crucial

Baby Shotta : Movado with Ward 21 on the Nookie 2k6 riddim. This thing runs through my head every day.

Movado – Ward 21 – Baby Shottas

You can even buy it on iTunes

Movado with the gorgeous drifting song, Ward 21’s Suku—the bass dude. Good cop bad cop. Ward 21 always play their voice talent like an orchestra. Suku is the one that intones hypnotically on that single deadly pitch. Suku also produces many of my favorite Ward 21 tracks. Sometimes his voice is filtered like a mosquito in your ear and you don’t even notice him (threatening you sweetly with japanese version ak-47s, ass-kickings into the middle of next weeks and turning people off like switches for being snitches). Kunley is the main voice talent, and Rumblood is the guy who keeps saying “you know how we roll” on every frickin track.

Bashment has finally rolled into a new generation. Beenie (just got married), Ele, Sizzla and Capleton are all veterans now and the dancehalls are fresh with Adonia/Idonia, Busy Signal, Delly Ranks, Alozade and now Movado.

Delly Ranks is also a producer. Here’s Movado again on the way fresh sounding Red Bull and Guinness Riddim (and best riddim name this year) :

Movado – weh dem ah do – Red Bull and Guiness Riddim

buy:
http://www.juno.co.uk/products/210367-01.htm

I’m not going to leave these up for very long. Jamaicans don’t buy a lot of CDs and so these artists depend on EU and UK sales, but mostly from live shows.

Update: Damn, when I got back to NYC I found “weh dem ah do” was in the billboard top 100, in heavy rotation on Hot 97 and our boy Movado was on the cover of the Fader. He does stand out huge.

Must read this:
http://www.thefader.com/blog/articles/2006/12/14/weh-dem-ah-do

q. Where did “anyway” come from ?

a. “Outta my mouth it comes from!” he says. “‘Real McCoy’ started it. Remember? Me went inna the studio and the riddim played and me just say, Anyway! Gangsta fi life, bwoy! Just from anger. We stressed out and frustrated and things wicked for we so…Anyway!”

He was supposed to play at the Fader issue release party, but of course he didn’t show up.

Reggae
girl
lover
know
love
I’m
let’s
mi
shout
like
gal

Country
love
I’m
just
don’t
know
like
got
time
heart
go

Newage adis go say day night love sky says ergo heart Rap I’m like get got don’t n**** know s*** ain’t yo Rock I’m love don’t know just like got you’re time oh

Table 1: The ten most frequent non-stop words for selected genres from an online lyrics repository.

rap and rock got serious ego issues.
obviously dancehall failed to get transcribed.

newage has “ergo” in the top 10 !!! I’m switchin.

On the street, cell phones enable impromptu rapping, or “spitting,” over music played through speaker phones.

Grime is hated and loved. Its basically a super media thing, attractive to people who write about stuff. All these “new” genres are like that (Favela funk, Reggaeton). Music is hard to talk about, and music writers ALWAYS bore me. They stick to the surface attributes. No way to know if something really is good or not based on these descriptions. If I listen I can know in a second all kinds of things about the people, the scene, the internal energies.

full mp3 of DJ cameo with lady fury & crazy titch at WMF in Berlin :
http://www.grimetime.de/index.php?id=13

via:
http://www.voco-me.de/blog/

Hey, check out the new Vice german edition:
http://www.viceland.com/germany/v1n0

An (as usual) egotistical (we knew first, we are so cool) grime article (but hey, grime is all about ego, innit ? ):
http://www.viceland.com/germany/v1n0/htdocs/out_there.php

And check out the nasty comments from US hip-hop peoples. I met some black dude from Detroit outside one of the grime parties here in Berlin (a really lame one at the Berlin Arena; but the WMF parties have all been amazing). This guy had never heard of UK rap, and wasn’t having any of it. They didn’t come in, they were looking for “real” hip-hop. Why do you come to germany and try to find some place to hear US hip-hop ? duh. insecurity I guess.

Anyway, I like grime, but the ego shit is starting to wear on me. I found it really funny for a while; that everybody gets so cartoony and for me I can laugh in an egoless kind of way. But the more you deal with it, its just small. The ego is always small, cause it ain’t the infinite. By definition. Cartoons are funny though.

Many of the innovations in music for the past several decades happen in the more agressive, energetically active forms. Metal, punk, hip-hop, techno, jungle (hardcore), dancehall/bashment, grime. Nietzsche would be proud: the strong succeed, leading the way. The Appollonians may complain, back in their chill out rooms or up in their pop charts, but they follow the leader. Further down the line they sweeten the style up once its cooled off.

War presidents think this way too. Apollonian nations fall behind. The people don’t want to fight wars, but it invigorates the folk and the economy. In South Park terms its Dicks and Pussies.

I like breakcore, and noise and really crunchy tracks. Lots of my friends are in the current scene; everybody is really quite sweet. [Jason Forrest née Donna Summer](http://cockrockdisco.com), [Society Suckers](http://society-suckers.com), [Aaron Spectre](http://aaronspectre.com), [Dormouse](http://www.cockrockdisco.com/CRD2/Dm-press-photos.html). (Sorry, but you guys are all pussies though you pretend that you are assholes) The music isn’t an expression of their fucked up lives, its more of a grasp for that vital energy. If you had a really fucked up life, you wouldn’t need to make *core. [Rupture](http://negrophonic.com) and [Criterion](http://broklynbeats.net) flavor their stuff or associate (DJing / distribution) with breakcore for that vital spice without their own music actually being breakcore.

I’ve tried to make breakcore, and rarely succeed. I’m not really aggressive; or I don’t remain single minded enough or I slip in other wrong elements. Recently I’m finding all my (mildly) aggressive music fails, but when I release the over-focusing (the will to succeed) and let the sound flow, it succeeds. By succeed I mean that I like it, other people like it, it gets listened to more. Maybe its the better position to be in. Ego and the Will to Power may lead, but maybe I’m actually using THEM to do the dirty work. Let the aggressive people in dancehall etc. define the form. I just want some area to work in. If I innovate, off in the fringes, it doesn’t connect other than as a “misc” record.

Innovation ? That’s always been so important to me, but the outer-casing of music styles is distracting. Its the vessel, the delivery system. Its just some costume to put on while we do a play that really communicates on another level. Its the egotism of “I came up with something” and its what journalists pay attention to (the surface) because they can’t talk about the internals of music. That is when journalists aren’t blabbing on about how amazingly significant the geographic-location/gender/orientation/attached-political-reference is.

I made music that had no genre, or avoided genres. Some people like that; people like me search for stuff that isn’t always treading the main arteries. But, we have to admit that the main artieries exist, and you interact with them both by treading or avoiding them. Genres aren’t about innovation so much as about the coalescence of innovation; its structure; the dough sticking together. Neither water nor flour will make good bread; you need both — and don’t forget to bake it.

But is it important ? No. Is progress important ? Its getting less important as things speed up. Soon progress will bundle past us, leaving us dumb-ass humans to wonder what just happened. Its an un-winnable asymptote. Its fascinating and nerve racking. Most of the music buying public stopped caring about progress a long long time ago. Why have I always been obsessed with the future and how things change ? It takes away from the now.

I always declared myself Dionysian, and now I vaguely worry that I’m getting like old, self-secure and Appollonian. The danger of an overly ordered life is introversion. Being at peace dissconnects you. But in fact, this is only a stage until you learn to engage creatively with the world and still remain unattached.

Nietzsche disses the Buddha for being Appollonian. Damn peaceniks never accomplish anything. The Buddha disses him back because Nietzsche only understands the possibility of opposing these qualities. From the viewpoint of a Buddha its petty squabling between Gods—and crappy greek copies of hindu ones at that. Overly tranquil (tamasic) is an error, overly agitated (rajasic) is an error. Sattva is the ideal balance (as in Sativae). You strive to be neither active nor passive. Like Jet Li poised in peace but ready to kick your ass at any second.

Inspired by:
The Kubrick Site: '2001’ & The Philosophy of Nietzsche
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0013.html

wherein he notes that the ape becomes man by killing and the development of tools

and then here:

Kubrick 2001
http://www.kubrick2001.com

nearly dies at the hand of his tool (Hal). “You nearly got replaced by your tool, replaced by your container, by the extension of your own body.” (paraphrased)

http://www.ciat-lonbarde.net/dindatindudero/
the din datin dudero: the two large discs are nobs (with knobs you know what they will do, with nobs you know not what but you’ll feel somehin) which control a nabra (analog brain) within. the pins on the outside connect to nodes within the nabra… you can look at its orange heartbeats through a little window. so, there’s also a sh’bobo (digital brain rewirer) attached to the nabra in a sort of symbiosis with it….

controlling it with live worms:

I like this very American eccentric esthetic. (check the sound files on the page too) The europeans would have overworked it maybe or made it either more extreme or more expected. People in America who do this kind of stuff don’t expect anyone to reward them and don’t get quickly involved in the European tour, festival, art media opportunities. Which of course I’m not knocking, just pointing it out. US isolationism is good for something: it breeds serious freaks.

hamster controlled synth from a Cornell guy:
http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/02/hamster-powered-midi-sequencer.html

links found on http://boingboing.net