There’s an itch that rap music scratches that no other kind of music does. For this reason, I have a longstanding love-hate relationship with the genre. But the fact remains; I always come back to it. Once I realized I was listening to it alone, when there was no one around to impress, I figured I enjoyed the form enough to jabber about it sincerely.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Thousand Listen Club, Unfairly Maligned
Hey- you know what? There’s no need to pretend that Marshall Mathers III isn’t lucky garbage anymore. None.
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Can I let you in on a little secret?
Nobody actually likes 2 Live Crew. They stank. They were the kind of fraud that today, would be secretly sponsored by George “Fuck Everything Good” Soros. 2 Live Crew was just garbage.
I don’t know what a “puxxy” is, but I bet if you popped one, it would make a bad smell.
It was humiliating to stock, sell or even see 2 Live Crew albums in the record store. As soon as a customer brought one to the counter, you knew there would be a problem. The customer was always under 18, and thus forbidden to purchase the music; no one older than 18 cared about it. If they enjoyed rap, they had already moved on to something actually good.
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In 1994, a severely truncated version of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers was released to theaters nationwide, after a long and brutal production. It grossed about half its budget on opening weekend, and broke even in 2007. It was based on a story written by Quentin Tarantino, who was currently ablaze in Tinseltown thanks to Pulp Fiction. It starred former sitcom bartender Woody Harrelson, and Geoffrey Lewis’ daughter Juliette (the nymph in Scorcese’s Cape Fear remake), as mass-murdering marrieds Mickey and Mallory Knox.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Girls of BIUL, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee, Thousand Listen Club, Unfairly Maligned
Sampling in hip-hop is important because it can send you backward in time, when it’s done well. It’s crate-digging shared on wax. The best samples offer a window into the mind of the producer, and a peek at the most obscure records in their vault. Since legally all sources must be credited, you can check the liners and draw up a shopping list. The torch of the turntable is carried on.
And oftentimes, forgotten geniuses of the past get their due.
There’s an unspoken rule in hip-hop culture; it’s based in appropriation, so it’s all about forging something fresh out of a juxtaposition of elements. A sample is looped over a beat by a DJ, before the MC begins to rap. The right samples are crucial; they provide the hook of tonal immortality.
The handsome gent in the photo above is David McCallum. He is the most widely-heard yet unknown dude in rap music.
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Why do bad covers happen to good albums? Is there some sort of unspoken “aesthetic limit” that dictates that a certain quantity of enjoyable music must be balanced with a cover so hideous that joints cannot be rolled upon its surface? Sure, album art itself has more or less gone the way of the dodo in the past ten years, but does that mean that such a tremendous percentage of album covers have to be such a graphic-design abortion?
We’ve all seen one of those “Worst Album Cover” sites at one point or another. I’m not trying to compete with any of that. However, I do intend to share with you the albums that have personally irked my damned fine artistic sensibilities. You’ve probably seen these before, maybe you haven’t, maybe you wish you hadn’t. You won’t have to worry about any Roger Dean covers, because everyone I’ve ever met who was into Roger Dean was a total douchebag, thus I seldom bother to listen to albums with Roger Dean covers.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions, Unfairly Maligned, Worst Of All
