“Hip-hop” (Used 16 times)

It's not like happy days weren't already here at the FMA, but you gotta stand up and take notice when the forward-thinking heads over at Percussion Lab come through on some curator status.  If you've been to their website, you already know that electronic music is in trustworthy and loving hands just by sampling a few of their DJ and live sets.  Our Lady of Clicks, Cuts, Bleeps, and Bloops has blessed the Archive something serious with their generosity.  They have already uploaded fantastic live recordings from the likes of Daedelus, Caural, Machinedrum, Ezekiel Honig, and Percussion Lab head honcho Praveen, just to name a few.

For the purposes of this entry, I'm going to shed light on a DJ set that remains a favorite of mine.  Letherette first dropped this gem of a mix over a year ago and it remains as engaging and hypnotic as the day it first hit the Web.  It is a collection of beat sketches and unfinished instrumental thoughts, fragmented sentences that run into each other and suggest moments of poignancy, paranoia, and the butterflies that sit in your stomach when you're around that special someone.  It's a head-nodding good time and I've been fiending for their debut release ever since, which has yet to drop. 

(Praveen, seriously, I know you've got connections.  Tell them Letherette boys to quit holdin' out on that heat.  Two thousand ten is their year...)

I just found some awesome hip-hop by midwestern rapper Coolzey here on the FMA. WFMU's own Billy Jam has dropped quite a few Coolzey tracks on his excellent hip-hop show "Put the Needle on the Record," and even interviewed my new favorite Iowan rapper on the radio last week (archive here).

Check out Coolzey's 2007 EP "The He Did," a great listen through and through. Good humor, good beats. I'm a fan of "French Fries and Ice Cream," partially for the subject matter, and partially because it sounds like Coolzey rapped the whole song with a stuffed up nose.

The rapping Iowan heads to Texas and Wisconsin late Feb-late March, and I recommend checking out some of his music videos, from the low-fi "He Did" to the newer cut for "Look" (a song off of his new album, The Honey, released on Public School Records).

At 36 years of age, I find myself growing more restless by the day.  There are times that I feel twice my age, destined to become the ranting old coot that throws stuff from his front porch at passersby just because I can.  I resent the fact that my waking hours are spent at a place doing duties I could care less about and then having to steal back time and fight off sleep to do what I'm passionate about.  I resent a lot of sh*t, actually.

With that being said, it's nice to look upon the youth and see boundless potential, to know that there are heads coming up behind me that are light years ahead in possibilities.  Consider the young lord out of Hollywood, Florida named Black Ant, beatmaker in training.   Judging from his Free Beats Sel. 3 collection, he is well on his way to being a pad-punching, knob-twiddling Jedi.  Joints like the horn-drenched "government funded weed" and the head nod-inducing "Underdog" make me smile, plus they have me excited about what this hip-hop wunderkind will be creating in the next five years.

Sit back, relax, and take a minute and change to achieve bliss with the spaced-out selection "Oh K."  And once it's over, remind yourself that the brother's still in high school...

At 36 years of age, I find myself growing more restless by the day.  There are times that I feel twice my age, destined to become the ranting old coot that throws stuff from his front porch at passersby just because I can.  I resent the fact that my waking hours are spent at a place doing duties I could care less about and then having to steal back time and fight off sleep to do what I'm passionate about.  I resent a lot of sh*t, actually.

With that being said, it's nice to look upon the youth and see boundless potential, to know that there are heads coming up behind me that are light years ahead in possibilities.  Consider the young lord out of Hollywood, Florida named Black Ant, beatmaker in training.   Judging from his Free Beats Sel. 3 collection, he is well on his way to being a pad-punching, knob-twiddling Jedi.  Joints like the horn-drenched "government funded weed" and the head nod-inducing "Underdog" make me smile, plus they have me excited about what this hip-hop wunderkind will be creating in the next five years.

Sit back, relax, and take a minute and change to achieve bliss with the spaced-out selection "Oh K."  And once it's over, remind yourself that the brother's still in high school...

Some of my favorite hip-hop from the FMA this year...