klezmer electro-thug beats
klezmer electro-thug beats
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Can I get a Trump Thread?
From a distance, it's funny to watch developments and think about stuff like, who is going to actually step up and run alongside trump as a VP? Aside from "drunk incoherent aunt at barbeque" Sarah Palin I guess. That'd be funny.
But really, my more serious view has been that there is definitely a level of unrest we haven't seen in several generations. I'm not talking about the '60s either but the '30s. I'm American, so I've been following Trump's rise, but for example, here in the UK the "Leave the EU" campaign is winning polls based on literally zero positive offerings. What they are campaigning on is "excessive" immigration in this 92+% native-born white country, xenophobia against Turks and Ukranians joining the EU (because it was so bad when Poles, Romanians and whoever else already came, sigh), taking back the ability of the UK government to abolish the Human Rights Act, and other totally odious, dim, narrow-minded nationalism that hasn't taken hold in the western world since the 1930s. Austria nearly elected basically a '30s style fascist a couple weeks ago in an election almost too close to call, Greece has a rising Nazi party (not even Neo-Nazi), Hungary's third largest party is an irredentist ultranationalist racist party, France is coming close to a X vs. National Front runoff next election...
While it all manifests slightly differently in the US, I feel it must come from the same root causes. Trump offers national pride to people who have nothing else to be proud of. Much like other hard-right movements (men's rights advocates, white supremacists, etc.) I think it's people whose sole source of self-worth now derives from clinging to irrational superiority through racism, sexism, or in Trump's case, mostly nationalism (with some of everything else in there too), because every other more concrete source of self-worth has been taken from them: economic self-determination, social mobility, community support and involvement, stability, health.
So, ironically, capitalism and neoliberalism has won so soundly in these countries that they've actually progressed backwards in time and destabilized again. If I was a hard core fan of capitalism, I'd be looking for ways to moderate it, reduce inequality, etc. very quickly because it is going to eat itself with this shit. That's why you see the IMF putting out research saying "jesus, we really screwed up with this austerity stuff, it's actually made things worse just like the leftists said it would". They see they've misbehaved so freely that they've created the conditions for another rise of fascism, nationalism, maybe even world wars.
So while Trump is a clown we can all hope will lose - and will, if enough people turn out to vote - maybe next week the UK is going to vote to leave the EU and destabilize the fuck out of that situation, maybe hard-right governments are going to be elected in quite a few European countries, including parties who want to invade neighboring countries because of lingering ethnic reasons... maybe next time a version of Trump who isn't a total clown will run and win. There's a lot to fight for and not just sit back and watch now, at any rate.
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The 2017 RIP Thread
With Clyde, among the obvious Funky Drummer sample-inspiring-a-whole-genre stuff, and the killer recordings of Cold Sweat, Mother Popcorn etc., the thing that sticks out for me (as a shitty drummer who obsessed since age 12 over him, Bernard Purdie, etc.) was the 90s released live CD of James Brown live in Dallas 1968, "Say It Live And Loud".
They play what seems like 130-160bpm for the whole goddamn concert. There's an unbelievable version of "There Was A Time" on this that will make you drop a enchirito out of your crackass, in the words of ap. The ghost notes on that still give me wrist pain and I don't even come close. Every non-ballad is played so furiously and with so much snare grace-note depth it damn near presages 90s jungle/dnb records. Put that concert on and listen to "I Got The Feeling". I am not a James Brown completist but I haven't heard anything like that before or since. That is an overheating band and some unbelievable drumming driving it all.
In particular "There Was A Time" on that concert has driven my own feeble attempts at drumming way more than Funky Drummer or any of the famous Stubblefield recordings. The man is a personal hero for me and an enemy of my left wrist.
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Soul Strut 25: We're Not Done Yet Edition
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Not only teh vinyls
dizzybull said:nzshadow said:Hi. Been a while.
P.S. Pap.That’s what’s up.
These days I mostly just try to collect memories. A bit of hiking and travel. A lot of reading and playing the piano at home.
Sounds fucked. Memories don't fill Kallaxes. Nor do they burden your relatives with a multi-year reselling ordeal when you pass.
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Electionstrut 2024
Blastman said:I don't pretend to comprehend each and every voter's muddle of intentions, but historically shit like this happens when a country is in what you might call terminal decline. I don't really want to know what the terminal decline of a stronger superpower than history has ever seen with 750 military bases around the world looks like but I suspect I will find out
Idk how I didn't even see you said this, but what does "shit like this mean"? i'm just not sure exactly what you mean
I guess I was talking about the election result, but more broadly:
Incoherent political movements toward punishing scapegoats over any kind of vision of the future. Nothing will get better for anyone, but your purple haired grandson you hate, or the immigrants in your neighborhood, or just women generally, will have it worse than you. The ideology behind Trump has completely abandoned the idea that political power can be wielded to improve any voter or regular person's life (no one can remember the last time that happened. Maybe the COVID checks, but that's it).
And honestly the alternative from the Dems is not far from this - they don't promise to imprison and persecute enemies as much (though they damn well tried re:immigration this time around), but their offering is that things will get worse less rapidly under their watch. Not that things will get better. No more money in your pocket, not improvement in services from the collective wealth of the richest nation ever to exist in all of history, no baseline of dignity to everyone's existence that no one need fear falling below, no peace, no progress toward a world where there won't be 2 billion climate refugees in a handful of years, no feeling that you have a form of group power of self-determination within your community, whether that's your home, neighborhood, workplace or whatever. Certainly not your nation, or your world.
Politics play out strictly as an aesthetic, a consumer choice you use to signal the kind of person you are. Absolutely no promise to wield the levers of power toward a specific end. Everything is mystified, automatic, behind a curtain - you can't possibly understand what we do here in the halls of power. The function of government and the ends it works toward categorically cannot be as simple as giving the people what they want. And no one can explain why the choice was between two parties that do not reflect in any way what their voters want when polled on "issues" or specific political ends. No one can explain why even the people who "win" are miserable and will continue to be so, with their only satisfaction from having won being that they get to witness others' suffering.
Older generations especially: thinking, voting and acting politically as if the world will be sucked into a black hole when they die. Nothing matters beyond them, not even their own children. Zero vision of a world after their existence ends, zero concern for it. The fact that the crypto and AI bubbles that are now powerful lobbies in government are literally mortgaging the suffering of children born today via climate disaster, mass displacement and the terrifying actions you can imagine governments like this will manifest in response to those things: war, exploitation, imprisonment or abuse of refugees, genocide? And it's all for a bunch of temporary wealth for a handful of sociopaths. Even dangling stories of temporary wealth for a few is enough to send many millions of people onto the bandwagon, chasing that ludicrous simulacrum of "wealth" - which in its true form is personal dignity, peace, stability, community, self-determination (in the form of freedom to move, time to oneself to develop one's own person, freedom to decide how to live), a lot of things that generally money alone doesn't give you; a lot of things that depend on the people around you having roughly the same material "wealth" as you, not you having the most.
This level of deep, deep dysfunction of a society - what is supposed to be a collaborative project to protect and share amongst one another - has come about for a few historical reasons. The profit margin for capital is getting thinner everywhere. Or everywhere real. Tech bubble products don't collect your garbage or make your tap water not give you cholera. Maybe the US was able to stave off this dissolution for so long because of the national wealth it was able to gain through being first a genocidal takeover of an entire resource-rich continent, and then after that, a military superpower, dictating the terms of global trade, industry and investment. But it's starting to feel in a collective subconscious way that it's not hanging onto that status forever. So they look for internal enemies, they give up on anything getting better because the real way you could improve things for yourself is to improve things for the parts of the world you've traditionally exploited and stomped on. You can't build a wall big enough to keep out the sun, the seas, the clouds. Or refugees from the parts of the world you've made hell.
When you had it big, and you lose it, it does very weird things to people's self-regard as a nation. Look at the UK crying its eyes out every time it doesn't win a world cup, a sport a billion+ people play, of which 60 million are British. Why SHOULD they be world class? Why are they paying the United States to basically lease nuclear weapons so they can feel really big and strong, like a real global player? Because a hundred years ago they had colonies in every time zone, and they built a couple of pretty stone colonnaded city centres with the ill-gotten money from that network of global exploitation. They can go it alone! Vote Brexit! It's like society-scale dementia. And it's coming for the States, where it will play out differently. And the States has enough nuclear weapons to kill every human on the planet a hundred times over.
Sorry this isn't super coherent. I'm not VI Lenin I'm just some guy.
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Collection strut 2024
This year, along with my usual slow accrual of 45s, I am buying a lot of tiny-run DJ mixes on cassette because I am a sucker and/or mark. Perhaps even a buster. Getting a nice refurbed walkman on ebay was the gateway drug, even though I have a decent dual deck - 900 sq ft and two kids means I don't have a place to keep it permanently set up, so the walkman opened the gates back into tapes.And while I sympathize with the opinion that there's no reason to own music on tape as a format categorically, I think limited runs of weird stuff - DJ mixes and beat tapes with loads of uncleared samples, Drumetrics being Drumetrics, etc. - seem to be a sweet spot for me where I look past that. Like I still don't want to own (insert hip-hop classic here) on tape just to have it when there's 8 million ways to listen to it in better fidelity and convenience, but that kinda offbeat stuff kinda gets me. Mixes are also good for just chucking on. When I'm listening digitally I am constantly DJing for myself, switching songs and fiddling, and when I'm listening to records it's in one of two contexts only, relaxed living room listening or putting stuff on for the kids to jump around to. So tapes fit in a spot where I'm cooking or doing chores or walking where I can set and forget. If I walked around outside messing with my phone between each song like I do with digital music, that shit would get snatched anyway. A walkman would just confuse the guy on the electric bike enough for me to duck him.
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Old movies you've only seen recently...
I liked the Long Goodbye. Elliot Gould is great in it and the Altman conversational style works well with somewhat of a structure to it. Actually I think the Altman conversational style works without much structure too.
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Japan digging 2024
On my last time there (out of two trips in my life, no balleur) Nagasaki was cool, and we drove up the west coast to Hagi. All that shit ruled. Coastal walks, weird rest stops, not much else. A lot of totally impassible hilly terrain. Historical buildings to visit. Down in a random valley away from the coast was some museum of a petrified forest where you descend into an underground silo where they've dug out huge still-standing tree trunks and slowly resinized them so they don't rot. Hagi had an okonomiyaki joint manned by one guy, who self-styled as a samurai. I spent zero time looking for records outside Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka.Nagasaki itself was cool - Dejima, the Dutch district, was a tiny island in the city where the only foreigners allowed to land in Japan, the Dutch, were located - now it's an open-air town museum type thing. The atomic bomb museum is heart rending far beyond what you can put to words. I felt like it was better than the Hiroshima one but maybe I was just in a more receptive mood to utter downer material.Dunno, I wasn't the planner of these trips so I shouldn't say you can't find a place in Japan that is too boring to visit, but that's how it felt. -
2024 RIP Thraed
Saafir had one of the best voices, just vocal tone, in hip-hop. I'd listen to him spit absolutely wack shit because his voice and delivery rule so much.
