All roads lead in circles

The big noise on the blogs that I often check in with is a big messageboard quarrel going down between noted DJs and journalists about the reviews of Run The Road, a new comp featuring many unknowns (Earz,No Lay, Dutty Doogz {cited for some reason as "Goodz"... OBD-style rechristening? Contractual obligations?},) and some more established folks (Wiley, Dizzee, Lady Sovereign) that's kind of the Flex Your Head of grime, I guess. And, as used to happen in punk/HC 10 years ago whenever someone raised their head above the DIY rung, people are bent out of shape over whether it's a good thing for the movement.

For the uninitiated, I will attempt to define Grime as such: a jerky, energetic blend of hiphop and ragga, definitely influenced by drum and bass and industrial. Lots of sine wave bass lines, lots of menacing tones, vocals that cross the line between US-styled MCing and JA-styled voicing, and typically a level of cleverness and wordplay in the lyrics that generally redeems the subject matter (which is more often than not the worst of both the US and Jamaica - lots of tough-guy posturing, lots of talk of gunplay (which seems odd for a country with what I thought was good gun control)).

Earlier, I had mentioned that one of the things I liked about Grime is that it is still at the point of being diverse and active and alive to me in a way that punk used to be; there aren't any rules yet, and this is the magical years where things are allowed to blossom and evolve on their own, like hip hop was until it became the dominant American music and subsequently the music industry's cash cow. I don't think Grime is going to make it out of the various neighborhoods it exists in London to national awareness (here or there) any time soon, but every time I turn on the radio and hear the newest crunk jams, I have to admit that it's not too far fetched. Crunk and Grime are definitely painting from similar palettes, but while Crunk seems to focus near-exclusively on intoxication, sex and violence as its major motifs, there's an inescapable English goofiness in even the most nihilistic grime tracks that keep it from being overwhelming. Admittedly, this interpretation may be fueled by both my uncompromising hatred for the Southern US and my soft spot for Cockney accents.

Regardless, in the US at least, hip hop seems to go through weird production phases; a year ago, Indo-Asian textures were all the rage, and now it's all monosynths and low-bit drum samples. In this ADD-addled age, who knows, maybe some enterprising grime MC will embark on a My Fair Lady-esque quest to hide his accent and take the US by storm. It is weird how small the world has become, though - I downloaded a mix of Roll Deep live on Rinse FM from Ghetto Postage that, out of nowhere contains a riddim culled from Britney Spears's "Toxic". Right up there on the cross-cultural contamination charts with the Billy Squire sample on the first Dizzee record, really.

Anyway. Too much music talk. More Pittsburgh talk soon. I've been working and staying in of late, making my new experiences mostly focused on the internet, and thus music. More real life experiences that are not my reactions to things taking place on the other side of the Atlantic shortly.

The devil has the tightest jams

A long time ago, I was the type of person who would hunt down bands that no one I knew knew about. I still do that now, I guess, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, I mostly leave the hunting to other folk and am happy to be the scavenger who picks up what other people have already left out. This way of living has been good to me - without spending absurd amounts of money, I've been able to amass a sizable collection of grime and dancehall tracks. I was initially drawn to this stuff for the same reason that I was drawn to punk and hardcore in my, uh, early teens - because it's new and exciting, and has an unstoppable seriousness to it that punk lacks after fifteen years of exposure. However, unlike punk which drew me into its ideas and general scene, these types of music a) exist in very specific area which are not accessible to yours truly without a boat or airplane, and b) the ideas they express are actually kind of reprehensible.

Figure 1. T.O.K.

An example: a couple of months ago I stumbled onto DJ / Rupture's blog, which is a generally well-informed, intelligent take on life, music and politics made by someone much more notable than me. On said blog, there are occasionally mp3s posted, and one of the first was a track by a dancehall group called "T.O.K.", with some vague disclaimer about the general moral awfulness of the group. The track itself was excellent, exotic and rhythmic, wonderful singing, etc., although the lyrics are some juvenilia about sex. Whatever, I've certainly slackened in non-P.C. tolerance over the years, no biggie. So, a couple of days later, I download a couple more T.O.K. tracks off of Limewire, and they're all equally good, lots of great harmonies, off kilter beats, all the things that float my boat of late. One standout track has a hook that's almost choral; completely impossible to dislodge from the head, but totally unintelligible to me. After a couple of days, I give up on trying to figure out the patois and look up the lyrics. Chorus in question is
From dem a par inna chi chi man car
Blaze di fire mek we bun dem!!!! (Bun dem!!!!)
From dem a drink inna chi chi man bar
Blaze di fire mek we dun dem!!!! (Dun dem!!!!)
which clears up nothing. Eventually, I determine that 'chi chi man' = 'faggot', and the whole song fits neatly into place; it's a very pretty, catchy song either condemning (with the figurative interpretation) or advocating the murder of (literal interpretation) gays.

I guess I had heard things about how some dancehall singers were getting banned from playing in England for reason of their lyrics, so I shouldn't have been so surprised. But it's in fitting with the general decline of myself and my political, astute cohorts; some friends with Masters degrees, perfectly respectable day jobs and fully functioning brains find themselves spending money on cds by Scandinavian black metal bands that dress like monsters, advocate white supremacy, and in some cases have members who have actually murdered people. What is it about evil (or at least, evil ideas) that has such appeal to people who are more or less goody-goodies? Are the violence and intolerance-soaked lyrics of current dancehall MCs a reaction to all the positivity and comfortable spirituality of older forms of Jamaican music, in the same way that Black Metal is obviously a reaction to liberal and paternal Norwegian society? And what does this say about me, that I'm listening to the music of the underclass that's advocating things that I would be sickened to overhear?

I don't know, but at least I'm not alone. I stumbled into a blog of some European fellow a couple of days ago that hosts a bunch of music, ranging from the anarchist art / punk / industrial band that he was a member of in the 1980s to a handful of nicely done DJ mixes, one of which contains a good chunk of "Chi Chi Man". Although I've not had the heart to intentionally listen to it again, you have to admit that it's a pretty bumping tune.

A good day

Let's hear it for minor, but resonant, victories. Today I had a satisfying day at work, managed to free the stuck seatpost on my bike, rode several miles in the dark and the rain without peril, and confirmed the latest batch of homebrew is indeed living and in the midst of becoming alcohol. And, also, I'm using my blog after a week of writer's block.

So, yeah, my blog. While a good chunk of my raison d'etre is based around rejecting the navel-gazing of my peers and being a normal man as much as possible, here is why I am doing this (not as though you necessarily care, but, hey). I have had aspirations of making Writing as being something equivalent to doing music - not something that I would ever think of being a real vocation, but as something that provides satisfaction and entertainment, and allows me to more deeply process life. My history as a writer, however, has consisted of a handful of interesting ideas that turned into unfinished short stories, along with some utilitarian record reviews and other such stuff. The one victory in the writing department has been the journal I kept when I was 20. It was kind of a magical, horrible time for me; after a couple of years studying and struggling with Japanese in college, I realized that it was more or less now or never, and signed up for a year of study abroad at an undistinguished university in suburban Osaka. Since the school itself quickly proved itself to be a bad joke and my grades only counted as a pass or fail, I found myself with lots of free time. While most of my American and European comrades saw this as the perfect opportunity to put a down payment on that cirrhotic liver they needed to go with their business degrees, I instead spent a lot of time attempting to do Japanese things while not pretending to not be an American. Long story short, that's not the easiest thing to do, and so I spent a good chunk of my time documenting my foibles and various stages of resultant mental decline in a journal that ended up being well over a hundred pages by the time my shattered ego was flown back to the states.

So what made that my golden period for inspiration? Well, I've come to realize how important those nine months were, for supplying me with a decent arsenal of small talk - even though I can barely read or speak Japanese anymore, pretty much every month I find myself talking about it in some form or another. And yes, living in another country is not something which most people have had the opportunity to do, but it's not really the Japan aspect of the journal which makes it interesting, it's the way I thought about things. Now, a decade since I've been there, I still think about things, but often I don't talk about them (and I sure don't bother writing about them). Why is that? Is it the same impulse that makes me shrug shoulders when people ask me what's new? Of course there are things that are new. They might not be as obviously exciting or glamorous as the things that I have deemed worth writing about, but they're still important and still relevant. I think there is an impulse, fed by reading too many LiveJournals, or maybe just by feeling more mature and less like you have something to prove, to not make a big deal over things that are going on in your life. While I will eat this laptop before I post any pictures of myself staring sulkily up into a camera or posting any intimate details, I think there can be a happy medium, and, hopefully having a theoretical audience will motivate me to keep this up.

I'm a hell of a lot happier with myself now than I was when I was twenty, and I'd rather not have the twenty-year-old me be my legacy. Okay?

test post

testing Dan's blog, which, hopefully, he will use.