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In Memory Of Dilla, Pt. 2: The 00's

Continuing from my post from last week, I take a look at some more highlights from J. Dilla's career into the 00's, including some posthumous gems. All of these tracks provide more proof as to why James Yancey was one of the best producers we'll ever see in the hip-hop world.


Bilal featuring Mos Def and Common - "Reminisce" (2001)
Dilla always had a knack for seamlessly utilizing his talents behind the board to mingle with the realm of R&B and soul without ever straying far from his roots in the hip-hop world. While early-to-mid 90's rappers had a contentious relationship with more commercial-minded R&B dominating the airwaves at the time, at least until the mainstreaming of hip-hop as the decade wore on made the two uncomfortably inseperable, Dilla instead looked to the neo-soul classicism of the late 90's/00's as his inspiration, melding the staunchly nostalgic movement to his own whims and crafting a concotion that was as natural as it was commandingly funky. Neo-soul crooner Bilal proved an adept fit for Dilla's rich tapestry of slick 70's groove motifs, and if the hip-hop skeptics needed some more convincing, Mos and Common offer further incentive.

In Memory Of Dilla, Pt. 1: The 90's

It's dismaying and bittersweet that the week in which we celebrate the birthday of celebrated hip-hop producer J. Dilla (February 7th), we also have to reconcile the fact that it was only a few days later that the legend passed away from complications related to lupus (Feburary 10th). In the years since his death at the maddeningly young age of 32, Dilla's cult has grown significantly, but this posthumous appraisal is definitely not without good reason. It was even while bed-ridden in a hospital suffering from the disease that would take his life that Dilla crafted the exquisite opus Donuts, a superb statement that focused on Dilla's rabidly growing innovations as a beatmaker and a forward-thinking master of craft who's artistic career was cut infuriatingly short. Thankfully, Dilla left behind a strong body of work stretching back into the 90's, one which has been evaluated in the ensuing years as one of the most distinctively consistent and inventively soulful in the pantheon of hip-hop. Like his friend and colleague Madlib, Dilla was one of the most visionary of the post-90's golden age of beatsmiths, with both using their worship of giants like Pete Rock, Large Professor, DJ Premier, and the DITC crew (Diamond D, Showbiz, Lord Finesse, Buckwild) as a starting point for a distinctively original and personal sonic template that shined as the obvious progressions from this revolutionary era of hip-hop. His drums and his basslines have a legendary funk that made his singular work a perfect fit not only for many MC's within the hip-hop community, but also for a good handful of soul and R&B acts as well. Dilla was one of the last great hopes for hip-hop in a period marked by an increasingly commercial crassness, where big business and trend-chasing began to stifle the progressive spirit set forth in years past. His passing was beyond unfortunate, but thankfully, a strong backbone of fans indebted to his work keep this genius's body of work visibly lauded for what is sure to be years and years to come.

Below are some highlights, many overlooked, from Dilla's 90's career (then producing under the name "Jay Dee"). Part 2, looking at the 00's, will follow next week.

1st Down - "A Day Wit The Homiez" (1995)
Although the Payday imprint was responsible for such cult hip-hop classics as Showbiz & A.G.'s Runaway Slave and Jeru The Damaja's first two albums, they seemed to drop the ball when it came to the early careers of some eventual hip-hop legends (see also Mos Def's trio Urban Thermo Dynamics having their solid 1995 album for the label scrapped in spite of two singles being promoted). 1st Down was the duo of Detroit stalwart Phat Kat and Dilla himself (then going by the pre-Jay Dee moniker of John Doe), who saw this 12" pressed on the label and then....nothing. It's a shame as "Day" is a wonderfully smooth lost gem with Dilla making deft use of both a loop of Joe Sample's familiar "In All My Wildest Dreams" (most famously sampled on 2Pac's "Dear Mama") and some added flavor from The Brothers Johnson's "Tomorrow." An early notable glance of greater things to come.

Klaus Schulze live in 1977

The La Vie Eletronique series of triple-disc collections archival material from German synth wunderkind Klaus Schulze has beautifully compiled the man's various live and unreleased sides, painstakingly compiled in chronological order. Me being a fan especially of his symphonic and texturally dense soundscapes indulged during his "Berlin School" phase, I've been particularly taken by the fifth volume, from which this following performance appears. Seeing Schulze control such a meticulous accumulation of equipment is a site in itself, and something that certainly puts a lot of the less driven also-rans in the recent synth-revival to shame. Essential viewing....

Brainbombs on TV

Here's a strange television piece on Swedish psychopaths Brainbombs in the 90's, centered around what may possibly be one of the best band interviews ever. Tongue-in-cheek discomfort reigns in abundance, which may help take a bit of the edge off the band's absurdly anti-social m.o. Be sure to click the Closed Caption button on the video, unless you're fluent in Swedish.

Zoviet France Television Profile

Found this tonight, an excellent television profile from Toronto on elusive and legendary British experimentalists Zoviet France. Another band, along with The Shadow Ring, criminally overdue for some kind-of re-issue campaign:

Hanson Records Promo Video from 1997.

While you slowly wake up out of your post-holiday food/family comas in time to prepare for whatever New Year's Eve debauchery you have on the agenda, here's an indispensable Hanson Records "promo" video circa 1997 uploaded straight from the label's mastermind, the great Aaron Dilloway. This collection features some extremely rare performance footage of defunct Michigan projects, both featuring future superstars/mainstays of the 2000's noise underground, Mini-Systems (Nate Young of Wolf Eyes and Anthony Miller, a.k.a. HZMT) and Isis & Werewolves (Dilloway with Steve Kenney, later of Demons, and Andrew W.K., who I believe sits in on drums here) as well as some wonderful homemade films from Beast People (Dilloway, Young, and Twig Harper of Nautical Almanac), Ron Of Japan, and perhaps most fascinatingly to many, an early short film from Andrew W.K. (then going under his full last name of Wilkes-Krier) documenting the absurdist rocker/cult pop figure's uncomfortably bleak early travels through the dirges pof Michigan noise.

HANSON RECORDS Promo Video 1997 from Hanson Records on Vimeo.

Florida noise weirdos Boy + Girl

I first came across the sadly defunct Florida-based noise nihilists Boy + Girl when their founder/mastermind AG Davis sent me a demo for release on my label. An inspiring fifteen-minute blast of heavily-edited grind-noise juxtaposed with excursions into severely-damaged electronic melodicism and out-of-context field recordings, I heavily dug this short burst of mayhem I was given, the overall album reminding me in the best possible way of some of Sissy Spacek's re-appropriation of their early grindcore demos. I eventually asked Davis to design the logo for my label, to which he happily obliged, and we've since kept in touch through the power of the Internet, but my one regret is not having been able to witness Boy + Girl in its live incarnation. While the various B+G CD's and cassettes jumped between the harsh, meticulous gabber-churn to even nauseatingly unbalanced pop jingles, Davis and co. turned B+G into something else entirely live. A delirious, wonderful mess of the most id-driven factions of noise, free jazz, hardcore, and whatever else you may gather from the ensuing muck, the players in these incarnations (always with Davis on vocals it appears) definitely hit upon a homemade, chaotic freedom sorely missing in a lot of noise performance these days.

A Few Forgotten 90's Hip-Hop Jams

Industry Rule #4080 was still in effect throughout the 90's, but for at least a brief period during this time, there seemed to be a slew of fascinating label acquisitions that saw a rather wide-breadth of talented MC's and crews that nevertheless went nowhere commercially. Before shiny suits and thug cliches became an easy cash-cow for rich label execs, a more open-minded attitude regarding hip-hop personalities made for an interesting landscape of talent that at least left some great material behind before typical industry incompetence and/or bad luck befell their careers.

The Space Ghost Coast To Coast Sonny Sharrock Tribute Episode

When Space Ghost Coast To Coast started airing in the mid-90's, it's brand of off-kilter absurdity went way over my 10-year-old head, but I'm sure if the adult-me had been around at its inception, I would've embraced its genius without haste and in addition, freaked out over their choice of free jazz legend Sonny Sharrock to provide the score. Sadly, Sharrock passed away as the first season was airing, and during the third season in 1996, the show's creators produced an incredibly poignant tribute episode for Sharrock which still kept firmly in-line with the show's gleefully nonsensical universe. A showcase for a few of Sharrock's improvisations set against a phoney emergency and a non sequitur Thurston Moore guest spot, the episode is pretty much 12 minutes of Sharrock at his most fierce.


Space Ghost C2C - 26 - Sharrock by SpaceGhostC2Cfan0224

The Taj Mahal Travellers Tour Film

I still haven't had the time to fully immerse myself in this one yet, but here's the beautifully pastoral film made in 1973 depicting Japanese drone-geniuses Taj Mahal Travellers on tour. A soothing collection of wandering excursions and performance images set to the collective's stark and mysterious improvisations. As good an entry point into their world as your likely to find.

R.I.P. Heavy D

Heavy D was one of the few unabashed "pop" stars in the hip-hop world to nevertheless maintain a universal respect and admiration from all corners of the hip-hop community, even among those who increasingly felt that the prospect of crossing over into the mainstream was a major taboo. It's due to Heavy's unwavering integrity in regard to his talent and affable persona that endeared him to even the most hardcore hip-hop fan: he was an incredibly skilled MC with a deft, enthusiastic flow, and even when Heavy made tracks for the underground heads, he tailored the tracks to his own laid-back demeanor. His diverse musical ambitions made him one of the few mainstream rappers that mattered, and although he may be known more for New Jack Swing/pop smashes like "Now That We Found Love" and "Somebody For Me," he still gave those of us deeper into hip-hop's underground a solid share of classic tracks without the polish of the Top 40:

Karen Dalton, in her element

While her two proper solo albums are just fine, it's been the release of two compilations of live and home recordings (Green Rocky Road and Cotton Eyed Joe) in the past couple years that provide the purest document of Karen Dalton at the peak of her musical prowess. Her voice is still one of the most gorgeously unpolished expressions of weariness and mournfulness among the 60's folk/blues set; her voice's presence manages to overtake its audience in such a way that one can't help but devote all of their focus to what was laid to tape. Dalton was frustratingly under-documented, the case for so many tragically overlooked musicians over the years, and while the incredibly upsetting end to her life might cast a distinct intensity over her recorded work, it all stands on its own as some of the most vital and powerful American music of its time. These videos below (which I believe come on a DVD with the Cotton Eyed Joe set) are Dalton in her most comfortable settings, her music striped of the sometimes intrusive country-rock-flavored production that robbed her two proper studio LP's of a certain intimacy seen here.

First, Dalton performing a stunning interpretation of "It Hurts Me Too," recorded for a French documentary:

Stick Men With Ray Guns Invade The Local News

Nothing quite amuses in the way that a vintage local news report on those crazy kids and their "punk rock" does, but there's something extra surreal when the dry, patronizing drone of the local anchor follows around the going-ons of a band that actually represents the genre at its most gleefully obnoxious rather than just another new-wave Blondie rip-off. Here's some great footage of underdocumented Texas noise-punks Stick Men With Ray Guns profiled sometime in the 1980's on one such evening news sojourn. Come for the condescending narration from an anchor who just can't seem to believe that these Stick Men, what with their slam-dancing and their angst and their atheism, aren't some junkie thugs lying passed out in a gutter, stay for some pretty excellent footage of the late Bobby Soxx and his cohorts:

The No-Budget Glory of Chrome's Music Videos

San Francisco's Chrome was one of those phenomenally singular bands that's difficult to put into words the peculiar space they inhibited. Proto-industrial-rock gets thrown around quite a bit in regards to their output but that doesn't really begin to crack the surface. Half Machine Lip Moves was my baptism by molten metal, a Stooges-by-way-of-Luc-Ferrari scum-punk masterpiece that still surprises me with each listen. Their subsequent work rests in a more sleazy, post-glam mindset, one where the electronic inflictions of "new wave" actually fell into the gutter its punk predecessors dug out. Most of these following music videos fall in that time frame, "New Age" from the recently re-issued Red Exposure album and "Firebomb" from 3rd From The Sun a couple years later, and the anti-budget, homemade surrealism of their inverted, scrappy films fit Helios Creed's and the late Damon Edge's modus operandi perfectly.

First, the incredibly underrated compilation track "Meet Me On The Subway," sadly left off their proper albums:

1995 Flashback: Every One Of Your Favorite MC's Drops By For The Final Episode of Yo! MTV Raps

Today's post was inspired by my friend Paul Walker, who yelled at me to write more about hip-hop. To all of you, I present this, what I believe holds up as easily the greatest musical moment on MTV (and I will argue this to the death). A wonderful send-off for the beloved Yo! MTV Raps, this huge cypher session represents a bygone era of hip-hop, which during 1995 was still hitting numerous artistic peaks, a couple years before the infamous "shiny-suit" era would predict a rather dire downturn in the genre's creative fortunes. One need look no further than the lineup in these videos as evidence that hip-hop was rather unbreakable. A special nod goes to the choice of the Pete Rock remix to Das EFX's "Real Hip-Hop" to serve as the backdrop to the majority of the session, surely one of PR's very best productions; the swirling beat is such a perfect fit for the rappers that it's no wonder they keep it going and going and going.

I was still an awkward, sullen adolescent in 1995, but it's stuff like this that makes me miss those days pretty heavily sometimes:

Taking Over Your TV, Pt 1: The Seeds, Rip Rig & Panic, Wolf Eyes, and Christian Marclay

The late Sky Saxon and The Seeds stop by this now-forgotten sitcom entitled The Mothers-In-Law to deliver a particularly...errrmmm...."gassy" performance. Tolerate the awful jokes, come for the enthusiastic miming of one of the best garage jams of the era, and stay for Saxon's brilliantly eccentric presence.

The Young Ones' anarchic, hypnagogic alternate-reality probably makes the most sense as a televised platform for an obscure post-Pop Group project, but it's still pretty wild to see the lost dance classic "You're My Kind Of Climate" performed live (for real) on the tele. Neneh Cherry, who sang on the studio version, is absent, but Andrea Oliver does just fine. Also, this band needs a reissue campaign, stat.

A wonderfully deviant studio-performance on local San Diego music show Fox Rox from Wolf Eyes, subverting the expectation of doing one of their "hits" (e.g. "Stabbed In The Face") by executing a dynamic, sprawling version of one of their more abstract soundscapes (the first "Dead Hills" piece from their EP of the same name, in this case). Considering a lot of the M.O.R. indie acts that appear to have made up the brunt of the performances during its run, this Wolf Eyes excursion, as evidenced by the mind-numbingly moronic YouTube comments that accompany this video, must have caused a channeling of the Stravinsky riots in a few suburban homes.

With smooth-jazz snore David Sanborn as host and piss-lager stalwart Michelob as sponsor, Night Music sounds less than promising, but the show managed to accumulate a solid slab of visionary performances from the likes of Sun Ra, The Residents, Diamanda Galas, John Zorn, Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Ambitious Lovers, and others. Here's one of my favorites from the show, certainly one of the more challenging for its network TV audience: Christian Marclay abusing vinyl as only he can.

A Detour Into A Peculiar Head-Space With The Muppets

I'm going to detour today into some eccentric territory with the Muppets during their early gestation, beginning with this pleasingly outre clip of Kermit and Harry The Hipster (when the term meant something; Harry without debate puts these Brooklyn kids to shame) pontificating on the practice of allowing one's inner dialog to transpire visually. Harry really takes the concept to its furthest and most extravagant end here as he crafts a rather bugged-out slice of improvizational jazz scatting that eventually snowballs so intensely that his visualized music takes total control of all negative space. Remember, be careful when you improvise, kids:

Going out into an even more penetrating head space is this Tonight Show clip circa 1974 where Jim Henson and Frank Oz abandon the cuddly aspects of their craft so that they can give themselves over to this distinctly dark psychedelic piece regarding one abstraction's cluttered tour through his mind. This clever and omonious interpretation of one's mental process gets into fantastically vanguard territory with an almost proto-Altered States furbish. At least Kermit is there after the commercial break to play clean-up, placating any unsettle viewers with "It's Not Easy Bein' Green" lest the audience be left to ponder the much-too-agitating inquiry they had just witnessed:

Chasing this more philosophical venture, I leave you with Kermit on Sam & Friends (the source of the first video as well) jauntily miming this absurdist little folk number, a performance followed by more headway into slick jazz as he and Harry make best of their need to gratify the show's sponsor by delivering a inanely hep little number about bacon and sausage, which may actually ring as a little discomforting given the frog's relationship with a certain sow:

A brief look at Current 93 live in the 1980's

David Tibet's Current 93 project carries forth one of those dauntingly prolific and richly dense discographies that took me until recently to start to crack, and although he has probably become most synonymous with helping pioneer the pastoral groundings of the neo-folk movement, Tibet began his project immersed in an aura of abrasion and cacophony. Dogs Blood Rising from 1984 was one of the first records of his that I latched onto, with the cold-sweat nightmare it evokes hinting at a sort-of cross between a humorless Nurse With Wound fed through the trajectory of early SPK at its most dirge-y. The NWW comparison makes obvious sense given Tibet's close musical partnership with Steven Stapleton, and one can perhaps deduce that the divergent paths Stapleton and Tibet would take their respective projects in were birthed from a similar starting point. Current 93 during their "noise" period seems still oft-underrated, and if one needs reminder of Tibet's power as a performer right out of the gate, this extremely intense live performance from 1984 should provide more than enough evidence:

On the other ends of Tibet's spectrum lays this late period video of the song "Happy Birthday" from the Looney Runes LP, with this performance melding a more accessibly melodic undercurrent of folky post-punk into something nevertheless confrontational and unsettling thanks to Tibet's impassioned performance. Although superficially miles away from Tibet's initial works, one can perhaps more easily draw a distinct line between the two periods with careful attention:

Heathen Earth in gestation

My personal favorite Throbbing Gristle LP has always been Heathen Earth. To me, it's perhaps the most robust documentation of the band in their prime, the album working on the novel concept of a live-to-tape in-studio performance attended by a small group of spectators. So in a sense, this album blurs the often all-too-distinct barrier separating a band as a studio entity and as live performers. Being that the uncertainty and fluctuation of live improvisation was an absolute necessity in TG's aesthetic, this concept of live performance-via-studio setting suited the quartet splendidly, with the band turning in a immensely vigorous performance with the pristine fidelity that such an environment naturally warranted.  Some variations on prior studio material appear (the second track borrowed the instrumental motif from 20 Jazz Funk Great's "Six Six Sixties" while the fifth track does the same with the single b-side "Something Came Over Me"; according to P-Orridge, the sixth piece was "Still Walking," but in a completely alien form from what appeared on Jazz Funk), but overall the album has its own distinct development and aura, beautifully moving between the mechanized dirges and modulated electronic soundscapes that the foursome excelled at. The performance was filmed and released on VHS many eons ago, and thankfully, it's been preserved by some kind soul on YouTube. A must-see for any fan of the group, and also of definite interest to casual spectators. Some imagery in these vids may be NSFW:

 

Early Kraftwerk Live

During Kraftwerk's initial inception, the group in hindsight operated in a more, for lack of a better word, "traditional" school of Krautrock exploration, one that due to it's often under-referenced influence (at least in comparison to the more universally celebrated strides they made with 1974's Autobahn and onward) makes for what I'm sure is a point of intense fascination for many fans of the group. Frustratingly, the band themselves have very sporadically acknowledged the merits of the first three records that Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider released under the Kraftwerk name. These early video clips, as one should expect, exhibit a wonderfully bold collective that had a distinctly malleable identity, weaving a sound that functions with audible strength between the distinctive traits that would form the basis of their many contemporaries and descendants, from Kluster's ominous and atonal improvisations, to the more traditional psych-rock elements that cropped up in some of Faust's early output, to Neu!'s more serene divergences into proto-ambiance, to Agitation Free's use of international and fusion influences to inform a consistently transfixing groove. I've heard that Kraftwerk have hinted that a box of their first three LP's (Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2, and Ralf und Florian) may at some point see the light of day, and I'm sure I'm only one of many who hopes such a vague promise might come to pass. Below, some excellent footage of Kraftwerk's early years: