentless. Most beautifulist thing in the world is how sweet your girl is. Few songs have ever delivered their hook so quickly.
I'm sold and so, being a good consumer, I find the Entourage page on the HBO website and click the link to the list of that episode's music selections.
Simple enough. The song is "Champ" by Mewzic Monsterz. Armed with a title and artist, I figured I was about 8 seconds away from a download. The simplest and most ethical option was iTunes, so that's where I stopped first. But no song matching those coordinates came up; nothing for the artist Mewzic Monsterz; nothing on the album Entourage: Music From and Inspired by the Hit HBO Original Series.
Having been failed by the iTunes juggernaut, I turned to another: Google. The first hit led me to a message board where I read the following post from Boozoo:
There had been no replies for a week until:
Nothing against Boozoo and Sweetlikeharmony, but I decided not to take their word for it and contact the artist myself. Which led me to the ominous and vague mewzicmonsterz.com. Shrouded in black with a logo in some kind of ninja Klingon font, it looked like a homepage for a video game company, or a drum'n'bass artist. Not whatever next-level soul stirrers had written and performed "Champ."
A loop of far-East techno played while I scanned the various links: discography, television/film, profile. So far so good. Art gallery? Hmmm. I tried picturing the next Pharrell or Al Green having an art gallery. It didn't seem right. When I clicked on any of these links, they took me to a page that said "Coming soon..." (Now two years later, all of these sections are still "coming soon.") I found the contact link and fired off an email to you@mewzicmonsterz.com. It got bounced back, just as sweetlikeharmony had warned.
Having now been shunned by two thirds of the holy trinity of internet culture, I finally took my prayers to MySpace. Sure enough, Mewzic Monsterz had a page, but only one track on their music player - "A MoNsTer" - a kind of half dancehall, half dirty south hip hop. The artist listed next to the song's name was RokstrZ. I started to wonder. What was Mewzic Monsterz, anyway? A production house? A licensing or publishing company?
Totally confused now, but more determined, I sent them a MySace message:
Hi. I love the song "Champ" that was on Entourage. I've been trying to buy it online but haven't had any luck. Is this your song?
About a week letter, I got a three-word reply:
Yep. That's us.
Wow. Talk about cultivating an air of mystery. These guys must really be committed to building a buzz. I sent back:
Oh, great. So how can I buy the song?
I never heard back from Mewzic Monsterz.
At this point I had completely bombed at snagging "Champ" legitimately, and getting my hands dirty with illegal alternatives wasn't even an option. I found this almost impossible to believe. I mean, a series like Entourage must be raking in millions of viewers and music placement on the show is a huge part of its energy and style. They use music that makes the guys and their California nightlife look good. But in turn, those same scenes give the songs an entirely flattering context. As an artist, you couldn't ask for a better commercial for your tunes. How could anybody trying to crack into the business NOT be ready and waiting to capitalize on an opportunity like that? It was unthinkable.
I did some more googling. More frantic message board posts by people looking for the track and getting nothing in the way of information. So I forgot about it.
Flash forward a year and I'm cleaning out my MySpace inbox. I come across my pitiful little exchange with the enigmatic Mewzic Monsterz. I click the link to their page and, lit like God's holy dove, the song "Champ" is up, credited to Jay. I hit play and it's every bit as good as I remembered. The only problem, I do the same searches as a year before - iTunes, the band's dot com - and come up just as empty. I try messaging the group again via MySpace. A week passes. I can see the message has been read, but there's no reply.
This is when I said "Fuck it." Without a tinge of remorse, I used a program I bought called Audio Hijack to rip my own audio file from the MySpace stream of the song. I've been loving on it ever since.
It's been over two years now and Mewzic Monsterz have taken no further steps to make their amazing, high-profile piece of music available for purchase. I don't know whether to scorn or admire them for their Vince-like nonchalance. Either way, the song is a must-have. My version's got a few seconds of silence at the top because of the way I ripped it. And the quality's not going to be the best because it was going through the hideous compression of MySpace's music jukebox. But it'll do for now until the artist, or the show's producers, finally get around to releasing a legit copy. It'll have to.
Mewzic Monsterz/Jay - "Champ"
The things I'm about to tell you are incriminating. Multiple laws were broken to bring you this mp3 and I'll have to break a few more just to tell you the story of how I found it. I'm talking unauthorized captured screen grabs, illicit insinuations and flagrant violations of copyright laws. But such is my love for you. That I would go all Indiana Jones to rescue this pearl from the vine-covered tomb of anonymity.
I can hardly believe it, but here is the story.
In the summer of 2006 I borrowed the Season 1 boxset of the HBO series Entourage from my girlfriend, who had gotten it as a present from her macho boss. To my surprise, I got hooked. I say surprise because it's sort of a show for meatheads. It follows a posse of mid-twenties dudes living out their fratish fantasies in Hollywood, all childhood friends and all riding the coattails of Vince, the next big movie star. Every episode is a parable without a moral, about excess; of pleasure, testosterone and douchebaggery of every kind.
But that's a surface description because Entourage is smarter than that. And underneath all the weed, whiskey and women is a steady theme of Daoist resignation in the form of the lead character. Vince just takes things as they come, he never strives. He's completely in the gush of the universal stream, his lack of effort the very secret to his success.
It works for Vince anyway, but for the rest of us sometimes a little striving is in order, which brings me back to the subject of my hallowed mp3. In episode 10, "My Mazerati Does 185," all of the entourage bros show up to a slamming LA party - something which happens every fifth scene on the show - and the most phenomenal slice of bump is playing on the loudspeaker; this hoarse croon spouting a clipped lyric over distorted claps and clangy percussion. Half relaxed, half relentless. Most beautifulist thing in the world is how sweet your girl is. Few songs have ever delivered their hook so quickly.
I'm sold and so, being a good consumer, I find the Entourage page on the HBO website and click the link to the list of that episode's music selections.
Simple enough. The song is "Champ" by Mewzic Monsterz. Armed with a title and artist, I figured I was about 8 seconds away from a download. The simplest and most ethical option was iTunes, so that's where I stopped first. But no song matching those coordinates came up; nothing for the artist Mewzic Monsterz; nothing on the album Entourage: Music From and Inspired by the Hit HBO Original Series.
Having been failed by the iTunes juggernaut, I turned to another: Google. The first hit led me to a message board where I read the following post from Boozoo:
July 24, 2006 08:59 PM
Mewzic Monsterz's song "The Champ" ...Can't find the CD or MP3 of this song!! Help This song came on HBO's "Entourage" ep. 10...but I can't find it anywhere! Has anyone found it? Someone, anyone, pleeeease help me find it!
There had been no replies for a week until:
sweetlikeharmony
Aug 2, 2006 02:30 PM
i work in a record store and i checked the band in our database and the cd isn't even avalible, and i tried to find it to download but thats also impossible, i might suggest looking at http://www.mewzicmonsterz.com and contacting them about it.
Boozoo
Aug 3, 2006 06:53 PM
thanks for looking! it's funny, i found that site during my search a few weeks ago, called them and it's always busy. then i emailed, and it bounced back! i even found mewzic monsterz on myspace but it wasn't the same people! looks like this may be the most elusive song in the history of music.
Nothing against Boozoo and Sweetlikeharmony, but I decided not to take their word for it and contact the artist myself. Which led me to the ominous and vague mewzicmonsterz.com. Shrouded in black with a logo in some kind of ninja Klingon font, it looked like a homepage for a video game company, or a drum'n'bass artist. Not whatever next-level soul stirrers had written and performed "Champ."
A loop of far-East techno played while I scanned the various links: discography, television/film, profile. So far so good. Art gallery? Hmmm. I tried picturing the next Pharrell or Al Green having an art gallery. It didn't seem right. When I clicked on any of these links, they took me to a page that said "Coming soon..." (Now two years later, all of these sections are still "coming soon.") I found the contact link and fired off an email to you@mewzicmonsterz.com. It got bounced back, just as sweetlikeharmony had warned.
Having now been shunned by two thirds of the holy trinity of internet culture, I finally took my prayers to MySpace. Sure enough, Mewzic Monsterz had a page, but only one track on their music player - "A MoNsTer" - a kind of half dancehall, half dirty south hip hop. The artist listed next to the song's name was RokstrZ. I started to wonder. What was Mewzic Monsterz, anyway? A production house? A licensing or publishing company?
Totally confused now, but more determined, I sent them a MySace message:
Hi. I love the song "Champ" that was on Entourage. I've been trying to buy it online but haven't had any luck. Is this your song?
About a week letter, I got a three-word reply:
Yep. That's us.
Wow. Talk about cultivating an air of mystery. These guys must really be committed to building a buzz. I sent back:
Oh, great. So how can I buy the song?
I never heard back from Mewzic Monsterz.
At this point I had completely bombed at snagging "Champ" legitimately, and getting my hands dirty with illegal alternatives wasn't even an option. I found this almost impossible to believe. I mean, a series like Entourage must be raking in millions of viewers and music placement on the show is a huge part of its energy and style. They use music that makes the guys and their California nightlife look good. But in turn, those same scenes give the songs an entirely flattering context. As an artist, you couldn't ask for a better commercial for your tunes. How could anybody trying to crack into the business NOT be ready and waiting to capitalize on an opportunity like that? It was unthinkable.
I did some more googling. More frantic message board posts by people looking for the track and getting nothing in the way of information. So I forgot about it.
Flash forward a year and I'm cleaning out my MySpace inbox. I come across my pitiful little exchange with the enigmatic Mewzic Monsterz. I click the link to their page and, lit like God's holy dove, the song "Champ" is up, credited to Jay. I hit play and it's every bit as good as I remembered. The only problem, I do the same searches as a year before - iTunes, the band's dot com - and come up just as empty. I try messaging the group again via MySpace. A week passes. I can see the message has been read, but there's no reply.
This is when I said "Fuck it." Without a tinge of remorse, I used a program I bought called Audio Hijack to rip my own audio file from the MySpace stream of the song. I've been loving on it ever since.
It's been over two years now and Mewzic Monsterz have taken no further steps to make their amazing, high-profile piece of music available for purchase. I don't know whether to scorn or admire them for their Vince-like nonchalance. Either way, the song is a must-have. My version's got a few seconds of silence at the top because of the way I ripped it. And the quality's not going to be the best because it was going through the hideous compression of MySpace's music jukebox. But it'll do for now until the artist, or the show's producers, finally get around to releasing a legit copy. It'll have to.
Mewzic Monsterz/Jay - "Champ"
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
When Beatmakers Make Babies
Modeselektor + Apparat = Moderat
As an equation, this combo holds true. A good middle path between Apparat's gentle minimalism and Modeselektor's macro theatricality.
The demonic dubstep of "Slow Match" reminded me of the post-reggae Turrets Syndrom in Lee "Scratch" Perry's latest Repentance. So ima post some of that too.
Moderat - "Nasty Silence"
Moderat - "Slow Match"
Lee "Scratch" Perry - "Baby Sucker"
As an equation, this combo holds true. A good middle path between Apparat's gentle minimalism and Modeselektor's macro theatricality.
The demonic dubstep of "Slow Match" reminded me of the post-reggae Turrets Syndrom in Lee "Scratch" Perry's latest Repentance. So ima post some of that too.
Moderat - "Nasty Silence"
Moderat - "Slow Match"
Lee "Scratch" Perry - "Baby Sucker"
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The Triumvirate
Two of the three reasons I like hip hop are finishing new records right now. This is good.
The third tenor of my hip hop triumvirate is Black Milk, so I'll post a little of him too and call it holy.
Clipse (with Kanye West) - "Kinda Like a Big Deal" [From forthcoming Till the Casket Drops]
Mos Def "Quiet Dog" [From forthcoming Ecstatic]
Fat Ray and Black Milk (feat. Nametag) "Lookout"
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Prince, Fone Culturing and a Criticism of Criticism
I met someone recently who told me they occasionally read this blog and at some point in the conversation he told me he thought my subtitle, All Pro, No Con, was my way of saying that this blog is very professional. Funny. But no, it's just a little mission statement: that I try, as much as possible, to only write about things I like.
This led to the topic of a recent conviction of mine: there is no value to music criticism. And by that I don't mean thoughtful writing about music but the use of the medium to put something down. The idea of the act as a judgment.
I've done plenty of music criticism myself and even a few pans, particularly in the few exhausting months that I wrote for a local web magazine and had to write record and film reviews by the dozen every month. But I realized at some point that wielding my creative energy for the purpose of tearing down others' work was making me feel gross, in part because I'm a musician but mostly just because I'm a spiritual being.
Eventually, I couldn't really think of what purpose it was serving. I tried asking myself, was I acting as a filter, helping consumers sift through the internet-released landslide of pop culture, battling the problem of media saturation? Maybe, but I don't buy this excuse. The best filter against something mediocre is to just not talk about it. There is so much amazing music and art, a lot of it going criminally underpraised. What if all that copy space was devoted only to praising things that we believed in, instead of snarky jabs about records that failed to pique our interest in the 1 and 1/2 listens we gave to it before penning a review.
I brought this up to talk about the new Prince double album LotusFlow3r/MplSound and how the problems of excessive and negative analysis can be harmful not just culturally, but to the artistic process as well if they get out of hand.
I read Jess Harvell's passionate but frustrated dis of the new Prince records on Pitchfork yesterday. As a lifelong fan of certain artists who've continued to offer diminishing returns I could empathize with the over-aware fanboy perspective Harvell brought to listening to a new release by a seminal artist loved since youth. For instance, I will continue buying new U2 records the day they come out for as long as I live - it's Pavlovian - and I will continue having a love-hate reaction to them. I don't take issue with Harvell's dismissal of these albums in principle, but I do think that they're a case of someone being too close to the music, with too much personal history invested in the artist, to see them for what they are.
I only began to listen to, and love, Prince's music five years ago. I got a copy of Sign O The Times and it blew my fucking mind. My biggest issue with the Prince I had heard up until that point was the sheen - the wedding-band keyboard patches and Guitar Center-ish axe lines. I just needed to hear Deranged Prince, the pitched-warped funk vocals, the bony drum programming, the screaming and sex, the gaudy futurism, the sheer out-ness of it all.
As far as I can tell, the stock complaint about new Prince material is that he's just imitating his past brilliance. But listening to LotusFlow3r/MplSound, much of which sounds uncannily like an '87-vintage session cut concurrently with Sign, I fail to see what the problem with that is. Because Prince's brilliance was never co-opted. Unlike, say, Pearl Jam, who had hundreds of imitators take their sound and drag it through the mud by soulless imitation, I've never heard anybody make skewed pop music that sounded even remotely like Prince's best experiments. Listen to a track like "Valentina," the whole thing, and try to picture anybody else in pop today who could have composed this, let alone performed and produced it as well.
This is the problem with longevity in pop music. You can't win. It you break ties with your past, people are going to whine about the good old days. On the other hand, if you do more of the same, no matter how brilliant, they're going to pull the self-parody card on you. I have no doubt that if Jimi Hendrix was alive today he'd be dealing with the same underwhelmed analysis.
I like the fact that Prince just keeps making records. There's a workmanship to it that makes a nice balance to his other extravagances. This is someone who's weathered the storm of has-been accusations, whose dealt with people trying to fossilize him by framing his '80s work in hallowed terms and crafting a Michael Jackson-like narrative about him in which an '80s prodigy loses the magic in the '90s as the result of his self-indulgence and inability to innovate within a changing music culture. It would have been so easy for Prince to go all Kevin Sheilds on himself and crumble under the weight of his own legacy. Instead he just keeps doing what he loves without suffering from the psychological rot of self-doubt. There's a lesson in there.
Prince's showy self-love is the thing people are quickest to criticize him for, an Elephantitis of the ego. But it's also what's kept him functioning all these years when he was supposed to be disappearing in the retro shadow of his past brilliance.
LotusFlow3r/MplSound is some amazing music. As future-funky as it ever was. As long as you don't over think it.
Prince - "Valentina"
Prince - Chocolate Box
Prince - Here
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Miami Vice Fever
In a recent interview Karin Dreijer Andersson, who records as Fever Ray and is one half of The Knife, said that her greatest current musical inspiration was the aesthetic of Miami Vice. She also mentioned Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight," which was famously used in a crucial scene from the Miami Vice pilot.
This makes total sense listening to her music. I love those things too (part of the reason I'm a fiend for Michael Mann movies to this day) and there are a few Phil Collins tracks in my collection that I consider some of the most timeless music I own.
It's hard to say why these two Collins tracks don't sound dated, but if I had to guess I'd credit the use of analog synths and drum machines (rather than digital presets) as well as the energy of Collins' vocal performance and acoustic drum tracks. On "I Don't Care Anymore" in particular, listen to how dry the mix is, how when Collins starts singing they take the room effect off of the drums. That is just a shithot drum sound, no two ways about it.
Phil Collins "I don't Care Anymore"
Phil Collins "In The Air Tonight"
Fever Ray "Seven"
Fever Ray "Triangle Walks"
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Jealous
I want to be Dan Boeckner, making rock records with my wife, having not one (Wolf Parade) but two (Handsome Furs) great bands, making videos where house shows turn into zombie romance epics.
I love the new Handsome Furs record Face Control. Much more than the latest Wolf Parade even. Some of Boeckner's songs take a sec to find their power and it's got me back into longer forms, taking my time, the value of a slow hand.
Handsome Furs "Officer of Hearts"
Handsome Furs "Thy Will Be Done"
Handsome Furs "All We Want"
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