Brooklyn Soul

In our contemporary era of internet-democratized digital media, the remix is as ubiquitous and token as a "copyrighted" notice is futile, but rarely does a remix actually fulfill its implicit ambition: to rework the given song into something different and, here's the tricky part, better. Bogged down by flaws of vision-less, muscled, and half-assed attempts, or gimmicky and impossible mash-up pairings (not to mention the analogous logic of the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it principle), the average remix simply doesn't arrive--and in most cases fails to have enough flair to suffice more than a skimmed listen. Take 2007's American Gangster. Although its been remixed to near infinity, Jay-Z's second post-retirement effort hasn't been treated much differently. Google searches return pages and pages of 'American Gangster remixed' hits; and there's even a two-volume mixtape out there dedicated to showcasing the supposedly 'best of' remix for each track from the original. But of all the American Gangster remixes I've gotten through, nearly all only agonizingly fodder the above argument. That is, all of them except this one:


My only real, albeit very minor complaint against American Gangster was the uninspired and somewhat redundant production (discounting the interstellar, Neptunes-laced banger "I Know"), so it helps that this mixtape's shrewdly inventive beats are consistently bobble-head worthy. But the real triumph and indication of MickBoogie's knob-wizardry here, is how Brooklyn Soul is able to successfully (see: masterfully) match Hova's most cerebral and dynasty-preserving verses to date with intuitive Marvin Gaye-sampled production that cohesively retains, not undermines (a la The Grey Album), each original track's intended ethos. Boogie's remixed beats provide new backdrops to Jay's drug lord tales and scathing Imus-backlash commentary alike, mirroring the cool demeanor of the former's braggadocio, while maintaining the vigor and acuity of the latter.

Which is not to say that Brooklyn Soul merely slaps on a different set of instrumental wheels upon which Jay's ryhmes indifferently spin. No. MickBoogie's reworking includes changes in tempo and nuance, shifts in accent and focus that refract and articulate Jay's songs to different and--here we go--often improved ends. For instance, the swaggering nonchalance of the original "Party Life" becomes all marching-band gusto in MickBoogie's capable hands, the American Gangster version's smoke-lit, seventies-lounge bassline traded in for a bouncing pulse of string shots and crescendoing Marvin vocal-samples that highlight and punctuate the irregular cadence of Hova's complex lyric pattern. On "No Hook," the dull and ultimately deflating growl of the original beat is exchanged for a cheering crowd and mellow, slow-building, bassline that gives way at the chorus' turn to a slick, strutting, beat laden with lilting horn riffs, crisp snares, and cascading Kanye-esque background vocals--all of which more deftly embolden the most impressive verses of the record. Similarly, the blaxploitation beat of album version "Sweet" is transformed into a nostalgic and celebratory 1992-throwback fit to rival Biggie's "Juicy." However, the true gem of Brooklyn Soul is the brilliant pairing of Gaye's often-hackneyed "Sexual Healing" with Jay's "Hello Brooklyn 2.0," which, impossibly yet unequivocally, somehow turns out to be anything but trite.

Download Brooklyn Soul here, and check out "Hello Brooklyn 2.0" in the Gold Soundz player.

Barkley running for mayor

Seems Sir Charles is making moves.

From deodorant to cellphones to tv analyst, now political? Somehow I'm not immediately crying WTF?

But then again there are those commercials . . . . . . . . . . . . . see story at ESPN.com

consumer article #2

The allure of vinyl

The introduction of compact discs in the 1980’s (along with the subsequent digital media explosion they heralded) spelled the end of the vinyl record’s golden era. CD’s have since eclipsed vinyl as the dominant music medium; only to subsequently be replaced themselves by the almighty mp3. In today’s age of iPod’s and Internet downloads, most vinyl record collections have long been boxed up in attics and basements, sold on garage-sale lawns, or dropped off at the local Goodwill. Not many contemporary artists still bother to produce their albums on vinyl, and even fewer major retailers carry these LP’s on their shelves. Like the typewriter or rotary dial phone, the vinyl record has become an antiquated concept—an archaic way of doing things that no longer has a place in 21^st century life.

Which makes sense. Vinyl records are labor intensive, heavy, and costly to ship. They are easily damaged, and vinyl albums are far more expensive to produce (a commercial-grade recording on CD costs around $150, while a vinyl one costs close to $700). More importantly, CD’s are more practical to use, more conveniently found in stores, and are better designed for a variety of listening environments (you can’t bring vinyl in the car). If you replace the letters CD with digital music file in the previous few sentences, the arguments against vinyl become even more compelling.

But despite all of these apparent “disadvantages,” vinyl is enjoying a recent resurgence in popularity, and could be mounting a comeback. While records have always occupied a marginal part of the music business—primarily on the strength of obsessive collectors and high-fidelity enthusiasts loyal to the vinyl sound—record sales have lately been noticeably increasing, along with the number of people who are buying them both new and used. Second-hand vinyl boutiques are on the rise, and many music stores are expanding their vinyl sections. In part, this trend has been fueled by nostalgic baby boomers, and young people lured by the vintage appeal of vinyl’s obscure technology. But the musicians are behind the movement as well: the Black Keys, Of Montreal, and Built To Spill are just a handful of the many contemporary artists that include an online-coupon for a free digital-version of their album when you purchase it on vinyl. And certainly, the Internet’s ever-growing capacity for uniting people of common and often particular interests (think Ebay) has also made the exchange of things like new and used records easier than ever before.

This is not a sufficient answer, however. A lot of the music that has ever been printed on vinyl has since been re-released on CD or in mp3 format; and if this vinyl revival was simply about the music, why would anyone stray from digital, a further advanced and (supposedly) superior-sounding technology? There must be something more—something which only records can offer—responsible for the obsessive collectors and loyal audiophiles, the baby boomers and hipster youths, the incentive-giving bands, as well as people like me, who keep retuning to music’s vinyl origins in spite of current technology.

What’s so alluring about these old-fashioned, ungainly, black discs?

Well, maybe it’s the tangibility of vinyl; the ritualistic interaction between you, the record, and the turntable; how you can actually hold the musical apparatus and feel it in your hands instead of merely double-clicking a representative image on screen. Or maybe it’s the way a record compels you to listen to an entire album rather than skip to individual tracks; how you learn to appreciate the lesser songs and subtle moments that might otherwise be missed, making you digest the work as a whole. Maybe it’s the gentle crack and spittle of empty noise that briefly precedes and follows each track, reminding you of vinyl’s imperfection, its mortality. Or maybe it’s the certain “warmth” of a record’s analog sound, which many claim to be unmatched by any other form of music playback.

Picture the record listener: pulling the vinyl from its sheath-like cover, he can literally feel the music—the tiny grooves on each side of the disc—in his hands. With care, he places the record on its circular bed. The vinyl is now prepared for the needle that will set its sound free. A needle that symbolizes precision. A needle that symbolizes true sound. The needle appears, set down upon the records edge, the album’s beginning, where it follows the groove outside-in. Maybe it’s Forever Changes playing . . . . . . . maybe Graceland . . . . . . . or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The listener’s eyes watch the needle drag itself along as the record gently turns and the songs develop. He marvels at the mysterious way that music, something so immense, can emanate from something so small.

Side one ends.

He gets up and turns the record over. Placing the needle back down again, he returns to his listening-post, hoping that the brief skip he just heard at the start of track one was only because of dust, and not a scratch. Because he remembers that with each play, the surface of vinyl is slowly worn down, and that a record’s life is not infinite; lots of spins will eventually cause the record to no longer sound as true. Like the bands whose music they capture, records show their age—the crackle and popping noises heard between songs accumulate over time like wrinkles.

Eventually side two ends and the album comes to a close. The listener picks up the record’s sleeve and carefully slides the disc back in, taking one last look at the cover. The large size of vinyl’s packaging can accommodate elaborate and detailed images, which often serve as a place where the artist(s) makes a visual and/or written statement to accompany their sound. Classic cover art from records like the Beatles’ Abbey Road, Led Zeppelin’s IV, and more recently, Nirvana’s Nevermind, are iconic. With digital music, however, cover art is downsized and usually accessory.

Placing the record back on the shelf, the listener heads upstairs to do x. He feels satisfied from the unwind that comes with just sitting and honing in on a set of good music. But not just any music. The experience would not have been the same if he had been listening in CD or mp3 format.

When vinyl enthusiasts try to explain why this is so, they tend to generally focus on a difference in sound quality. On a technical level, vinyl does not function the same way as CD’s or mp3’s do: the former is part of the analog tradition of sound recording, while the latter two represent the products of a more recent move towards digital playback. And while the debate between which is better, analog or digital, has supporters on both sides, the consensus among most audiophiles is that the so-called “warmer” vinyl sound reigns supreme. Of course, they also say that any noticeable differences can only be heard at high-level volumes on the highest-end equipment. So the decision for most people comes down to personal preference, between the convenience digital music offers, or the aesthetic of the vinyl experience.

As for myself, I find that in vinyl there lies a certain ineffable quality that somehow gets lost with digital music, that perhaps—to paraphrase record-fanatic Paul O’Boyle—although with vinyl “you get things that you supposedly can’t hear, you simply can feel the difference.”

consumer article #1

Here' s an article I wrote for the inaugural issue of 'The Consumer," the new incarnation of the Pio's former music insert 'The Ear' :

As 2007 came to a close, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) suddenly further-tightened its grip on the Internet’s pervasive and illegal exchange of copyrighted music, unleashing a series of federally-backed crackdowns upon some of the more notable contributors from the web’s untold number of file-sharing host sites and music-leaking blogs. Within a short span of weeks (some even within a few days), the RIAA shut down infamous host site albumbase.com, the invite-only torrent community Oink.cd, and pesky leaker-blogs “nodatta” and “robin hood of indie music” (both incarnations 1 and 2).

During that same brief span—and perhaps not coincidentally—Sony and Warner Bros. announced that they too would begin selling DRM-free (unencrypted) music through various online outlets like iTunes and Yahoo. The last of the four major record labels to do so, Sony and Warner Bros. follow in the foot steps of EMI and Universal, who made similar DRM-removal announcements early last year.

Of course, the consequences of such actions are hardly earth-shattering; many readers out there (all two of you) may even quickly dismiss the potential victims as limited to esoteric music-snobs. But keep in mind that a majority of these sites illegally share just as much “mainstream” music as they do “indie” and other underrepresented material—in other words, that copy of the new Jay-Z or the new Killers record you copped last week, if it wasn’t initially purchased legally by yourself or someone you know, probably has its origins in one of the aforementioned sites (or at least a similar one).

More importantly, however, is how the latest batch of RIAA and DRM drama once more calls attention to that digital-age-old debate over the free exchange of copyrighted music, an issue that’s at once chronic, ubiquitous, and easy to gloss over.

Just about everyone is a perpetrator of music “theft” on some level; and more often than not any moral guilt or rational hesitation what-have-you is wholly overcome by the more immediate possibility of temporally- and economically-unencumbered aural gratification. Not surprisingly, the most common justification out there for our generation’s rampant and illicit music sharing essentially boils down to: “we simply don’t have the money or access or time to possibly cover all of the records we’re interested in listening to. If we didn’t ‘steal it,’ we would never have heard the music otherwise, and we’d rather listen to it than not”

While this type of thinking comes off as more than a little self-centered, it’s also hard to genuinely contradict. I mean, shit, I know I go through an existential crisis over my own exploitation of the internet’s free music smorgasbord (e.g. the PDX Pop Now! Compilation that’s playing in the background as I write this article came into my hands without a dime dropped) just about every other week, and to date I have yet to settle on a singular stance or solution; quartered between the often-opposing poles of wanting to support the artists, wishing to posses their latest albums, limited spending money, and no truly comparable record store in town, I almost always end up ‘stealing’ my music instead of paying for it. In an admittedly weak and rationalized defense, I justify this “theft” by convincing myself that I’ll support the artists later by attending there concerts or picking up the vinyl copies of there records (I’m somewhat of an aficionado). Yet this is only applicable to those bands or records that I’m really into—not the dozens of other bands whose music I acquire illicitly but end up not liking (enough).

But everyone else is dong it, right?

Sure. Which cuts right to the heart of the matter—it’s just so damn easy. For every blog or host site the RIAA shuts down, ten more usually spring up the next day, making most new records just a search, click, and stable-internet-connection away. Anonymity plus ubiquity breeds impunity and complacency.

Only, no matter how easy it is to displace the consequences of illegal music sharing with the satisfactions of convenience or a righteous “fuck the man!,” those consequences are real. And so-far they have been detrimental to everyone in the music industry—not just the big-dog music executives, but the more blue-collar people like sound engineers, independent record store clerks, and above all, the struggling artists. So while sharing copyrighted music may always be an available option, the gradual elimination of DRM codes and increasing threat of federal prosecution make it ever-more more difficult to justify.

We all love music, but is that enough to steal? Think about it.

(Update: Robin Hood of Indie Music 2 is back and running for the time being, and nodatta has a new name: nodatta2.blogspot.com. fancy!)

(Second Update: Robin Hood of Indie Music 2 is now exclusive to a limited number of invites based on donations)

Kick Out The Jams

In the interest of shameless self-aggrandizement, unmerited narcissism, and a straight-up love for reveling in our po-po-mo culture: I've started a (primarily) music blog. And I've asked my friend Nick to co-author. While it's a safe bet that these musings will not achieve much of a readership beyond our own spellchecks, we plan on delusionally trudging ahead anyway--me writing from Seattle and Nick from Portland.

Stay tuned. The future is glorious.