One of my biggest peeves about music dorkery in the age of the internet is those dudes who make what they assume are awesome as fuck mixes of obscure shit that is like a collection of Nigerian lesbian funk from 1978 or all early ‘90s hip hop songs done by midgets who eventually became addicted to crack or songs written by Steve Earle that he never got publishing credits for because he traded them for heroin or whatever, and they make these wonderful mixes for you to freely download and enjoy on your own, except they make them one long fucking mp3 track. Now I understand the thinking is, it is a mix, like old school mixtape days. Except people don’t make old school mixes anymore. It is just other digital files slid into place on a gridlock with little wav files clipping and peaking and dipping and tweaking. I think this is part of the reason why to this day I still enjoy fucking Screw tapes so damned much, because he was a dude with two turntables and a 4-track (or whatever) and a mic and a living room with his shit set up against the far wall, and he picked out slabs of vinyl to make his tapes with, and if you got #132 after #131, he might have used the same song or played the instrumental again or something. That was the shit that was bumping in his life.
For me, that was the beauty of making mixes, and I have never done this with a digital mix (in fact, I’m not sure I’ve done one before; or if I have, I’ve tried to block it from my brain). I would dig out a milk crate or two of possibilities, and then you pick the shit that was most bumping in your current day-to-day, or most appropriate to the thematic mix you were making, and as that song spun round and round on the turntable, you’d be thinking about the next song. The shit had time to incubate and connect and grow organically (“organically” is my favorite chump-ass word to use, because it makes sense a lot of times, but is so perverted by Nu Age Whole Foods Aren’t Obama Awesome? types that it makes me laugh to myself every time I use that word for something like this), and that makes the mix stronger. Shit, I think so at least. When I would do it, there’d be a constant shuffle of albums in the milk crate, and if a slab was used it was left outside, because I’d never take more than one song off the same shit, ever. Pausing to stop the tape player so it didn’t have a hard cut at the end of the song, then hitting stop and twirling it back like a tiny turn with your finger, so that the two songs would blend… this was all simple mad science that was common knowledge if you got into making mixes, and nobody held ownership of it. Sure, everybody knew some music nerd dumbass who would make his mixes that were numbered and you weren’t supposed to dub for anybody and it was some sign of you being special for him to give you one, even though half the time those types of mixes were far worse than weed-induced mindframes made the guy who made them think.
But inside the interwebs, music nerds carry their musical ownership as a source of pride. “I have all this wonderful obscure funk gospel music, because I spent the time and energy collecting and filtering it, and now I am going to make one giant long ass version of this shit for you to see how awesome I am, but not with any easy format where you can dump the 17 songs I picked that fucking sucked and keep the 2 kinda cool ones and 2 really fucking great ones. Because I did this, not you.”
The worst is when that guy moves onto starting an indy record label to release collections of Peruvian chicha music he crate dug for himself or Ghanaian high life music or whatever the fuck. I mean, you’re serving a purpose, but damn, this whole form of making music without actually making music, it bums me out. And yet it is very American.
Anyways, this is a track from the Codeine Fiend Screw tape, which lately has been my second favorite (Syrup & Soda always the best), and I know nothing about C-Bo other than he is west coast gangsta, maybe. I don’t know, maybe he’s a pen & pixelated dude. I don’t really care. Music nerdery goes too far in trying to know every goddamned thing there is to know about something. Fuck that noise. This is a fun goddamned screwed song by some dude I don’t know shit about and it makes me want to stop and buy blunt papers. I wonder if there are organic blunt papers out there somewhere? I always thought it would be great to do vegetarian chicken gizzards or something like that that normal holier-than-thou organictarians would never actually want to eat. Organic blunt papers kinda rolls along with that, because your Democratically-inclined zen Buddhist non-confrontational tai chi master probably never would ever roll their precious reefer up in a blunt. One day I will be rich, and then will go broke trying to make things like organic vegetarian chicken gizzard dinners and organic blunt papers for the world, because it is funny to me.
STEAL “Groovin’ On A Sunday”
NEXT UP: Catchy catchy jingles about ign’ant shit!
No comments:
Post a Comment