Weekend Beats: Gold-Plated Doors on Thirty-First Floors

Posted on August 17, 2013 by Ryan under Weekend Beats

Gram Parsons went hard, as in making-even-the-Rolling-Stones-worried hard, and his death at 26 from a flood of morphine and booze wasn’t any more surprising than what happened to Dylan Thomas and John Bonham. It isn’t Romantically complex and fitting when gifted human beings die young: it’s just dingy and awful, because when it happens, we all lose a layer off the thin armor that helps us get through this hurr vale of tears.

Modernity’s archival capacities do provide some comfort. Here is “Sin City” (1969), which Parsons recorded with his band The Flying Burrito Brothers. The guy spent his brief career twisting up the conventions of American honky-tonk, but his best work honors that genre’s blend of good times, Protestant guilt, and chilling melancholy.

Weekend Beats: Brick James Games

Posted on August 10, 2013 by Ryan under mainly rap music, Weekend Beats

Even if you’re dealing with a fascinating, appalling affair like the American drug wars; even if you’re digging into the under-appreciated criminal side of things; you need a demonically inventive lyricist to make the day-to-day business of slinging weight seem to be interesting, let alone a rhapsodic practice. (That, or you need David Simon’s creative team.) Not because Drugs are Bad (although some of them are), but because Modern Business, even a violent, fluid modern business like selling lots of drugs, is fundamentally boring, at least to most people who care about what lyricists do in the first place.

Coastal-Intellectual-Approved, and working over the beat from Mobb Deep’s “Cobra,” here is a since-disbanded band of bandits, the Re-Up Gang, which includes Pusha T and Malice from Clipse, one of the greatest hip-hop duos American civilization has yet produced. Most of the 2005 mixtape it’s from (We Got it 4 Cheap, Vol. 2) is worth bumping in your Civic.

You can stop listening around 3:45, because that’s when Pharrell shows up to remind everyone that he has never been able to rap. The track also contains the usual strains of paranoia, brutality, profanity, and nihilism that rap music about the drug game usually does. Otherwise it might not have been as good.

Weekend Beats (Yes Can Do)

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Dan under Weekend Beats

If you haven’t seen the YouTube series Live from Daryl’s House, do yourself a favor and watch as many of the performances as you can. Let me back up. You like Hall & Oates, right? If you don’t, stop reading and listen to this. All of it. Then watch Live from Daryl’s House, which is basically Daryl Hall getting semi-famous-ish musicians and a bunch of brilliant hired guns to come up to his barn to play Hall & Oates songs with him. Think about that for a second. People come to Daryl Hall’s barn to play songs he wrote like 30 years ago with him. That’s respect, folks.

My favorite performance is this rendition of “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” with Chromeo, an otherwise kind of silly band. But they just kill this song, and you can tell that everyone in the room (er, barn) is having a great time. This is what playing live music should be about. Hell, it’s what music should be about. Full stop. So go for this and enjoy your weekend, folks!

Happy Birthday, Mick

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Ryan under Weekend Beats

Mick Jagger turns 70 today, and boy, does “70” sound way older than “69.” In Sir Michael’s honor, here are the Stones before they turned into geriatric corporate wax figures: when they were the grimy, crude, ecstatic maniacs you should listen to at least once a month. Happy weekend, everybody.

Weekend Beats

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Ryan under Weekend Beats

Happy weekend, y’all. Survive the heatwave if you are living on the East Coast. May classic joints keep your porches on point.

Also: What if they made you the minister of MOOCs? Could you stay saintly?

Murderrrrrrr, was the case that they (people with bad taste) gave The General Reader.

Rapper Spasms

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Ryan under American Masculinity, mainly rap music, Weekend Beats

Because you need a laugh, because we all need a laugh, I give you .gifs of popular rappers . com. WARNING: this link contains radioactive levels of humor & may cause scream-laughing. Walter Benjamin is right that film lets you look at human movements over and over and over. Why would we want to do that? Because it’s funny as fug! I’m not the first person to notice that: such repetition is part of Henri Bergson‘s theory of comedy, for instance. And this site is obviously an oblique homage to Benjamin. And to Punch and Judy. Looney Tunes. Beckett’s novels, too. Have a good weekend, ya’ll.

-TGR

PS BEAT DUKE