The buzz over the compact disc packaging of The Stimulus Package by Freeway & Jake One has been causing ripples on many hip-hop board and forums, making people realize that there’s still life in proper album packaging. I liked it, but of course being the vinyl junkie I am, I asked “HOW ABOUT THE LP VERSION?” Here’s the answer.
As you’ll see by the video, The Stimulus Package will be available as a 2-record set in a color gatefold cover, and the vinyl itself… aaah yeah. This will be a beaut.
Both the vinyl and CD versions of The Stimulus Package can be pre-ordered directly from Fifth Element, and if you order now, you’ll be automatically entered to win one of five 100 dollar cash prizes, and you’ll get a number of extra goodies too like free mixtapes, coupons, etc. Rhymesayers may be practicing quality packaging with their cash money, but they’re also giving away something in recession-conscious times. Now let’s see if the label helps stimulate the brain matter of other labels and artists to push their product in the same fashion.
I’ve been a fan of The Whitefield Brothers for awhile, and I love being able to zone out without having any images but the record spinning and the cover in front of me. But what happens when they happen to make a video? The visuals for “NTU/Safari Strut” looks like something Tobacco of Black Moth Super Rainbow would put together, but sometimes the best videos have absolutely nothing to do with the music, and it works.
Sometimes I’ll listen to an album and go “what the hell were they thinking?” Lil’ Wayne has gigantic balls for being bold with doing a hard rock album full of auto-tune, but he also crosses the line between being an idiot and being a genius. I’m split over what crown he should be honored with.
I’ll give credit where credit is due, Rebirth (Cash Money/UniversalMotown) is a complete mess, but within that mess is Lil’ Wayne’s twisted idea of what works. Lil’ Wayne has become who has become in the last few years by understanding the limits, catering to his audiences, and twisting it by the sack because he can. It’s his version of hard rock, but more about the hard rock post-Nirvana than it is anything before. His attempt to be progressive works within the limits of his own world, taking hints of the eccentric talent of Andre 3000 but owing more to keeping Hollywood excited than Atlanta, or in his case New Orleans. It’s very far removed from anything Lil’ Wayne has done, but within the colostomy bag of sounds is someone who is cock sure of how to make these sounds work.
Case in point: “Ground Zero”, the third song on the album. With his hard rock backdrop he raps, and to me this works great. It’s not Mike Shinoda by any means, but he’s at his best when he’s rhyming while under the influence of who knows what he’s taking. For him though, what he rhymes/raps about can be turned into song, so he’s not afraid to talk about biting panties, metaphorically munching on female abdomen, or offering a middle finger to anyone who dares step up to him as he’s metaphorically munching on female abdomen. I don’t know if he’s serious or if this is the 21st century update of Bill Cosby’s Hooray For The Salvation Army Band.
Musically and lyrically, it sounds like all of the cliches much of 90’s rock and hard rock has become, especially all of the metal/hip-hop hybrid bands that came out in the last 15 years. This isn’t to say that Lil’ Wayne can’t do it, because I think if he worked with the right people and made some decent songs, he would be viewed differently. Maybe he’s playing on that, he could care less about what rock, metal, or hip-hop critics think. This is the hybrid music Justin Timberlake warned us about. If Lil’ Wayne is having a laugh with this, it’s funny to listen to it from that perspective. If he’s serious… no, he can’t be. If he’s making music that he knows will be discussed, talked about, mocked, bashed, and in the end bought, he has done it again.
With Mary J. Blige covering Led Zeppelin for her forthcoming album, and this being Lil’ Wayne’s *first* (which to me means he promises more) hard rock album, all I can say is that The Roots need to save the day with their announced cover of Frank Zappa’s “Peaches En Regalia” for their forthcoming LP, fast.
If you watched yesterday’s Super Bowl XLIV, you may have caught a commercial featuring The Who’s “My Generation” but heard in a different fashion. The co-vocals in that mix was done by none other than will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. What you may not have known was that the song also featured guitarist Slash. While the new version is sure to upset purists, it was not bad at all.
The new mix, created by will.i.am with approval from The Who themselves, has now been released as an MP3. All proceeds will be going to the Oxfam America’s Haiti Earthquake Response Fund, a charity selected by will.i.am himself.
Joan Jett was “a part of the gang: in the early days of MTV, becoming a staple for the fledgling cable network to the point where Weird Al Yankovic would parody her with “I Love Rocky Road”. You loved her passion for the music, that aggression and attitude, and maybe you felt that was sexy. I still remember back when “world premiere videos” were an event, I wanted to see the video for “Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)”. I dozed off, but when I woke up she flashed me. WHOA!
Anyway, one can easily have similar flashbacks or memories with her music, and with a new biopic about her and her time with The Runaways, people are realizing how much her music still holds up. She has compiled a greatest hits album with all of her great songs, including “I Love Rock’N'Roll”, “Crimson & Clover”, “Bad Reputation”, “I Hate Myself For Loving You”, “Light Of Day”, and three updated versions of Runaways songs, including “School Days”, “You Drive Me Wild”, and “Love Is Pain”. With luck, this greatest hits collection and the biopic will inspire a younger generation of girls and young women to pick up a guitar and become maybe not the next Joan Jett, but the next movement of ladies who will share an inspiration to rock out for the fuck of it.
Her Greatest Hits album will be released as a single CD and of course be made available through the digital networks, but you can now pre-order it as a 2-record set from Amazon.
While Germany’s Jazzanova gained a lot of attention for their combination of jazz, funk, soul, disco, and incredible production combining real instrumentation and samples. a group from Norway were turning heads with their brand of intense jazz with a so-called post-modern touch. They are Jaga Jazzist, and while their shared love of jazz and the letter J may be some of the few things they have in common, their sounds are very different from one another. Jaga Jazzist have become underground favorites for those who have discovered their music, but those in Norway know they weren’t always underground, since they were once signed with the Norwegian division of WEA/Warner Bros. Records. Their discography has been very healthy, with no plans as of yet to stop creating.
Now finding comfort with the good people at Ninja Tune, they’re ready to turn people inside out again with their first full-length album in five years, One Armed Bandit. It was released on January 25th, with a North American release set for February 23rd. Vinyl junkies will be proud to know that the album will be out as a 2-record set later this month, which you can pre-order through Insound (click link for details.)
The group are doing shows throughout Europe this year, no word yet on any shows outside of the continent but if and when there will be, I’ll let you know.
I’ve been a fan of hers since she was Isis within the X-Clan crew, and she’s still doing her thing years later, letting people know what she’s still about and what everyone has been missing on. This video has been out for about a month, so if you haven’t heard or forgot, get (re)acquainted.
Southerly is the name Krist Krueger records under, and this Portland, Oregon artist is steering clear of any sophomore slump with the release of Champion Of The Noisy Negativists. It will be released on vinyl through People In A Position To Know Recordings and digital-only (i.e. no CD) through Self Group. Southerly will be going on a European tour to support the album, you can look at confirmed dates by clicking here.
Apparently Southerly (no relation to the Arthur Lee pseudonum of Arthurly) is into creating soundscapes and textures, and along with using the human voice to tell stories, he likes to cater to that need of creating noises just for the hell of it, but in a distinctive way. You can download for free a song called “Trials” (5.82mb) to hear a hint of how he does it.
I have been a fan of records for as long as I can remember. Some of my first memories involved music, and that meant going into my garage and seeing a Santana album in the phonograph, or having my dad sing Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” or John Rowles‘ “Cheryl Moana Marie” to me as I sat on the fishtank while I glanced at the labels spinning on the record player, or maybe going to my uncle’s house next door and being freaked out by how scary the covers for Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality or Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy were. I embraced the 8-track, got into cassettes, loved what the compact disc represented, saw people use reel-to-reel tape machines, wanted to use DAT and mini-disc players, discovered the underground joy of being able to download a song as an MP3, and then discovering how it was possible to download lossless files that were equal to the sound of a CD but at half the size. At the core of the coming and going of these formats is the music, and that’s how it should be.
I am very much an 80’s kid, and yet I have always been fascinated with my discoveries in the 1970’s and in that decade, things in the years where I was too young to care. As I approach my 40th year on this planet, I have seen the rise and fall and rise again of a format that I hold dear to my heart: vinyl. The record. Platter. In the early 80’s the cassette became the format of choice, it was compact and convenient. The first Sony Walkman’s were big and bulky but it meant listening to your tapes while walking to school, catching the bus, or (in my case) at the beach. When they made the first Walkman’s that were as “thin” as a cassette case, it felt like nothing could be better. Everyone could release cassettes, whether you had them professionally made or had enough to record a few songs for a demonstration tape. Everyone used cassettes, it was the cheapest way to get as many songs as possible when you recorded them off the radio. As cassettes had taken over the world, the compact disc made itself known to the public around 1982. The idea of being able to play two sides of a record in one sitting, without walking to your record player or flipping it over, seemed insane. You could actually sit and listen to 40 to 45 minutes of music at once? The only way you could do that was if you had a phonograph where you stacked up the records on a spindle, or knew how to make custom cassettes. The first compact disc players, which you could only see in specialty rooms at stereo/audio stores, were $2000+. Yes, plus. I remember when my dad went into such a room at the Ward Warehouse in Honolulu. I’m not sure how he heard of it or if he just wanted to look at stereos, and the guy there simply wanted to do a demo. I remember being blown away at seeing a shiny disc move at a really fast speed (500 revolutions per minute) and playing music. We were told it was done without a needle. WHOA! I loved it, and dreamed of maybe having a CD player someday.
Despite the trends and convenience, I have always held to my admiration for the record. It has imperfections, but at its best, it’s at its best. In other words, it’s a great format to listen to music: giant artwork, cool design, and if recorded, mixed, and mastered properly, it can sound incredible.
The 00’s has been an uncertain decade for the music industry, with some claiming quality control went out the window on everything from sound quality to choice of artists being pushed in the mainstream. The rush to embrace the MP3 format made people toss out all of their CD’s, just as millions tossed out their records tapes in the mid to late 80’s to replace their collections with shiny discs. New and “better” technology has always lead to this pattern, but while CD sales are going down, the industry discovered that vinyl sales are going up. Older audiences are re-discovering what they loved about records in the first place, and younger audiences are finding that records are cool, something perhaps from an older, slower time. What was once considered outdated and obsolete continued to be championed by fans of the format. As record players and turntables were spotted in various aspects of pop culture, from department store TV ads, to finding a home in the living rooms of such shows as The Simpsons and Family Guy, and even a little Hawaiian girl playing her Elvis Presley 45’s in her room in Lilo & Stitch, that made people of all ages why this “record thing” is still embraced. Now a younger generation are discovering it for themselves, and it’s great to know that awareness exists. However, as I do searches on forums, blogs, and on Twitter, there’s a lot that isn’t known by vinyl newbies.. This is where I hope Record Crack will come to the rescue.
I’ve bean a record collector for 30 years. It began with simply having parents and family buy me records and accumulating them. Sitting down with a record as I listened, I looked at the cover, the inner sleeve, and I read the liner notes and credits. I wanted to know more about what I was hearing, reading, and seeing, so I went out of my way to seek that information. There was a record store in Honolulu called Strawberry Fields Forever and I discovered a magazine called Goldmine, decided to record collecting. Ten years after reading my first issue, I would become a contributing writer for them for about two years. What moved me from a fan of listening to someone who wanted to collect and archive music was an article by Wayne Harada in the Honolulu Advertiser on November 3, 1983. The idea of having records that may be of value seemed incredible, that I might find a record with a misspelling which someone wanted for 200 or more dollars: sign me up. As you collect, you also listen and learn, and doing research through records only leads to one thing: more records. That in itself became a joy, and my hobby. The seeds had been planted.
Record Crack will look into various aspects of records and record collecting, what to look out for, what to avoid. I’ll also touch on the terms of the hobby, how to spot and know what an “original pressing” is, the value of a reissue, why some collectors look for non-domestic pressings. I’ll also go into the weird size of record collecting, because with every copy of Boston’s first album that can be found at countless thrift stores and garage sales, there’s a heap of records that someone felt a need to release. That need to be heard is what moves me to find the oddities, so I’ll cover them too.
It will not be just analog fetishism here, there are many online resources that you can go to in order to find more information, podcasts that cater to being vinyl-only, and how all of this record attention is being translated in the 21st century. Many are archiving their record collections to CD, MP3, WAV and lossless files, and even high quality DVD-Audio discs/files, and I’ll touch on how to preserve your music that way. I want to be able to pass along what I know, and I want to learn too so if I’m incorrect in anything or you feel I need to be aware of something, please respond.
Mahalo nui (thank you) for making Record Crack your place to fulfill your addictive music needs. Bookmark this spot, and let’s venture forward.
(NOTE: Record Crack is a section that will highlight brand new releases on vinyl. It will also be an informative section on articles and links of interest, including news on everything from turntables to anything that’s record/vinyl-related. Articles will be determined simply by the subject line referring to a number, as in “No. 001″. Albums have catalog numbers, so having the articles numbered is a reference to that. At least that’s how I do it until there’s a better system of doing it.)
When I read this article from the Los Angeles Times, I cringed somewhat. A part of me wants to hold to the goofy “sacred cows” of rock’n'roll, but a part of me is also thinking cool, someone is trying something different from their norm, but I have a few mixed feelings about this.
The article by Shirley Halperin states that as Mary J. Blige was in Los Angeles to record the updated version of “We Are The World” to raise relief funds for Haiti, she was recording music for her forthcoming album. In this case it was a recording session that featured guitarists Steve Vai and Orianthi, drummer Travis Barker, and bassist Randy Jackson, all handled by producer Ron Fair. The song is Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven”.
Pause.
I’m a huge Led Zeppelin fan and I respect the power of that song. I grew up with it, loved it, understand the Wayne’s World joke, and now it’s a classic rock staple, the staple of all staples to where if it’s on the radio, I turn it off. I’ll listen to it every few months, but that’s it. When people talk about Led Zeppelin, it eventually leads to discussion of “Stairway To Heaven”, it is their epic song from one of the biggest selling hard rock albums of all time.
However, as someone who calls herself a longtime rock’n'roll fan, it just seems so cliche to do that song. I can already see it: the hard rock/heavy metal kids will hate it. Some of Mary’s fans will say “oh no, she’s gone off the deep end now”. Blige was criticized years ago for working with Elton John and George Michael, that’s fairly tame compared to what this song will do because there are people who still feel Led Zeppelin are monarchs of hell, with Satan found in their music, artwork, and mysterious demonic symbols on the cover with the band carrying a bundle of sticks. There will no doubt be some minster who will reverse the Blige version and say “now listen, the evil shared by England’s Led Zeppelin has been modernized to talk about gang warfare, crack cocaine, the Talbian, and Lil’ Wayne”. Blige will become the new Satan, and it will be interesting to see what happens.
Personally, it would have been cooler to hear Blige cover something not-so-obvious:
King Crimson’s “Epitaph” Whitesnake’s “Slow And Easy” Y&T’s “Eyes Of A Stranger” Queensryche “I Don’t Believe In Love” Aerosmith’s “Nobody’s Fault” Metallica’s “The Things That Should Not Be” Kiss‘ “Do You Love Me” Black Sabbath’s “Solitude” or “Children Of The Grave” Metal Church’s “Watch The Children Pray” Mudhoney’s “This Gift” Tad’s “Stumblin’ Man”
Since I’m mentioning Mudhoney and Tad, imagine if you will, a Mary J. Blige cover of Mercyful Fate’s “Gypsy”:
If “Stairway To Heaven” will turn Blige to Satan for some people, I can’t imagine what would happen if Blige was open enough to cover something sung by the almighty King Diamond.
I don’t know, I would not mind hearing Blige cover more rock and pop, no harm in that. Yet out of all the songs to do, “Stairway To Heaven”? I’m sure some of the people involved are thinking “fuck a sacred cow” but… how about “Thank You”, “The Rain Song”, “That’s The Way”, “In The Light”, or “Since I’ve Been Loving You”? The choice of “Stairway To Heaven” is similar to saying “I love rock, but only what I heard on the radio. What are the big rock hits?”
We’ll have to wait a few more months to see what will happen. If this moves Keri Hilson to cover Black Sabbath’s “Sign Of The Southern Cross”, I’ll throw up my devil horns. In truth, hard rock and heavy metal has always been a means of debate between those who have seen the music and creators as evil, and fans who know of the music as a means of escape and dealing with the realities of the world. A lot of hard rock and heavy metal have “heavy” subject matter, but we all know countless bands, especially the ugly ones (you know who I’m talking about), have done songs on everything from love, loss, fears, and hopes. Could be a Maxwell or Raphael Saadiq album. Maybe next time, when a soul/R&B vocalist covers a rock song, I hope it’s one that challenges them, the original song, and the fans.
