Ladies and gentlemen, pals and haters, I have, as they say, good news and bad news. Truthfully, the bad news is that I’m not certain which is which. I’m very au courant in that regard. As such, I will simply report, and allow you to decide. I won’t waste your time here with nebulous designations like “good” and “bad”. Please, read on.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Idiot's Delight, Thousand Listen Club
Comments Off on Better To Burn Out
Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Site Stuff
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.
Continue readingComments Off on Rap To Which I Do Listen
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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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Idiot's Delight, Worst Of All
Okay I gotta walk this one back a bit. Not for the reasons you think, like I’m afraid Ice Cube is going to beat me up/cut a “diss” track about me. Or the racial epithet, which, by the way, I’m not the one uttering.
No; it’s because an Ice Cube movie brightened up one of the darkest points of my life.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Thousand Listen Club
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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Filed under Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Worst Of All
I would call Outkast the greatest rap group of all time. The thing is, we’re from the same city (ATL), and I’m afraid I’ll sound like a local promoter.
That’s why I always forget to bring ’em up. This is a problem, because the media tends to focus on the wrong aspects of rap; the guns, the gangster fetishism, the bitches and hoes. These things don’t really exist in Outkast’s oeuvre. Integrity? Quality? Talent? Those do, in excess. Continue reading
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Filed under Thousand Listen Club
You can offend a rapper the same way you can offend a cartoonist; by implying that their career “looks easy”. Cartoonists must compete in the public eye with Internet doodlers who draw in their ample free time, and rappers have to battle the false impression that they’re just boopity-bopping over a beat loop.
Before hip-hop and rap were widely understood, they were exploited as “novelty” records; a passing trend, not something that would dominate and rend asunder every other type of fucking music on earth. Rap was not a “lifestyle”. It was a fad, like the hula hoop and the Twist. So, like many other musical fads before it, rap became a haven for bad comedy.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee, Worst Of All
I’m not going to bore you with more boasting about how I can draw better than any contemporary “web comic” artist out there. I’m going to bore you with an explanation why.
From INVISIBLE LEGENDS (unpublished)
I’ve got The Jizz.
You could set out right now to be the greatest cartoonist in the world, spend billions of dollars, and you’d still never top me. You don’t have The Jizz. I do. Continue reading
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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Uncategorized
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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Filed under Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions, Thousand Listen Club
BIG BOOK OF COMICS (SIGNED)
$10.00
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