Duderonomy
Duderonomy
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Beat making
Got bored, made this in an afternoon, pretty happy with it...
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reposted from fb, 25 albums that shaped your life
14. The Beastie Boys - Ill Communication. I'd listened to Paul's Boutique when it came out alongside ATCQ Instinctive Travels and De La Soul's 3 Feet High but I wouldn't say they hit me as much as Communication. I appreciated the others, but I wasn't committed yet. By the time this came out, I'd basically left grunge behind, given up on modern guitar music and was filling the void with rhythm. I might've listened to Cypress Hill's Black Sunday more and been more impressed with the crazy atmosphere created by the beats, but lyrically there wasn't as much to get into. It's not my favourite rap LP but Communication got my attention that year and I fell in love with the genre again/more.
15. DJ Shadow - ...Entroducing. If I buy enough obscure old records, I can make an album without needing to learn instruments too! First time I heard this I wasn't feeling it. I had his earlier singles, but this wasn't as formulaic and easily assessible... but once I got into it, I loved it.
16. King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown In A Firehouse. First dub LP I really got into, once the offbeat switch had been flicked I never really looked back. Sure, I'd heard The Police, Madness, The Specials, but this was something less poppy, much more abstract and much deeper... psychedelic.
17. Fela Kuti - Beasts Of No Nation. A record dealer I used to supply with lists of lps with breaks on (@Chris Energy) tried to get me into Fela, and at the time I wasn't sure about it. But over time I really fell in love with the rich polyrhythms, the power of the horn section, the irresistible groove. Since then labels like Soundway & Analog Africa have unearthed an absolute goldmine of amazing music and afrobeat is one of my go-to sounds, but it did take a while for me to come around.
EDIT: 25 for me isn't easy. I've been scratching my head wondering what I've left out. During my early life the family had limited access to albums, so while there's more songs I could've listed (Ghost Town, Golden Brown & Let's Dance spring to mind for differing reasons), the above is basically it IIRC. Then during adolescence every couple of months felt like a new, world-changing musical discovery was made. And post-21 years of age, there's new music, but it doesn't mold your mind like it did before... the period of music from 1990-1995 shaped the sounds I'm still in love with and to my ears nothing as good has come since, and as much as I'd love to include something more recent, I've not heard a new music movement since that really compares to that era. The '00s as a decade was godawful - as some wag remarked it's '80s revival lasted longer than the '80s did. Dubstep came along, but no sooner had that started sounding good than it was hijacked and turned into screechy headbanging trash. Influential discoveries of the last decade? The best DnB is actually revival jungle... whadayaknow, rap has turned back the clock to use real drums and samples again... and after a lot of exposure to it, I've found that there is absolutely nothing redeeming about reggaton. Hoping the kids find something new and funky for the '20s.
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reposted from fb, 25 albums that shaped your life
In vague chronological order:
1 & 2. Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms/Queen - greatest hits. When my mum divorced/fled my dad she left everything she couldn't pack into a single suitcase behind her in the US of A, so I've never had that 'grew up in a house full of music and records' thing going because all my mum's records had been smashed to pieces by my dad, and in England we were too poor to afford anything you couldn't eat. Hell, while we were living in social housing we were given our first tv (black&white) by a neighbour who's son also introduced me to 2000AD comics (still got a copy he gave me from '86 in storage). So on the rare occasions my mum bought a tape cassette, that sh*t got played, and played, and played. Around the time of Live Aid ('85) Dire Straits & Queen smashed it, and my mum got these two.
3&4. Run DMC - Raising Hell/Otis Redding - greatest hits. My mum would sometimes get a babysitter to look after me & younger brother, and one time it was this University student who introduced us to music made by black people (!). The single most influential tape cassette I'd heard in my short life. Side one was the hugely popular Run DMC album, obvious highlight being Walk This Way, but the scratches on Proud To Be Black blew my mind. The rapping, the music... I'd never heard anything like this, and it was curse-word-free enough that my mother didn't mind us listening to it. Side two had a completely different side to black American music, something I had never heard before on the tv or radio. Soul. Also mindblowing, and even more powerful in a subtle way. Mr Pitiful was my jam.
5. Holst - Teh Planets - this was my first real introduction to classical music (and probably for a lot of Brits my age). I think there was some kind of science program on the BBC in the mid/late '80s that discussed each planet in the solar system with the relevant Holst tune as a backing track, and along with describing the atmosphere on Venus etc, a little info on the music was also provided.
6. The Doors - LA Woman/Waiting For The Sun. Another 2nd or 3rd generation home-taping was killing it godsend from somebody, this was my first introduction to OLD music (classical wasn't just old, it was antiquity) from generations past. Yes, music had been made before I was alive to listen to it. Yes, it was really good! Could it be that my mum had also been young once? :mindblown:
Bonus, by this stage my mum had started working (we had to lie that she wasn't as it meant she was leaving 2 kids at home on their own after school until 6pm everyday), and my grandma had helped her buy a second hand Renault 5. This was the soundtrack to weekend car journeys.
7. The Prodigy - Experience. A friend's older brother had been disappearing every weekend this one summer and coming back with tape recordings he'd made by leaving a portable recording next to speaker stacks at some weird parties called "raves" that the police and the politicians were all very upset about. These tapes and his descriptions of events were otherworldly, and my first taste of repetitive electronic beats. The nearest I got to an album representative of the social revolution these parties had started was by the Prodigy. It still stands out for freshness, ideas, and energy.
8. Nirvana - Nevermind. I was an angsty teenager, this was angsty teenager music. Me and a group of friends would get drunk and stoned to this on school nights, fall asleep on dude's bedroom floor to this, get up and go to school with a horrific hangover to this. '60s music was for friday nights. We took LSD for every episode of the Ren & Stimpy show one year. We were rockists.
9&10. Portishead - Dummy/Various - 110 Below - Journey To The (t)rip (s)hop. I'd started going clubbing with another group of school friends. We'd take a pill, go and mash out to some trippy techno, go back to a dude's house and play trip-hop for the come down while we discussed how much skag there was or wasn't in that nights pill (my contention was that there was no way they'd be cutting pills with heroine as it was more expensive than mdma) over cigarettes and bong hits. We were clubbers. One of the group had discovered Portishead which was really, really good, and as an angry reaction to Cobain blowing his brains out, I'd started exploring electronic music and was stealing tapes from HMV (Jungle music should also feature heavily on this list but it's not an album genre). This compilation had a bunch of MoWax artists, including Kemuri by DJ Krush, and that turned me on to a whole new ball game.
11. ColdCut - JDJ. So it's a DJ mix. I don't care. The word 'seminal' was invented for things like this. Made me want to be a DJ.
12. Aphex Twin - I Care Because You Do. One of the clubbing gang had turned me onto ambient music which was exploding back then. The Orb, Orbital, Future Sound Of London, and in what was my own discovery, Aphex Twin. I was attracted to the weird cover and that I could put the tape cassette in my pocket and walk out without paying. The music on this album melted my face clean off. Nuanced. Hypnotic. Funky. Scary. Soothing. Clearly the work of a genius, to me it still sounds like a transmission from an alternate dimension.
13. Curtis Mayfield - Superfly OST. Having dropped out of school at 16 I spent a couple of years living in the interzone being unable to (a) get a job or more likely (b) sign-on and get that government unemployment benefit, so I hung out with a group of guys slightly older than me who had qualified for that free money, and lived in a slumhouse so shitty the toilet fell through the ceiling one day. One of this gang was a dealer. The rest of us were running wild making money selling stolen books and CDs for drugs, playing Mortal Kombat on pills and spliff, and as time went by, a lot of this gang got into heroine. Drug culture had become very glamorous in our eyes. We were junkies. One of us stole a VHS of Superfly and that was amazing. Having not seen Blaxploitation films before, this was raw and had a syrup-smooth funky soundtrack. Up to this point my knowledge of '60s-'70s music was mainly rockist. This was my real introduction to funk. It was also weirdly symbolic for me in that as I saw friends around me getting into heroine, I knew I needed a safer addiction, and vinyl was it. I bought a Charlie reissue of the OST and from there on I was hooked bad. I had also bought vinyl thinking that I wouldn't be able to sell records for drugs as easily as CDs... my own collection had been hocked and re-stolen many times over. Who's gonna pay for second hand records???
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TAKE THAT SHIT TO THE-BRITS.COM
Cheers for the words guys. Burying my head in work seems to be the best solution. And going out and enjoying the Canadian autumnal colours.
etc
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TAKE THAT SHIT TO THE-BRITS.COM
My dad checked out last Saturday. A sense of relief, I feel a bit weird that this was my first reaction (instead of grief - guess it needs to sink in), but he was in a lot of pain for the past few months... years even, and that he passed in his sleep feels like a blessing as my biggest fear was that he’d die choking as his lungs gave out. Instead it seems the heart was the first to go. I spoke to him via zoom on Thursday, and he had a brief moment of lucidity. Opened his eyes wide, said ‘Hey butthead... this sucks’. According to my cousin and the nurses, that was the last coherent thing he ever said. Feels like a little piece of me has gone with him though. Fragments of my childhood and events only he could tell me about. I had plenty of time to prepare for it as the doctors gave him 6 months to live and that was 3 and a half years ago. Agent Orange killed him at 68. Nice one Uncle Sam.
