A moth gives freely of itself unto the bulb

Today marks the first time in three years that my last.fm (audioscrobbler, if you're nasty) has beeped, whirred, clicked, and spat out a Weekly Top Artists list completely dominated by hip hop acts. It wasn't so much as a year ago that I'd casually whip out that most frequent of colloquial wankisms that so dominate the self-styled Indie culture, "I like everything; except hip hop, rap and country. You know, good music." Depending on the flair with which you popped out that "good", your audience would know just how hip you are.

Lame.

To be fair, it's really not hard to understand this cadre of skittish youngsters' cynicism toward all things hip hoppy: take a peek at what's busting platinum in the genre and ask yourself if you'd give it even half of one chance to please your ear. The seemingly endless army of store-bought gang-stahs parading around the virtues of mysogyny, crass materialism and dropping things like they are various uncomfortable temperatures aren't exactly stopping their indulgences in favour of anything artistic or progressive. It isn't a stretch to call these false paragons of hip hop things like "rephrensible" and "multiple felons", and brand the rest of the genre likewise and believe me, I was right in there doing so.

Too bad for me. I'm not eager to jump on the bandwagons I'm seeing crop up here and there proclaiming "hip hop is the new indie", because I feel like a tool making any proclamation of the sort and could tell you a few stories you'd like me less for. But with full view of the huge influx of cookie-cutter acts since Modest Mouse smashed their way into the public eye 'round ought-four, I must admit a steady standardization of indie rock and pop.

And you all know what the OC has done to us. Yeah, it keeps me up at night too.

Hip hop, on the other hand, has laboured fantastically under the heavy burden and resulting oversight its overpaid pop culture liasons have reaped. Startlingly unique acts have blessed my ears with seemingly endless poise and experimentation for months. Every conceivable genre has been hijacked into poignant, musically powerful hybrids by any number of artists for years, from metal in Dalek to electronica in Prefuse 73 to glitchy singer-songwritery indie pop in Why?.

You can trust me on this, you'd like the stuff if you gave it that one half chance. Let me point you in the right direction:

Top five hip hop albums to convert indie kids with

5. Why? - Elephant Eyelash


Just talking about this week, this is just this-week-Josh talking here, Why? statistically blew away all comers in the ever-heated battle for my listening time. The solo project of Yoni Wolf, an Anticonian beatmaster making up one third of personal favourite cLOUDDEAD, Elephant Eyelash conjures all manners of psychadelic and pop influences and channels it throught the unbelievably tight confines of Yoni's synthesized beats. Finding his closest mirror in indie-pop favourite Emperor X, absolutely every note on this ecclectic masterstroke finds itself synthesized and tossed together with any number of unlikely mates: acoustic guitars weave in and out of turntable quips, gorgeously selected samples gallop wide-eyed past exulting strings, and Yoni's own half-sung rhymes tell beautiful pop tales that'd make the The Piper at the Gates of Dawn look sober.

4. J Dilla - Donuts


Instrumental, sample-driven, defiantly theatric and sadly posthumous, Jay Dee's late and great celebration of glistening organic production packs the emotive and intellectual impact of any art-film you'd care to name. Drawing his samples from generations of soul and blues and working them over with the skill of a true craftsman, Donuts is a boundless canvas of glittering tableaus, the sleek deliverance of literally dozens of succinct, beautiful feelings so ineffably personal, so obviously real that they shrug off any need for identification. A producer's producer album, Donuts is as sweaty and visceral as hip hop gets, and twice as classy. I can turn this on any day and get lost in it.

3. Dalek - Absence


I've spoken on these two men more than any other artist thus far, and I'll do it again. Signed to Ipecac Recordings, who carry such monster acts as Isis, Hella, and the goddamn Melvins, Dalek are the metalhead's hip hop act. Their latest LP notwithstanding, Dalek bring the noise: whole canyons of it, stretching and gouging sampled instruments, vividly industrial synthesizers, and some of the best scratching in the field, care of turntablist DJ Still. These men literally produce the heaviest drum mix I've ever encountered, bar none, and throw down intelligence and social conciousness with sincerity and vigor. What's best, while the wall of sound that Absence hits you with certainly overwhelms, surrendering to the storm of it yields breathtakingly detailed music, unstoppable layers of sound harnessed into powerful songs as affecting and potent as any of their rock brethren.

2. Prefuse 73 & The Books - Prefuse 73 Reads The Books


This is completely shameless indie baiting, what with the Books' status as indie/electronica darlings, but herein lies the heart and soul of this ridiculous list. Instrumental and sample driven like Donuts, Prefuse 73 Reads The Books opts out of the organic and slaloms gracefully into the electronic, the spiritual and the futuristic. Seamlessly merging the Books glitchy acoustic guitar noodling with Prefuse 73's flawless production and beats, the album soars close to Post Rock, Boards of Canada level ambition but settles comfortably for a celebration of beautiful sounds.

1. Subtle - For Hero: For Fool


Most of the men and women, including my own family, have found me quite honestly frothing at the mouth in praise of Subtle's utter perfection of form and content, and yet I've hardly put any space aside for the angelic For Hero: For Fool herein. I could and probably soon will devote pages upon pages to each and every track, something which so consumed my idols at CMG that they could barely contain their review of even one track in the confines of the mere internet.

Trying to describe the genre-bending Subtle accomplish through this, their second proper album is pointless: the sextet leave such petty considerations far, far behind. The amalgamation of electric cello, Jeffrey Logan's impeccably sharp beats, all manners of woodwind and synthetic flourishes, and Doseone's jaw-dropping impressionist liturgy come together with such grace and gut-level power that I've repeatedly failed to do the men justice - hence the frothing. No single album has ever proffered such crossover appeal, so gorgeously combined mind razing dance aesthetics with such heavenly orchestral dynamics, with such progressive lyricism as could startle any modern poetic scene and render all lesser emcees obsolete. I've made the journey through FH:FF's weightless body numberless times by now, and every trip never fails to leave me overwhelmed.

The intergalactic presses have been halted accordingly

Message History
03.05.07 9:37pm Josh: Exactly how much Dragon constitutes a Force?
03.05.07 9:39pm Dan: Infinite.

You know, I think he's right.

So,

Subtle single-handedly ruined every other concert I've ever been to by putting them all to unrequited shame. The electric cello rendered impotent the work of any mere guitarist, soaring and transmogrifying with deft insanity to produce an absolutely un-goddamn-limited palette of sound. A man I could swear was television's Gregory House played sax, oboe, flute, and synth whilst wear an enormous, body-enshrouding cape. Their drums were almost entirely provided via synth and for the first ten minutes I had no idea why that man was hitting his synthezier so wildly. Their canonical drummer also played guitar and looked exactly like Goddamn Kurt Cobaine, and from the moment the first howitzer volley of drums made my pants nearly fall off to Adam Drucker's closing litany of sun-eating machine gun nonsense scraped off of my very human soul, I knew what love was.

I am serious when I say these things.

Unbelievably personal, endlessly artistic, immaculately executed, and Doseone telling stories about New Jersian eggplant and how he got into Rapper Heaven early. He was dressed like a nineteenth century English Lord after a mugging by voodoo priests and threw plastic forks at us. I managed to rescue a filth encrusted, possibly Hep-A toting remnant of this barrage off of the floor afterward and I'm positively never going to let it go.

Perfect.

TV On The Radio's follow up performance couldn't hope to hold my attention with the same exquisite carnality, excellent as it was. Young Liars couldn't have been a better opener, and those coy bastards left Staring At The Sun to the very end of their tripartite encore, but something did feel amiss. It was too heavy, the production-laced nuances of their legendary albums were either impossible to pick out or else abandoned entirely - but then, it was still TVotR. I won't go so far as to say that the anticonian hip-hoppers upstaged the crowned indie lords of New York, but then, they did.

I'm at least three steps out of synch in school, and the ride back afterward felt like a long swim through some sort of gothic, evil cereal, but as my ride-getting, trunk-sleeping-in friends have enthusiastically drilled into my head, it was so totally worth it.

I'm going to have to write a review of the previously mentioned Abandoned Language and so help me God it is not going to be positive.

He's finally come stumbling home

I feel bad about neglecting you, blog.

But real life staged an intervention. That and, after downloading some Limp Bizkit for an ecstatic blast of sheer nostalgia, I discovered that someone had quite seriously tagged it as "post grunge" and I threw up all over my keyboard and lost about a week of my life.

That and, y'know, work and exams.

Sometimes I worry whether my quality in one pursuit or another is indicative of any actual talent, an unequivocably personal expression of skill, or just mimicy with varying degrees of accuracy. Other times I wish my mind had an RSS feeder that put into print all of the disparate tidbits of the absurd that make me question my own wholesomeness. There'd be something in it for everyone. The hilariously mundane (why did that person look at me just now oh god I hope they like me) to the outright offensive (I wonder what faces that person makes during orgasm) would all be presented in impersonally glorious monotype and the internet would be scarier for it. The thing is, I don't even really will these thoughts to percolate through my admittedly thick skull the way they do, they're just sort of there - mechanical responses to stimuli I have little control over. I'm like Pavlov's dogs blessed with the cornucopia of human experience that is wikipedia, eight AM classes, and a libido - shit like this is bound to happen.

I think that, when you get down to it, we're all like Pavlov's dogs.

I'm just throwing these out here because it's mid February and I just don't want to write about them anymore. Don't look at me like that Jams, I wrote like thirty other reviews you can read. After this embarassing little hiccough fades from memory (and my hackles cease to raise at the thought of picking up writing again after a five, six, seven week absence), I can finally get back to what's really important: unstructured mediocrity.

Best of '06, ten to one:

10 Inhuman Rampage - Dragonforce
9 Orphans - Tom Waits
8 Beast Moans - Swan Lake
7 Ships - Danielson
6 Roots & Crowns - Califone
5 Return to Cookie Mountain - TV On The Radio
4 He Poos Clouds - Final Fantasy
3 For Hero: For Fool - Subtle
2 Gulag Orkestar - Beirut
1 Six Demon Bag - Man Man

I really tried to give each of these albums a solid dissection, but it proved too much a task for even one such as myself. Of course I did express my exhaustive, semi-erotic love of nearly half these albums already, so what's the harm in a little cop out? It was agonizingly difficult to put these ten little albums in any semblance of just order, which - among the many other parts of my excuses - can explain my long absence, at least a little bit. Indeed, upon finally placing Beirut ahead of Subtle, and marking my most excrutiating decision down in words, I did suffer a stroke and very nearly swallowed my own tongue.

Mustering up the cajones to once and for all proclaim that Six Demon Bag was the uncontested best album of two thousand and six cost me the use of the right half of my body for nearly a fortnight.

I don't know how to explain what this terminal stretch of my latest, oddest project means, and I'll be damned if my meagre praise can accurately express the quality of workmanship, the veracity of art that each of my choices represent.

Just listen to the freaking things. I'm tired.

Gubbish

 I will not preface any article herein with any variation of the phrase, "So, it's been a while."

I think anyone who's ever tried to keep a steady journal or diary or blog has had moments where they realize they've neglected their self-imposed charge and, stricken with guilt and returning to the pen or keyboard, they declare that this time will be different.  They insist, I will not lose this one!

Nooo.

I think everyone's experienced the odd moment in their life where some subsurface ideas or notions, present but not fully realized or discussed, are suddenly brought into sharp relief by some revelation or another, and then you feel stupid.  

Know what I thought?  I thought that the wondrously smart and complex hip-hop found in 13 & God, Subtle, and cLOUDDEAD was so good.  I just couldn't get over how the emcees from each had picked up the exact same nasal delivery style.  I went so far as to encapsulate my unending praise for Subtle (which, to be fair, adequately answers the question of what jamming every genre ever together sounds like: awesome) by explaining to Jams that they were like a much deeper, more listenable 13 & God.

These outfits have the same freaking emcee.  Bam.

It's too late an hour to write more.  I feel silly.