Blog – Page 91 – The Designer Monologues

April 19, 2013

Friday Music

Was up until 4:00am via a combination of watching the events unfold in Boston and working on fixing a major glitching of the FAR WEST forums thanks to spammers, but here we are again with another weekly installment of the Mixtape of Teh Interwebz.

The lovely young lady at left is Etta Bond, a UK singer/performer who describes her style as “soul, with a bit of weird.” This track, which she recently posted to her Soundcloud page, is described as “posh rap”, and is a jazzy spoken-word piece over glitchy electronica. Very cool, with some great lines: Etta Bond – “Inside My Head.”

Another bit of weird: A poppy, summery tune about the murdered girl in Twin Peaks. This is a track from UK alternative band Bastille — but I’m posting a remix by RAC (the Remix Artist Collective, a group of three DJs spread between Portugal, NYC and Portland, Oregon) which I like much, much more. RAC took the song, pitch-shifting the vocals and adding a much more 80s-pop sound replacing the original track’s Coldplay-esque bombast. I played it for my wife Laura, and she described it as sounding like a “tribute to Laura Palmer’s last great summer.” Bastille – “Laura Palmer (RAC Mix).”

The FX TV show The Americans is really quite good, telling the story of deep-cover Soviet agents in early 80s America. It’s somewhat disconcerting to see an era that I clearly remember being handled as a “period piece.” Makes me feel old — but one of the things that the show has gotten very right is the music. This track (from one of my favorite bands) was featured in a nightclub scene in this week’s episode: Squeeze – “Slap and Tickle.”

While I’m on the subject of feeling old, nothing perhaps makes me feel older than realizing that the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is twenty goddamn years old. Yikes. Hip-hop with soul samples and dialog cuts from old kung fu movies? It was almost like it was genetically engineered specifically to make me a fan. So here’s a bit of NSFW lyrical madness that’s almost old enough to drink: Wu-Tang Clan – “Bring Da Ruckus.”

Sample-based music, turntablism — I love all of that stuff. Caught a show on VH1 late night this week called “Master of the Mix”, which is a competition show for DJs, which is cool for folks like me who dig that. One of the guest judges was Cut Chemist (aka Lucas MacFadden, who has DJed for Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli in addition to solo stuff), which reminded me of this track, one of my favorite bits of turntablism: Nat King Cole – “Day In, Day Out (Cut Chemist Mix).”

Lastly, all of the news out of Boston has had this song going through my head — a mocking paean to the city by a California garage band, which the city took and said “Nah, fuck you. We’re keeping this.” — and turned it into an actual anthem. That’s pretty much Boston in a nutshell. The Standells – “Dirty Water.”

There ya go, kids. Enjoy.

April 17, 2013

Wanted: 21st Century Free-Staters

In the mid-19th century, Abolitionists from New England settled in Kansas in a bid to oppose the extension of slavery into the state. My town, Lawrence, KS was settled by these Free-Staters, and today, residents are surrounded by constant reminders of this past — in the names of schools, local businesses, and in the very symbol of the town itself: a phoenix rising from the ashes (pro-slavery guerillas led by William Quantrill burned Lawrence to the ground 150 years ago this August). The Free-Staters organized and moved across the country, in an effort to influence the political future of the country.

As I watch the news today, where despite overwhelming majority support from the American people, the Senate failed to pass the watered-down bill for background check on gun sales — even though it had 54 votes, a majority in a 100-seat chamber — I realize that our country is almost irreparably broken: perhaps more so than at any time since the prelude to the Civil War.

What we need are 21st century Free-Staters.

Part of this inspiration comes from witnessing the unhinged rhetoric of the Right, especially on the issue of gun control legislation: They are quick to phrase things in apocalyptic, violent wish-fulfilment: There is instantly talk of “taking up arms” to “defend against Tyranny” and such. It reminds me that, for a large percentage of the American Right, “Culture War” is not a metaphor. They firmly believe that Progressives are coming for their guns, to outlaw their religion, to place them under the yoke of tyranny.

Progressives, by and large, are not prepared to fight a war. We dismiss the rhetoric with sarcastic snark, and look down upon what we see as ignorant hayseeds who seem to revel in violence, anti-intellectualism, and blind adherence to political or religious dogma. While we insult and demean, it only reinforces the divide — a divide which is already as intractable as it was 150 years ago. Meanwhile, the other side acts — and through manipulation of a hopelessly out-of-date electoral system that encourages disproportional representation and gerry-mandering, and a legislative system that requires that all sides operate in good faith or it breaks down completely — they hold our entire country hostage to their minority extremism.

Progressives need to stop snarking and start DOING. Unlike the Right, however, we’re not going to advocate armed insurrection to get what we want. So instead, I argue that we should take a page from the tactics of the Free-Staters.

Progressives should move, en mass, to the deepest of Red States, in an effort to change the political demographics on the ground. In short, if you’re tired of people like Lindsay Graham and Rand Paul holding the entire country hostage to their agenda, the only solution is to flood into places like South Carolina and Kentucky until we tip the scales.

It’s not a quick fix — and it certainly isn’t an attractive option for many, since we all prefer to live in cultural surroundings that reflect our own. But if we’re serious about changing the country, about altering the course of our culture in the long run, then we Progressives will have to abandon our propensity for aggregating in a small selection of high-population cultural centers, because the electoral reality is that low-population areas are given disproportional representation.

So we need to game the system.

April 12, 2013

Friday Music: Aaaand We’re Back!

From February 2005 until January 2011, I did a weekly blog entry, presenting what I called “a Mixtape of the Interwebs” — a handful of tracks that I’d discovered via various music blogs, etc., presented for your listening pleasure on a Friday. A lot of people enjoyed that series (and so did I), but as 2011 continued, and I got busier, the stretches between entries got longer and longer. 2012 saw entries that were literally months apart, and then I stopped doing them altogether. I had too much other stuff to do — not just for the blog entries, but for the time taken to find tracks during the week. So I got out of the habit.

I’m starting the habit again, because I realize that I need to make time to do the things I enjoy, purely for the enjoyment’s sake. So here we go. More Friday Music!

This track from 2010 has been getting more notice recently, as the theme tune for The History Channel’s excellent drama series, Vikings. Appropriately enough, it’s by Swedish artist Karin Dreijer Andersson, half of the electronic music duo The Knife, who records solo under the name Fever Ray, pictured above. Fever Ray – “If I Had A Heart.”

I discovered this track after it’s use in a Bacardi commercial — it’s the work of Parov Stelar, an Austrian DJ who specializes in electro, acid jazz, breakbeat and house. This track is a perfect mixture of booty-shaking electro and the retro swing sound of the 1930s. Parov Stelar – “Chambermaid Swing.”

I heard a track via the soundtrack to EA Sport’s FIFA 13, and tracked down the band, who sounded to me a lot like Duran Duran. Young Empires are a Canadian group who describe their music as “World Beat Haute Rock” — World Beat referring to the Latin and African percussion they use, and “Haute Rock” being, in the words of bassist Jacob Palahnuk, “tracks that make you feel wealthy, attractive, powerful; a soundtrack to your haute life.” Which pretty much describes Rio-era Duran Duran pretty well, too. I mean, listen to this — it’s not just me, right? Young Empires – “Rain of Gold.”

From the neo-80s to the actual 80s: I’ve been listening a lot recently to The Ultimate Collection, a Best-Of collection from The Fixx, who were a group whose songs I always really liked, yet I somehow never managed to buy an album. I’ve picked two tracks for your Friday listening — one pretty well-known, one slightly less so (at least in the US).

The well-known track: The Fixx – “Red Skies.”

…and the lesser-known earlier track, a slice of Cold War pessimism: The Fixx – “Stand or Fall.”

Long-time readers will be aware that I’m big fan of hip-hop — and have a special interest in international varieties, where the idea of DIY music, using samples, is filtered through the local culture of the underclass specific to a region (French hip-hop that mixes North African music, for example). Here’s an example of Romanian hip-hop, from Bucharest: Skizzo Skillz – “BINIDITAT (feat. Karie).”

Lastly this week, for no other reason than it’s been noodling around my head a bit, I’ll leave you with a track from perhaps the best Canadian singer-songwriter in the history of Ever. Gordon Lightfoot – “Sundown.”

Enjoy, kids. Back here for more next week. (F’reals, yo.)